Connexion
The breathing room afforded by the Court should not give Christians a false sense of security.
I tend to think of myself as a fairly strong communitarian, or at least an enemy of the rigid individualism that has afflicted certain strains of American thought since the middle of the 18th century. A society cannot be built on antisocial pillars. Yet even my skin crawls at the dehumanizing mass-man newspeak of the civil-rights branch of the left.
Charlie Craig and David Mullins, the litigious pair who dragged the baker Jack Phillips through court for half a dozen years over his unwillingness to participate in their gay wedding in 2012, take the form to a startling extreme in USA Today this week.
You see, when the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that these two men and the deferential agents of the Colorado government did Mr. Phillips a grave injustice, it did so only on the grounds that Phillips’s treatment was a blatant instance of religious persecution.
When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission issued the vindictive instructions that Phillips must “change [his] company policies, provide ‘comprehensive staff training’ regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps [he] has taken to come into compliance and whether [he] has turned away any prospective customers,” they did so merely because they despised his Christian faith. The Supreme Court thus overturned the commission’s verdict without taking a stance on the underlying issue.
Lorie Smith, a web designer who has been barred from the wedding market by the same “anti-discrimination law” that strung up Jack Phillips, thus brought her own case against the compelled-speech statute, hoping to score a broader victory. On Friday, the Supreme Court granted one, affirming the obvious fact that a man or woman cannot justly be forced to produce speech that contradicts his or her sincerely held beliefs.
Craig and Mullins write that this First Amendment liberty “greenlights discrimination” as they grumble about “the harm caused to LGTBQ+ individuals who are denied equal access to public accommodations.”
Never mind that no real harm can possibly be caused by the restriction of available bakeshop options by one. The term on which their argument hinges is a bothersome one: public accommodations.
It has its roots in the civil rights regime of 1964, which superimposed a new system on the longstanding United States Constitution. And it would be reasonable enough if it meant what it says; nobody will argue that the town should shut off a man’s public water for the crime of sodomy, much less for a simple fact like the color of his skin.
But this is not what public accommodation means in civil rights jargon. It means you. It means Jack Phillips, and anyone else who hopes to live some part of his life outside the four walls of his home. Whatever is intended by the letter of the law, the new regime in practice has made clear that operation in the public square—participation in the common life of society—requires compliance. You cannot opt out. You cannot plead conscience. State-enforced homosexuality is more than an edgy meme.
The overreach is justified by a good deal of fear-mongering about supposed harm. Craig and Mullins lay it on thick, but their melodrama is nothing compared to the dissent of Justice Sonya Sotomayor. The justice preaches that “invidious discrimination” is not one of “the values in the Constitution.” She worries that the resurrection of such practice “reminds LGBT people of a painful feeling that they know all too well: There are some public places where they can be themselves, and some where they cannot.… Ask any LGBT person, and you will learn just how often they are forced to navigate life in this way.” (Every Christian in America unavailable for comment.) She even makes an emotional appeal to the death of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old meth dealer who happened to be gay and was murdered by two drug-trade associates.
The activists attempt to contrast this harm with the rosy life of the people they persecute. Both the Craig-Mullins op-ed and a number of other early takes on the ruling note bitterly that Smith was never asked to design a website for a gay wedding. They take this to mean that no person was harmed, and it is difficult to read this conclusion as anything other than blind egotism.
When Jack Phillips was forced to stop making wedding cakes altogether, he lost 40 percent of his business. A similarly sizable chunk of income is no doubt lost by a boutique web designer driven out of a massive sphere of the small-scale web design market. Yet it seems beyond these people’s moral capacity to put themselves in her shoes.
It is also worth noting that the radical front has framed itself (in this as in so many other battles) as David up against the reactionary Goliath. Never mind the long march through every institution, the unanimous endorsement of every cultural power, the outright criminalization of dissent. By sheer numbers, the claim is absurd. In each of these related cases, the persecuted artist has been represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a scrappy legal outfit dedicated to an ethos of Christian liberalism; the activist complainants, meanwhile, have prosecuted their cases through the American Civil Liberties Union, a 1.8 million-member behemoth that has spent the last century using courtroom bullying to drag this country leftward.
Even discounting the latter’s numerous affiliates, ADF has barely one-fourth the annual budget of the ACLU. With no sense of irony, the men who trampled on the rights and livelihood of a humble baker for nothing but their own smug self-interest and satisfaction groan that the ADF’s cases “advance conservative Christian power and privilege at the expense of everyone else, especially LGBTQ+, women, and racial and religious minorities.”
Plaintiffs like Craig and Mullins lost these cases not because the cards were stacked against them, but because their causes were so plainly unjust that even a stacked deck could not ensure their desired outcome. It is a thin safeguard, and the breathing room afforded by the Court should not give Christians a false sense of security. As Jack Phillips has learned, the next attacks will follow quickly.
The post To Fight Another Day appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Racial preference won’t go away. It will just go underground.
The Supreme Court this week banned the use of race as a factor in college and university admissions.
It’s unlikely the ruling will have the majority’s desired effect. Schools and activists are already mulling in the pages of the New York Times how to do an end-run around the decision.
What’s more likely is that the admissions process will become even more opaque. More schools will ditch standardized testing requirements, and use the personal essay and other subjective criteria as proxies for race.
Racial preference in admissions won’t go away. It will just go underground.
In overturning Bakke‘s holding about the supposed educational benefits of diversity, the Court at least returned the debate over affirmative action to a more honest station. It was never about whether and to what extent a diverse student body improved educational outcomes. It is about whether and to what extent we should reward and punish people for the actions of their ancestors.
Maybe the fact that a New York neighborhood was “red-lined” in 1935 really should entitle the son of a black professional athlete to have a built-in advantage over the son of a white Iowan pea farmer in the college admissions process. Many Americans find that argument compelling. I don’t. And as we found out Thursday, the Supreme Court, to its credit, doesn’t either.
The post The End of Affirmative Action? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Hunter Biden’s plea deal touches only the tip of the iceberg.
About two years ago during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed stories about his son’s laptop emails as disinformation. After becoming president, Joe said that his son Hunter was innocent. Most recently, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion and weapons charges, the president said that he was proud of his son.
Which part are you proud of, Joe? The video evidence of his crack use? The video evidence of his cavorting with prostitutes? The tax evasion charges? Or was it the weapons charge, where Hunter lied to obtain a handgun?
Joking aside, the easy-sleazy plea deal Hunter accepted, which has him serve probation in lieu of jail time, leaves several important questions about exactly what Hunter (and Joe, and Jim, Joe’s brother) were doing in return for millions of dollars in consulting fees. Tax evasion seems to be just the beginning. Let’s get specific. Most of the incidents below are drawn from Hunter’s email and laptop documents. (The American Conservative published a dive into the laptop’s contents online in December 2020, and a deeper dive in our print edition.)
The reason we have to ask all these sticky questions is because half of Americans—including a third of Democrats—think Hunter got favorable treatment from federal prosecutors after he agreed to a sweetheart plea deal.
So, Hunter, you joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month. You had no obvious work duties. What was your actual job at Burisma? We ask because on April 16, 2014, while Papa Joe was vice president, he met with your business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Three days later, Joe traveled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma paid more than $4 million for your and Archer’s board memberships. You never registered as a foreign agent.
While you and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded that Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.
While serving on the Burisma board, you and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Did you guys get to chat? The reason we ask is because whatever your job description read, your value to Burisma was your perceived access to the executive branch. Papa Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.
Your laptop shows that you used front entities to take money from foreign firms and then moved that money to American institutions, from which the funds were parceled out to other persons and entities, including Joe’s brother Jim. Some of it then went back to foreign hands. This is dirty stuff. Enormous transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, institutions registered in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. Can you explain why your fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did you pay Uncle Jim for, and why did he appear to kick back some of the money you paid him?
What is this money all about, Hunter? In 2014, you received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.
But let’s move on to China; Russia and Ukraine are so depressing. The majority of the contents of your laptop are a jumbled record of your international business ventures. Sticking out from this farrago of irregularity is a large number of wire transfers to and from your clients. (But no evidence of what “work” you performed for those clients.) The addresses that can be traced lead to what look to be mostly employee-free anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices.
In August 2018 you also returned $100k back to CEFC in China via its own New York subsidiary LLC, Hudson West V, whose listed address was on Foxwood Road in New York state. That address is not a business office but instead a residence worth over $5 million. It looks like the place has new owners, but phone records seem to suggest two people lived there when you were in business, including Gongwen Dong.
These complicated transfers look an awful lot like money-laundering. Is that what you were really up to, fee-for-service to the Chinese? Inquiring minds and all that, you know.
The Foxwood address also appears on millions of dollars worth of bank transfers among Cathay Bank, CEFC, and multiple semi-anonymous LLCs and hedge funds. One single transfer alone to Hudson West III on August 8, 2017 moved $5 million from Northern Capital International, apparently a Chinese government-owned import-export front company. What was that all about?
In addition, the house on Foxwood was the mailing address for a secured VISA card in the name of your company, Hudson West III. The card is funded anonymously through Cathay Bank for $99,000 and is attached to a Cathay checking account worth $450,000. Shared users of the card are you, Hunter, and Gongwen Dong. The card was opened as CEFC secured a stake in a Russian state-owned energy company. You and others subsequently used the credit card to purchase luxury goods. A Senate report identified these transactions as “potential financial criminal activity.”
Jim Biden was also an authorized user of the credit card. When he ran into financial trouble, he was bailed out with loans from the rest of the family, including from you, Hunter. Jim also received a loan of $500,000 from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and long-time Biden campaign donor. This occurred at the same time that the then-vice president oversaw American Ukraine policy.
Where does all this leave us? With President Joe Biden, who ran in part on an anti-corruption “normality” platform. Biden says he regrets meeting with the Burisma official. It’s always easier to apologize than to seek permission. Is that what your dad always says, Hunter?
Do we even need to address the infamous 2017 email detailing a prospective venture with an explicit set-aside for the “big guy,” publicly identified as Joe Biden by Hunter’s former partner Tony Bobulinski?
There is a lot more, but you get the picture. It looks like a lot of impropriety from your dad. In corrupt stews like China and Ukraine, the sons of powerful men have and trade on access to their fathers. Is that where you picked up the idea?
Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” So Hunter, help us out. Explain.
The post The Wild Hunt appeared first on The American Conservative.
Just because something is incoherent doesn’t mean that it isn’t real—and dangerous.
Recently, I received separate inquiries from reporters working on stories about the use of the term “gender ideology.” What do I think it means? What is its origin?
The requests, though they came from different reporters, were identical. This seemed suspicious. After all, these journalists showed no interest in explaining or analyzing the ideology that has passed through our culture faster than a viral particle through a loose-fitting surgical mask. They wanted to know, rather, whence this nasty right-wing slur, “gender ideology,” came.
This seems to be part of a larger media campaign to discredit this and related terms. For instance, the new AP style guide advises, “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology.”
The Wikipedians are also doing their part. Something called the “anti-gender movement,” the website explains, “is an international movement which opposes what it refers to as ‘gender ideology,’ ‘gender theory,’ or ‘genderism.’ The concepts cover a variety of issues and have no coherent definition.”
The giant online encyclopedia even quotes some European academics who claim the term is an “empty signifier.” Rubes who use this purportedly content-free word “include right-wingers and the far right, right-wing populists, conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists.”
The charge is not so much that the term gender ideology is unfair or inaccurate—which the AP suggests—but rather, that it doesn’t refer to anything at all.
Yet clearly such an ideology exists and can be named. If thousands of people use a term to refer to the same set of related facts out in the world, then it both means something to them and has a referent. This is true no matter where the term originated, even if it’s hard for a random person on Twitter to formulate a tight definition on command.
Anyone following politics in recent years already has some idea what “gender ideology” means and what it refers to. It gave us the Gender Unicorn. It inspires every new letter and symbol added to LBG in the Pride Month alphabet. It coaxes school districts to allow males who “identify as” females to compete in girls’ sports and use their bathrooms. It hypnotizes the media into pretending the man who won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics is a woman.
Gender ideology is the source of the belief that children can be born in the wrong body. It leads Californians to think that if a young girl feels anguish over her body, the doctors should not help her adjust to her body but should change her body and her surroundings—name, bathroom, pronouns—to conform to her “gender identity.” It fuels the spread of concepts like “gender identity”—including the many new supposed identities such as non-binary and pansexual—and the telling phrase “sex assigned at birth.” It inspires opaque proclamations like “transwomen are women.”
It prompts the State Department under Joe Biden to fly the progress flag during Pride Month. It led Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to answer “I can’t…. I’m not a biologist” when she was asked “What is a woman?” during her Senate confirmation hearing to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The ubiquity of gender ideology is why the Babylon Bee headline, “Bigoted Gender Surgeon Still Only Offering ‘Male’ and ‘Female,’” is funny. Get it? Of course you do. You know tacitly what gender ideology refers to. It’s ludicrous to pretend that these ideas have no nameable source.
Still, defining an ideology is much harder than pointing to its effects. That’s why critics of gender ideology often come up short when challenged to do so. They might say, for instance, that it claims that people can change or choose their sex or gender at will. But that’s not what its adherents claim.
Any good definition of a term should make explicit what its users already tacitly understand and refer to. It should also reveal the thing itself. In this case, it should capture the view of gender ideology’s champions who would much rather it continue to work its magic in the shadows, than be named—and so examined—under the glaring light of reason.
Gender ideology is even harder to define than most terms because it refers to a protean postmodern confection. If you try to collect all the claims of its adherents over the years into a single long conjunctive proposition, as Ryan Anderson did in 2018, it looks downright incoherent.
It is child’s play to point to its effects, but the thing itself is shrouded in obscurity and equivocation. Its proponents play a constant game of Motte and Bailey with the public, redefining familiar words and creating new variations of those words that only make sense within their own paradigm. As a result, one can’t really define gender ideology without invoking some of the terms it has already inserted into our language—terms that also cry out for definition.
Nevertheless, it can be done—so long as we focus on its current incarnation. Recently, “gender-critical” physician Jeremy Shaw queried the Twitterverse for just such a definition. I sent one back without much thought—as one does on Twitter. It read:
Gender ideology is the theory that the sex binary doesn’t capture the complexity of the human species, and that human individuals are properly described in terms of an “internal sense of gender” called “gender identity” that may be incongruent with their “sex assigned at birth.”
Gender ideology is certainly more than that. But it is at least that.
On reflection, I’d replace “theory” with the less highfalutin “view.” Like all definitions, this one contains terms that are not themselves defined. It also contains terms that are artifacts of the ideology, such as “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth.”
According to Google’s dictionary function, “gender identity” is “a person’s innate sense of gender.” The term, we’re told, is “chiefly used in contexts where it is contrasted with the sex registered for them at birth.” So, we’re supposed to understand each of these terms in light of the other.
This circular definition of gender identity is the standard. The word “gender” appears in both the definition and the term being defined—in both the explanans and the explanandum.
Despite this deficiency, we can get a better sense of gender ideology by focusing on its use of “gender” and “sex.” To most outsiders, “gender” might look like a synonym for “sex”—as it has been for centuries. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, recently tweeted ten “truths,” among them, “2. There are two genders.” It would have been better if he’d said, “There are [only] two sexes”—which is clearly what he meant.
Why does this matter? Because gender ideologues tend to use “gender” as a shorthand for “gender identity”—as in the euphemism “gender affirming care” in medicine. Such “care” affirms the presumed gender identity of the patient, even if that means destroying the patient’s primary and secondary sex organs. In such a lexicon, “There are two genders” could mean “There are two gender identities,” which I doubt anyone would bother to defend. Gender ideologues, for their part, admit no limiting principle to the number of gender identities. And their critics should just say, “There are only two sexes.”
Rather than denying the reality of sex outright, though, gender ideologues employ the now-ubiquitous substitute, “sex assigned [or registered] at birth.” They thus avoid using the word “sex”—the real biological difference between male and female human beings—and posit, instead, a mere social construct. It’s no wonder normal people are confused.
As bizarre as this is to those still in command of their senses, this gender lexicon is already so advanced that if you google, “What is the sex binary?” it will redirect, or rather misdirect, you to pages trying to debunk the “gender binary.” Google is clearly doing its part to advance the cause of gender ideology—though, according to recent polls, fewer and fewer people seem to buy it.
Why do gender ideologues play such verbal shell games? Why pretend their view cannot be defined? It’s surely because they want it to be seen as a simple deliverance of science and sweet reason, rather than a dogma so outlandish that almost no one would accept it if it were explained precisely and without the threat of social opprobrium.
The plain truth: Gender ideology does not accommodate the reality of sex—the reproductive strategy of mammals including human beings. Sex, in this reckoning, is not an objective truth about men and women. We are not male or female by virtue of our body structure or the fact that our bodies are oriented around the production of sperm or eggs. Human beings, are, in essence, psychological selves with internal senses of gender—like disembodied gendered souls. These “gender identities” are independent of, and can be incongruent with, the bodies that God gave us and that medicine has come to associate with “male” and female.” These “sex” categories are mere conventions, says the gender ideologue, not facts.
For obvious reasons, gender acolytes rarely speak so bluntly. But don’t be fooled. When you see these confusing terms deployed to explain away what you know to be true, you can be quite sure you’re not dealing with sound science or sound philosophy, but with an incoherent kludge of concepts that we may rightly call gender ideology.
I hope this clears things up for those curious journalists who seem to be perplexed by the term.
The post What Is Gender Ideology? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Western elites’ response to the civil unrest from clashing cultures grows more untenable by the day.
At this point everyone knows the play. There’s a death, often under unclear circumstances. Before the smoke is clear, there are riots. The riots are dubbed protests “towards justice.” In reality they are anything but, given that most rioters loot consumer goods like shoes, bags, and television sets, and burn down schools, libraries, and the small businesses of those who have nothing to do with the original issue at hand. Most of the riots are carefully planned and organized on social media, whether by BLM and Antifa in Kenosha or Minneapolis, or in the mosques in the French banlieues and suburbs.
Left-wing politicians call for calm. Right-wing politicians call for control of social media. Police arrest hundreds and then let them off after a few days. No one does anything about the underlying problems of the mass migration of people who are socially incompatible with civilized society, or human rights laws and the NGOcracy that are often shields for disorder.
This again happened act by act in France; the proximate cause was the shooting of a 17-year-old Algerian man. There are scenes on social media of a library that housed priceless medieval manuscripts being burned down. The library had miraculously survived the Second World War; it did not survive the riots. There are scenes of radicalized Arab kids looting and committing arson, egged on by their elders. There is now an investigation of an attempted murder of the wife and children of a French mayor by rioters who tried to burn the mayoral house down.
It’s easy to blame it all just on new migration, which of course didn’t help European social cohesion. But that is only partly responsible for what just happened in France. The perpetrators of this outrage are third-generation immigrants from former French North African colonies. Unfortunately, they do not identify as French, and probably never will. That fact should bring everyone rational to a few uncomfortable realizations.
At some point sane minorities will have to mention in public that uncontrolled mass migration is a curse that often imports incompatible cultures. And culture is a very strong variable regardless of how taboo it is to mention in sophisticated elite circles. Not all minority cultures are the same. Some migrants attempt to integrate. Some do not. It is a fact, and denying it or refusing to study it further will do no one any good, least of all those minorities who want to assimilate to the host culture and contribute towards civilized life.
Assimilation is a two-way street. If a person remains more concerned about his native culture or country of birth, then he has not made any effort to assimilate and should receive no sympathies in return.
A final point: If normal political parties fail to restore order by force, and tackle the corrosive human rights NGOcracy, people will eventually elect those who will.
A self-neutered France, impotent due to European Union’s human rights laws, is teetering on the brink of a civil war following mass unrest and radicalization on both sides. It is haunted by its own history and governed by an elite whose worldview dictated that politics is simply a domain of perpetual management, not action. That is now unsustainable. And that is a lesson for us all.
The post France’s Floyd Moment appeared first on The American Conservative.
Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.
If reviews of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made reference to an “aging” Harrison Ford, in 2023 there is no denying that the actor is now old. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not shy away from this fact. The film opens by showing Indiana Jones in 1969: We find him clad only in his underwear, awakened in his easy chair by the longhairs partying in the adjacent apartment, blasting the Beatles first thing in the morning.
Still a bit drunk from what appears to be a nightly routine of solitary boozing, Indy grabs a baseball bat and heads to confront the revelers, who laugh and tell the old man to get lost. Humiliated, he returns to his tenement, where he confronts the reality that his family is falling apart. Outside his apartment building, New Yorkers are enjoying a ticker-tape parade celebrating the moon landing. But Dr. Jones is exhausted by the present.
As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2023, we are confronted by a nation seemingly drained of its past vitality. Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.
In both cases—the real America of 2023 and Jones’s life in 1969—our exhaustion stems primarily from the present’s stark contrast with the past. There is some sense that our halcyon days are over, and that they cannot be recaptured. Today, the country grapples with the important questions posed by this fatalism. What is the value of the past? Who, if anyone, has the rightful claim to it? Should it have any role in the life of the present – or does the past have a right to stay in the past?
These are the issues addressed by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While it isn’t a great film, it does offer some compelling answers—answers that can help those of us who sense that the great America that we used to know is taking on the status of an ancient relic.
In many ways, the Indiana Jones series itself is a historical artifact. The first film was released in 1981 to universal acclaim in a much different America. While everybody loved these movies, not everyone has loved Indy. Critics have derided the character as an avatar of western colonialism, an educated cowboy who travels to exotic places, blasts and whips his way through the local muscle, and locates cultural treasures—only to steal them back to the safety (and sterility) of an American museum. Indeed, the screenwriters apparently feel a bit ashamed of Indiana Jones: All five films include characters who level charges that he is a “thief” and a “graverobber.”
But contrary to what woke critics and Indy’s fictional detractors say, he is not a thief or a graverobber. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones doesn’t try to procure the Ark of the Covenant as much as he tries to prevent the Nazis from doing so, and he protests when he learns that US authorities will simply keep it in secret storage. In Temple of Doom, when he finds that a small Indian village’s sacred Sankara Stone has been stolen by a Thuggee blood cult, he retrieves it and returns it to the people. In Last Crusade, Indy doesn’t want to seek the Holy Grail—he is compelled to do it in order to rescue his father, a grail expert who has been kidnapped by the Nazis. The goal is not to possess the grail, but to keep it out of Nazi hands. When they find it, there is a brief moment where the younger Jones does want to take the cup, but when his father tells him to leave it behind, he complies. Similarly, the entire plot of Crystal Skull is driven by Indiana’s effort to return the artifact to its indigenous place of origin .
In short, the films don’t depict a rapacious crusader, but rather a man with a deep and abiding respect for the past. Time after time, his impulse is to protect artifacts, to honor them, and when possible, to leave them be. When the situation does not allow them to be left alone, his refrain is that they “belong in a museum.” Woke zealots today see museums as mere storage houses for the spoils of colonialism and war, but that’s not what they are for Indiana Jones. He wants the remains of the past in a museum precisely so they will be protected.
But protection isn’t enough. After all, the Ark of the Covenant would be quite secure sitting in a locked crate at a secret government facility. The museum is a place where the relics will get the reverence that they deserve. Reverence from whom? Professors? Curators? No. Reverence from everyone. Reverence from the people. This indicates Dr. Jones’ recognition that if anyone “owns” the past, it is a collective ownership, a human ownership that reflects our shared history. To know our own time is impossible if we don’t understand both how the present differs from the past and how it represents a continuity with history.
Early in the Dial of Destiny, Jones’s partner insists that “some things should stay buried.” This a pithy digestion of the entire theme of the film, which culminates in a moment where Indiana must decide whether he will live in the glorious past or in the present. While the present is less than ideal, making a choice to abandon the past in its favor amounts to a gesture of hope. The future is uncertain, after all. Choosing to live in the present reflects a will to believe that the future will be worth living. Viewers of the film will find that Jones needs a little intervention in order to let the past go—but he does.
Ultimately though, (re)resurrecting a beloved film franchise—a piece of our shared (pop) cultural inheritance—simply to have an octogenarian encourage us to honor the past by leaving it behind…well, it’s a strange bit of metafiction. After all, if Ford and the makers of the movie really believed its message, they would have never set out to make it. Indeed, for decades Ford himself scoffed at the idea of revisiting classic characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But he has returned to both.
This unwillingness to let cinematic history stay in the past is also underscored by Dial of Destiny’s impressive use of computer technologies that “de-age” Ford in certain scenes, depicting him as a younger man around the age he was in the first three films. Again, this is a very odd choice for a film that finally tells us to let go of the past and live in the now. One wonders: with technology like this, have we really seen the last Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (or at least his digitally rendered likeness)? New stories featuring a 35-year-old Indy in his prime could be made in perpetuity. There’s a lot of money to be made. Let’s hope Hollywood can learn the lesson of Dial of Destiny and respect the past by leaving that money on the table.
Which brings us back to our present. This week we celebrate the foundation of this nation and our shared history. The great symbols of our heritage have not been treated well as of late. The founding is falsely smeared as an effort to protect slavery. Whether it’s via demands to expand the Supreme Court or calls for abolishing the electoral college, the government bequeathed to us by the Constitution is under attack. Many Americans now see these documents as relics: ones that deserve no reverence, even ones that might need to be destroyed. In making these attacks, the belligerents of our society assert some ownership of that past—they claim the right to do with it what they will, even if that means their destruction.
The Fourth of July is a holiday where we remember our past, and how our present is an extension of it. By remembering it, we revere it. And while the America that we see in 2023 may never again be what it once was—before the cultural revolution and its assassinations, before 9/11, before the terrible year of 2020—it still belongs to us. That means that while the past perhaps cannot be recaptured, we nevertheless have an obligation to honor what remains, to protect it, and to transmit that legacy to a new generation. That Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate this nation is one of many ways we continue to fulfill that duty. In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to its legacy, and choose to look toward a shared future in a spirit of American optimism rather than one of trepidation.
The post Indiana Jones, Independence Day, and the Presence of the Past appeared first on The American Conservative.
The state and localities are wrestling with post-Roe realities.
The Dobbs decision brought an end to the federal regime of abortion-on-demand, with only a vague “mental health” standard previously limiting third-trimester abortions. Abortions are no longer available with certainty.
The screams that the decision provoked have been equaled only by those accompanying the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, with its time limits and work requirements. Yet when word got out that teenage pregnancy did not bring with it economic independence and 18 years of assured cash payments, the teenage pregnancy rate fell from 213 per 1000 in 1990 to 65 per thousand in 2016.
No longer do Baltimoreans and Marylanders have occasion to decry three-generation welfare families. Yet it has not yet dawned on Governor Wes Moore of Maryland or Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore that the uncertainty induced by Dobbs may be a similar gift to Baltimore and Maryland in addressing their most serious social problem: family breakdown and the attendant crime and delinquency.
Each day shows us that Roe v. Wade was a social disaster. Contrary to the premise of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s concurring opinion that unwed motherhood would almost disappear, the percentage of white children born out of wedlock increased from 3.1 percent in 1965 to 27.5 percent in 2021; among black Americans, it skyrocketed from 24 percent to 70.1 percent.
So-called shotgun weddings declined from 59 percent of unwanted pregnancies to 9 percent. Unimpeachable scholars, Professor Janet Yellen, now Secretary of the Treasury, and her husband, Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof, showed in a 1996 study that the change was due to altered abortion rules and resulting changes in mores, what they called “reproductive technology shock.”
The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy…women feared that if they refused sexual relations they would lose their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected.
Many less privileged women, relying on the new-found right as a “backup,” discovered that—because of ignorance, procrastination, lack of means, parental pressure, fear of losing the ability to conceive, or a maternal instinct to protect the fetus—they did not want or could not obtain an abortion. For their consorts, the newly discovered right operated as a hunting license.
The Dobbs decision is thus cause for rejoicing. Situation ethics is no longer a rule of constitutional law. The ruling already appears to be inducing greater care in the choice of sexual partners, the use of precautions, and a reduced rate of unwed motherhood. The consequences of a 70 percent rate of unwed motherhood in certain populations may be invisible to privileged professionals and journalists, but even Baltimore’s unionized schoolteachers are highly aware of it.
Of course, the legislation that states enact must be drafted with a view to prudence as well as principle. Laws that are unenforceable bring the law into disrepute. Surgical abortions, denials of the purposes of medicine, were long condemned. Not so pills, whose use can be punished only with difficulty, a gift to the underworld.
Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and later president of the European Parliament, when sponsoring French abortion law reform as health minister in the Giscard government, urged “not allowing abortions to produce scandalous profits…. Foreign women will have to fulfill conditions of residence…. Information about birth control [is] an obligation, on pain of administrative closure, for the establishments where abortions are performed.”
Further, she advised that medical and social consultations and a waiting period be provided to ensure that “this is not a normal or banal act but a serious decision…the pregnancy can only be terminated early because … [of] intrinsic physical and psychological risks of terminating a pregnancy after the end of the tenth week following conception…When one knows that dentistry, non-mandatory vaccinations and prescription glasses are not or are only minimally reimbursed by the healthcare system, how can it be acceptable to reimburse a termination of pregnancy? Medical aid has been provided for, for the most destitute…. the law no longer forbids, it does not create a right to abortion.”
Yet the responses of Maryland’s Moore and Baltimore’s Scott to Dobbs have been perverse, abandoning the erstwhile pretense that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Instead, they are now some sort of blessed sacrament, the subject not of tolerance but of promotion.
As Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken wrote nearly a century ago, “Nor is the moral virtuoso made more prepossessing when he takes the Devil’s side and howls for license instead of for restraint. The birth controllers, for example, often carry on their indelicate crusade with the pious rancor of prohibitionists.” But abortion law affects not only those already pregnant, but those not yet pregnant, now rendered more cautious by potential perils that lie ahead: economic burdens in middle age, loneliness when old.
Maryland’s governor has proposed a constitutional amendment that would sweep away the remaining feeble restrictions on third-term abortions—making way for, among other things, non-doctors to perform them—and enacting laws of dubious constitutionality precluding Maryland courts from honoring the subpoenas of neighboring states. The mayor proposes to stockpile abortion pills. He thus gives force to Mencken’s prophecy that if there were a substantial number of cannibals in the electorate, politicians would promise them regular meals of grilled missionary. If assisted suicide becomes more fashionable, Mayor Scott will no doubt want to stockpile strychnine also.
Baltimore is to be rendered an abortion Mecca, a curious economic development decision given the failure of previous administrations to encourage financial institutions fleeing New York in the 1980s to relocate there and its active repulsion in the 1980s of immigrants, including those fleeing Hong Kong.
The efforts to undermine the policies of neighboring states are especially repulsive. General De Gaulle once wrote of pre-Roe America that “the central government and Congress normally confine themselves to larger matters: foreign policy, civic rights and duties, defense, currency, overall taxes and tariffs. For these reasons, the system has succeeded in functioning up to now in the north of the New World.”
National legislation where public opinion is evenly divided will produce only continued dissension. In most American states, divisions are far from even, and those dissatisfied with each state’s law will make up a much smaller portion of the nation’s population.
One must ask: How would Governor Moore or Mayor Scott like it if Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia were to offer inner-city Baltimore residents free bus transportation to the nearest Virginia gun shop in order to subvert the Old Line State’s efforts at firearms control?
Baltimore’s vital interest in socializing its minority young is being subordinated to a vote-buying agenda promising short-sighted college coeds a moral climate fostering situation ethics and free love. As the post-Dobbs statistics relating to unwed motherhood improve, it is to be hoped that the governor and mayor will withdraw from their exposed positions.
The post Dobbs Comes to Maryland appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new memoir from a Westerner living as a bureaucrat in China’s education system has important lessons for America.
The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, Daniel A. Bell, Princeton University Press, 196 pages
In 2004, global audiences were treated to the martial-arts epic Hero, a masterful work of the Chinese director Zhang Yimou. The film, set in the Warring States era of Chinese history, tells the story of multiple assassination attempts upon the king of the Qin state. A visual feast, loaded with philosophical reflections as well as Alfred Hitchcock-esque plot twists, the film is also often criticized for being Chinese Communist state propaganda—the ultimate message of the film is the sacrifice of an individual for the collective good of China.
Nonetheless, Hero, which was nominated for multiple awards in the West, including Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, represents how China of the 21st century wishes to be viewed by the world—a country deeply rooted in the past and at the same time more modern than modern. It is, further, a country that utilizes technology, science, and art from the West, but as the Japanese did in the 20th century, puts a distinctly Asian stamp on it. Finally, it is a country that, while collectivist, does in its new, rebranded form allow for some individualism and even individual heroism.
In his new work from Princeton University Press, the Confucian scholar and Chinese educator Daniel Bell attempts to provide a similar portrait of today’s China. Indeed, Bell, who has received strong criticism from Western figures because of his defense of China, explicitly states in The Dean of Shandong that it is his goal to convince readers that, despite some authoritarian tendencies, China is not the dangerous red dragon of Western imaginings. In fact, Bell notifies the readers that it is his goal to live and work in China for the rest of his life, and hopefully to obtain Chinese citizenship.
En route to this puzzling and controversial rhetorical goal, Bell provides a portrait of his life as an administrator in a Chinese university; laying aside his support for China, he gives Western readers a unique vision into the new China.
From 2017 to 2022, the Canadian-born Bell was the dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party would allow a foreigner to serve in an administrative post at a Chinese university may seem strange. Bell assures readers that he is not a member of the CCP. He was appointed because he is well known for his research on Confucianism, and China has been attempting to reclaim its Confucian heritage in recent years. Bell further notes that, for the past 40 years, China has been trying to “internationalize” its universities. Bell advocates for further reformed China, which draws from the principles of Confucianism.
At the beginning of the book, Bell provides a brief history of Confucianism, which he sees as playing a central role in shaping a reformed modern China. As Bell notes, Confucius (551–479 B.C.) did not see himself as the creator of a school of thought. Rather, he viewed himself as a midwife of an earlier tradition of thought. Like Plato, Confucius tried and failed at politics, settling into the role of a teacher. As with the case of Aristotle, his students recorded his writings into the Analects. Bell notes that Confucianism was later joined with Daoism and Buddhism and, in our day, with liberalism and democracy.
At the heart of Confucianism is the idea of harmony, which starts with “filial piety” or respect for one’s family. One should practice humaneness toward others, and, as in Stoicism, one should dedicate himself to the service of the state (this notion, reflected in the film Hero, is clearly amenable to the contemporary Chinese Communist Party). Moreover, Confucian rules should govern the people with ethics as well as ritual and only use force if other means have failed—this point is key to Bell’s argument, for Bell is attempting to provide a kindler, gentler version of China.
Bell’s desire to reform China is noble, but his belief that China can be reformed through the implementation of Confucianism is perhaps unrealistic. Moreover, his limited defense of contemporary Chinese policy—Bell has himself run up against CCP censors for some of his work—is something to which Christians, human rights activists, and other critics of China might object.
He does nonetheless provide a curious portrait of life for a foreigner in contemporary China. Bell curiously notes the importance of hair-dying in China; black hair is a sign of vitality, and there is whole culture of hair-dying; as part of his unconventional nature, Xi Jinping has created a revolution of his own by allowing streaks of natural grey to appear in his hair. Bell further notes the importance of a drinking culture in China—especially toasting. While countries like England, Ireland, and Germany are notorious for their immoderate drinking, Bell notes that certain provinces in China likewise have such a reputation. Moreover, drinking and driving became a problem as part of the rapid increase in wealth and technology created new opportunities as well as new problems for the Chinese in the 21st century.
Bell’s defense of China may not convince most readers. Yet his apologetic depiction of China has some pronounced lessons for the West. The first is the notion of meritocracy. If China surpasses the West in the 21st century, it will be because China, as the West once did, prizes merit over political correctness. As both the public and private sectors in America continue to lower standards and expectation both of employees and for consumers, America risks further losing the innovation that drove the American Century.
Also, as Bell indicates, Chinese education prizes excellence, and seeks to appropriate both Western and Eastern culture for the progress and flourishing of China. The West is crippled with self-criticism and guilt and is actively attempting to erase its past. While there are certainly dangers of chauvinistic nationalism as well as merits to self-criticism, China’s patriotic and meritocratic approach to education will likely win in the end.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the question of why Bell (and others) seek to leave the West for the East—Bell notes that much of the world currently sees America, once the world’s preeminent power, as a dysfunctional basket case. It is incumbent upon Americans, especially American educators, to help craft a future in which Americans not only want to succeed and flourish, but who actually want to live in the land of their birth.
The post Fast Times at Shandong U. appeared first on The American Conservative.
Wishing away the ghost of a slain predecessor, our president is trying to bury a living law.
Hypocrisy is never a good look. On June 30, our secretary of Education declared that the Supreme Court, by striking down President Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program, had “substituted itself for Congress.” On the very same day, Biden issued his “Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” decreeing that, from now on, executive-branch agencies would adopt the CIA’s “Transparency Plan” for releasing assassination related files they control.
The problem: The federal law governing disposition of such files, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, is still in force. It set a deadline of October 26, 2017, nearly 54 years after the horror in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, for the release of any still-withheld documents. By executive fiat, Biden made his memo the “final certification” under the Act, meaning that, at least so far as our commander-in-chief is concerned, the legislation passed unanimously by Congress over three decades ago is now dead.
To those familiar with this situation, Biden’s edict looks like an effort to preempt a troublesome conclusion to legal action currently under way. In October 2022, the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) filed suit in federal court against Biden and the National Archives, charging that the president had already violated the JFK Records Act when he certified postponement of withheld files in October 2021. In December 2022, Biden proclaimed he was again certifying postponement, the fourth time a president had done so since the legal deadline. His 2023 diktat is trying to put a “final stamp” on an already illicit process, in hopes of brushing away the will of Congress forever.
MFF v. Biden raises constitutional issues related to the separation of powers, but its most important element may actually be an ancient principle of Anglo-American law. The defendants’ lawyers argue that the courts have no authority to enjoin or constrain the President in the exercise of his powers, including declassification of government records, and their argument rests on the idea that there is nothing special about the JFK Records Act. Yet they know this is untrue.
The JFK Records Act is a “remedial statute.” That means it was designed to correct an error in the implementation of another law. As the plaintiffs’ lawyers explain:
The canon grew from the “mischief” rule that calls on courts to identify the mischiefs and defects that the legislature identified when it enacted legislation, and then construe the statute in a manner that would suppress the mischief and advance the remedy.
In other words, the courts should interpret the law as broadly as possible to fulfill Congress’s objectives, and a run-of-the-mill “executive privilege” claim shouldn’t be good enough. In contending that Biden is “above the law” regarding declassification of assassination records, the government is flouting the “mischief rule” on the grounds of “national security,” expecting us to trust that the CIA and other executive-branch agencies have our best interests at heart, even as they collude with industry to censor free speech and commit other rights abuses. But what is at the heart of the secrecy that is now set to continue indefinitely if the CIA’s scheme takes root?
While educated guesses are not irresponsible in contemplating government abuses of power, it is unlikely that conspirators would have put a plot to kill the president in writing, to say nothing of documenting it in official files. Still, suspicion that President Kennedy’s murder was the result of a conspiracy remains widespread, and an examination of the historical record may offer clues to what transpired on November 22, 1963—and to why our national-security grandees might be hiding a titanic disgrace to their reputations and consequent mortal threat to their power.
In early 1962, the Pentagon conceived and approved a program called Operation Northwoods, involving “false flag” attacks to be staged on American territory and blamed on the Communist regime in Cuba. These would have constituted acts of terror, but hawkish members of the U.S. national-security state saw them as worth the price, since they would create the pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba and removal of its charismatic leader, Fidel Castro, whose CIA cryptonym was “AMTHUG.”
When presented with Operation Northwoods, President Kennedy rejected it. He had already nixed hawks’ exhortations to bomb Soviet military bases during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and in 1961 reportedly had walked out of a National Security Council briefing during the Berlin Crisis. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was explaining how the United States might launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and survive the response. As he was leaving the room, Kennedy remarked to his secretary of State: “And we call ourselves the human race.”
But Operation Northwoods lived on. The JCS revived its “pretext” plans without presidential approval in spring 1963, and by November a complementary CIA psychological warfare operation codenamed AMSPELL was in full swing. Designed to trumpet the menace of Cuban Communism infiltrating American society and institutions, AMSPELL made a special target of the New York-based Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a group calling for normal diplomatic and trade relations with Havana. In violation of the Agency’s own charter prohibiting operations on American soil, the CIA funded and directed U.S.-based anti-Castro Cuban exiles for propaganda purposes. In August 1963, the group at AMSPELL’s core—the Revolutionary Student Directorate, or DRE—had an altercation on the streets of an American city with the man ultimately accused of killing JFK.
As the CIA financed the DRE to the tune of half a million dollars a month in today’s money, Lee Harvey Oswald was captured on camera handing out FPCC leaflets to passers-by in downtown New Orleans, a city with no official local chapter of the organization he claimed to represent. After a scuffle seen by many, Oswald and the DRE activists were briefly jailed, and within days the twenty-three-year-old Oswald was speaking on TV about U.S.-Cuba relations and debating the local DRE leader on the radio. Wittingly or unwittingly, Oswald thus perfected his own “legend” as Castro-sympathizing Marxist oddball, so that hours after the assassination, the DRE was broadcasting (without evidence) that he—an “ex-defector” to the USSR—had murdered JFK on Castro’s orders.
These events hint at some toxic mix of the Northwoods and AMSPELL having led to Kennedy’s murder, prompting an official cover-up to protect careers. The DRE’s “conspiracy theory” about Castro would be abandoned, and the man in police custody—describing himself angrily on camera as “just a patsy”—would be depicted instead as just a lone nut. Plans to invade Cuba would fizzle as preparations for the Vietnam intervention ramped up, and documentation of AMSPELL and Northwoods would be withheld from the public to the present day. While it may be a stretch to suggest anything in these files reflects foreknowledge of Kennedy’s murder, the idea that the CIA knows much more about the assassination than it has ever revealed seems inescapable.
In October 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo—appointed to head a powerful agency with which he had no professional experience, and that both he and his boss were keen to appease—convinced President Donald Trump to continue withholding assassination-related files. Whatever the former president saw, he probably did actually lay eyes on “sensitive” materials. He has reportedly conveyed his shock at their contents to people he knows. The anonymous source quoted by Tucker Carlson in December, in answer to the question of whether the CIA had a hand in the assassination, sounded distinctly Trump-esque: “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”
But is Joe Biden, who doesn’t even appear to know where he is most of the time, aware of any of this? So far, he has evinced no emotion about the files, never mind shock, so maybe he’s seen nothing meaningful at all. The JFK Records Act vests the president with the sole, non-delegable duty to review assassination records, to certify whether—by “clear and convincing evidence”—“identifiable harm” to national security from disclosure outweighs the public interest in transparency about an acutely painful episode in our nation’s history. It looks as if unlawfully delegating this duty to agencies such as the CIA is just fine by Joe Biden. He might rather take a nap anyway.
As for any agency in control of embarrassing or incriminating files, the current scenario is ideal. With a little CIA sleight of hand, an apparently debilitated chief of state can be convinced to sign anything. Endowed with a “divine right” he can’t even perceive, our elected king can avert his unsteady gaze from a bloody ghost of America’s past while a corrupt national-security state continues to get away with murder at home and abroad. Figuratively speaking, of course.
The post The Divine Right of Joe Biden appeared first on The American Conservative.
We shouldn’t expect much to change from the Supreme Court ruling, but it is at least a decent start to a different debate.
“It’s not about being colorblind. It’s about being blind to history, blind to empirical evidence about disparities, and blind to the strength that diversity brings to classrooms.” So sagely opines America’s vice president, whose qualification for high office seems to be the fact that she brings diversity to the cabinet.
I am not sure what other qualities she possesses that my flawed mortal eyes cannot detect. It is certainly not English grammar, syntax, or linguistic ornamentation, or rhetorical flourish, or timeless historical wisdom. Her ode to empirical evidence doesn’t count for much. Arguments for empirical evidence that fail or refuse to consider cultural variables that contribute to group failures or group successes are, by definition, not very empirical. Harris’s tweet was prompted by the recent Supreme Court ruling in the cases brought by a group representing Asian American students against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court ruled that affirmative action is basically illegal and discriminatory. Naturally, Harris, among others, was livid.
Consider the academic standards at the founding of the republic. When Alexander Hamilton entered King’s College (now Columbia University), he could read Cicero and Virgil in the original Latin. Likewise, James Madison during his time at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) had already mastered Virgil, Horace, Justinian, Caesar, Tacitus, Lucretius, Phaedrus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato.
Standards remained relatively high until the end of World War II and the beginning of the current “diverse” regime in the mid-1950s. One can see the question papers set by Hannah Arendt for students during her professorship. Nowadays, we have David Hogg in Harvard taking the place of some smart hard-working Asian. Noticing the steady declension in quality of higher-education question papers for the past six decades, give or take, one should be at least cautious in opining about “empirical” evidence in the presence of such strong observable patterns and correlations.
But the ruling brought forth a governing conundrum. The core function of higher education, in a republic, is not simply the creation of an imperial meritocracy. It is maintaining stability between competing factions of the citizenry and to foster an elite core that reflects the country; to create a detached and smart national governing elite, as well as to promote a competitive meritocracy that pushes the polity forward.
Our universities, for the most part, now fail in both charges. To think that the state has no interest in the creation of this national elite through education and that higher education will not be used to shape an elite is not only idiotic, but also in fact futile and makes space for chaos. One of the first acts in Massachusetts was an education bill known, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, as the “Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647.“
Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote an interesting essay on the topic recently.
Our top colleges know that their admissions process is a significant force shaping the nation’s governing class. But the fact is, in a democracy, representation is an essential principle. And if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are curating our elite, then it makes perfect sense—for reasons of political stability and fairness—to make sure that African Americans and Hispanics are well represented in those classes. This is a consideration that is perennial in government and in life—it’s why English kings once contemplated giving out peerages to loads of Labour members and Catholics, to balance an overly Tory and Protestant body.
That is, of course, correct in principle. Social equilibrium and stability are some of the highest conservative virtues. Pure meritocracy cannot simply exist without an imperial governance system. There will be some form of selective representation, and the state will interfere in some ways to decide that.
That said, where I disagree is the assertions that affirmative action in its current form is leading to that formation of a competent national elite and that torching the quota regime will lead to complete disaster. First, there is no evidence that the current elite is either competent or nationalistic, or in fact republican in spirit. Second, the Asian or Indian kids who study for 12 hours a day and learn to play Chopin and to spell some of the most exotic English words by the time they are 13 will simply learn how to write a good admission essay, adhering to the new social norms and using the new normative lingo that any colleges impose. The cream always rises to the top, as the great philosopher Macho Man Randy Savage once said.
The point is that the colleges have simply given up on excellence. There’s now an elite consensus that any form of blindly tested merit—or anything that goes against an egalitarian orthodoxy or enforces some boundaries or hierarchy—is equal to “white supremacy.” Yes, of course a republic needs social equilibrium, but a republic will not survive at all if members of the governing elite are all ideologues or imbeciles.
This incredible essay by Rupa Subramanya, published immediately prior to the ruling, showed what was at stake. It showed the parallel story of one Calvin Yang, who was a party to the lawsuit, a university swimmer and rugby player, debate-club champion, and a speaker of six languages. He scored a 1550 out of 1600 on his SAT, and was then rejected by both Harvard and Yale. On the other hand, there was Sonia Green, a 19-year-old black woman who was “accepted almost everywhere, including Harvard—despite scoring a 28 on her ACT, much higher than her public high school’s average of 12, but lower than the average at the most competitive schools.” In the end, she ended up at Duke with a full scholarship, where her mother is an administrator in the university’s African and African American Studies Department.
That is both indefensible and unsustainable. Likewise, Chesa Boudin, Lori Lightfoot, Jacinda Ardern, and Anthony Fauci getting tenure at top universities is not the formation of an elite reflective of the values of the country. This is not lending a hand to the hardworking underprivileged in order to have an elite reflective of the national milieu, either. This is the reverse of that, a form of nepotistic kakistocracy.
In the short term, not much is going to change, for as long as America is haunted by its original egalitarian dogma of collective group excellence. A republic is not designed to have caste systems, strictly based on quality or professions, nor should it be that determined in its hierarchy. A republic is likewise not an empire (or a certain dictatorship ruled by a certain vanguard party geared towards hegemony) with a ruling elite that picks and chooses winners and losers in a system and enforces brutal meritocracy.
But any functioning republic is a polity in need of a patrician class, often decided by its institutions of state-building: in our times, the universities. This affirmative action ruling improves the law, but will not change much, as long as we have thousands of universities churning out hundreds of thousands of credentialed bureaucrats designed for an ever-growing Soviet-style administrative state. The sheer mass opposes any form of genuine meritocracy.
The colleges will continue to take in a mass of superficially diverse midwits who will look different but with the same social values and internalized dogmata—a very similar group to the range of students representing all the way from Syria to Kazakhstan at Moscow State University in 1982. The way to a superior national elite, as well as proper meritocracy, is not some court ruling, but shrinking the current bloated higher education model altogether in favor of more hands-on work, trade education, and apprenticeships. But we are not having that debate yet.
The post Reaffirming Merit appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Western allies are increasingly invested in a dangerous Russian loss and an unlikely Ukrainian victory.
Washington is a world apart. A war the United States supposedly isn’t waging hangs over the imperial city. Americans imagine they are at peace, but the Biden administration, backed by most members of Washington’s foreign policy elite, is waging a proxy war (and then some) against Russia in Ukraine.
Accurate information about the conflict is hard to come by in the nation’s capital. Ideology reigns triumphant, leaving Washington a bubble in which no one is supposed to doubt Kiev’s final victory. Even the media compliantly spins the U.S. government’s line. Yet Ukraine’s latest offensive appears to have consumed many men and much materiel, with little territorial result. What if Kiev, not Moscow, is lurching closer to defeat?
What do we know, and how do American policymakers regard the war? The Putin government bears responsibility for initiating hostilities. Nothing compelled Vladimir Putin to invade Russia’s neighbor and turn it into a country-wide charnel house. However, the West created the conditions for war. America and Europe excel at sanctimony while avoiding accountability for their actions. Alas, this is nothing new. Three decades ago Madeleine Albright spoke for the West in asserting that “we,” meaning America’s smug and arrogant leadership, get to decide whether hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners “is worth” the price.
The Ukraine tragedy is no different. Contra the allies’ prodigious propaganda, the war has nothing to do with autocracy, democracy, or aggression. The U.S. and West routinely, even enthusiastically, support murderous dictatorships when it suits them. For instance, the allies continue to arm the Saudi monarchy, one of the world’s most tyrannical states, and underwrite its horrific war against Yemen, which has consumed far more civilian lives than has the Ukrainian imbroglio. For Western officials, weapons sales trump Arab lives.
Not that the Biden administration is unique in this regard. The Reagan administration backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after he attacked Iran, a conflict in which hundreds of thousands of people died. That support encouraged him to believe Washington would acquiesce in his attack on Kuwait. The Nixon administration “tilted” toward Pakistan in its war with India despite the former’s genocidal conduct in what became Bangladesh. Then there were America’s own destructive interventions, such as the catastrophic Iraq war.
American support for Kiev concerns geopolitics more than casualties. Washington officials claim to oppose spheres of interest, but some unashamedly cite the Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of America’s hegemony in the Western Hemisphere; most unofficially believe the U.S. should dominate every other nation, including Russia, up to its border. To that end, successive American administrations ignored the many allied commitments to Moscow to not expand NATO.
Moreover, the transatlantic alliance attacked Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. Without formally inducting Kiev, the members, led by the U.S., brought NATO into Ukraine through weapons transfers and personnel training. Putin’s professed fear that troop and missile deployments would eventually follow was not unreasonable.
The West consistently put its ambitions before peace. The allies refused to foreclose Ukrainian membership even though doing so might have led to an agreement preventing hostilities. Once at war, leading Europeans, including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, admitted that the Minsk accords were a fraud, intended to buy time for Kiev. Moreover, early last year the U.S. and its allies apparently lobbied the Zelensky government against accepting neutrality to end the conflict.
In recent months the drumbeat has gotten louder to effectively destroy Russia: regime change, democratization, confiscation, war crimes trials, disarmament, even dismemberment. Yet seriously pushing such policies would ensure continued conflict and potential escalation. Russia won’t make peace on such terms. Rather, faced with such demands, Moscow likely would resist even more strongly, relying on nuclear weapons if necessary. (Regime survival would trump even presumed Chinese opposition.)
Allied leaders apparently imagine that defeat would spawn a liberal, humane, and submissive government prepared to sacrifice all at Washington’s direction. This is not Russia’s historical experience. In 1917, democratic forces friendly to the U.S. and the western Entente powers were supplanted by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Putin quickly succeeded Boris Yeltsin and the similarly oriented elites who took over Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Putin’s strongest internal critics are nationalist in philosophy and ruthless in temperament. The specter of Russia’s collapse brings to mind Yugoslavia’s dissolution, only with a civil war leavened by thousands of loose nuclear weapons.
Yet all this speculation will prove irrelevant if the Kiev government cracks first. Unfortunately, we know little of the conflict’s actual course since even major Western media have become fervent advocates, submissively conveying the official narrative. Ukraine’s ongoing offensive has gone slower than expected. Most allied officials still profess optimism, but a few discordant voices dismiss triumphant visions of expelling Russian forces from the Donbas and Crimea.
Moscow obviously blundered badly in its initial attack but learned from its mistakes. Russia has constructed formidable fortifications—and so far Ukrainian attacks have failed to reach, let alone penetrate, the main defense lines. Despite sanctions, the Putin government retains an advantage in materiel and production, especially of ammunition. Moreover, allied weapons transfers have not reversed Moscow’s significant battlefield edge in aircraft, missiles, and drones.
Some allied analysts began tempering their expectations of the offensive before Kiev struck. In February the Biden administration pointed to “force generation and sustainment shortfalls” and predicted that the attack could “fall ‘well short’ of Kiev’s original goals.” Even some allied publications acknowledge heavy losses. Consider this Ukrainian thrust, which ended badly. Per Forbes:
Analysts recently have tallied even more wrecked and abandoned 47th Brigade M-2 infantry fighting vehicles. At the same time, a Ukrainian photographer on or before Saturday got close enough to the site of the failed assault to snap photos of the Russian minefield that trapped the Ukrainian battlegroup, ultimately destroying dozens of 47th and 33rd Brigades’ best Western-made vehicles and killing or wounding many Ukrainians.
Substantial manpower and materiel losses will limit the Zelensky government’s ability to sustain its efforts, yet the American and European governments appear unwilling or unable to replace lost equipment. In fact, the allied military cornucopia is rapidly emptying. A gaggle of visiting Europeans recently admitted that their peoples were tired of underwriting Ukraine’s war effort. Americans remain sympathetic to Kiev, but their patience will be tested in coming months.
The top Ukrainian commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, recently offered a surprisingly pessimistic account. Of the current fighting, he allowed: “Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all.” The Washington Post reported that “His troops also should be firing at least as many artillery shells as their enemy, Zaluzhny said, but have been outshot tenfold at times because of limited resources.”
Moreover, the Post reported, “Zaluzhny expressed frustration that while his biggest Western backers would never launch an offensive without air superiority, Ukraine still has not received modern fighter jets but is expected to rapidly take back territory from the occupying Russians.” Yet even those planes would not deliver air superiority against Moscow’s well-regarded air defenses, including control over its airspace, from which many Russian planes operate.
Perhaps even more crippling: Ukraine cannot easily replace the loss of so many trained personnel. Noted Le Monde, “The time when army recruitment offices were overwhelmed with requests from civilians ready to take up arms seems to be over.” And current military exigencies make extended training before deployment difficult if not impossible. Despite the flight of some draft age men, Russia retains a substantial population edge, an advantage enhanced by Ukraine’s population drain as refugees escape westward.
What if Kiev’s current offensive fails to yield a decisive Ukrainian breakthrough and Russian collapse? Deadlock is bad for Russia but worse for Ukraine, which provides the battleground. Moreover, an exhausted and diminished Ukrainian military would be vulnerable to renewed Russian attacks. Although Moscow doesn’t look close to victory as some analysts have repeatedly claimed, it appears stronger than the allies insist.
The Biden administration continues to say that only Kiev can decide its war ends, but the latter cannot bind the allies. Today the Zelensky government, backed (or forced) by a large majority of Ukraine’s population, is committed to recovering lost territory. Unfortunately, Kiev’s desire appears to vastly outstrip its means. A dramatic Ukrainian advance or convincing pacific Russian political shift remain possible but look increasingly unlikely.
Washington must decide policy based on American interests. An open-ended conflict with steadily increasing entanglement against a nuclear-armed power with far more at stake is a bad deal for the American people. The Biden administration should engage in serious discussions with Moscow about ending the conflict and building a stable security structure.
A realistic agreement means Ukraine would not regain territory lost in 2014 and even over the last year. In fact, discreet talks may have already begun, which could explain Kiev’s latest hardline declarations. The situation is reminiscent of American negotiations to end the Korean War. The South Korean government, which could not fight alone, nevertheless sought to thwart an agreement and keep Washington in the war.
Of course, the Zelensky government might not agree to concessions even under pressure.. But then it should understand that it would be on its own. Ultimately, Washington must protect its own people first. And that means ending today’s dangerous confrontation with Russia.
As for Europe, the U.S. should engage in burden-shifting rather than -sharing. The time is long past for the continent to take the lead in its own defense. Even now, with Moscow perceived as a significant security threat, Europeans admit that they fear doing more would encourage America to leave. Thus, Washington needs to begin leaving to force allied governments to take over their own defense. Uncle Sam no longer can afford to underwrite dozens of deadbeat allies who believe their security is America’s responsibility.
Russia’s unjustified attack on Ukraine has had horrendous consequences. Unfortunately, the allies share blame for the conflict, having recklessly ignored Moscow’s security interests and warnings. Washington should take the lead in searching for peace.
The post What if Russia Is Winning America’s Proxy War in Ukraine? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Robert Lighthizer’s new book, No Trade Is Free, should be the foundational text for a new generation of policymakers.
No Trade Is Free, Robert Lighthizer, HarperCollins, 381 pages
When I was first married, I briefly tried to earn an honest living. I worked for a startup attempting to take advantage of various long-term changes in the irreparably broken American healthcare industry. It paid poorly and had no benefits, and the rigors of the early COVID economy had resulted in exciting changes to the payroll process—namely, whether we’d get paid or not. Shortly before the birth of my eldest daughter, like a dog to its vomit, I returned to the conservative press.
At this company, we were handling large amounts of what we called, vaguely, “data”—lists of patients organized by this or that metric, clinical notes from encounters with patients, collections of billing information. The tedious movement of these data into and out of electronic medical records systems was handled by Filippina ladies, who were hired through an online service at the princely sum of $7 per hour.
Near the end of my tenure, we discovered through the same service a taciturn Macedonian named Ali. Ali was an actual medical doctor, and could proofread clinical notes for accuracy as he entered them into records systems; he cost $6.50 per hour. Our billing was handled by an Indian firm; I forget exactly how much we paid them, but it was far less than an equivalent American full-time position.
There are a handful of important and interrelated points to take from this little self-indulgent dip into my personal history. These “knowledge work” jobs are all completely digital and ultimately service-based, the sorts of positions meant to replace American manufacturing and goods-based work at the end of history. They are also, by American standards, often low-paying and unpleasant—not the promise held out in the ’90s. Finally, thanks to the internet, they turn out to be just as easily outsourced as manufacturing jobs, if not more so—even relatively high-skill work like proofing notes and handling billing.
This anecdote should be a cause for alarm and dread. (If you think it is exceptional, I recommend you go to fiverr.com and look for other high-skill service professionals like graphic designers or web developers.) Robert Lighthizer’s new book, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking On China, and Helping America’s Workers, articulates that alarm and proposes remedies.
Former President Donald Trump’s trade representative first lays out clearly and dispassionately the history of American trade policy, particularly the last three catastrophic decades. He explodes the idea that a trade deficit is irrelevant, showing instead that the United States has leveraged a perversely strong dollar and hollowed out or sold off its industrial capacity. The fruit of the swap? An explosion in imported consumer goods.
The result: a mass outflow of American capital, and the capture of real American assets by non-American firms. (To the doctrinaire free marketeers who would pooh-pooh this concern: Are you really comfortable with the fact that a Chinese company dominates the American pork industry?) Manufacturing jobs have been sent abroad in favor of the sort of “knowledge work” described above, which itself, as shown, can be easily offshored. In short, a bad deal for the mass of Americans and a bad deal for national sovereignty.
An impression that emerges from Lighthizer’s account is how moderate the Trump trade policy was. The American tariff load post-Trump is still lower than that in comparable economies, including those of our putative allies in the European Union. The renegotiation of NAFTA, the USMCA, required Mexico to play by American labor rules and reformed country-of-origin regulations for automobiles rather than attempting to cut Mexico out entirely. (I have written some about the difficulties and questionable desirability of completely decoupling from Mexico at this point.) It is worth underlining a point that Lighthizer makes gently—the Trump administration completely changed the trade policy paradigm, and the Biden administration has adopted many of its solutions wholesale. Hardly the stuff of wide-eyed fire-breathing economic madness.
Lighthizer does not render only an archaeology and theoretical account of American trade policy; he gives granular reports of the particulars of his own negotiations. While these sections may seem beside the point for pundits and think-tankers, they will provide an invaluable primer for the staffers of any future administration’s trade office—for example, Lighthizer’s description and analysis of the application of steel and aluminum tariffs to Europe, including a description of what he would have done differently.
There are two types of argument when it comes to economic policy. As you’d expect, the first is purely economic: Thus and such action will bring more prosperity. The second is—you guessed it—political: The state and the nation are strengthened by thus and such action. The former sort of argument is subject to all sorts of quibbling and special pleading; the latter tends to be clear-cut, a matter illuminated by the sober light of day. Simply put, if the United States is ever involved in a war with a near-peer power, it must have an industrial base that is under its control. (For those who think the days of materiel-heavy infantry wars are over, or that trading partners never go to war, I say, Ha! and point to the Russia–Ukraine articles in the New York Times.) Lighthizer argues persuasively that an aggressive trade policy is economical; he is unanswerable when he says that it is vital to the interest of national sovereignty.
Without laws set and enforced states, markets devolve into piracy and unruly conflict, hardly an arena for fair trade. Since conditions for markets are created and maintained by states, market purity must be subordinated to the interests of the state—a simple premise. The Trump presidency made some first steps toward reining in our trade policy to serve the national interest; the question is whether a weakened America will stay the difficult course to a healthier clime.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The post One Equal Temper appeared first on The American Conservative.
Something like the end of affirmative action has happened before—and, for better or worse, it completely changed American elite culture.
The Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is an unusual one insofar as no one really knows what its effect will be. What happens now—will it be enforced? Can it be enforced? What would enforcing it look like?
The ruling says that Harvard may not discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions policies. This means the affirmative action program Harvard has been using to increase its number of black and Hispanic students is unlawful.
The majority opinion says specifically that universities are not allowed to recreate their affirmative action policies by giving the same boost they used to give for race to students who talk about “adversity” (i.e., race) in their application essays, as many schools have been hinting that they will do. “Universities may not simply establish through the application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” the chief justice wrote. On the other hand, the ruling can’t possibly mean that Harvard is required to admit students on the basis of test scores and grades alone.
The Harvard freshman class of 2025 was 24 percent Asian, 53 percent white, and 16 percent black. A 2013 study found that without affirmative action Harvard would be 43 percent Asian, 38 percent white, and less than 1 percent black.
Clearly the Supreme Court wants Harvard to move away from the first set of numbers and in the direction of the second—but how far?
Neither logic nor the law can give us an answer to that. Obviously Harvard must be allowed to take into account whether an applicant has demonstrated grit and determination against adversity. But what if the admissions office simply stipulates that being black or Hispanic in racist America constitutes adversity in itself? That would be a transparent attempt to circumvent the law. Unless admissions officers genuinely believe that—which, to be honest, they probably do.
The only thing to do is what everyone in the affirmative action debate has done from the beginning: figure out what kind of outcome we want and trust the Supreme Court to backfill a logical justification later.
There are many reasons why Harvard will never admit a freshman class that is half Asian and less than 1 percent black. Letting an important American minority group go almost entirely unrepresented in the Ivy League would be politically unpalatable. Letting a small demographic minority (America is less than 6 percent Asian) be so overrepresented would have consequences, too—for campus culture, for Harvard’s reputation, and quite possibly in terms of backlash once those students took their place in the country’s institutions of power.
If you know your history, you recognize these as the same arguments that were made about Jewish students in the 1920s. Jewish students would alter the atmosphere on campus, with their single-minded focus on academics; admitting a class that was 40 percent Jewish would be a recipe for antisemitic backlash; therefore, we must impose a cap on their share of the freshman class.
So history is where we should look for guidance now. The arguments for Jewish quotas were all based on predictions about the future: If we admit unlimited numbers of Jewish students, then this bad outcome will follow. In the end, quotas were abolished, and Jewish admissions did rise. How did those predictions fare? The Supreme Court has essentially instructed the Ivy League to lift its de facto quota on Asians, so history surely offers a lesson here.
There were three basic arguments made by Ivy League administrators in favor of capping Jewish admissions at around 10 to 15 percent, more than their share of the American population but lower than their academic achievement would warrant. If I may ventriloquize:
1. Ever heard the Yogi Berra-ism “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”? Students come to Ivy League schools in order to hang around the sons of the upper class. The networking that comes with that, and the social polish, are what people pay for. If they discover they are instead paying to hang around the sons of dentists and garment workers, then no one will want to come here anymore—including, eventually, the sons of dentists and garment workers. It will be an admissions death spiral.
2. If we admit a class that is 40 percent Jewish, then 30 years from now Wall Street and the State Department will be 40 percent Jewish, and that will be bound to elicit an antisemitic backlash among their peers and in the public.
3. Universities are places of acculturation as much as education. They exist to impart values. This does not happen in a classroom but by osmosis from the campus community. If an alien culture attains a critical mass in the student body, then that acculturation will not take place, even if those newcomers desire to assimilate to the former majority culture, which in this case it is not clear that they do. We want to pass our distinctive New England Protestant culture on to our children. If that doesn’t happen at Yale, where will it? We would have to go build another university for that purpose, and we already did that. We built Yale from nothing. The only reason you want to come here is because of what we have achieved. It is our inheritance, and we have a duty to preserve it, which means admitting outsiders in modest numbers compatible with cultural continuity.
Argument three also came in a more hostile variation, defining the nature of the cultural differences between the two demographics in terms of antisemitic stereotypes. But no one denied that cultural differences existed, and in some cases the differences were quantifiable, such as being more likely to live off campus and eschew extracurriculars in order to save money, as was the case with the many Jewish townies from New Haven who attended Yale.
How did these arguments fare in reality? The first two predictions clearly failed. The Ivy League schools dismantled their quota systems around 1960, and by 1986 the New York Times estimated that Yale’s student body was around 30 percent Jewish. The admissions death spiral never materialized. Quite the opposite: Ivy League schools have become more influential and admission to them more sought after since the 1960s. As for antisemitic backlash, that, too, never came. Polarization between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans did increase, and Ivy League elites are distrusted and resented as never before, but that alienation has not taken the form of ethnic hatred.
But the third prediction has been vindicated. WASP culture has ceased to exist. It had been transmitted through institutions like Yale and Harvard, and when these institutions were taken over and coopted for other purposes, that cultural transmission didn’t go someplace else. The transmission ceased, and the culture died. Maybe you see this as a tragedy and maybe you don’t, but no one can deny that the world depicted in the novels of Louis Auchincloss or J.P. Marquand has vanished from the face of the earth. Significantly, there is not a single WASP among the eight university presidents of the Ivy League today.
Each of these arguments can easily be adapted to the present situation.
1. If Harvard admits all the Asians whose scores justify it, it will become Caltech and no one will want to go there.
2. If Harvard admits all the Asians whose scores justify it, then in 30 years we will have a 50 percent Asian ruling class, and that will not be popular with Middle America.
3. The culture of the Ivy League will change if their student bodies are 50 percent Asian. It will come more to resemble immigrant culture and the cultures from which those immigrants come, especially in the age of globalization and multiculturalism when the pressures of assimilation are less.
My guess is that history will repeat itself with numbers one and two. Harvard will not become Caltech if it admits a class that is half Asian. There will be no student exodus; the brand is too strong. Backlash is a bigger worry, especially since the population of Asians is so much larger than that of Jews, both in terms of the number in the United States and their total number on the planet. There is a real chance that they could dominate our upper class, not just relative to their share of the population but in absolute terms. Growing tensions with China obviously complicate everything further.
But the left has always said that backlash is no reason not to do the right thing. Racists don’t get a veto. If the rest of America doesn’t like the idea of a ruling class dominated by Asians, then maybe they should study harder.
That leaves number three. The culture on campus will change if its demographics are altered. The question becomes, how will it change and will the change be desirable? Here we venture onto dangerous ground, because in the current year we are not supposed to make generalizations. But anyone who has spent time in China or India knows that those countries have cultures that are foreign to our own, and immigrants from those countries preserve elements of that culture even after many generations. Perhaps it will be safest to pose a series of questions, with the necessary caveat that every member of a culture will have different answers and for any culture the answers to these questions are not binary but a spectrum:
Do parents tell their children to follow their passions and do what makes them happy, or to pursue worldly success? Do they say things like “the important thing is to try your best” and “the journey is the destination,” or do they teach them to focus on winning? Is cheating viewed as a genuine outrage, or a venial sin that many people get away with when they can? Are relations between superiors and subordinates characterized by egalitarianism and frank speaking, or are people inclined to treat those above them and below them in various hierarchies differently? Is free speech prized as a good in itself or is group comity a competing value? Is it gauche to flaunt one’s wealth, such that even the wealthy in society claim to value “experiences” over “things,” or is it basically acceptable for rich teenagers to drive expensive cars and live in large off-campus apartments? Does family have a claim on a person’s time, money, and space after they graduate, or are you basically your own person once you become an adult?
None of these questions has a right answer. Clearly the broadly “Asian” constellation of answers has something going for it, since their kids are outcompeting native whites. It also diminishes their motivation to assimilate into the American way of doing things if the Asian or Asian-American way leads to greater academic success.
That being said, I can’t help noticing that it is Asian immigrants who are moving to our country and not the other way around. The Ivy League didn’t start out as a place for handing out golden tickets. The reason we have golden tickets to hand out is because our way of doing things works well. And regardless of whether different cultures might be superior by certain objective measures like SAT scores, the American way is ours, and I, for one, am attached to it.
The lesson of the quota era is that schools like Harvard and Yale can admit large numbers of newcomers without affecting their power or their prestige—but not without affecting their culture. Most people today would say that the WASP culture killed by the midcentury admissions changes deserved to die. Personally, I disagree. But the pertinent question now is whether the American culture that exists on Ivy League campuses today also deserves to die, or the people there want to preserve the schools’ current values with some continuity. If they do, then I do not think we are required to interpret the Supreme Court as having declared that desire illegitimate.
The post The Price of Admissions appeared first on The American Conservative.
In France, the demand for racism outstrips the supply.
I didn’t have an especially wild college experience, at least by conventional standards. I wasn’t in a fraternity, didn’t do drugs, and didn’t party much. Animal House it was not.
The most memorable thing to happen in my four years of college was probably the whole-of-campus meltdown that ensued after a few girls hosted an impolitic Halloween party. They called it a “ghetto” party, which they should have known was a terrible idea; some of the attendees posted pictures of themselves in orange prison jumpsuits and cornrowed hair.
Within days, there were write-ups of the incident in the New York Times and Teen Vogue. Black student groups on campus were up in arms, and denounced the school and their fellow students as racist in a school-wide “conversation” on race relations. They insisted that the incident was representative of subtler forms of racism that supposedly pervaded the school.
I did not attend the party, and certainly wouldn’t have worn those costumes in that context. But the outrage that followed—the tears, the yelling, the campus-wide struggle session, the self-flagellating apology from our president in the pages of the New York Times—was wildly disproportionate to the gravity of the incident itself.
You realized pretty quickly once you got on campus how much emotional and institutional energy was invested in the idea that our school was racist. Black student groups were constantly decrying “institutional racism.” The school’s small army of diversity bureaucrats were always eager for some incident to come along that would justify their jobs, but mostly had to content themselves with offering optional seminars on “inclusive language.” The student paper was ridden with articles fretting about the lack of diversity on campus. They often ran editorials demanding a “conversation about race,” as if it weren’t the only thing we talked about.
I don’t think the activists themselves were conscious of it, necessarily, but I think they were desperate for a bona fide incident of racism to “prove” things were as bad as they claimed.
There is a similar principle at work in the riots that have possessed France since Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French boy of Algerian-Moroccan descent, was killed by a police officer last week. There is a difference in the gravity of the precipitating events and the scope of the outrage—a crude Halloween party is not, despite what my former classmates may have thought, as grave as the taking of a human life, and my classmates didn’t burn down convenience stores—but activists in both cases saw their respective episodes as vindicating long-standing complaints about more subtle forms of racism.
In a sympathetic profile of the demonstrators, one French protestor told the New York Times that non-whites in France are regularly “targeted by the police.” Another said he doesn’t “worry about robbers,” but does worry the police will target his children. A third promised France would “continue to burn until we get justice.”
They’ve done that, and then some. The Times reports that more than 5,000 vehicles have been torched and 1,000 buildings damaged or looted in five nights of rioting in France since the shooting. Upwards of 700 officers were reportedly injured, and thousands of rioters have been arrested. The country has seen treasured buildings defaced, and shopkeepers have lost thousands in stolen goods. The violence has been explained away and treated sympathetically by the American and international press.
Let’s stipulate, for argument’s sake, that the killing of Nahel Merzouk was unjustified. He was driving from the scene when he was shot, and the officer responsible has been charged. Let’s also stipulate, since it’s true, that human life is infinitely valuable, and its having been taken unjustly is an outrage. That doesn’t explain what’s happening in France.
More than fifteen people are murdered in France on any given week. Those murders don’t prompt nationwide paroxysms of violence and disorder, and if they did, the perpetrators wouldn’t be justified by a member of the National Assembly. Why did this death, in particular, prompt French agitators to burn the country to the ground?
It is certainly not a commitment on the part of French radicals, in the National Assembly or in the streets, to the value of every human life. When an Algerian national in France allegedly killed and raped a child late last year, for example, no buildings were torched, stores looted, or police officers beaten. No rioters toppled monuments or assaulted officers. If they had, you can be sure the New York Times wouldn’t have given their fellows a favorable hearing.
That killing was an inconvenient aberration. Last week’s officer-involved shooting was, to the rioters, an illustration of France’s subtle racism, which the majority population cannot see. The resulting riots, to the press, were an understandable response to decades of oppression.
The demand for racism, as the idiom has it, outstrips the supply. That’s true in the United States, and it’s in France. These riots are the latest fruits of that pent-up demand.
The post France’s Number One American Import appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: That the Biden administration hopes to resume its interference tells you everything you need to know.
An appellate court this week enjoined the Biden administration to cease interfering in the operations of social media companies. The Biden White House has already announced plans to appeal the ruling.
The named plaintiffs in the suit included users who claimed to have had their posts demoted or removed by a social media site responding to Biden administration pressure. The states of Missouri and Louisiana were also among the named plaintiffs in the class-action suit.
The court documented extensive coordination between the Biden White House and social media platforms, with the former pressuring the latter to remove or demote supposed Covid-19 misinformation. Twitter, for example, set up code on their internal servers to prioritize moderation requests from the White House, while Facebook assured Biden officials that “vaccine-skeptical” posts on their platform would be demoted and given warning labels. Posts making “debunked” claims, Facebook told the White House, would be removed entirely.
Former Biden digital strategy official Rob Flaherty even asked Facebook for “some metrics” indicating “the scale of removal for each” type of supposed misinformation, and sent angry letters to the company, accusing it of stoking “vaccine hesitancy.”
To get a sense of the type of coercion involved—remember, this is the federal government we’re talking about—here are a couple of messages sent by White House personnel to private social media companies:
“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.”
And:
“I care mostly about what actions and changes you are making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.”
That the Biden administration is appealing the ruling in hopes of resuming this type of behavior tells you everything you need to know.
The post White House to Appeal Social Media Ruling appeared first on The American Conservative.
Sometimes the solutions aren’t complicated.
The headline in Jerusalem Demsas’ essay in the Atlantic Monthly last November says it clearly: “Housing Breaks People’s Brains.” The subtitle refines the point, “Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes.” Is there anything else to say?
Unfortunately, the headline, essay, and venue—a magazine read largely by (supposedly) smart and educated progressives—didn’t break the fever at Barron’s, where two academics wrote a post with a headline that needs an answer: “Yes, Homes Are Expensive. And Building More Will Solve the Problem.”
The post at Barron’s is premised on our national belief that we are in the throes of a “housing crisis.” Few make a quantitative case for that claim, aside from a reference to cost burden, that is, the number of people in a given jurisdiction paying more than 30 percent of their pre-tax income on housing.
I’ve inveighed against cost-burden analysis in the past for being based on old American Community Survey data. Worse, the numbers are reminiscent of Dr. Evil’s ransom demands in Austin Powers. In almost every jurisdiction, cost-burdened households number in the tens of thousands. Some analysts take that number and insist that is how many new units are needed.
In an example from the linked post above, one city, Albuquerque, was advised by a consultant that it had 15,500 cost-burdened households, and therefore needed to build 15,5000 units. But the city had only permitted 12,000 units of housing total over the course of 5 years, and at an unrealistically cheap price tag of $100,000 per unit, building the proposed number of units would have cost $1.5 billion, double the city’s entire operating budget.
Interestingly, the authors of the Barron’s post confirm what I have argued before, namely, that there isn’t a massive need for new subsidized housing construction. The authors argued that there is no national housing shortage, and that there isn’t one in most major cities, either.
In fact, they write, “of the 707 growing metro markets, only 26 have shortages of housing, with household growth exceeding housing-unit growth. These markets tend to be small, containing less than 1% of the nation’s population.” Using United States Census data, the authors also found that “two-thirds of the growing markets had a surplus of housing, meaning the increase in units from 2000-21 exceeded the growth of households by at least 10 percentage points,” and the markets where this occurred represent “about 72 percent of the U.S. population.”
The authors correctly point out that the problem has to do with the gap between incomes and housing prices. But then they suggest something that I’ve seen suggested before, that it isn’t lack of supply, but job creation that drives up housing prices. This line of thinking—that more jobs means better paying jobs and thus higher housing prices—is a stubborn one.
When developers and investors decide to build more housing, the first thing they consider is an area’s job growth. Why? Because when there are new jobs in an area, more people will move there. When population goes up, so does the demand for housing, and thus the opportunity for investors to get a good return on their investments.
The best investments are made in an area where job growth and population will outpace existing housing. If this doesn’t happen, then prices will skyrocket, not because of the abundance of jobs but because, yes, there isn’t enough housing.
Investors and developers look for rising prices as a signal. Prices represent the interplay between supply and demand. If I’m a developer, I’m not going to build 500 units of housing in a place with high vacancies, growing unemployment, and falling population. I’m looking for the opposite relationship—falling vacancies, more jobs, and more and more people. Wages matter, too, because people who earn less money feel price shocks first and for longer. When housing prices go up, poor people give up a greater share of their incomes to pay for it.
The authors do have at least one proposal that I completely agree with:
The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist through housing vouchers for renter households and down-payment assistance for home buyers.
As I argued last October here at The American Conservative, while allowing more housing to be built is the long-term solution, cash subsidies for market-rate housing, limited to people who can’t work, is a short-term fix.
Overall, the problem with the housing economy is at the margins, among people who earn lower wages and are bound up in intergenerational poverty. When local governments make it hard for producers of market rate housing to build apartments or homes, the resulting scarcity leads to inflation, which, again, hits those people in the margins hardest. That’s why the last line of the Barron’s post is a bizarre head scratcher: “The U.S. cannot build itself out of its housing crisis.”
In fact, the United States can build its way out of the problem of price volatility. If local governments would stop choking housing supply, creating inflation, complaining about the crisis they created, then demanding more federal subsidies in the form of Low Income Housing Tax Credits, we would be well on our way to a healthier housing market.
The solution is pretty simple. First, reform zoning laws, and regulate housing only for health and safety. Second, tie federal subsidies to local governments making these changes. Third, consolidate the billions of dollars in federal programs into a single cash-for-rent program. Finally, reserve capital investment of public money for the hardest hit, especially people with mental health and addiction issues.
Good housing solutions start with good thinking about the problem. We can build a less volatile housing economy if we put our brains to good use.
The post Build, Baby, Build appeared first on The American Conservative.
Groff v. DeJoy is a cause for celebration, but it is hardly an epochal victory for religious Americans.
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Groff v. DeJoy last week was one of several victories for religious liberty over the last two years. We should celebrate these Supreme Court victories, but we should do so aware of the modesty and the limitations of these wins.
Gerald Groff, a postman and an Evangelical Christian, was a sympathetic plaintiff with a simple request of his employer: allow an accommodation so this Christian man, who believes in the importance of the Commandment to “keep holy the sabbath,” does not have to work on Sundays. This set the stage for an important change in precedent.
Groff had worked as a mail delivery man with the U.S. Postal Service since 2012. At the time he was hired, there was no conflict for a Christian, as mail was not delivered on Sundays. As Amazon began Sunday delivery services (an evil that deserves its own essay), Groff moved to a rural station that did not make Sunday deliveries. As Amazon continued its march toward world domination, Groff was again forced to confront the Sunday deliveries, which he refused as a violation of his obligation to keep Sundays holy. He continued to be disciplined until he was forced to resign.
The legal heart of the matter is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of religion. If an employee invokes Title VII and requests a religious accommodation for his beliefs, the employer must accommodate the employee unless it “demonstrates that [the employer] is unable to reasonably accommodate… an employee’s or prospective employee’s religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business” (emphasis added).
The result in Groff was straightforward. In a case called Hardison, decided in 1977, the Supreme Court heard a similar but distinct religious accommodations case. The central holding of that case had to do with whether a 1972 amendment to Title VII violated the Establishment Clause. In issuing that decision, the Court made the now-infamous statement “that requiring an employer ‘to bear more than a de minimis cost’ to provide a religious accommodation is an undue hardship.”
This is the crux of the issue: Title VII itself states that a religious accommodation can be denied only if the employer can show it would create undue hardship, but since Hardison an “undue hardship” has been interpreted to mean “anything more than a de minimis cost.” In short, Hardison gave license for employers to deny religious accommodations for almost any reason, which led very easily to Gerald Groff being forced to work Sundays because it would be too much of a burden on the Postal Service to change his schedule.
The majority opinion in Groff explained that, while a reasonable reading of Hardison does not even lead to the legal requirement of this “anything more than a de minimis cost” standard, the decision has clearly been relied on in fact to institute this burdensome standard on religious exemptions. “Diverse religious groups tell the Court that the ‘de minimis’ standard has been used to deny even minor accommodations. The EEOC has also accepted Hardison as prescribing a ‘more than a de minimis cost’ test….” The Court in Groff corrects this error: to deny a religious accommodation, an employer must show “that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
The Court clarifies that an undue hardship means a substantial burden on the cost of business, not any burden slightly inconvenient to the employer. This is a rather mild ruling by the Court—especially when one considers that the outcome does not actually protect Gerald Groff’s job but sends his case back to the lower court to be decided under the proper standard of what constitutes an undue burden.
The mild, moderate nature of this case ought to both showcase the outlandish and extreme reactions of the left to the current Supreme Court and serve to warn conservatives to remain realistic and vigilant.
Groff merely clarifies that religious accommodations under Title VII cannot be denied on a whim; none of the liberal justices even dissented, indicating that this was a particularly uncontroversial decision. But it is important to reflect here, not just on Groff, but on the many hot button cases that have been decided by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court in the last two years. How extreme were these conservative opinions, really? A couple examples will suffice.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. Despite the ridiculous outbursts of the progressive media and even the Biden administration about this dangerous decision that erased 50 years of precedent and “undermined women’s autonomy, health, privacy, and safety,” Dobbs was a measured decision. Dobbs merely stated that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, that there is clearly no right to abortion found in the Constitution, and that abortion goes back to the legislatures to figure out how abortion policy should be crafted. While pro-life legal advocates argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should be read to protect the life of unborn persons and therefore make abortion unconstitutional, the Dobbs court took the moderate stance.
Last week, the Court also decided 303 Creative v. Elenis, giving a more decisive victory to a Christian business owner than poor Jack Phillips was able to get from the Supreme Court in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Again, a Christian party wins a newsworthy case, and the left goes wild. Justice Sotomayor inexplicably used her dissent in a free speech case about a website designer to remind us of the horrors of the Pulse nightclub shooting and the murder of Matthew Shepherd, hinting that allowing Christians the freedom to speak may take us back to “an environment in which LGBT people were unsafe.”
President Biden also weighed in, expressing his deep concern about the discrimination being unleashed by the 303 Creative decision. But what was decided? The holding was merely that, since creating a custom website is speech, it is protected by the First Amendment. That means a state nondiscrimination law cannot force someone in the business of speech to speak a certain message—in this case the celebration of a same-sex “wedding.”
The media has been pushing the narrative that the Court has been hijacked by conservatives and that the public is losing trust in its impartiality. While this is indeed the most conservative court the country has seen in decades, it is not producing extreme, activist legal rulings. Most of the Court’s supposedly controversial decisions over the past two years simply have not been extreme, activist, or overtly conservative. If anything, they have imposed mild restraints on liberal extremes. Roe v. Wade was a terrible, activist decision that needed to be corrected. Allowing coaches to pray after games, religious schools to participate in public tuition programs, and religious employees to be reasonably accommodated are not extreme.
These things are a part of our nation’s tradition, and they were not controversial just a few decades ago. As the nation’s laws, policies, and culture have sprinted to the left, the current Court has been well within the bounds of law, reason, and prudence in making the corrections it has. We need to take back the narrative and insist that the Court is not extremist, but is moderating extremism from the left.
While we should celebrate these glimmers of sanity from the Court, we should remain cautious. Declan Leary summarized the proper demeanor we ought to have in this moment: “The breathing room afforded by the Court should not give Christians a false sense of security.” The attacks will not be settled by these new precedents. As the Court rules in favor of Christian individuals and businesses like Gerald Groff and 303 Creative, the fight will continue. Employers will continue to find ways to deny religious accommodations, even under the new standard. Non-discrimination laws will continue to try to squeeze people of faith out of the public square. The left will continue to cry that the Supreme Court has lost its impartiality and therefore its legitimacy.
As the 2024 presidential race heats up and the meltdowns over another conservative Supreme Court term continue, expect radical calls to ignore Supreme Court decisions. Expect continued persecutions of conservative justices. And expect the resumption of chatter about the legitimacy of the Court and the need to pack it with additional justices to somehow balance things out, as if it is “balanced” for the Supreme Court to be forcibly moved to the left when it seems every other institution is already quite slanted in that direction.
We should celebrate conservative victories, but we should do so knowing that the left will quickly find its next angle and attempt to subvert each victory. This is not cause for despair, but a reminder that these are not decisive victories. Each policy win, each corrective Supreme Court decision, is part of an extended (possibly lifelong) battle for the very soul of the nation and of the West.
The post A Mild Corrective in a World Gone Mad appeared first on The American Conservative.
Iowa’s new raw-milk law is a faint reminder of the rugged spirit of the American farmer.
On my writing desk is a copy of Joel Salatin’s book You Can Farm. The beginners’ guide to regenerative farming practices is more of a how-to book than a philosophical one, and is not, perhaps, inspirational the way the words of Horace or Chesterton might be to your average writer. I keep it with the other tools of my craft all the same.
Those big, green block letters serve as a regular reminder to me of what it means to be an American. If such a phrase can have any meaning, it is to be found in the sort of people who would risk life and livelihood to grow corn and wheat, and who fought a war to continue to do so in solace, away from government scolds. These men and women did not arrive in America as the expert agrarians we might imagine today. Thus, those green letters are a prescription as much as an ethos: You, desk-job keeper, descendant of factory-line workers, or Ph.D. student and coffee-shop enjoyer, you too can farm, and you do not need a degree in agriculture to do it. The earliest American settlers were not experts, but neither were they intimidated by the prospect of taking dominion. They took this same soil in their hands and declared that, with time and toil, they would learn to cultivate an Eden in its hills and valleys. And so might you, Salatin whispers.
This is all a very prosaic way of saying that, when USA Today writes with horror about Iowa’s new raw milk law, which allows residents a still regulated but at least legal means of buying and selling unpasteurized milk, the appropriate response is pleasure. If “public health has lost the war” on raw milk, as the headline declares, this loss has not only been caused by a new distrust for institutions like the FDA, per se, but also by the ghost of an older one: that rugged ethos still, mercifully, lingers.
The raw milk law in question, which went into effect this week, is fairly restrictive. While Iowans are joining the small handful of citizens from states that may purchase raw milk, they still may only buy it on the farm, and not from restaurants or farmers’ markets. Iowa farmers, too, may only sell the milk of up to ten animals, and must submit those animals to monthly bacteria inspections. In other words, the state has decided to stop prosecuting small-time farmers for sharing their excess milk with friends and neighbors, and that is about all.
Reading up on raw-milk laws across the nation gives one the impression that unpasteurized milk is equatable to other controlled, abusable substances such as marijuana, tobacco, or alcohol. In the free state of California, raw milk is legally sold in stores, but as with most other laws, the Golden State is an outlier. Many states do not permit any sale of raw milk, and if they do, they almost certainly mandate the farmer to acquire additional licensing. Of those that do permit raw-milk sales, most do it via “herd share” arrangements, in which a consumer signs an agreement to own a share of the animal itself, and thus, as most Americans take this to mean, any of the products which come from it. In Ohio, absent a herd share, raw milk may only legally be purchased under the condition that it be sold by a dairy which has operated without interruption since 1965. No such dairy exists in the state.
Other states get around the hurdle by permitting sales of raw milk for animal consumption, with an additional licensing requirement, and consumers imbibe with the knowledge that no known law prevents them from eating animal feed. More liberal are the states that allow “incidental” sales of raw milk, or a maximum of 500 gallons per month per farm, with regulations merely dictating how a farm advertises the milk (in Kansas, the only permitted promotion is a sign on the farm indicating the milk is raw, “the letters of which are a uniform size,” while Mississippi permits no advertisements whatsoever).
Of course, raw milk and psychotropics are two vastly different things, but that has not stopped the public health P.R. campaign against it, either. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that consuming unpasteurized milk can spark an outbreak of food poisoning, which can cause diarrhea, vomiting, kidney failure, and even death. While these things may be true under certain circumstances, it takes little more than pocketbook medical knowledge to know that they are not the result of raw milk itself, but of bad milk, raw or pasteurized. Such immoderate fear mongering encourages the consumer to doubt the honesty of the messenger, which even USA Today admits may be one reason raw milk has become more acceptable in the post-pandemic era.
The public health bureaucracy is right to note the changing tide on this one front: Iowa’s raw milk law suggests some hope for both our national health and that lingering ethos, as more Americans seem willing to bet on their local farmer over an unknown public health bureaucrat. But many other unorthodox food choices—or rather, healthy, orthodox food choices that have been lionized even by those in favor of modern farming techniques—remain illegal and taboo. Efforts to change this, such as Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s PRIME Act, have failed repeatedly, while farmers like Amos Miller of the years-long Miller’s Organic Farm debacle attest to the high cost of operating in any way that does not fall within the inflexible parameters of government food regulations. Who these regulations primarily benefit, the consumer or the biggest dairies and butcheries, is irrelevant, because the bureaucrat rules.
But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.
The post The Power of Knowing Your Milkman appeared first on The American Conservative.
Someone has to take responsibility for our nation’s capital.
I recently picked up my Washington, D.C., license plates after months of hang-ups and bureaucratic delay. I was relieved: This was the first time my car was road legal in nearly a decade. When I walked out of the Department of Motor Vehicles in Southwest and knelt before my bumper to attach the plates, I was greeted with this slogan: “End Taxation Without Representation.”
Since 2016, that sentence has been printed on nearly every new plate issued in the city. (One notable exception: President Biden.) Prior to that, the slogan had just been “Taxation Without Representation.” But this bare statement of fact, the city council of the time argued, was not enough: adding an “End” is more assertive. And putting it on all license plates effectively enlists the whole city in its leaders’ mission to stop the practice.
Not that I am complaining. I am more than happy to be drafted into the ranks. I am a firm believer in ending taxation without representation—that is, the taxation part.
At the same time, I’m no idealist, and I have read enough Milton Friedman to know that in these matters there is no free lunch. It would not do simply to abrogate Washington, D.C.’s, taxation duties and hope that everything rolls along merrily after that. Someone has to take responsibility for our nation’s capital. And I think it’s pretty obvious who is best suited to have stewardship over the city: the fifty states.
Of course, the states already do in large part fund Washington’s main industry with their tax dollars (at least in theory). But what I am proposing is more encompassing, and, I think, more true to the spirit in which D.C. was founded. The city was never intended to be an autonomous entity, with its own appetites and interests; it was proposed as a neutral zone between North and South and, for much of its early history, it was pushed around like a pawn by the two opposed powers.
Yet, from the very beginning, the fact that Washington suffered taxation without representation gave its inhabitants an appetite for things forbidden to them. Not long after the city’s founding, activists within it began demanding representation, pointing to the Boston Tea Party, not thirty years past. The question was thought to be conclusively settled in 1831, when in Loughborough v. Blake the Supreme Court took up the question of whether Congress had a right to impose a direct tax on the District of Columbia. The court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, found that the body can and should levy taxes in any area governed by the “American empire,” regardless of representation.
Marshall’s argument in effect kills any push for D.C. statehood on the basis of its taxation status. But it also seems to leave open an unexploited and strange possibility for the District. The Constitution, Marshall writes, makes it plain that when Congress levies taxes on the states, it must apportion the burden equally. “Congress has clearly no power to exempt any state from its due share of the burden,” Marshall writes, hastening to add that “this regulation is expressly confined to the states, and creates no necessity for extending the tax to the District or territories.” If I can extend this line of thought a little bit further, if Congress so chose, it could designate Washington, D.C., as a place with virtually no taxation and no representation.
Everyone would likely be better off if this were the case. The benefits to D.C. are plain, but, I think, the rewards for those living outside of Washington are much greater. A state of no taxation, no representation essentially rewrites Washington, D.C., as a territorial non-entity: the seat of government, yes, but little else. Everything in the city which at present is funded by its inhabitants would become the responsibility of the country at large, ceding real control over the capital to the states. (I leave it to the wonks to discover a practical way of enacting this proposal.)
This is true federalism: for decades, Americans of all political persuasions have complained that Washington has too much power in their lives. Putting the capital at the mercy of state funding is just one way to disperse that power across the country.
In any case, the next time you find yourself driving around D.C., remember that those license plates need not be interpreted as a battle cry for statehood. They are just as easily a plea for self-annihilation.
The post End Taxation Without Representation appeared first on The American Conservative.
How the story of St. Stanislaus speaks to our political moment.
“Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood.”
Acts 20:28
On May 8, 1079, the Bishop of Kraków, Stanislaus of Szczepanów, was fulfilling his priestly duties as first articulated and exemplified by our Lord and described by St. Paul in Acts, leading his flock in celebrating Mass. It was an obligation that he had performed thousands of times. That day in the Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel, a church just beyond the old city of Kraków, he would not complete his priestly function.
As Bishop Stanislaus celebrated Mass, agents of King Boleslav II barged in and attempted to kill him. But the king’s men, so moved by the mystery celebrated before them, could not—or would not—take Bishop Stanislaus’s life. The king, enraged first by the intransigence of the bishop and then the seeming incompetence of his men, took matters into his own hands, plunged his sword through the bishop’s body as he celebrated Mass.
Upon killing Bishop Stanislaus, the king ordered the men to chop up his body and scatter the pieces—but the bishop’s body miraculously reassembled.
I visited the Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel yesterday. For the next few weeks, I’ll be in Kraków, studying the history and tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. Never fear, I’ll be reporting (mostly through TAC’s State of the Union blog) on the war in Ukraine, its perception here in Poland, and other experiences I’ll have along the way.
Why then, have I started this trip by relaying the story of St. Stanislaus, who was canonized in 1253 by Pope Innocent IV?
I believe the events that led to his martyrdom speak profoundly to the political moment in which Americans currently find themselves. What drove Boleslav to murder was the bishop’s willingness to condemn the king’s sexually and morally deviant lifestyle. St. Stanislaus had implored the king to cling to his wife. Eventually, he excommunicated the wayward monarch, leading him to call St. Stanislaus, according to Gallus Anonymus, the “traitor bishop.”
In a 2003 letter to the Archdiocese of Kraków, Pope John Paul II wrote, “As Bishop and Pastor he proclaimed faith in God…. He taught the moral order in the family based on sacramental marriage. He taught the moral order within the State, reminding even the king that in his actions he should keep in mind the unchanging Law of God.”
The murder of St. Stanislaus caused such a stir among the people that Boleslav was overthrown. Tradition teaches us that the king lived out some of his last days in a monastery, where he repented for what he’d done. Boomers want to send leftist youths to communist countries, but maybe the solution is simpler than that.
“Your people were given a Pastor who laid down his life for his sheep,” Pope Pius XII wrote in a letter celebrating the 700th anniversary of St. Stanislaus’s canonization, “defending Christian faith and morality, who in pouring out his blood made the seeds of the Gospel even more fruitful.”
Those who have defended the dignity of the human person and the unity of marriage have, throughout history, been targeted by those who wish to subvert the natural law and turn their vices, sexual and otherwise, into virtue. That battle will continue to rage.
Though it is never invited, there will be further violence and more martyrs. But it is a just war, and we have holy men and women like St. Stanislaus on our side. Take heart, the battle has already been won.
The post Blood Spilt at Mass appeared first on The American Conservative.
Candidate events in the Granite State show how much work remains to be done in rebuilding the United States.
The ground campaign for the presidency began in earnest this week as half a dozen hopefuls took part in Independence Day festivities in New Hampshire, the first state to hold a primary election.
At the Fourth of July parade in Merrimack, the long-shot GOP challenger Ron DeSantis marched alongside long-long-long shots Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Will Hurd, and Perry Johnson, as well as hippie-left spirit guide Marianne Williamson.
The holiday festivities marked one of the highest concentrations of contenders yet seen in one place and time in the ’24 campaign.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vivek Ramaswamy—respectively Donald Trump’s best and most likely pick for vice president—had been in the state just a few days earlier as featured speakers at PorcFest (the Porcupine Freedom Festival), an annual convention of the Free State Project that bills itself as among the largest libertarian gatherings in the world.
The summer drive in the Granite State is traditional, and the reasons for it are fairly obvious. New Hampshire votes first, so the race there is especially vital for upstarts hoping to gain early momentum. And the state’s size—forty-first by population and forty-sixth by area—makes it an ideal proving ground for campaigns and candidates still working out how to play crowds and press flesh.
New Hampshire is not determinative, of course. If it were, Patrick Buchanan would have eked out a victory in 1996. Iraq would not have been razed, and a whole host of other disasters might have been averted.
Alas, the nation does not follow New Hampshire. In 2020 even, the man who eventually claimed victory in the presidential race came fifth in his own party’s primary, with just over 8 percent of the state’s Democratic vote.
Nonetheless, trends in New Hampshire are well worth watching.
Trump—busy as the target of a few political show trials—was notably absent from the Fourth of July campaigning. Still, he seems set to run away with the bulk of the state’s delegates. In a crowded field in 2016, Trump established his dominance here with more than double the votes of second-place John Kasich. Up against nominal opposition in 2020, he racked up strongman numbers. Even the closest poll this time shows Trump a solid twenty points ahead of DeSantis, the likely runner up in the Republican primary.
The picture across the aisle is even more dramatic. No presidential incumbent has ever lost New Hampshire, but Joe Biden seems intent on being first.
Convinced by 2020 that race-baiting is the key to victory, Biden is smashing precedent to move South Carolina up to first in his party’s primary schedule. The black vote there secured his eleventh-hour win last time, and he hopes that the ongoing polarization of the U.S. along racial lines will ensure a repeat in 2024.
This snub coupled with a few other major missteps may be enough to kill the incumbent’s nine-point lead over Trump in current polling. Biden’s historic combination of incompetence and overreach will not win him much favor in a state that is intensely, self-consciously libertarian. As the Granite State grows ever more wealthy and more educated, though, the sheer force of the Establishment should not be undervalued. Biden, for all his populist posturing, is an Establishment creature through and through.
In a general election, New Hampshire has voted for the Republican for president just once in the last thirty years. In 2016, though, Donald Trump trailed heavy favorite Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes—about as close as margins get in a presidential race.
It is worth considering the simple factors that drive New Hampshire’s unusual outcomes, not the least of which is the fact that a state that was once a worldwide industrial powerhouse saw its factories shuttered one by one as the twentieth century drew to a disappointing close. Combined with the freedom-loving culture that draws RFK Jr. and a few thousand other eccentrics every year, as well as the peculiar character of its northern mountain people, it is not hard to understand why New Hampshire swings the way it does.
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, four years before the state delivered his first electoral victory, Patrick Buchanan remembered in a now-famous passage:
There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill, in Northern New Hampshire in a town called Groveton—tough, hearty men. None of them would say a word to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by one. They were under a threat of losing their jobs at Christmas. And as I moved down the line, one tough fellow about my age just looked up and said to me, “Save our jobs.”
Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who came running up to me and said, “Mr. Buchanan, I’m going to vote for you.” And then she broke down weeping, and she said, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl. What am I going to do?”
My friends, these people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart.
They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.
Whistle-stop tours might get us halfway there, especially with a candidate who draws base support as devoted as Donald Trump’s. But a real fulfillment of this unrealized vision requires a great deal more: wars ended, work reclaimed, culture restored, borders secured, clocks effectively turned back three or four generations.
In a state prone to surprises, America may find cause for cautious hope.
The post A Hard Day’s Work appeared first on The American Conservative.
Can Mike Pence ride nostalgia to the White House?
Presidential elections are unpredictable, as they often depend on the yet to be expressed will and mood of the electorate. This means that while many races are characterized by the emergence of new, striking, and ‘outsider’ candidates that capture the spirit of the time—the Trumps, Obamas, Reagans, and Carters—others eventually promote more staid candidacies who do little other than maintain the policy paradigms of the time by alluding to its past successes—the Bidens, Doles, and Bushes.
Mike Pence, who now seeks the Republican presidential nomination, belongs to the latter category. Throughout his political and media career, he has found success through his image as a textbook conservative with traditional talking points. This image has remained tethered to a pre-packaged and digestible form of Reaganite conservatism: non-denominational Christianity, traditional family values, fiscal responsibility, neoliberal economics, and hawkishness on national security. Pence is effectively what the average layman has long imagined a conservative to be, even to the point of parody: the site of both elderly, midwestern admiration and late-night ridicule. Ask the man in the street what he thinks of Pence and you will immediately get a good sense of his politics.
Pence’s position as both an orthodox Evangelical and a Reaganite provided enough of a foil to Trump’s unpredictability to land the vice presidency; even while severing his link to his former running mate in the aftermath of the 2020 election, his principles surely evoked the sort of “support-the-process” stand that has been championed for decades by constitutional conservatives.
But Pence’s connection to the current and future (post-Trumpian?) state of American conservatism is an inadequate one. This is because while conventional right-wing “wisdom” would suggest that he is an ideal candidate to win Republican primaries, the values and policy objectives at the core of the American conservative movement are undergoing fundamental change.
Instead, Pence only offers a politics of nostalgia, consisting of both the same tired neoliberal policy paradigm and the recycling—in fact, the wholesale reuse—of the same Reagan-era platitudes. This, more than policy, seeps through the aesthetic of the campaign itself. It is explicitly positioned as a continuation of the “Reagan revolution,” calling attention back to the moment when Republicans were supposedly united around a far simpler philosophy of government.
But it is unclear how a supposedly Pence-led White House would fit into an effective, future-oriented party vision that addresses real problems, not to mention the novel directions that conservatism ought to go. His campaign, for example, has thus far made no clear statement on the meaning and legacy of the Trump presidency, instead straddling the line between strong criticism and faint praise, noting only the unspecified “progress we made together toward a stronger, more prosperous America”.
There is no clear engagement with the emerging policy paradigms of the right that now compete to eclipse Reaganite-Bushist neoliberalism. How does Pence propose to deal with the fusionist compromise that continues to unravel? The post-liberal challenge to state neutrality, the call to direct interventionist state power to a renewed industrial and trust-busting strategy? How is a constitutional conservative to govern, to get things done, alongside allies and opponents that increasingly disregard established procedure? A resistant administrative and military establishment?
Still, a Mike Pence presidency is a real prospect. Even though most observers consider the campaign to be a longshot, there are nevertheless indications of both competitive campaign organization and strong poll standing in Iowa. This support, though, hasn’t come from the pundits, elites, or intelligentsia, but from average conservative voters—the type of people who come out to see Pence at Culver’s and the Pizza Ranch.
The common refrain is that our age is one of nostalgia, seen through the cynical rehashing of the same old culture and film franchises that never die. The popular view on the right is to see this through the lens of national decline, where a breakdown in intermediary social institutions produces an anomie that drives many to seek a return to an idealized past. Of course, President Trump was and continues to be seen as a political expression of this climate, speaking to groups of Americans that feel dislocated from the center of national life.
But Pence appeals to another kind of nostalgia, rooted in the sense of dislocation now faced by many of the Grand Old Party’s faithful. The Trump phenomenon was not just about restoration, but also about the still-incomplete aspiration to destroy the governing elite and their established way of doing politics. It has worked to displace the overarching neoliberal mooring that had been sustained by Reagan and the Bushes, opening former assumptions to critical questioning. But, for the layman, it means that it has become much more difficult to offer a succinct summary of what a conservative is and what policies they are supposed to support.
By refusing to give voice to Trump’s legacy, Pence prescribes a more simple and comfortable approach to conservatism that aligns with past expectations. It projects, through the image of Reagan, the myth of a unified and resolute party that, so long as it stays true to its orthodox ‘principles’, will find policy success. But it is a vision of rhetorical rehashing, in which the very same problems and policy solutions are repacked and sold ad nauseam, conveniently forgetting meager results, failures, or detrimental effects when necessary.
Reaganite conservatism, while not a total failure, belongs to the past: It is an inadequate way to deal with the problems of today. It cannot recognize the increasing downsides to uncheck global economic liberalization, and – in the more social or cultural sense – it has done little to conservative much of anything. President Trump thrives on negation, and the more affirming policy paradigm that will replace neoliberalism has yet to be fully articulated. But the need to do so is imperative: There is no need for yet another remake of the Reagan years.
The post Let the Dead Bury the Dead appeared first on The American Conservative.
Two common-sense rulings from the Supreme Court uphold core principles of American democracy and law.
If there were two lessons from the high school civics class most Americans seemed to have skipped that should be learned now, they are: Rights are for everyone and free speech sometimes protects speech you don’t like yourself. Luckily, the Supreme Court recently offered America tutorials on both topics.
In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina the Court made the common-sense ruling that discrimination against some races is a poor way to fix discrimination against other races. What woke mind could have possibly conceived that the 14th Amendment’s establishment of equal protection under the law meant treating a large portion of the population unfairly at the expense of another?
Starting back with 1979’s Bakke, which was largely reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 2003’s Grutter, America’s higher education institutions decided to fix systemic racism in America by offering preferential treatment by race; white and Asian students were considered less deserving of a good education at, say, Harvard, and had to sit out the Ivy League so that some black and Latino kids could take their places.
The word for this back in the day was not racism (which it was) but “affirmative action.” It would right wrongs. This “reverse discrimination” was allowed through some clever word play because its goal of a diverse student body was considered a “compelling state interest” that overshadowed other compelling interests, such as equal protection under the law. It was sanctioned by the Supreme Court of its day, but only as a temporary solution; Justice Sarah Day O’Connor in one of the key cases upholding affirmative action wrote, “We expect that twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
It didn’t seem to work, short- or long-term, in significantly changing society—at least, if the racial justice activists of 2023 are to be believed. Decades of pushing aside white and Asian kids for black and Latino kids did not seem to improve society noticeably, notwithstanding individual success stories.
“When affirmative action was conceptualized, it was to right past wrongs,” one commentator said. “Then, it became sort of endless. It wasn’t just African Americans. It was Native Americans and Hispanics. And then it was women, LGBT, etc., and that wiped out the moral imperative of it a little, because diversity is not quite as strong a claim as correcting past wrongs.”
There were other problems. Letting someone into Harvard is not the same as him succeeding at Harvard. If some program had sent me to an Ivy school at age 18, I would have failed miserably, coming out of a non-rigorous but nice enough Ohio high school where upon graduation I had neither read one classic book nor written one proper research paper. I think Harvard expects you to know that kind of thing and, white as I am, I would have floundered. I’m sure they have some sort of remedial program for their unqualified students but it seems unlikely to make up for many years of half-hearted education before it. And that exposes another dirty little secret about why affirmative action failed: America is divided primarily by class, not race.
America’s second recent high school civics lesson from the Court: You as an individual may not like everything other people use their freedom of speech to say and do. In fact, their deeply held beliefs may run 180 degrees away from yours: This is the whole point of the First Amendment free speech clause and it was on display in another recent Supreme Court decision, 303 Creative v. Elenis.
In the case, one web designer, wanted to know what would happen if she refused to produce a hypothetical celebratory wedding page for a gay couple, claiming her religion did not allow her to support same-sex marriage. The couple would have sued, because of course they would, probably claiming a part of a protected class by sex in Colorado.
Lower courts had weighed in favor in other cases, claiming various cake makers, florists, and web designers must be forced to practice their craft (i.e., their expression, their speech) to avoid LGBT discrimination. It was as if one side had more rights than the other; the logic would have resulted in the government of the United States using the threat of arrest or fine to force the web designer to produce speech to which she was opposed.
That’s a big no-no in a democracy, compelling speech.
Though the state can demand businesses provide goods and services to all customers in protected categories, it cannot demand individuals engage in speech proclaiming messages that they oppose, such as in web page design. In Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s words, a win for the state of Colorado would mean some businesses that provide custom speech for customers could be forced to “espouse things they loathe.”
This all goes back to 1943’s West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette when during WWII the Supreme Court held West Virginia could not make Jehovah’s Witness students pledge allegiance to the flag. The decision contained arguably the most famous finding in American First Amendment law: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The key finding in 303 Creative is that the designer is not denying a service to a protected class but instead refusing to engage in speech because she disagreed with its message. (Masterpiece Cakeshop failed to yield a definitive ruling and is not relevant here.)
Despite all the hubbub, the Court correctly applied the broader civics class way of thinking in 2023, focusing on the First Amendment speech clause, and said nothing directly about the more contentious and limited religious aspect of all this, and passed on 2023’s wokeist definition of discrimination. Had the recent case involved a Jehovah’s Witness’s web page and not something to do with gay rights, you would barely have heard of the matter even though the real significance would have been about the same.
It’s easy to forget most of what you heard in high school, especially in a one-off class like civics. But common sense can get you a long way. It is easy to write off the Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions as discriminatory, with only a little thought that what it does away with—affirmative action—is discriminatory as heck. Same for 303 Creative v. Elenis, which is being promoted by the MSM as anti-LGBT when in fact it is an example of how robust our First Amendment is.
At the Founding no one could have conceived of a free speech battle between a web designer and gay clients, but that is what the First Amendment expanded to take in. The Supreme Court has not gone rogue, and democracy is not in danger. These two recent cases prove the system is flexible for the times and robust in defending the most basic freedoms a democracy is built upon.
The post A Tutorial on Freedom from the Supreme Court appeared first on The American Conservative.
Russian ‘regime change’ would likely be anti-climactic.
On a train from Lviv to Kiev, I received the news that Queen Elizabeth II had died. For its round-the-clock coverage, a transformed BBC swept aside customary cynicism about the Crown for grave and respectful reporting. As cause for celebration amid national mourning, “commonwealth” emerged as a persistent theme, heralding the late sovereign’s life of support for the Commonwealth of Nations. The organization’s loosened eligibility criteria, accommodating applicants with no history of British imperial rule, denoted its success at fostering hope for the future even as it reflected the past.
Contrast this with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an association of twelve republics (now nine) from the collapsed USSR. Decades-old hopes of this “club” giving rise to a friendly family of democracies are in tatters, the titular post of general secretary having long ago passed to career functionaries of Soviet Russia’s security services, the siloviki. A former officer of the Soviet KGB’s First Chief Directorate holds the position today. The war in Ukraine sprang not just from neoconservative war lust, though that was one cause. It also arose from the spiritual and moral void at the heart of the CIS.
The Russian regime is a manifestation of that void, not some political extreme. It is immune to neither political correctness nor the allure of globalism, and President Vladimir Putin is no tin-pot dictator. Western biographies cite Putin’s “outsider” relationship to the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), delineating him and his peers generationally from the ex-Party men heading nascent ex-Soviet republics. Never a member of the CPSU nomenklatura, Putin was just a quietly ambitious climber in the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB). Typical of his inner circle, he was a mid-level officer when he retired.
But a sad paradox informs the regime’s identity. The KGB was formally the “Sword and Shield” of the CPSU, anathema to all patriotism, including Russian. While the siloviki dismiss as irrelevant the party they once swore to serve and protect, visible pride in their KGB past scuppers the “national patriot” mien. Russia’s best qualities survive despite the KGB, not because of it, so “silovik patriotism” is warped. Benign nationalism both reveres benign traditions and historical institutions and shuns their malign counterparts.
Most of today’s republics exult in their regal pasts. Packed Polish and Lithuanian museums lionize kings and queens of yore. Germans, French, Austrians, Italians, and other Europeans still dine out on royal or noble roots. Even in America, subliminal links between royalty and prestige inhere in the marketplace. But in republics born immediately of apocalyptic revolution, including the USSR, all public nostalgia for royalty is bloodily rooted out. In part, post-Soviet Russia follows the examples of other ex-Communist states in this regard, but with a key difference: Russia today hails both the glory of monarchy and the squalid state security organs that liquidated it. The Russian regime thus clings to a very dark past.
In the summer of 1918, the Cheka (as the KGB was first known) murdered the defenseless Nicholas II, his immediate family, and members of their retinue in a basement, burned their bodies with acid, and buried them in shallow unmarked graves in the Urals. The official Soviet version always held that a local district council ordered the murders, and that Vladimir Lenin only found out afterwards. Objectively, however, no Soviet official could have perpetrated such a momentous act without the supreme leader’s approval. Top Lenin deputy Leon Trotsky confirmed as much in his diaries, describing how fellow Politburo member Yakov Sverdlov told him of the executions a week after the crime.
“We decided it here,” said Sverdlov when Trotsky, on returning to Moscow, asked who authorized the killings. “Ilyich [Lenin] thought that we should not leave the Whites a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances.” In other words, Lenin authorized the atrocity, and the KGB carried it out. The Cheka grew quickly, the resultant culture of animalistic thuggery reaching into Soviet society at large, inspiring Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel, Heart of a Dog, as early as 1925. The KGB would dwarf all tsarist-era secret police organs in size and power. Because key hands-on perpetrators of the regicide were Jewish, the episode heightened virulent anti-Semitism already common in Russia.
Russia still adheres to the Soviet-era line that the murders of the tsar, his wife, and their five innocent children, cook and doctor were the work of rogue local officials. A sad incident, today’s siloviki might say, but nothing to do with the man on whose burial chamber they stand to review parades, against a backdrop of memorials to Stalin, Sverdlov, and other architects of state terror interred with supreme honors. The Russian regime’s union of patriotism and Soviet Chekism is thus a schizophrenic one, and as its leaders stand on the Lenin Mausoleum for official events, they are oblivious to the incongruity of their own myth. Their oblivion has likely fed the Russian military’s undeniable brutality in Ukraine, just as it prompted the blundering invasion itself, eight years after Ukraine began building a proper army.
Russia’s chief executive for nearly a quarter-century harks back to imperial glory, likening himself to Peter the Great, who crushed a Swedish-backed Ukrainian Cossack rebellion in the early 18th century. Yet his cabinet seems to ignore 21st-century reality: many Russian units in Ukraine hail from republics with abysmal living standards. Even in Ukrainian villages, troops from Buryatia in Siberia have been shocked to find levels of comfort far above those at home, including indoor plumbing. Tales of Buryats ripping out and running away with toilets are commonplace.
Historian Niall Ferguson compares this era to the “Time of Troubles” (1598-1613), when Poland seized Moscow and put a Polish boy-prince on the throne. During the abortive “Wagner Mutiny” last month, Anne Applebaum asked whether it might be Putin’s “Czar Nicholas II moment,” inferring similarities with the emperor’s abdication and Bolshevik seizure of power from a weak republican government in 1917. I see more parallels with Nicholas I, who built up a feared secret police apparatus (the ‘Third Section’), savaged the Turks in the Balkans, and pushed back the Persians in the Caucasus before trying to capture the Black Sea and finally drive a stake through the heart of the Ottoman Empire. This roused the British and French to team up with the Turks and Sardinians to go and teach Nicholas a lesson.
Crimean War hostilities did not, however, halt with Nicholas’s death in 1855 at age 58. The Russians lost the war the next year but moved back into Crimea’s evacuated areas after the invaders left. Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, modernized society, industry, and the military and emancipated the serfs four years before the U.S. abolished slavery. When the reformist autocrat was assassinated in 1881, his reactionary son replaced him. Russia went on being Russia.
In 1999, oligarchs installed Putin as a resolute enforcer to protect their interests for a cut. As prime minister during the Second Chechen War, he posed as a leader offering moral support for Russian soldiers in the field, where young conscripts captured by Islamist rebels were getting their throats slit like goats at a halal slaughter. Presiding over a return of predictability to ordinary Russian lives after the degrading chaos of the 1990s, he garnered widespread popular support at home and the “friendship” of leaders abroad.
It is doubtful he enjoys the same popularity in Russia today, and his silovik government has proven unable to foster the genuine commonwealth to which Russia and Ukraine must both belong. But concluding on that basis that the Russian Federation is on the brink of a break-up, as some have, feels unhinged. If a crack-up were somehow to happen, nothing in history supports the rosy vision of friendly democracies rising peacefully from a disintegrated union. Since there has never been a civil war in a nuclear-armed state, such an aftermath would require bellicose Western policymakers to sober up. More likely, as in the time of the tsars and CPSU, only the “flavor” of the regime will change, not the regime itself, as Nicholas I-like reformer Putin makes way for a different reformer.
The West bears much of the blame for the tragedy in Ukraine. Our shrill war hysteria proceeds from the assumption that inside every Russian is a Westerner trying to get out. But as Churchill noted in 1939, the West faces not only an unfathomable regime but an inscrutable civilization. One Ukrainian YouTuber, having interviewed countless Russians over the past few years, reveals that even the relatively educated see little abnormality in their government. They speak candidly about the complaints they have with their president yet still rationalize his “Special Military Operation” and indicate they would vote for him as long as he is on the ballot. If and when the Russian government undergoes meaningful change, entering a new era but still failing to resemble the West, truculent neocons addicted to violent regime change should be sidelined to deal carefully with the new Russian reality.
The post Whither the ‘Siloviki’? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Ahead of the NATO summit, the president remains trapped by his rhetoric.
There is nothing new to argue about NATO. Consider the two newest additions, by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson in Foreign Affairs and by Peter Hitchens in Compact. The cynic in me is skeptical that such rational arguments will change minds in the other camp, even if they might persuade the fence-sitters; the supporters of Ukraine’s admission into NATO all argue from a position of faith.
The basic argument for Ukraine’s accession touches on the following points. First, Ukraine is a strong country and therefore will strengthen NATO. Second, Ukraine is a weak country, and therefore needs NATO to pledge nuclear war in extremis to defend Ukraine’s borders. Third, Ukraine is a strategically important real estate and vital to NATO security; therefore it must be in the Western sphere. Fourth, Ukraine is a bastion of democracy, is free to decide to join NATO, and is fighting for survival, so we must help it.
Laying it out thus simplifies the usually deliberately knotty and convoluted nonsense from the supporters of Ukraine, and shows just how ridiculous each statement is. If Ukraine is a strong country, then it shouldn’t need NATO and can do away with the pretense of weakness. The fact that Russia and Ukraine are currently involved in a costly stalemate demonstrates that neither is strong nor especially weak, and that Russia, whatever its wishes, has no capacity for continental hegemony.
Irrespective of Ukraine’s strength or weakness, Ukraine isn’t a strategic enough prize to warrant nuclear war. The mastery of Europe or the preponderance in the Atlantic balance of power isn’t dependent on who controls Bakhmut or Crimea, and no one sane should be willing to risk the total irradiation of Massachusetts for Mariupol. Ukraine was, after all, on the other side of the Cold War. We came out of it just fine.
Flawed strategic arguments aside, the supporters of Ukraine in NATO talk about the moral imperative to support the free choice of democracy. It defies logic. Ukraine is barely a functioning democracy. The free choice of Ukraine is irrelevant to the question. NATO is a defensive alliance, and the constituent members are also free to do a brutal cost-benefit analysis about pledging nuclear war on behalf of a new member, at war with a nuclear rival. Every democracy or aspiring democracy isn’t worth fighting a war. Geography is destiny.
To his credit, the president appears to understand the conundrum. Joe Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and there is some residual realpolitik left in him. He stuck to his predecessor’s timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite his own military brass trying to slow-roll the process and corner him with delay—so much so that the actual act became chaotic. He is also reportedly against his own activist State Department on any direct involvement in Ukraine. (Also to his credit, he was the lone sane voice arguing against Libyan intervention in 2011 when he was vice president.) All that is to say that it could have been a lot worse, with Kamala Harris as a president and Samantha Power and Evelyn Farkas advising her on Ukraine.
Yet Biden is trapped by his own grandiloquent rhetoric of democracy and human rights. The question of Ukraine is not primarily about either. It is a simple strategic trolley problem. The only American martial interest was the ravaging of Russian frontline troops. That has been achieved. The recovery and restoration of Ukraine isn’t an American concern, given Ukraine’s proximity to the rich countries of Europe; Europe should bear the economic burden of supporting Ukraine, if that is in those countries’ interests.
Ukraine simply isn’t worth a probable nuclear war, given the strategic irrelevance for the security of the American homeland and the asymmetry of Russo-American interests. These are the cold hard truths. As long as Biden continues to dwell on the morality of the question, the American grand strategy in Europe will continue to be incoherent.
The post Start Telling the Truth About Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Strict scrutiny for me, but not for thee.
Chicago law professor Sonja Starr argued this morning that the Supreme Court’s striking down Harvard and UNC’s affirmative action policies could threaten the legality of other race-conscious policies in education and government. She added that the logic of the Court’s decision could even imperil the legal use of race-neutral means (e.g., geographic quotas in college admissions) to effect race-conscious ends.
As Starr points out, when the government’s, or in some cases a private institution’s, actions would limit a person or group’s constitutional rights, or discriminate on the basis of a “suspect classification,” the Supreme Court and lower courts bound by its precedents apply “strict scrutiny” to the proposed actions. She notes that, historically
when a policy’s language and implementation are race-neutral but its goals are race-conscious, courts apply strict scrutiny only when those goals are invidious — promoting racial disparity rather than fighting it.
But surely fighting racial disparity does not, or in any event should not, give an institution or the government the right to discriminate on the basis of race. In the case of affirmative action and policies like it—Starr describes a series of Fairfax County School Board policies intended, by facially race-neutral means, to increase Thomas Jefferson High School’s proportion of black and Hispanic students—”fighting” racial disparities necessarily involves discrimination against qualified white and Asian students who are rejected for no reason but their race. The fact that Starr and previous majorities on the Supreme Court have not considered such discrimination to be invidious doesn’t make it any less so.
The post Invidious Discrimination appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new book documents the fight for conscience and Constitution amid the military’s Covid vaccine mandate.
Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines, by Robert A. Green Jr., Skyhorse, 192 pages.
In Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines, Commander Rob Green offers a detailed account of the battle by military service members to remain faithful to conscience and the Constitution during the DoD’s Covid vaccine mandate. This well-researched and accessible book covers various legal precedents for the mandate, the moral and legal responsibilities of service members, and the constitutional limits of Defense Department leaders. It reviews the diverse experiences of those who resisted, their wins and losses along the way to repeal, and offers a hopeful call to remain faithful to conscience and the Constitution.
Green’s lucid portrayal of both his personal experiences and the tragedy and triumph of other defenders of conscience is essential reading for those interested in preserving the core constitutional principles that have grounded our nation since its birth. He opens by describing the special role that officers have in judging the legality and morality of military orders, helpfully noting that a service member’s obligation to disobey an illegal or unconstitutional order is just as strong as the obligation to obey a lawful order. This obligation to disobey explains the motives of the many who resisted the mandate.
Rob presents the vaccine holdouts as having the same sort of righteously rebellious spirit as the early-American “Sons of Liberty.” Great men such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and other Founding Fathers rightly resisted King George’s regal overreach through a loose network of American patriots. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to one another to mutually resist the growing tyranny from across the Atlantic.
Similarly, Green equates the incremental oppression of the crown with our own government’s gradual aggregation of authority in the name of protecting American citizens from communicable diseases by impinging on their medical freedoms. He shows how mis-rulings in both Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in 1905 and Buck v. Bell in 1927 gave an over-zealous medical bureaucracy the unconstitutional authority to limit free medical choice.
In addition to these precedents, the Department of Defense militarized the effort to defeat Covid-19, listing the disease as a priority even over the competition with near-peer adversaries. Defeating Covid birthed Operation Warp Speed, which cut the Covid vaccine’s approval and testing time from about a decade to mere months and became the impetus for the subsequent DoD actions that gave rise to the book.
Moreover, this threat inflation was used to pressure men and women in the services to receive and compel reception of the Covid vaccine. Service members, especially early in the mandate, risked a dishonorable discharge if they did not take the vaccine. Such an outcome would have given them the social standing of convicted felons, with the subsequent loss of Second Amendment rights and addition of “dishonorable discharge” to every future job application. In light of such risks, it is remarkable that so many resisted. Green’s moving representation of this group contributes to the greatness of his book.
If there is an inclination to read the use of “behind enemy lines” in the title as hyperbole, the true stories and experiences of those brave men and women who risked so much to stand by their consciences and the Constitution suggests otherwise. Green tells of a conscientious recruit who was encouraged to join by tales of religious accommodation, only to be denied and kicked out within months. Additionally, some service members were not permitted to enter their workplaces and were counted not present for duty even while working from their cars.
The harm, though, was not limited to those who took a conscientious stand against the mandate policy. Green tells of a Navy captain hospitalized with blood clots only four days after receiving the vaccine. He also tells of those who experience great remorse for having succumbed to the pressure to take the shot. All who would have otherwise opted not to take it were harmed by the mandate. For all of these service members, as well as those who resisted, the feeling of being “behind enemy lines” is no exaggeration.
But in what way did they “defend the Constitution?” This ever-growing network of conscientious, highly motivated, intelligent, and diverse men and women spent thousands of hours researching and writing arguments in support of their religious and moral views. One of the most important issues this network addressed was the dubious character of the mandate’s enforcement. For instance, the millions of vials of the Pfizer Covid vaccine purchased by the DoD did not automatically gain FDA licensure when the FDA approved “Comirnaty.” All of these products remained Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) products. And by federal law, EUA products cannot be mandated.
These men and women also revealed the sleight of hand at play in the DoD’s legally disputable claim that existing EUA vials were “interchangeable” with the licensed Comirnaty. Federal law explicitly defines “interchangeability,” and the two products did not meet the statutory requirements for such a declaration. They also discovered that in some cases, religious-accommodation denials were drafted before the requests themselves were even read. Finally, they demonstrated how military leaders denied religious accommodations on the grounds that the member would not be medically fit to deploy, while at the same time deploying other service members with approved medical accommodations.
Green recounts a great many personal experiences—his own and others’—that show how the military’s application of the Covid vaccine mandate was detrimental to readiness, good order, and discipline in the military. He closes by noting that while the government can change its policies and work to rebuild trust, they cannot rewrite history. He writes, “It is our duty to ensure that history does not forget the unlawful actions taken by so many military leaders and government officials.” Green has acted on this duty in good faith. His book is courageous, compelling, engaging, inspiring, and at times, revolting.
Integrity, it is often said, is what you do when no one is looking. Commander Rob Green and the faithful men and women he describes in his book show that integrity is also what you do when many are looking and expecting you to do otherwise. This book is essential reading for those who have concerns about military readiness, medical freedom, national security, or the preservation of the core principles bequeathed to us in the Constitution.
Editor’s note: In a previous version of this piece, Rob Green was identified as a Navy captain. In fact, he is a Navy commander.
The post A Few Good Men appeared first on The American Conservative.
As Democrats push for radical policies, Republicans have to be willing to push back just as boldly.
The nation just dodged a bullet. The Supreme Court stopped the Biden administration from pushing through an unprecedented loan forgiveness program through unconstitutional executive overreach. This decision is a victory both for taxpayers, who won’t have to fund this unfair wealth redistribution, and for our constitutional system of checks and balances. But the fact that this win hinged entirely on fragile arguments for standing passing through the Supreme Court should be unsettling to voters and politicians alike. Indeed, the denouement of the loan forgiveness saga that has spanned the last decade should prompt Republicans to engage in some self-reflection about their lack of a coherent policy vision on higher education.
For years, there were telling signs that Democrats would pursue student loan forgiveness as part of the larger push for government-subsidized education. There were informal calls for debt forgiveness back in 2012, following the Occupy Wall Street movement. For-profit-college scandals further increased targeted calls for debt relief by Democratic politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and the erstwhile presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination on tuition-free college, influenced Democrats to adopt more extreme policies. As Democrats tried to out-do one another on who could offer the most benefits for their constituents, it’s no wonder that it eventually led to calls for massive student debt jubilees. Warren announced she would use executive authority to cancel up to $50,000 of student loan debt in 2019. And, of course, President Biden ran on a moderated version of debt forgiveness.
The Biden administration’s actions on debt forgiveness represent a gross overreach of the executive branch’s power, as shown in the various lawsuits that they provoked. Luckily, Republicans in Congress have a bill called the REAL Reforms Act, which would limit the authority of all future executives so that no such unilateral action on debt forgiveness could occur. But this bill was proposed in the summer of 2022, just a few weeks before Biden’s well-anticipated announcement of his debt forgiveness plan. Republicans had years to work out a solution to the student debt problem but failed to act until it was already too late.
What were the Republicans doing on higher education during the 2010s, if not addressing student debt and rising college costs? They were tilting at windmills, proposing trivial improvements on cost transparency, adjusting student aid eligibility for foreign medical schools, and carving out student loan deferments for special groups such as airline pilots. Sure, some of these proposals are benign—some are even reasonable improvements. But with higher education costs becoming increasingly salient in the lives of voters, the Republican proposals lacked grounding.
The unfortunate reality is that Republicans had no long-term coherent plan for higher education—and still don’t. While conservative media stir up public rancor against the unfair debt forgiveness policies of Democrats, Republicans seem to be asleep at the wheel, hoping that a few fragile lawsuits would stop the nearly half-trillion-dollar plan from moving forward. Worse, they ignore the fact that debt forgiveness was a response to legitimate issues with the higher education system—issues that Republican politicians have inadequately addressed.
Strict employment regulations, the easy availability of federal student aid, and pushing every person to attend college have made college an expensive barrier to accessing many decent jobs. Democrats respond by proposing to give students immediate and tangible benefits to compensate for the ever-increasing costs of attendance. But they don’t attempt to challenge the presumption that everybody should attend college. Republicans have a unique opportunity to challenge this premise, but they rarely do.
Two bills proposed this spring demonstrate that Republicans will even compromise fiscally conservative principles to avoid challenging the “college for all” ideal. The Federal Assistance to Initiative Repayment (FAIR) Act, a supposed “fiscally responsible, targeted alternative” to Biden’s loan forgiveness plan still forgives debt for some students. It also waives certain portions of interest for lower-income borrowers, which creates costs that will be borne by taxpayers. As progressives like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom push for interest-free student loans, which have already proven to be expensive, Republicans should be careful not to open the doors to such fiscal irresponsibility.
In June, Republican senators introduced the Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act, a “landmark” package of bills, that would make small changes to income-driven repayment programs, an already flawed policy that serves as a safety net for economically non-viable educational programs. The package of bills also suggests mild improvements to cost transparency, which does little to address the reasons why students borrow so heavily for college in the first place. The best aspect of this set of bills is that it eliminates Grad PLUS loans, which, according to recent research, made graduate schools unnecessarily expensive. It is long past time to roll back unlimited borrowing programs such as Grad PLUS loans, which ironically were passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed by a Republican president in 2005.
While it’s a good (late) start, this set of bills is not enough. Republicans should use the loan forgiveness situation as an opportunity to take higher education policy more seriously. They have a chance to reframe the issue away from the stale “college for all” message.
Younger generations are more skeptical of the value of a college degree. The Democratic Party’s mindless repetition that college benefits everybody doesn’t hold up with today’s underemployment rates for college graduates. Politicians who remain unquestioningly devoted to subsidizing higher education institutions will be left behind. There is a good chance to provide all Americans an actual alternative vision: an America that values diverse paths to success that work with the needs of each individual.
A cohesive conservative higher education agenda should be based on principles of merit, fiscal responsibility, and eliminating credentialism and should substantially roll back federal student aid and loans. The federal aid that is left should go to students and programs with the best economic returns. Lawmakers should work to loosen employment regulations to ensure a college degree is not a mandatory expectation for jobs that don’t need them. Some states have already begun to forego the college degree requirement for government-level jobs. If college degrees become less ubiquitous, private businesses will follow suit.
Loan forgiveness may be off the table for now. But advocates won’t stop until they get what they want. Short-sighted reactions win a few culture war points, but they won’t help Americans and they won’t hold colleges accountable. As Democrats push for radical policies, Republicans have to be willing to push back just as boldly. Otherwise, they can expect to learn an expensive lesson in the future.
The post What the GOP Should Learn From Student Loan Forgiveness appeared first on The American Conservative.
Even if we escape nuclear war, the U.S. is impoverishing her allies and depleting her stockpiles.
As NATO leaders gather in Vilnius this week, even Joe Biden appears wary of the hawks’ latest brainstorm: formally admitting Ukraine into the Western Alliance. In an interview with CNN ahead of the Vilnius summit, the president doubted whether “there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now,” adding: “If the war is going on [while Ukraine accedes to NATO], then we’re all in war.”
Thank God for Biden’s modicum of sanity. Then again, don’t be surprised by an about-face six months from now. It wouldn’t be the first, or second, or third time his administration has ruled out, or even condemned, some proposed measure, only to give in under subsequent pressure. Biden seems to hesitate before each rung on the escalatory ladder, but he climbs it eventually.
Still, if the gradual escalation doesn’t trigger all-out war with Russia, it follows that the hawkish approach to the Ukraine crisis has been a resounding success for America, right? Wrong.
Various versions of this argument have been making the rounds on both of sides of the Atlantic. Not just the hawks themselves, but even some critics of Ukraine hawkism have floated it in recent months.
Here’s a summary of the argument: Vladimir Putin is a neo-Hitlerian figure hankering for Europe’s land and America’s downfall (yes, so-called serious people like former U.S. envoy to Moscow Michael McFaul say such things). By goading the Kremlin to invade Ukraine, and then pumping Kiev with weapons and training, Washington has bloodied a dangerous enemy’s nose, humiliated its leadership, and ground down its forces and materiel.
But that isn’t the only benefit associated with escalation. The disastrous post-9/11 wars had led to a certain coolness between Washington and its core European allies. Americans of both parties believed that Europeans didn’t take their own security seriously enough, while Europeans (especially the French and Germans) found Washington overbearing, with Paris renewing vague Gaullist talk of “European strategic autonomy.” But now, Europe is once more eating out of Washington’s hand.
Many nations on the Continent have boosted military spending to levels urged by America, and the European arms buildup is entirely premised on near-absolute U.S. hegemony in the Atlantic area for the foreseeable future. Sanctions and the—ahem—“Western” destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines have severed German-Russian energy-industrial synergy, long viewed with suspicion by American strategists. The creeping de-industrialization of Europe that has followed might be bad for Europeans, resounding-success proponents concede, but it’s pretty good for America: It means that instead of two industrial rivals, China and Europe, Washington now only faces one. And all this was achieved, the resound-success theorists point out, by shelling out less than 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, a relative pittance.
But there are numerous holes in the theory, and any one of them would sink the whole gimcrack edifice into oblivion.
Start with the very premise that U.S.-Russian enmity is necessitated by Putin’s monstrous ambitions for conquest, which span Warsaw and perhaps even Berlin. If that’s in fact the case, then if anything, today’s escalatory policy is insufficient to meet the threat from Moscow. A Hitler or Stalin 2.0 calls on the United States and its allies to prepare for total war, not to rest content with grinding trench warfare over places like Bakhmut.
If Russia’s ambitions, much less its conventional capabilities, are more limited, however, then the American response to Ukraine is entirely out of proportion for a country long acknowledged not to implicate core U.S. interests. It’s also potentially catastrophic: Gradually escalating is all fun and games until a nose-bloodied and humiliated Putin lobs the first tactical nuke in Ukraine or launches a massive conventional strike on, say, Poland, and then the world as we know it comes to an end.
Even short of all that, the belief that it’s “worth it” to grind down Russia discounts the enormous costs of the policy to Ukraine, which is on the fast-track to rapid depopulation and which could soon turn into a Syria-like vortex, spewing misery and instability into the very Europe that American escalationists claim as Washington’s rightful domain.
Something similar might be said for the renewed U.S. economic mastery brought about by the current escalatory policy. Yes, German-Russian energy-industrial synergy has been severed (though the Germans are still enriching the Kremlin by purchasing rebranded Russian gas at a markup from the Chinese). But is it really wise for Washington to drive Europe, America’s largest foreign market and trading partner, into deindustrialization and penury? If high-wage manufacturing jobs disappear from the Continent, Europeans won’t be able to afford American exports: Talk about cutting your nose to spite your face. The rest of the world, moreover, is registering alarm at the sanctions by hedging against the dollar, threatening its status as a global reserve currency—one of the pillars of postwar American power.
Recall, too, that until well into the Obama administration, the smart money was that America’s strategic future lies in Asia, not Europe. The response to Ukraine, however, suggests a return to Europe (and its burning Middle-Eastern and North-African peripheries) as America’s main area of strategic concern. The resounding-success types insist that Washington can handle both: a pivot to Asia and a military-industrial wrestling match with China and, simultaneously, a confrontation with Russia. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” in the glib phrase of the hawks.
Yet evidently we can’t do both. As the Biden administration conceded recently, one reason Washington is turning to gruesome cluster munitions to bolster Kiev is that America’s military-industrial base isn’t keeping up with the war’s demands—itself a symptom of a generational, bipartisan abandonment of U.S. manufacturing. If the “pittance” of a war in Ukraine is stretching the Pentagon’s conventional stockpiles, imagine the industrial incapacity that a confrontation with China over Taiwan might reveal.
No, Ukraine hawkism isn’t strengthening the homeland. But one can understand the theory’s appeal. Hell, I’ve been drawn to it in the past. It is tempting, after all, to detect strokes of genius amid the messy interplay of democratic emotion, self-righteous propaganda, and haphazard decision-making that actually shape American strategy today.
The post No, Ukraine Hawks Aren’t Strengthening America appeared first on The American Conservative.
Abortion isn’t on the ballot the same way it was pre-Dobbs, but that doesn’t mean the slaughter of innocents has stopped being a political issue.
Do you know what’s odd? Thanks to Dobbs, for the first time in fifty years, abortion isn’t a major issue in the Republican primary. It will be especially weird for religious nutjobs like me, who are (or were) single-issue voters. Choosing a candidate used to be easy: Whoever wants to kill the fewest babies would get my support.
Then again, maybe this cycle won’t be so different. If your number-one priority is to prevent the needless slaughter of innocents, just ask yourself one question: Which candidate is most committed to brokering a peace between Russia and Ukraine? In 2024, pro-life means anti-war.
The U.S. government estimates that nearly half a million men and women—both military and civilian—have been killed or wounded since Russia began its “special military operation” last year. I’d say that’s more than enough.
And yet Washington elites are pushing to escalate the war. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently introduced a bill to the Senate urging Ukraine’s admission to NATO. (This is the same Lindsey Graham who called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin last year.) If he gets his way, all of NATO will be obliged to declare war on Russia.
Russia’s official doctrine is clear: They will only use nukes if the integrity of the Russian state is threatened. Well, Ukraine has already made incursions as far as Belgorod. Washington is also sending money and weapons to Kiev, with the expressed aim of recapturing Crimea.
Hopefully these incursions are a bargaining-chip, because Putin will not accept any peace deal in which Russia loses territory. If Zelensky and his NATO pals are serious about seizing territory from Russia, it may well trigger the first nuclear war in history. That really would be the “war to end all wars.”
Some might point out that Graham’s warmongering has been condemned by leaders of both parties, including President Biden. They might argue that the foreign-policy establishment is taking a more moderate line on Ukraine. Yet bear in mind that Graham is, and always has been, a stalking horse. He is bought and paid for by defense contractors. Every once in a while, they’ll trot him out to make some insanely belligerent statement, in the hopes of making “moderate” war hawks like President Biden look more, well, moderate. But Graham will not utter a single syllable that hasn’t been preapproved by the military-industrial complex.
So, if you want to know what Washington elites really think about foreign affairs, listen to Lindsey. And they’re making themselves clear. They would do to Russia what they did to Iraq. They want to invade Russia, kill Putin, and install a pro-Western puppet in his place. They’re willing to risk hundreds of millions of lives to achieve that goal. Hell, they’re willing to risk the total annihilation of all life on earth.
The truly pro-life voter, then, isn’t just anti-war. He’s anti-establishment.
Put it this way. Remember when, in 2012, a hot mic caught President Barack Obama telling Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev that “after my election I have more flexibility” in some unknown negotiation with Moscow? It’s entirely possible that Joe Biden is playing the same game with Kiev. He may be striking a centrist pose, now that support for Ukraine is declining; if he’s reelected, that mask will drop in the blink of an eye.
And the same might be said for Biden’s rivals in the GOP. Only one in three Republicans wish to maintain or increase U.S. support for Ukraine. That would explain why the two leading candidates—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis—have both taken dovish positions on the war. Both have declared that the United States should use its power and influence, not to fuel Ukraine’s war machine, but to broker a peace between Putin and Zelensky.
The question is, Will they follow through?
Trump, for one, has an excellent rapport with Putin. In fact, he raised eyebrows last year for saying that Russia’s invasion was “genius,” and praised Putin as “savvy” for supporting an independent Donbas. Most tellingly of all, perhaps, is the fact that Zelensky is openly hostile to Trump’s foreign-policy agenda.
And yet Trump is also famously impressionable when it comes to foreign policy matters. After running as a noninterventionist in 2016, he surrounded himself with neoconservatives like John Bolton and Nikki Haley. Specifically, Trump promised not to involve the United States in the Syrian civil war, but then launched 59 cruise missiles at Syrian air force base at the behest of his daughter, Ivanka.
And let’s not forget: Trump also got along pretty well with Zelensky. As a matter of fact, they got into some shady deals together. In 2019, Congress passed a $400 million aid package to Ukraine; Trump then told Zelensky he would authorize the payment only if he (Zelensky) would give him (Trump) the dirt on Hunter Biden’s gig with Burisma.
So, has Trump learned from his mistakes? Or will he once again fill his cabinet with veteran hacks who despise him and everything he stands for? Will he rekindle his old friendship with Putin? Or will he, too, succumb to Zelensky’s charms? Frankly, it’s anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, DeSantis has earned his reputation as a “conviction politician.” We can trust him to keep his word on Ukraine, right? Maybe—or maybe not.
For one thing, DeSantis’s “outsider” status is a load of rubbish. You don’t get to be Governor of Florida without greasing a huge political machine. He also has zero foreign-policy background. Put the two together, and DeSantis is likely to follow the same path as Trump in 2016. He’ll focus on one or two signature issues (in Ron’s case, fighting wokism) while outsourcing pretty much everything else to the Washington establishment.
This seems likely, given how quickly DeSantis walked back his claim that the Russo–Ukrainian war is a “territorial dispute.” He also condemned Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, while conceding that “there’s a lot of ethnic Russians there.” As a matter of fact, the Crimea is about 75 percent Russian. That might explain why Crimeans themselves consistently and overwhelmingly support joining the Russian Federation.
That’s a relatively minor point, but it shows how little DeSantis understands the situation. It also shows how timid he becomes once he leaves his comfort zone.
Who else is there? Tim Scott and Mike Pence are both confirmed hawks. So, of course, is Nikki Haley.
Then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy.
In many ways, Ramaswamy is the ideal candidate. Like Trump, he has more money than God, which makes him independent-minded. Unlike Trump, he’s a self-made man; he’s worth $630 million, and he earned every penny. That speaks to his competence, especially as a hirer-and-firer—skills that Trump definitely lacks. I can’t see him getting swept away in Bolton’s moustache or succumbing to Graham’s feminine wiles.
Ramaswamy also has a much better grasp of the facts than either Trump or DeSantis. He recognizes that U.S. hostility towards Russia is driving Putin into China’s arms. He would seek to secure a “Korean War–style armistice agreement” while allowing the Donbas to secede from Ukraine.
This last point is crucial. Like Crimea, the Donbas is majority-Russian. The majority of the public wants to join the Russian Federation. Local militias are fighting alongside the Russian army. They will keep fighting until Kiev allows them to join the Russian Federation. Among the presidential hopefuls—in both parties—Ramaswamy alone really seems to grasp that.
The trouble is that it’s hard to imagine him, or anyone else, beating Donald Trump. Then again, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Ramaswamy is singular among Trump’s rivals in that he has nothing but good things to say about Forty-Five; for his part, Trump seems to admire the young tycoon. It looks like Ramaswamy is taking a page from Ben Carson’s 2016 playbook. As a reward for his loyalty, Trump made Carson his HUD Secretary. The (infinitely more impressive) Ramaswamy could easily find himself the next U.S. Secretary of State.
Maybe then we can end the slaughter. Then, maybe, we’ll have a chance at peace.
The post In 2024, Pro-Life Means Anti-War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Is getting married and having a family a political act?
Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, by Peachy Keenan, Regnery, 256 pages.
I read this book on my honeymoon. Loyal readers might have noticed my byline’s absence for a couple weeks. Worry not for a wife abandoned even then to professional obligations; I only began Domestic Extremist on our trip. It seemed amusingly fitting, as we celebrated the newest triumph in our own careers of domestic extremism and the merger of our operations. It would at least provide this review a lede.
Peachy Keenan is the pseudonym of a California mother—“living deep behind enemy lines”—who “identifies as a husbosexual.” She writes and tweets prolifically, a Beatrice who found her Benedick and had her kids, and, being comfortable with nonconformity, is now letting the world have it. She begins her book with a quiz, to see if you, too, might be a living affront to the present regime. You get a point for each statement you agree with, such as “I am married or would like to be,” “I want/have four or more children,” “I believe parents are a child’s primary authority and educators,” and “Children can’t choose their gender.” My wife and I each scored twelve points out of twelve—Keenan: “Buh-bye, have fun in the gulags!”
Fundamentally, that means this isn’t really a book for me. That Domestic Extremist was not written for me does not mean I cannot recommend it—quite the opposite. It only means we need to figure out who to recommend it to, so you can buy a copy and give it to them. I’m a man; this book is a loving letter of exhortation from a woman to girls who are now as she once was. Peachy Keenan is telling The Facts, but I already knew them. Our cultural mores and political structures—what makes up the current American regime—are at war with nature, and the biggest front in that war is against the natural family. There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. Created order has a way of winning, in the long run, and the people who have babies do not die out; God is not mocked.
There are three parts to Mother Keenan’s practical guide to becoming a shield maiden of the future. First, women readers must recognize what has been taken from them by the triumph of a feminism that claims men and women are the same. They have lost their all-too-fleeting fertility, feminine virtues, covenant marriage, parental authority, even their gender. They must reject lies like “abortion is health care” and “children don’t need a father” and “public schools know best when it comes to educating your children and would never indoctrinate them politically or groom them sexually.” Second, women must “explore promiscuous monogamy” by marrying a man whom they love and respect—this takes becoming the sort of gal he’d want to wed, too—and then, to use a Davidic coinage rather than a Peachy-ism, they should happily fill their quiver full of children, which are as arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, and stay home with them. Finally, they should stick at it, till death does them part. (Mother Keenan does not pretend that this part is easy.) In the meantime they can convince their friends to join the victory parade.
I write “Mother Keenan,” but perhaps I’d better say Good Aunt Keenan, a Glinda to the Wicked Wine Aunt of the West. That’s loading the verbal dice a little—wine aunt is almost exclusively a term of disparagement. Yet it does describe a recognizable female type in the American middle class pantheon. The wine aunt is a professional woman who has put her career first. She is successful and independent and lives the yuppy life of boozy brunches and international travel well into her forties. She preaches that life to her younger friends and relations. She is the cool aunt if you like her, a wine aunt if not.
In Domestic Extremist, the Catholic Peachy Keenan is here to be the extremely online anti-wine aunt, bringing old good news. She even prefaces a chapter with a passage from Paul’s letter to Titus, where the apostle writes: “teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children.”
So then, who are these younger women? They must be young enough to take this advice to heart, so let us say they are 17 to 28. They are women for whom a life of career advancement in allegedly rewarding fields seems plausible, and they read new books, so they are college educated and probably solidly middle class. They are, in the end, the very nearly already converted, for Keenan’s appeal to her reader is that she would “trust what you already know to be best in life!” This then is a woman who recognizes her own maternal instincts, but smart and vivacious and femininely agreeable, fears her desires are really as low status as the world around her says.
If I have a criticism of Domestic Extremist, it is only that the author seems unsure just how almost converted her ideal reader is. Liberal quotation from Peachy Keenan’s fellow anonymous Twitter personalities and other online sources throughout the book suggest a very narrow target audience indeed: the young professional, politically conservative woman who just needs a little auntly permission to set aside her girlboss aspirations for good. But perhaps a less avid reader of online culture war commentary will still find this book funny, provocative, and encouraging.
Is getting married and having a family a political act? That is the curious question raised by Domestic Extremist, and much other contemporary conservative criticism. In its classical conception, the family, as the ultimate pre-political institution, cannot be political. It is a baseline, human beings in community. Political orders are formed with certain families, or for the protection and prosperity of certain families, and marriages and births have political significance reflected in law, but the formation of families in some sort of abstract is not that thing we call politics.
But in a regime that really does seem opposed to the natural family, that weakens the bond between husband and wife and authority of parents over children at every turn, then perhaps something is politically significant in doing the thing most of your ancestors did for a few thousand years. When we remember who it is that actually bears the next generation, then perhaps that is especially true for women.
The post Baby Steps appeared first on The American Conservative.
If America weren’t better than immigrants’ homelands, they wouldn’t be here.
Several Republican presidential contenders have called for ending birthright citizenship for children born to parents who are in this country illegally. Vivek Ramaswamy—a first-generation American born to Indian immigrant parents—was the most recent to do so, last week during an appearance on CNN. During that appearance, Ramaswamy even suggested that children of illegal immigrants should earn their voting rights through military or community service, or by taking a civics test as immigrants who choose to become American citizens must.
Ramaswamy is right: Ending birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants would make the American immigration system more just and promote patriotism for naturalized citizens.
As a legal immigrant whose family lived here for over a decade and worked to get citizenship through proper channels, I believe that the people hurt most by illegal immigration are legal immigrants. The negative impacts of illegal immigration on legal immigrants come in two parts, the first being more measurable. Illegal immigrants receive preferential treatment, ranging from amnesty and visa-less paths to citizenship to free tuition in progressive states. Those who went through legal processes to become naturalized citizens question the benefit of pursuing legal methods instead of taking the handouts, shortcuts, and special treatment.
My family emigrated in the year 2000, when two of the seven most egregious amnesty bills in American history were signed into law, which added an estimated 1.3 million individuals to the immigration pipeline alongside us and made the entire process from immigration to naturalization take more than 11 years in total. Years later, when my now husband, a British immigrant and now naturalized citizen, came to attend college in the U.S., he had to pay more to attend university than a citizen would, as international-student fees are higher than standard tuition—quite the opposite of the free college being offered to immigrants who don’t come here for through the proper channels.
The second negative effect of illegal immigration has to do with how immigrants are perceived. Immigration as a whole gets a bad rap when American citizens see illegal immigrants running across the Rio Grande at the southern border or not being deported after committing slews of crimes. Illegal immigrants are much to blame for the negative perception of immigration in general, particularly in Republican and conservative circles.
Legal immigration done through proper channels benefits both the immigrant and the country. Research published by the Cato Institute in 2019 highlighted the finding that immigrants who choose to become citizens self-report higher levels of patriotism than their counterparts and have more faith in existing government institutions. Key findings in the study included the notion that “immigrants who are American citizens are even more likely to agree with the statement that America is better than most other countries than are native-born Americans, 79 percent to 73 percent.” Researchers also noted that “75 percent of immigrants who are American citizens are very proud to be American compared to only 69 percent of native-born Americans.”
Immigrants typically come here either to make their own lives better, or to make America better, and often for some combination of the two reasons. Becoming a citizen is a privilege and a choice that those who aren’t born here spend a decade—or several—considering.
I was brought here as a child by my parents. I didn’t choose to come here initially, but I chose to stay and enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship. There isn’t much of a difference between being brought here as a child in the womb or as a toddler like I was—both are decisions made by a child’s parents. But growing up in a family who valued American freedoms enough to respect the nation’s legal systems made all the difference to me.
Living here for decades or more as a resident and waiting for the day that you become a citizen makes being an American seem like the privilege that it truly is. That reality is lost on many citizens who didn’t earn it.
Videos from conservative pundits and run-of-the-mill YouTube personalities show that something like a citizenship test made up of civics questions would do many of us some good. People who can’t answer questions about our past like “Whom did this country win independence from?” and “Who fought in the Civil War?” shouldn’t be making decisions about our future.
Ending birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants would prompt those children to learn patriotism on their own, allowing them to decide whether or not to go through the process of becoming an American citizen. Should they choose to go through this process, they would be more appreciative of the liberties granted to them than if those liberties had merely been given to them at birth.
To borrow a phrase from presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is a first-generation immigrant from Indian parents, even on our worst days, we are still blessed to live in America. Here, we acknowledge our diverse past and fight for a freer future. We know that America is not perfect, but it is a whole lot better than where we came from. If the opposite were true, we wouldn’t be here.
The post Citizenship Is a Privilege appeared first on The American Conservative.
After seventy years, it is time to bring America’s troops home from the Republic of Korea.
On July 27, 1953, the guns fell silent in the Korean War. The so-called “Forgotten War,” begun just five years after the end of World War II, was over.
After Japan’s defeat, the U.S. and Soviet Union divided and occupied the peninsula. A ravaged world began rebuilding domestically. Defeated states began slowly reemerging internationally. Victorious combatants began searching for normality.
The Truman administration withdrew U.S. troops and refused to supply the South Korean government with heavy weapons because President Syngman Rhee threatened to march north. Moscow demonstrated no such sensitivities in dealing with North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, who invaded the South. Although the Pentagon had written off the peninsula, placing it outside America’s “defense perimeter,” Truman rushed troops to defend the Republic of Korea.
With allied forces on the brink of victory, Chinese “volunteers” intervened. Washington’s hope of a quick victory went aglimmering, and two and a half years of war followed. After tortuous and torturous negotiations, an armistice finally took effect.
Some 37,000 Americans died in combat. Another 815,000 combatants were killed. More than a half million Korean civilians died, and millions were displaced. Much of the peninsula was wrecked, especially in the North, where little of value was not destroyed by the allies’ devastating bombing campaign.
With no peace, the peninsula suffered through its own unique cold war, which occasionally flared hot. For years the Republic of Korea (ROK) was economically and politically stunted, an impoverished dictatorship. Without American support for Seoul, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) would have realized its ambition and swallowed its southern counterpart, likely with enthusiastic Soviet and Chinese support.
Seventy years later, U.S. troops remain on station in South Korea. However, the world has changed dramatically. Most obviously, the Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union is gone. Mao Zedong’s reign is but a horrid memory. Although the recent downturn in U.S. relations with both Beijing and Moscow led them to increase their support for the DPRK, neither is likely to go to war on Pyongyang’s behalf. The People’s Republic of China, enjoying extensive economic relations with the South, views the DPRK’s survival as better than a united Korea allied with America on China’s border. Moscow is equally cynical, uncomfortable with a nuclear North but unwilling to aid efforts by the U.S. and its allies to contain and denuclearize the Kim family dynasty.
Equally important, the South has raced past the North economically and internationally. The ROK is one of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations, possessing fifty-plus times North Korea’s GDP. Seoul also is an increasingly important global power, diplomatically active with enormous soft power, highlighted by K-pop music. While South Korea’s friends have multiplied, Pyongyang’s allies have dwindled.
In this world why does the military status quo of seventy years ago persist? Why are nearly 30,000 U.S. personnel still acting as a tripwire for war in the South? Why does Seoul not provide whatever forces are necessary to deter and, if necessary, defeat North Korea? And why do successive American administrations endorse “extended deterrence,” which now risks the destruction of U.S. cities in any war with the North?
Of course, South Koreans are not the only foreigners enjoying defense welfare at the American people’s expense. The Japanese devote an even smaller share of their GDP to the military. A gaggle of Mideastern countries rely on implicit U.S. security guarantees. The Biden administration has become even more submissive than its predecessors, bruiting the possibility of issuing a formal defense commitment to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The Europeans also have been living off the Pentagon. The worst defense leeches are countries with large economies but low military expenditures, most notably Germany, Italy, and Spain. However, even France and the United Kingdom have maintained militaries more to police their old colonial empires than to confront great power enemies, most obviously Russia. As for Poland and the Baltics, if they fear Moscow as much as they claim, they should devote far more than NATO’s official 2 percent of GDP standard to the military to create territorial defenses that would exact a high price on any attacker. Instead, the Europeans have preferred to cultivate their welfare states while leaving their security largely in Washington’s hands.
Alas, South Korea, though devoting a larger share of its wealth to the military, is also dangerously dependent on Washington. During the 1960s the ROK’s economy began to take off. The South soon left the DPRK behind, but Seoul did not increase its military outlays accordingly. When I first visited in the late 1980s and inquired why, I was told that South Koreans had social needs, such as education, which prevented them from doing more. Unmentioned were American concerns. U.S. forces were simply expected to remain on station, apparently forever.
As the ROK economy continued to grow, this policy began to look vaguely ridiculous, with the well heeled and highly populated South cowering before the economic wreck to its north. If South Korea’s economy grew to the size of China’s the Seoul government undoubtedly would still insist that Washington maintain its defense treaty and military presence. After all, one can never be too careful.
On the conventional side South Koreans are well able to defend themselves. Might China and even Russia back a new North Korean invasion? Absent a larger war, such as the South joining the U.S. to battle the PRC over Taiwan, it is difficult to imagine a plausible casus belli for either Beijing or Moscow, whether in support of Pyongyang or on their own. So long as the ROK does not join a military campaign against them, they have no reason to add Seoul to their enemies’ lists.
Are there other reasons for the U.S. to garrison the peninsula? Much of the foreign policy establishment wants to use South Korea to help contain the PRC. However, a Chinese attack on the South is highly unlikely, at least unless Seoul intervenes against Beijing on Washington’s behalf. Allowing U.S. military forces to use ROK bases against the PRC would turn the entire South into a missile target in any conflict. Aiding Washington in a war over Taiwan would give China a reason to back Pyongyang attacks on South Korea. For its own interest Seoul likely would tell the US “no thanks” to war with the PRC.
What of the DPRK’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal? North Korea is an unpleasant actor, but Washington survived Maoist China and Islamist Pakistan developing nuclear weapons. Indeed, the U.S. decided against striking Beijing’s nascent program and ultimately accepted Israel, India, and Pakistan as nuclear states. The North’s bomb would not threaten the U.S. if Washington were not entangled in what amounts to the continuation of the peninsula’s civil war. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, hoping to leave this world atop a radioactive funeral pyre.
To increase America’s security Washington should end its defense commitment to, and especially nuclear cover for, the South. Yet the U.S. foreign policy establishment is determined to maintain extended deterrence, that is, risking American cities to protect Seoul. Indeed, decades ago Washington foreclosed a South Korean defense, pressing President Park Chung-hee to drop his nuclear weapons program. This policy worked so long as Pyongyang did not have the means to threaten the U.S. homeland. However, the North’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of targeting North America is transforming the issue. Nothing at stake in the Korean peninsula warrants risking the lives of hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of Americans.
The U.S. should set a certain departure date, while giving the ROK time to bolster its own military in response. Instead of maintaining its infamous nuclear umbrella, Washington should drop its objections to Seoul creating its own deterrent. U.S. disengagement wouldn’t mean the two countries should not continue to cooperate to advance shared interests. But America need not subsidize the ROK’s defense to do so. Washington’s defense shield allowed South Korea to develop and succeed. Seoul should take over the responsibilities of a fully developed and sovereign state and provide for its own security, including against nuclear threats.
No doubt, America’s endless war lobby would fight any withdrawal. However, Washington’s fiscal irresponsibility is likely to force military retrenchment. America’s national debt held by the public is almost 100 percent of GDP, nearing the historic record set in 1946, after the end of the world’s worst conflict. With fiscal responsibility a rarity on Capitol Hill, that burden is expected to nearly double by mid-century. Eventually Washington will have to set priorities and make choices. Americans are unlikely to place the ease and comfort of purported “allies” such as the ROK above their own welfare.
After seventy years, it is time to bring America’s troops home from the ROK. South Koreans are all grown up. It’s time they act like adults in providing for their own security.
The post Southern Growing Pains appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mid-year, give or take a week, is a good time to make some high-level assessments.
Gibbon opens The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with a survey of that great state in the time of the Antonines: the disposition of armies and fleets, the power of the state cult, the condition of the provinces, the health of the treasury. “It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire,” he writes in the first chapter, “and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.”
Taking a page out of Gibbon is rarely a bad move; the middle of the year is a good time for reckoning up debits and credits. Let us hope the object of our accounting does not soon meet the same fate as his.
The weaknesses of our current situation almost all take the form of attacks on American state capacity and political sovereignty. As that canny old philosopher Humpty Dumpty said, “The question is, which is to be master—that is all.” Do we live in a democratic republic where the people rule through their representatives in the state, or do we live in an administrative dictatorship? As bureaucratic and corporate elements gain power and autonomy, it is at the expense of the politically responsive republican government.
Our fiscal conditions are perhaps the foremost cause for concern. The New York Times editorial board has suddenly decided to be worried about the national debt. In a July 2 leader titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the sages of the City suddenly rediscover common sense: Floating bonds to pay for ongoing programs rather than particular projects is risky and, if interest rates climb, very expensive. Increasing spending and cutting revenue can be paid for only with debt or money-printing.
Somewhat perversely, the board lays most of the blame at the feet of the Republicans’ tax cuts and argues that abolishing the debt ceiling outright is a necessary reform. Increasing Treasury’s discretionary borrowing power is hardly a solution to the borrowing problem; indeed, this year’s showdown conceded far too much. This debt ceiling deal is different in nature, not just degree. Rather than setting an amount beyond which the Treasury may not borrow, it gives a date at which the Treasury’s permission to borrow must be renewed. In theory (give or take some particulars), Janet Yellen could hock the whole country tomorrow without further input from the political organs of the state.
The legislature has proven just as happy over the past hundred years to allow its control over the spending process to be eroded by the executive. Congress giving Treasury the credit card is an ideal circular buck-passing scheme, putting off growing revenue or cutting expenditure indefinitely—a borrowing bonanza underwritten by the dollar’s status as a world reserve currency, the American nuclear stockpile, and the increasingly tenuous historical argument that we’ve always paid back our debts before.
It just so happens, as the New York Times has muddled out, that this is a dangerous high-wire act. The whole thing falls apart if the dollar begins to act like a normal floating currency—as it is clear large portions of the world would prefer—or if interest rates start to make debt maintenance unsustainable.
Among other distortions caused by the artificially strong dollar is our trade deficit. Last week I reviewed Robert Lighthizer’s recent book on American trade policy; I encourage anyone with an interest in the topic to read at least his explanation of the problems caused by a massive and consistent trade deficit. The net outflow of American dollars has been enabled by the sale of American assets to non-American entities. That is why we all woke up one day to find that a Chinese interest owned the country’s largest pork producer.
The hollowing out of the American industrial base through dogmatic free trade and political mismanagement lays before us some dire prospects. Thanks to a period of ill-advised consolidation and state fecklessness, the American defense industry is struggling to keep up with the material aid we are providing in the Russia–Ukraine war; if footmen tire you, what will horses do? Or what if there were war with, say, one of our main pharmaceutical precursor suppliers or a nation that controls the majority of the rare earth metals supply chain?
Regular readers of The American Conservative will hardly need to be reminded of our feckless foreign policy’s incompatibility with republican government. The last time Congress declared war was 1942. The military–industrial complex, a lazy Congress, and a population increasingly insulated from the horrors of war—these have all led to the most ancient duty of the democratic state, deliberating war and peace, becoming an affair for unaccountable camarillas.
These conditions combine to keep our national destiny out of the hands of the democratically accountable elements of the state and in the hands of a relatively small group of administrative and corporate cabals—that is to say, to erode the sovereignty and the power of the nation as they impede the expression and execution of the will of the people.
Yet not all is lost. Some fundamental points of strength remain.
The United States is a very large country—330 million people is a lot of people, and 3.8 million square miles is a lot of land. Nearly every natural resource we could want can be found in the continental U.S. Even if Americans hit the bog-standard measures of productivity, the U.S. would be among the wealthiest and most powerful countries on earth on pure magnitude of manpower and resources. Even better: To our north and south sit two neighbors that are weak, dependent on us economically, and territorially unambitious; on our other two sides, ocean. (As a congressman, Lincoln underlined these advantages and the attendant responsibilities: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”)
A related point of strength is our agricultural sector. American farming is the world-beater; it continues to improve. American farmers are so good at producing food that our internal economic stability and the world market have to be propped up with a Rube Goldberg machine of subsidies and protections to prevent American corn from crashing food prices. As in any technical field, there are always ways to improve particulars and the entire system—but when was the last time you were worried about an honest-to-God famine in this country?
Nor is all lost when it comes to industry. The U.S. remains the second largest manufacturing power in the world, trailing only China. (It is third if you indulge the fiction that the E.U. is a single economic unit.) Our technology sector remains basically unrivaled—one of the downstream benefits of a very large population is a very large pool of talented and innovative people.
Victory is never assured. Yet defeat is not guaranteed, either. American politicians must ask what must be done to rebuild sovereignty and republicanism. Some congressmen have made noises about reining in presidential war powers, and the tide has turned decisively against extreme free trade dogmatism; perhaps these changes could be followed with proposals to reform the civil service and to force Congress to vote every time the federal government floats debt. As Alasdair Grey once wrote, Imagine you live in the early days of a better nation.
The post Taking Stock appeared first on The American Conservative.
Biden says he can let in anyone he wants.
Determining how many, and which, foreigners are allowed to move to the United States is a core responsibility of the legislature. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is constructed such that Congress has given the president broad authority to keep out anyone he thinks should be excluded, but he is authorized to let in only those who are eligible under a complicated set of rules.
Presidents have been encroaching on Congress’s authority in this area—as in others—for some time, but the actions of the Biden administration are so egregious as to be different in kind.
In fact, it is fair to say that the left’s current approach to immigration is a complete inversion of the INA: They now claim that presidents have the authority to let in anyone they like—in whatever number they choose, for any reason whatsoever—but, as we saw during the prior administration, they may only keep foreigners out under very narrow and clearly delineated circumstances.
This is what we have been seeing at the border for two and half years now, with well over 2 million illegal border-jumpers taken into custody but then released into the U.S., ostensibly to apply for asylum. (The law requires that illegals claiming asylum be detained during the entire course of their proceedings.)
This has become so institutionalized that the DHS under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has gone beyond turning Border Patrol agents into the equivalent of Wal-Mart greeters at the border to requiring them to actually facilitate illegal border crossings. In the run-up to the end of Title 42, for instance, American border officers were coordinating with Mexican authorities on when to send groups of people illegally across the river.
And the Center for Immigration Studies’ indefatigable Todd Bensman reports that many border-jumpers, blocked from entering the U.S. by Texas state police stationed at the riverbank, are calling out for the Border Patrol to come and get them; as he notes, “They told us, ‘We want American immigración, because they will let us in.”
This executive usurpation of the power of deciding who gets to live here also underlies the latest White House effort to “reduce” illegal immigration by funneling inadmissible aliens through established ports of entry along the border using what might as well be called the OpenBorder app (with apologies to OpenTable). The app, actually named CBP One, is the linchpin of the Biden administration scheme to hide illegal immigration in plain sight by redefining it as “legal” (it’s not). And the administration has increased the daily number of people it admits via this ruse from 1,000 to 1,250 to 1,450, based on nothing but its say-so.
The basis of all these initiatives is something called “parole.” In the immigration context, parole is a narrow authority Congress gave the president to let in the occasional foreigner who has no right to be here in exceptional, temporary circumstances—a medical crisis, for example, or the need to testify at a trial. The Biden administration has abused this circumscribed power to create his own immigration system, untethered to the laws passed by Congress.
And this use of parole to turn the immigration law on its head is not limited to border questions. DHS recently announced it was expanding a made-up policy of “family unification parole” to four more countries, totally without basis in law.
Congress has placed numerical limits on various categories of legal immigration; to give just one example, the number of green cards for adult brothers and sisters of adult U.S. citizens is capped at 65,000 per year. Those caps mean that, when there is more demand than there is supply, which is most of the time, people have to wait for their number to come up. The State Department publishes a monthly document reporting when people in which categories will be able to come in.
This is often derided as a “backlog” by anti-borders activists, wanting you to imagine that lazy bureaucrats haven’t bothered to get to your file yet. On the contrary, these are just waiting lists, little different from standing in line for your turn to get on an amusement park roller coaster.
With the family reunification parole scheme, the Biden administration has decided that it is just going to let in as many people as it wants, Congress’s numerical limits be damned. This isn’t just a matter of cutting in line; instead of simply letting in different people, Biden’s DHS is letting in more people. To use the image of the amusement park line, the administration isn’t just giving a fast-pass to certain favored groups; it is actually stuffing three people into a two-person roller-coaster car.
Specifically, the new policy allows people from Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who have a relative in the U.S. that filed an application for them to immigrate to just come in regardless of the numerical caps. They are able to live and work here while they wait for their green card number to come up. (This expands a similar program started under the Obama administration for people from Cuba and Haiti.) It is true the five-year clock for citizenship won’t start until they actually get a green card, but that is a secondary concern for most immigrants. What they want is to get in and be able to work, and that is exactly what Biden is giving them.
But the point to Congress’s immigration limits is to limit—to limit the annual number of newcomers in order to protect American workers, reduce the burden on American taxpayers, and promote assimilation into the American mainstream. The Biden approach of ignoring those limits relegates Congress to the role of merely deciding what color photo ID a foreigner that the president let in gets to have: the pink-ish work permit or the green-ish permanent resident card.
It is time for Congress to take back the power to decide how many people move here from abroad. The most urgent step is to abolish parole and prohibit the president from giving work permits to people who aren’t explicitly eligible for them.
The Biden administration has openly rejected the idea of limits on immigration. Congress must stand our upside-down immigration law back on its feet.
The post Turning Immigration Law on Its Head appeared first on The American Conservative.
Republicans are just catching up on the battlefield.
The United States lost nearly a quarter of its combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to musculoskeletal injuries. Military officials considered that evidence that they weren’t choosing the fittest men and women for combat roles, which prompted them to create a gender-neutral fitness test to better measure candidates’ combat-readiness.
The Army had previously used sex-specific standards for male and female recruits. Men had to perform significantly more push-ups, sit-ups, and run a faster two-mile-time than did women. There were similar tiered standards based on a recruit’s age.
Army brass reasoned that the military doesn’t need to be “diverse,” but it does need to be able to kill people and execute orders in the field. As Sergeant Major Daniel Dailey said in 2018, a casualty stuck in a vehicle “doesn’t care whether you are a woman, a man, 50, 60, 18 or 24—he or she needs to come out if it’s on fire.”
The new gender- and age-neutral fitness test, rolled out in 2018, included a host of new exercises meant to better measure a recruit’s ability to perform the skills needed in the field. The results, predictable to most people, were startling to the Pentagon. On the maximum three-rep deadlift, the average male soldier out-lifted his female counterpart 238 to 160 pounds. On the hand-release push-up portion, the average male performed thirty-four to the average female’s twenty. The two-mile run and the sprint-drag-carry were dominated by male soldiers, and on the standing power throw, an overhead medicine-ball toss, the average male out-tossed the average female by nearly four feet.
Between October 2020 to April 2021, forty-four percent of women failed the test, compared to just seven percent of men.
Most Americans, to that point, had assumed the armed forces were striving to create a maximally effective fighting force. The fact women were less likely than men to pass the new physical fitness test should not, by that standard, have mattered. The military is a killing machine, not a group meant to scratch its members’ felt need to “belong,” or better “represent” the diversity of the American population.
But the Biden administration thought otherwise. Biden’s now-Secretary for the Army said at her nomination hearing that she was concerned “about the implications of the test for our ability to continue to retain women.” Last year, the Army re-instituted its gender-specific testing standards. It is once again the official policy of the United States Army to admit candidates to the force whom it knows to be less capable of protecting the United States.
This is a long wind-up to make a simple point. Despite the media’s insinuations to the contrary, the military has been part of the culture war for a long time, and certainly long before the debate over proposed Republican amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act.
A handful of Republican congressmen have proposed amendments to the annual NDAA re-authorization that would ensure the U.S. military is a maximally lethal fighting force rather than a vehicle for progressive social engineering. Several of the proposed amendments are considered “extreme” by the press only because the military, in its current state, is extremely far gone.
Representatives Roy and Crane, for example, introduced an amendment prohibiting federal funds from being used to establish a “Chief Diversity Officer” at the Department of Defense. Representatives Gaetz and Crane similarly would prohibit federal funds from being used to train military personnel on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and Representative Boebert would abolish the position of Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Extremism at DoD and bar federal funds from sponsoring Pride Month activities at Defense. There are dozens of other amendments taking aim at Pride activities, diversity initiatives, and Pentagon-sponsored abortions and “gender affirmation” surgeries for servicemen.
Each of these measures is, by any standard, benign, and in keeping with the expressed preferences of our men and women in uniform. Sixty-five percent of servicemen surveyed in a recent Heritage poll said they were concerned about the politicization of the military. Those who expressed concerns highlighted the lowering of physical fitness standards and the Pentagon’s obsession on race, and eighty percent identified the Biden administration’s allowing transgender-identifying members into the ranks as a contributing factor in their response.
House Republican amendements are a response to that politicization. And they are over the target. You can tell by the press and Biden administration’s response. A Democratic aide told CNN that “Republicans are trying to hijack NDAA to make it a culture war battle,” as if the status quo—DoD-funded diversity czars, drag shows, and abortions—were not itself the result of a decades-long “culture war” waged by progressives and elected Democrats. And the White House announced it “strongly opposes” efforts “to eliminate the Department’s longstanding DEIA efforts and related initiatives to promote a cohesive and inclusive force.” The military, it argued, relies “on diverse perspectives, experiences, and skillsets to remain a global leader, deter war, and keep our nation secure.”
Of course, having transvestites in the military does not help to “keep our nation secure,” and whatever benefits flow from having “diverse perspectives” can be retained without handicapping physical fitness standards to bolster female recruitment or insisting that our servicemen read Robin DiAngelo.
More fundamentally, these amendments raise, and provide the right answers to, questions about our military that elected Republicans have skirted for too long. Should the Department of Defense care if there are disproportionately few female soldiers in its ranks? If so, why? Why, in clear and precise language, is the Department of Defense sponsoring gay pride celebrations?
Progressives and elected Democrats have a whole-of-society vision, and never feel the need to cabin off their social priorities. They will use any American institution—the military, the federal bureaucracy, whatever—to achieve it. To the extent there is a culture war being waged at the Department of Defense, progressives fired the first shot. Allowing existing policy to stand would not be to decline to participate in the “culture war,” but to endorse Democrats’ victory.
The post Soldiers in the Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mobile homes put the dream of affordable housing within everyone’s reach.
Making cheap, dignified housing available to poorer Americans is essential to ensuring that all Americans, as Donald Trump put it, are able to participate in “the American way of life.” The only financially feasible way to give every American family their own four walls and backyard is with manufactured housing units, often referred to as “mobile homes.” Mobile home parks have been mostly illegal to construct in the U.S. since 1990, but conservatives would do well to embrace them anyway—they encourage family formation, lower the cost of living, and put the Jeffersonian dream of “a little portion of land” within everyone’s reach.
Most of our housing policy discourse today centers around single-family homes and apartment complexes. Single-family homes are inherently unaffordable for many families. The average price of a home purchased by a first-time buyer was $215,000 in 2019, not even remotely affordable for an individual working full-time and making the federal minimum wage, or even double or triple that. Add in family obligations, and owning a single family home becomes a pipe dream for many Americans.
Apartments can be more affordable than single-family homes, but affordable apartments are generally not dignified places to live. Living in cramped quarters and sharing walls, floors, and ceilings with neighbors makes managing a crying baby or toddler difficult. Tenants have few options if their neighbors develop a penchant for loud parties or cheap cigars, a problem reinforced by the perverse incentives and eviction protections built into some low-income housing programs. And while affordable apartment complexes may not be ideal for families, they are ideal for rats and cockroaches.
Mobile homes are a happy medium. They are more affordable than single-family homes and often more dignified than apartments. Mass-production and economies of scale mean that mobile homes are around fifty percent cheaper than custom-built homes; compare having a Toyota Camry delivered from the factory to having one assembled in a customer’s driveway. The average new mobile home costs only $70,600 in 2016, not including land. Even in relatively dense mobile home parks, residents have some outdoor space to garden or let kids play; many mobile homes have attached porches as well.
Mobile homes are a good deal, which helped propel them to a brief moment of national popularity in the 1960s. The industry collapsed around 1975, however, due to lobbying from home-builders and aligned interest groups, helping to create a nationwide mobile home park shortage that persists today.
The 1950s included both a housing and baby boom. The federal government provided the most affordable mortgage financing in U.S. history, and suburban developers such as William Levitt built the most affordable homes in U.S. history. Easy access to housing encouraged World War II veterans to marry young and start families. Members of the Greatest Generation did not spend their twenties fretting about student loans and postponing major life events for financial reasons.
Mobile home developers took Levitt’s mass-production techniques even further and took control of the low-income housing market during the 1960s. Between 1960 and 1972, mobile homes surged from ten percent of total housing units produced nationwide to almost sixty percent. Traditional homebuilders lost a large swath of their low-end market share, and responded with a ferocious lobbying campaign, spearheaded by the National Association of Home Builders.
In the late 1960s, Congress passed laws excluding mobile homes from financing for traditional custom-built homes. Even today, many mobile homes are financed through more expensive “chattel loans” instead of through less expensive traditional mortgages. Congress dealt an even more severe blow to the industry in 1975, passing a strict national building code that decreased mobile home production by more than half.
Home-builders also lobbied local governments to ban mobile home parks through zoning. Pressure from construction interest groups is a major reason why the city of Chicago has virtually no mobile home parks, for instance. Since around 1990, new mobile home parks have been illegal or virtually impossible to construct in almost every American city, severely limiting the number of new mobile homes available. As of 2023, only eight percent of the American population lives in a mobile home.
Inflation is hitting American families hard. Both post-2020 economic quirks and long-term cost-of-living increases are contributing factors. Housing is the biggest line item on a typical family’s budget, making it a particularly critical driver of families’ economic hardship.
Housing pundits frequently call for improving housing affordability through either zoning reform or other land use deregulation. However, zoning is essentially land-use democracy: It gives local people control over what happens in their neighborhoods. Zoning is usually logical and broadly popular with voters, and no highly populated area of the U.S. has totally overhauled its zoning system recently, although some places have made tweaks, such as California’s recent ordinance forcing cities to approve granny flats. The loudest proponents of zoning reform tend to be progressive technocrats, who want to reform zoning so that they can force their unpopular policy preferences on individual neighborhoods.
Land-use deregulation is better than zoning reform because it gets closer to the heart of the problem: Non-zoning land-use regulations are a major reason why housing is hard to build in California but much easier to build in Texas. But deregulation is not a motivating issue for most voters. Small business owners and libertarian interns get excited about deregulation, but your average member of the Republican base does not.
Conservatives need to go beyond broad calls for zoning reform and deregulation; they need a compelling account of the good, the true, and the beautiful when it comes to housing. The American Dream of owning a home, and the older Jeffersonian ideal of the small landholder, gets closer to this. Owning property gives families resources, a sense of dignity, and a greater measure of control over their lives. It also encourages civic participation: Homeowners vote more consistently than renters, and they presumably feel more motivated to volunteer in their communities. Having some level of material security encourages people to vote for more stable political candidates rather than for demagogues out of spite.
Maybe Jefferson never lived in a single-wide, but he would still be proud.
The post A Little Portion of Land appeared first on The American Conservative.
Athleticism in the GOP primary is embarrassing, but not for the reasons Politico thinks.
If you’ve ever run an eight-minute mile, you might have what it takes to run for president. That is Politico’s take, at least, on the sort of logic they imagine determining the Republican side of the 2024 ticket.
In a piece this week that has by now earned some appropriate lumping, a Politico writer detailed the rather pathetic athletic achievements of a few long-shot candidates for president on the right—Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Francis Suarez—and those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is to the political establishment the other right, under the headline “The testosterone primary of 2024 is ‘getting out of hand.’”
The phrase “getting out of hand” comes from the mouth Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a frequent critic of masculinity in right-leaning evangelical circles, and author of Jesus and John Wayne, a book to the same effect. Du Mez, despite noting the unimpressive nature of the athletic feats in question, fears “this kind of masculinity — physical fitness — goes hand in hand with masculine toughness.” These two words are apparently fearsome enough on their own to need no further explanation. A day later, MSNBC re-shared a 2022 article in which a columnist drew a red thread connecting gym gurus and Nazism.
“Being fit is far right now, apparently,” replied writer Katherine Dee over at UnHerd. Dee argued against what she rightly identified as “the bizarre politicization of being healthy, which is slowly becoming coded as ‘Right-wing.’” This applies not merely to fitness, but also to any show of real or imagined masculine strength, as Du Mez’s comment suggests.
Putting aside tin-foil hats about Nazism, however, we should not disagree with the underlying premise of what the left-leaning commentators identify. Health is, at several levels and especially today, squarely the domain of the right, and a man’s physical fitness has long been a symbol of his fitness to govern.
That health is becoming “right-wing” is at least partly due to the deeply unhealthy pathologies that have taken root on the left—some ideological, while others, like gender-affirming surgeries and other medical solutions to psychological problems, are unavoidably physiological. So far from the national politics of previous generations, in which disagreements were over the means to be taken to the shared end of a good life, ours have come down quite literally to a divide between a way that leads to life and one that leads to death. In this sense, when the left calls health “right wing,” it is saying something true, albeit distorted by the ever-present fascism goggles.
If someone tells you who he is, listen; if the propaganda arm of the regime says it is opposed to strong men and healthy citizens, we ought to believe it.
But beyond the sickness that has saturated the left, there is another, older reason why the right should be proud to call physical strength our domain. Kennedy, Ramaswamy, and Suarez vaunt athleticism because each hopes to capitalize on an image of small “r” republican virtue: physical strength, athletic prowess, and a general vitality. This has less to do with so-called “extreme” masculinity than it does with self-governance.
Such vitality is, after all, the natural condition of a man whose loves are well-ordered, and whose lifestyle does not treat either body or spirit as a separate thing, but instead treats both in the incorporated whole. Which is to say, when Slate wonders, under the headline “A Governing Body,” if Kennedy’s “pecs are presidential,” it is a legitimate question.
It is natural that men, especially American men, should seek to demonstrate their ability to govern others by showing how they have governed themselves. It is also natural that voters should prefer a candidate for the same reason. Contra Du Mez, this is not a bad way of judging candidates, any more than judging them by the successes or failures of their marriages might be. Both look to a man’s priorities, and thus present in miniature a view of his ability, or inability, to put the first things first. The voter can be relied on to register the difference regardless, even if only at a sub-rational level, between a man whose public appearances include bench pressing and one who only ever appears outside to eat ice cream in a mask.
Hyper-masculinity, meanwhile, is a far cry from what is actually happening in the GOP camp. Mike Pence’s athleticism begins and ends with riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in a leather jacket. Ramaswamy, staying true to his elitism, has repeatedly posted a supercut of himself playing tennis against former college athletes—athletic enough, but hardly the chosen sport of the aggressive American male. Meanwhile, Francis Suarez, the Miami mayor, boasted about running a five-kilometer race with a mile time that, it gives me no pleasure to report, is just a few seconds faster than my own. Suarez also candidly admits to the reporter, “I’m not sure if my wife would let me be without a shirt on film, but you know, I’m working on it.”
Needless to say, this is not the bogeyman Du Mez and others are looking for: It is closer to feebleness than fascism; to dandyism than masculinity. It is also, unfortunately, a far cry from the republican virtue the candidates have, consciously or otherwise, been attempting to convey. Still, the Politico article’s tone is clear that even this minimal display of masculine strength is unacceptable; perhaps Chris Christie alone is sufficiently domesticated for our feminized era.
For this precise reason, such breast-beating among candidates should not be discouraged. But neither should we stop at three-mile races and the occasional tennis match. The lack of physical fitness among our presidential candidates says much about the health of our nation, and the fitness of our elected representatives, both physically and otherwise. Indeed, the field remains wide open for a man of real strength to reveal himself.
The post The Republican Body Politic appeared first on The American Conservative.
In the debate over NATO expansion, the fate of Ukraine is something of an afterthought.
Amidst the dross that clutters the New York Times op-ed page on most days, glimmers of enlightenment occasionally appear. A recent guest column by Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney offers a case in point.
“NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is,” declares the headline. Contrary to the claims of its architects and defenders, Anderson and Meaney argue persuasively that the central purpose of the alliance from its founding was not to deter aggression from the East and certainly not to promote democracy, but to “bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order.” In return for Cold War-era security guarantees, America’s European allies offered deference and concessions on issues like trade and monetary policy. “In that mission,” they write, NATO “has proved remarkably successful.” A plot of real estate especially valued by members of the American elite, Europe thereby became the centerpiece of the postwar American imperium.
The end of the Cold War called these arrangements into question. Desperate to preserve NATO’s viability, proponents claimed that the alliance needed to go “out of area or out of business.” NATO embraced an activist posture, leading to reckless state building interventions in Libya and Afghanistan. The results were not favorable. Acceding to U.S. pressure to venture out of area proved to be costly and served chiefly to undermine NATO’s credibility as a militarily capable enterprise.
Enter Vladimir Putin to save the day. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided the U.S. with an excuse to forget its own post-9/11 military failures, so too it has enabled NATO to once more constitute itself as the chief instrument for defending the West—and, crucially, to do so without actually exacting a blood sacrifice from either Americans or Europeans.
In this context, the actual fate of Ukraine itself figures as something of an afterthought. The real issue centers on reviving damaged aspirations of American global primacy. With something like unanimity, the U.S. national security establishment is devoted to the proposition that the United States must remain the world’s sole superpower, even if this requires ignoring a vast accumulation of contrary evidence suggesting the emergence of a multipolar order. On that score, Putin’s recklessness came as an impeccably timed gift.
There is an element of genius at work here. Defeating Russia without having to do any actual fighting becomes the means to restore the image of American indispensability squandered during the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Washington, as Anderson and Meaney appreciate, the true stakes in Ukraine go far beyond the question of whose flag flies over Crimea. If Ukraine “wins” its war with Russia—however “winning” is defined and however great the price Ukrainians must pay—NATO itself (and the NATO lobby in Washington) will claim vindication.
Rest assured that major European nations will then quietly renege on promises to boost their military spending, with actual responsibility for European security once more falling to the United States. With the centennial of World War II now within hailing distance, U.S. troops will remain permanently garrisoned in Europe. This will serve as cause for celebration throughout the U.S. military industrial complex, which will prosper.
Flexing its muscles, the United States will inevitably prod a greatly expanded NATO into turning its attention to enforcing the “rules-based international order” in the Asia-Pacific, with China as the chosen adversary. Ukraine will thereby serve as a template of sorts as the U.S. and its allies throw their weight around many thousands of miles from Europe proper.
The U.S. global military footprint will expand. U.S. efforts to put its house in order domestically will founder. Pressing global problems like the climate crisis will be treated as afterthoughts. But the empire that has no name will persist, which ultimately is the purpose of the game.
President Biden is fond of saying that the world has arrived at an “inflection point,” implying the need to change directions. Yet the overarching theme of his approach to foreign policy is stasis. He clings to the geopolitical logic that prompted NATO’s founding in 1949.
Back then, when Europe was weak and Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, that logic may have possessed some merit. But today the importance attributed to NATO testifies chiefly to the bankruptcy of American strategic thought and an inability to prioritize actually existing U.S. national interests, both foreign and domestic.
A sound revision of U.S. national security strategy would begin with announcing a timeline for withdrawing from NATO, converting it into an arrangement wholly owned and operated by Europe. The near impossibility of even imagining such an action by the United States testifies to the dearth of imagination that prevails in Washington.
The post Ukraine: The Empire Strikes Back appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is nothing to celebrate in the beginning of the French Revolution.
Today, July 14, is Bastille Day. It is the anniversary of the day in 1789 when French commoners stormed the Bastille prison fortress in Paris in a brazen challenge to the monarchy, marking the explosive beginning of the French Revolution. Bastille Day is celebrated in France to this day—think of it as a Gallic Fourth of July—and in several U.S. cities. But is the start of the French Revolution worth celebrating?
In many minds, the French Revolution stands for, in the words of one of its most famous mottos, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” According to this narrative, the revolution saw the oppressed masses breaking their chains, overthrowing the unjust rule of the aristocracy, and establishing an egalitarian democracy in France. In reality, the storming of the Bastille was an event marked by cruel violence that foreshadowed a bloody revolutionary tyranny much worse than the rule of France’s kings had ever been, an era of chaos that would only end when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power a decade after the fall of the Bastille.
In his history of the French Revolution, Citizens, the historian Simon Schama recounts the violent birth of the chaos that would consume France for years. When the governor of the Bastille, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de Launay, was captured by the mob that had overtaken the fortress, he was beaten and abused so horrifically that he shouted “Let me die” before the crowd stabbed him to death and then cut off his head and paraded it on a pike.
The crowds were whipped up into a frenzy by their hatred of France’s monarchy, which they blamed for many of their wants. Though King Louis XVI was not a tyrant, as the revolutionaries claimed, he was a weak king who was unable to deal with the storm of troubles buffeting France at the close of the 18th century, including national bankruptcy and a severe food crisis. These issues exacerbated the frustrations already felt by much of France’s population, including a heavy tax burden.
De Launay wouldn’t be the new revolution’s last victim in the days that followed. Though King Louis XVI was still technically ruler of France—for only a few more years until his overthrow and eventual guillotining—he was not able to respond to the attack on the Bastille. The new revolutionary National Assembly was in effective control, and crazed revolutionaries known as sans-culottes ruled the streets.
These sans-culottes would, at the slightest pretext, launch killing sprees of innocents. In September 1792, they raided the prisons of Paris—which were full of prisoners whose only crime was opposition to the new regime, real or imagined—moved by a baseless fear that royalists were planning to liberate these “enemies of the state.” The hysterical mobs were stirred up by rabble-rousing provocateurs, one of whom exhorted: “let the blood of traitors be the first holocaust to Liberty.”
In this “holocaust to liberty”, more than 1,000 innocents died—roughly one in two of Paris’s prisoners—often in horrific ways. And worse was to come.
In the months following the September Massacres, paranoia grew in Paris’s streets as foreign anti-revolutionary armies marched on France and as revolts broke out in some provinces. The radicals began seeing a royalist plot in every corner, and due to this growing hysteria, the revolutionary government created the Committee of Public Safety.
This executive body with an innocuous sounding name was meant to defend the revolution against foreign and domestic enemies, and it did so through a national killing spree that eclipsed the preceding bloodshed. On September 17, 1793, the government enacted the Law of Suspects, “which gave the Committee and its representatives sweeping powers of arrest and punishment over extraordinarily broad categories of people defined as harboring counter-revolutionary designs”—effectively turning the Committee into a dictatorship.
The Committee was dominated by the Jacobins, a radical faction whose tyranny was so cruel that it gave rise to the word “terrorism.” Fittingly, the Committee plunged France into what became known as the “Reign of Terror,” an almost year-long paroxysm of violence and political persecution. Maximilien Robespierre, who sat on the Committee and was one of the Jacobins’ primary leaders, summed up the radicals’ mindset when he said: “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”
Many perished in the Committee’s “emanations of virtue.” During the Reign of Terror, the regime arrested potentially hundreds of thousands of people on the flimsiest grounds and tried them in kangaroo courts with no real due process. One didn’t need to be a royalist to get marked—even revolutionaries who were perceived as too “moderate” were sent to the guillotine, including the prominent revolutionary Georges Danton. The exact death toll is uncertain but possibly reached up to 40,000 souls who were either executed or died in prison.
The regime crushed anyone who resisted. In 1793, in France’s western Vendee region, royalist and devoutly Catholic peasants who opposed the Jacobins’ brutality and radical anti-Christian secularization policy rose up in revolt against Paris and scored many victories over revolutionary armies. In response, Paris sent battalions of soldiers known as “infernal columns” to ravage the countryside and murder anyone associated with the revolt, killing roughly 200,000 of their own countrymen. The victims of this violence were peasants, the very people that the revolution had promised to liberate from the shackles of oppression.
The butchery finally came to an end when moderate members of France’s national legislature decided they had had enough, arresting and executing Robespierre and his chief Jacobin allies. What followed was a more moderate, yet dithering and corrupt regime known as the Directory, which only survived for a meager four years before being overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte on his rise to the imperial throne.
Massacres and despotism worse than anything the French monarchy had ever done—these are the fruits of Bastille Day. The revolutionaries promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, and delivered tyranny, inequality, and fratricide. Remember that today, and every July 14.
The post Mourn Bastille Day appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Is Christianity true, or isn’t it?
Pope Francis recently appointed Bishop Americo Aguiar of Lisbon, Portugal to the College of Cardinals. Vatican watchers noted that Francis’s incardinating an auxiliary bishop like Aguilar instead of his superior was an extraordinary move.
Aguiar is the coordinator of this year’s World Youth Day (WYD), the annual global gathering of Catholic young people. The bishop-turned-cardinal stirred up controversy in an interview with a Portuguese television station about the event. He said:
We want it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is or for a young Muslim, Jew, or of another religion to also have no problem saying who he is and bearing witness to it, and for a young person who has no religion to feel welcome and to perhaps not feel strange for thinking in a different way…. We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all…. That we all understand that differences are a richness and the world will be objectively better if we are capable of placing in the hearts of all young people this certainty…
The now-Cardinal Aguiar attempted to walk these remarks back in an interview with the Pillar, claiming he had intended to discourage “proselytism” rather than evangelism as such. Whatever the merits of that distinction, I will be charitable to the newly appointed prince of the Church and assume he didn’t mean what he plainly seemed to, and instead will comment on what I perceive to be a broader problem, of which the cardinal’s remarks are a symptom.
Christianity is either true, or it is not. Islam is either true, or it is not. Judaism is either true, or it is not. Each may be useful, in all sorts of ways, even if it is not true. Believers might be better people on account of their beliefs. They might be more charitable, more patient, more kind. But that is different from saying that each of the three faiths, in its own way, is true. They aren’t.
Take Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam make mutually exclusive claims about the most fundamental matters of theology and philosophy: the nature of God, the person of Christ, the path to salvation, and more. It is possible that neither Christianity nor Islam is true. It is possible that either Christianity or Islam is true. It is not possible that both Christianity and Islam are true.
And if Christianity is true, I’m afraid it doesn’t give us the option to believe that “differences” in belief about the nature of God and Jesus Christ “are a richness,” nor that the world would “be objectively better” if people tolerated with a passive indifference the error of other faiths on the most essential questions of human existence. If Christianity is true, we must—not should, but must—”want to convert the young people to Christ.” If that’s impolite, so be it. Christ came to bring the sword, not to set up an NGO.
Catholics, particularly Catholics in positions of authority, should act as though they believe Catholicism is true—not just that it can be used to create a more just society, or make life meaningful, or tell a compelling story about God’s relationship to human beings—but actually, really true. Flannery O’Connor said of the Eucharist, “If it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.” Some young people, I’m afraid, are saying the same of the Catholic Church.
The post ‘We Don’t Want to Convert the Young People to Christ’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
The anthropological and ontological claims of Krakow’s architecture.
Summer in Krakow is hotter than you might think. I find reprieve in the shade cast by St. Mary’s Basilica on the porch of one of the many restaurants that line the main square. Maybe it’s not as hot as I think—maybe it’s the European aversion to air conditioning or my own aversion to paying for water. Beer costs about the same as water. As at the wedding at Cana, Our Blessed Mother makes sure I will not thirst.
The church and square are almost equal in age. Since the early 13th century at the latest, people have come to the commons for community and commerce—to break bread in more ways than one.
The basilica and square developed in tandem. The basilica, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the most iconic Catholic churches in the world because of its striking Gothic architecture and remarkable Veit Stoss wooden altar. As for the square, it remains the largest still in use from the European Middle Ages.
The beginnings of both basilica and square were much simpler. A museum exhibition of an archaeological dig performed on the square in the early 2000s showed what the first iteration of the church probably looked like: a simple, wooden, T-shaped structure. The square was a burial ground and bazaar.
Both were sacked during the Mongol invasion of Poland in the mid-13th century. When the Khanate crumbled, the Polish kings rebuilt the church—this time in a new style, early Gothic—and the square.
Throughout the 14th century, the church and square grew in size and significance. In the reign of Casimir III, the king ordered the basilica to be rebuilt bigger and more Gothic than before. He also ordered the construction of a town hall and central market building, the original Cloth Hall, on the main square. Over the 15th and 16th centuries, development continued. The towers of the Queen of Heaven’s basilica were crowned, and Polish kings used the square to dazzle diplomats, dignitaries, and dukes. Processions, with the pomp becoming of late-middle ages royalty, set off from the nearby Wawel Castle, which sits just south of the square on a hill that hugs the Vistula River. They would make their way to the basilica, circle around the square, and return to the starting point.
From the castle, one sees the basilica clearly, and vice versa. The square is evident to each, and both are evident to the people in the square. Wawel Cathedral was the coronation site of Polish kings. The basilica is devoted to Poland’s queen. Connecting the castle complex and its cathedral to the basilica and its square is Grodzka Street. It’s more or less a straight shot.
A city’s architecture is its story set in stone. It reveals the anthropological and ontological beliefs of its citizens. In Krakow, God has been at the center of both political and communal life since the beginning of the city. He brings order out of the chaos. He crowns kings, and His mother looks out for His people.
The timeless beauty of the churches, the culmination of constant care and patronage over the centuries, proclaims God’s glory. The immensity of the churches intimates the mystery of an omnipotent and omniscient yet personal God. We feast under the shade of the church, and she pulls our eyes upwards, causing us to ponder the eternal banquet to come.
Krakow is unlike many of the cities in this part of the world, not because this structure is unique but because it has survived. In the wake of World War II, Europe lay in ruins from Volgograd to London. In Poland, estimates suggest that 85 percent of Warsaw laid in ruin. Behind the iron curtain that would later fall upon Eastern Europe, the communists built the brutality upwards.
But Krakow was spared this fate. When the Nazis invaded from the west, they needed a place to put their headquarters. Even the Nazis saw the beauty in Krakow’s old city, which is why the General Government led by Hans Frank chose Krakow as its capital. And when the Nazi occupation became the Soviet occupation, the Soviets did not raze and rebuild nearly to the degree that they did in other cities such as Budapest.
Why was Krakow spared the most brutal modernity has to offer? Because, as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said in his 1990 Nobel lecture, “the persuasiveness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable”:
A true work of art carries its verification within itself: Artificial and forced concepts do not survive their trial by images; both image and concept crumble and turn out feeble, pale, and unconvincing. However, works which have drawn on the truth and which have presented it to us in concentrated and vibrant form seize us, attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to deny them.
Krakow will not be denied.
The post A Story Set in Stone appeared first on The American Conservative.
Las Vegas has rediscovered a sort of architectural genius.
I thought America was out of ideas. I thought our best days were behind us. And then I saw the video of the newly built Sphere in Las Vegas set against Independence Day fireworks as “Viva Las Vegas” blared.
Am I saying this tongue-in-cheek? I honestly don’t know. And I suspect if the creators of the $2.3 billion sports and entertainment arena—billed as the largest spherical structure in the world and coated in LEDs—learn of my confusion, they will high-five each other. Set against the background of the Vegas Strip, the LEDs light up in images of snow globes, the planet Earth, a tired eye, a basketball, and so forth, soliciting emotions ranging from awe to terror and back to awe again. It is primal, novel, extravagantly expensive and very, very American.
In 1925, Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky visited the United States on a journalism assignment. Mayakovsky was a communist, but his ideological biases did not prevent him from leaving impressed with America’s industrial might, which he saw perfectly embodied in the architecture of the Brooklyn Bridge. The poet described being overcome with a sense of veneration at the site of the construction:
Like a maddened
believer goes
to church
or retreats
to a monastery
strict and simple —
so do I,
in the graying
evening dusk,
humbly
walk on
the Brooklyn Bridge.
(The translation is my own.)
It is not that the atheist Mayakovsky projected quasi-religious sensation into the mundane, but that the bridge’s pointed arches deliberately resembled those of medieval architecture. The early skyscrapers, too, were adorned with neo-Gothic details, and many of the later ones were designed as a nod to medievalism—for instance, the bases of the ill-fated Twin Towers were shaped like cathedral vaults. Europe’s great cathedrals were contrived to reach towards the heavens, so the architectural elements like vaults and flying buttresses were very functional. Designers in the 20th century used the same engineering principles to pack office space vertically to maximize investment in real estate. In both cases, purpose and form joined forces.
Mayokovsky was inspired by the raw power of the bridge:
I’m proud
of this
steel mile.
My visions
came alive in it –
the fight
for constructions
instead of styles,
the harsh calculation
of gears
and steel.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1883; by the time Mayakovsky set his eyes on it, it was already nearly half a century old. But to the Russian poet, the streamlined structure framed by suspension cables represented a radical break with the past. The poet hailed the “steel mile,” despite the characteristic stone neo-Gothic arches. All-steel suspension bridges, like San Francisco’s Golden Gate, weren’t built until the following decade. Mayakovsky would have been even more proud of that bridge—its red spears piercing layers of fog, a testimony to human daring.
Futurism might have been an art movement in Europe, but in America, it is a way of life. From the onset of the Great Depression, when the Art Deco masterpiece nonpareil, the Chrysler Building, was erected in Manhattan, through the decade following the end of the Cold War, the tallest buildings in the world were American. We were a young and assertive nation.
But three years before 9/11, the Malaysian Petronas Tower overtook Chicago’s Sears Tower. Since then the tallest buildings have been erected in Asia; the current champion is the 829-meters tall Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates.
The U.S. lost its nerve and turned inward. With borders wide open and a sclerotic, oversized federal government, the dynamism of the private sector has been reduced to a whimper. Masculine temples of capitalism are not something to celebrate in the age of #MeToo. Besides, we’ve already been to the moon and our cities (except for Oakland) have already developed distinct skylines—what else is there to do?
Or maybe we lost some of the know-how. Look at San Francisco’s fifty-eight-floor landmark Millennium Tower, completed in 2009, which is sinking and leaning to the side.
Yet there is another kind of futurist or, perhaps more properly, science-fiction aesthetic. It also comes as a basic shape and a primal idea. It is round like the roof of a planetarium or the Death Star. In the ’70s in particular, along with some of the most undistinguished skyscrapers, a number of undistinguished domes were built around the country. Today, most of these look hopelessly outdated. The idea behind them was yet to reach its perfection.
A dome is physically the opposite of the skyscraper; it is the dot under the exclamation point. Instead of yearning for God, it sits there, low and feminine. Whereas elongated objects are best used to defy gravity by trading energy for speed, spherical objects minimize circumference area relative to mass to conserve energy at rest.
The Sphere doesn’t project its will, leaving one gaping in awe of what is possible. Instead, UFO-like, it sucks in our fantasies and brings them to life. Like a skyscraper, the Sphere is a very dumb idea that is absolutely brilliant.
This is not because Sin City visitors ingest all sorts of legal, illegal, and semi-legal substances, and their intoxicated visions of a giant eyeball resting in a parking lot in the desert might be the best experience Hunter S. Thompson never had. In Vegas, no drug is necessary to be unwell. Among flashing lights, loud jingling sounds, hotel rooms pumped with oxygen, and the arid air, even a sober man can start hallucinating. Vegas is a “trippy” town.
I thought I was done with Vegas. I’ve been there too many times visiting family, and on our last trip I was relieved to go hiking in Red Rock Canyon. But then I saw that picture of Sphere and I knew I would be back.
The post The Gravity of a Sphere appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is an undeniable connection between free-and-easy birth control and the unraveling of American order.
On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration green-lit the sale of an over-the-counter birth control pill for the first time in the country’s history.
The move follows the recommendation of a panel of seventeen scientific advisors who voted unanimously in May to affirm the public health benefits of an over-the-counter pill—unanimity, of course, being a sure sign that selection for the panel was not an especially balanced process.
The drug, Opill, will soon be available to anyone and everyone, with virtually no restrictions and hardly more regulation.
In an effusive celebration masquerading as a news article, the New York Times predicts that “the move could significantly expand access to contraception.” What does this mean, though? It cannot possibly mean what these words in this order would mean to a reasonable person. “Access” to contraception is already damn near universal.
In context, it is entirely clear that “access” for these people is synonymous with “use.” The concern is not whether birth control is legal or illegal, or whether it is produced and made available to all or part of the public. It is whether any individual — of any age, gender, socioeconomic status, BMI, etc.—will encounter any kind of guardrails when attempting to purchase a powerful drug that hijacks an essential bodily function.
The implications of this radical position are concerning, to say the least.
According to the New York Times, “Experts in reproductive health said its availability could be especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription.”
This is a rather diplomatic way of noting that the FDA’s move here will make children, trafficking victims, and anyone else with limited agency more available for sex than ever before.
It seems this dimension has not even been considered by those who insist on driving “progress” and “access” in “reproductive healthcare.” But what else could possibly be expected of a sweeping government action that drastically reduces obstacles to consequence-free sex while simultaneously eliminating such basic requirements as identity verification and third-party involvement? The whole thing is a cartel coyote’s wet dream.
Equally concerning, organizations like the New York Times are not even attempting to obscure their interest in the age question here. The aforementioned report is littered with insistent mentions of Opill’s importance to minors, who have sometimes been afforded minimal protections when at risk of being treated as sex objects; no longer. The agenda is transparent.
Though troubling, none of this should be especially surprising.
Last year, when Donald Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court saved the lives of countless American babies by repealing the infanticide mandate of Roe, The American Conservative published a symposium asking which terrible SCOTUS precedent should be overturned next.
My answer—an easy one—was Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1963 ruling that invalidated state laws prohibiting the sale of birth control pills. (Only two such laws remained in the Union at that point.)
It is difficult to overstate how far-reaching and disastrous the consequences of this case have been.
The actual question of birth control is almost secondary. What Griswold did was to sneak into the body of American law an entirely novel concept of the individual’s relation to the state. Prior to the Court’s innovation in Griswold, the “right to privacy”—an inheritance from the English common law tradition—was understood as just that: a right to privacy. It was a man’s right to be free from arbitrary imposition on his lane, essentially an extension of the right to property.
In Griswold, following arguments laid out decades earlier by Justice Louis Brandeis, the Court not only expanded but essentially redefined the concept. Underlying the revolution was Brandeis’s 1890 conclusion that “the principle which protects personal writings and any other productions of the intellect or the emotions, is the right to privacy, and the law has no new principle to formulate when it extends this protection to the personal appearance, sayings, acts, and to personal relation, domestic or otherwise.”
Once the Court accepted this conclusion, the right to privacy became a right to action, and everything went to hell.
This may sound like hyperbole, but this relation between free-and-easy birth control and the unraveling of American order—the decline of an empire—is not that. It is not even conjecture. It is a simple fact.
From the root of Griswold v. Connecticut grew Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges—a host of poison fruits that have nearly killed a whole civilization.
It was on contraception that radical progressives struck the decisive blow against American public morality. The victory of the birth control activists in this country, that is, was the final triumph of anti-human individualism over the politics of the common good.
Maybe the damage is done. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and all that. But if there is any hope for reclamation of the broader culture—for a restoration of the Christian ethos that animated the United States until just before the generation that delivered Griswold—it will not be in half-measures.
The post Slouching Towards Sterility appeared first on The American Conservative.
What if there’s nothing the country could do to unalienate its restless, riot-ready ethnic youth?
As France awakens, shell-shocked and ash-strewn, from a nearly week-long hexagon-wide blitzkrieg against the Republic’s symbols and sanctuaries, readers intrigued by what’s next should pick up The Geometry of Despair (2006). The title could resonate with any number of Houellebecqian themes, but this particular bildungsroman stands thematically apart from anything else the enfant terrible of French literature has produced in his 30-year career.
The main character’s “despair” is not so easily assuaged with Houellebecq’s usual dose of antidepressants and pornography in a France increasingly submerged by both—the therapy involves leaving France altogether in search of a new identity. David Behaim, a Sephardic Jew born into an Algerian family, has poured his soul into becoming French, only to find out that France’s stubbornly naïve indulgence with mass migration leaves him no other option than making aliyah to Israel.
As you would expect, David’s “despair” has a particular geometry. When his family moved to a habitation à loyer modéré (HLM) in Montreuil, in the infamous 93rd county north of Paris, his HLM’s stature—reaching for the sky higher than the Eiffer Tower—allegorized the family’s hopes of upward assimilation. Ultimately, the family’s dreams and aspirations, shrouded in suburban quietness, atrophy into a noisy and horrendous nightmare that epitomizes what France is fast becoming.
David is born in 1963 into a Jewish family that, the year before, had fled Algeria before the looming anti-colonialist victory in the country’s bloody civil war. The Front de libération nationale (FLN) was threatening to drive out all pied-noirs, Jews and gentiles alike, but the Benhaims trusted that General de Gaulle would emerge with a plot-twisting defense of France’s overseas territories that didn’t happen. If the Benhaims had previously prospered as outwardly secular French patriots, all too happy to subordinate their faith to the imperative of assimilation, their move across the Mediterranean further tightened the secularizing corset.
David recalls his mother yelling at him one Shabbat when he forgot to take off his kippah (a name his family de-Hebraized into “calotte”) upon leaving synagogue. At his bar mitzvah (another name Christianized into “communion”), David’s parents asked for a half-gentile guestlist (and preferably half-Christian). The Benhaims worshiped the God of Israel at home but eagerly replaced Him in public with the godly French Republic, a kind of secular deity. This god had its own mandates and strictures: honor the flag, speak the language, aspire to move up the social ladder through sheer hard work, and assimilate. They asked not to be referred to as “Jews” but as “Frenchmen of Judaic faith”. Had they been asked to change their sons’ name to something Christian, they would have gladly assented.
But the Benhaims’ idyll of Francization began to unravel toward the end of the Trente Glorieuses in the late 1970s, as waves of Muslim migrants followed in their footsteps with a wholly different appraisal of what a first-world country’s welcome demanded in return. Renault had built an assembly plant in nearby Rosny-sous-Bois, turning Montreuil into its dormitory. When the plant’s workers began petitioning for family reunification instead of heading back south, Montreuil wasn’t revitalized by the new Arab blood in quite the way the Benhaims expected.
Symptomatic of what sociologists at the time called “le malaise des grands ensembles”, David’s new Arab classmates—and those born in France in their wake—lived in crowded, single-earner homes in the architecturally brutal HLMs the city’s socialist mayor kept erecting. In a scene likely inspired by the death of Ilan Halimi, David is once robbed on his way back from school by three youths who thought they could extort any Jew for riches. Montreuil’s only synagogue is vandalized in a riot triggered by the death of a 16-year-old in police custody, a fictionalized version of what became a frequent occurrence through the 1980s and 1990s.
Once on weekend leave, David finds a posse of his former classmates loitering in his HLM’s front yard. They deal hard drugs and taunt him with antisemitic slurs. David, who had forged an overpowering identity out of his instinctive Frenchness, begins feeling out of place amid these French-born cast outs who revile not just France, but French Jews specifically. He finds little succor in the political class that he once admired, which had proudly hailed the country’s post-war immigration as a win-win model but which seemed befuddled when the model earned the bile of its intended beneficiaries.
The left refuses to admit the problem’s ethnic and religious undertones in a senseless bid to avoid “amalgamating” the outlaws with what few law-abiding Arabs live in their midst; thus it reduces the integration quandary to a socio-economic glitch solvable through investments in public services and state-subsidized employment. The right, meanwhile, is more willing to speak plainly, but nevertheless offers little to David’s family besides moving out of the town that saw him grow up, as other wealthier Jews have done, which they can’t afford. Together, both socialists and Gaullists seem unable to see the ineffectiveness of the solution they’ve been cowed into, namely, expensive plans for urban renewal and pouring billions into the very institutions and public services these thugs abhor: public schools, police stations, sport facilities, and town halls.
Meanwhile, and largely as a response to rising antisemitism, David begins to witness—and later partakes in—an identitarian regression within the working-class Sephardic community, which has all but lost patience with republicanism. At the risk of even viler taunts and attacks, David and his cousins rebel by donning the kippah outdoors and hanging in their rooms a flag not of France but of Israel. David even hesitates to drop out of his mathematics doctorate at École Polytechnique to seek rabbinical ordainment. He sours on the country’s Jewish bourgeoisie as he gets drawn into the dragnet of an ever-deepening gulf within the community.
On one side lies the elite of mostly secular, Parisian, Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents arrived from eastern Europe in the interwar period and survived the Holocaust. They’re left-leaning and wield considerable influence through the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF). They’re absorbed in a war against all discriminations—even imaginary ones—and refuse to single out Arab antisemitism for fear of typecasting the entire community. On the other side lie the suburban, religiously observant Jewish grassroots abandoned by that elite, made up of Sephardic families from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Having coexisted within Arab society before immigrating to France, they know that antisemitism’s roots are sunk deep within Arab culture, and they’re not afraid to say so.
David ultimately abandons hope in a multiracial but cohesive France, moves to Netanya (Israel) and becomes a successful tech entrepreneur. His story fits into what scholars call “triangular migration”, referring to Jewish families who left the Maghreb in the 1960s, lived in France for a generation, but ended up in Israel by the 1990s. It is a story so common and plausible that you likely haven’t checked whether Houellebecq did indeed write The Geometry of Despair. He didn’t; the story is made up, our own invention. Not that the author isn’t inspired by the slide of the banlieues into crime-infested hotbeds of Islamism; he’s simply not interested in the Jewish experience of that degeneration.
Houellebecq’s only Jewish character is the girlfriend of Submission’s (2015) protagonist, François, who leaves him heartbroken when she makes aliyah (“there’s no Israel for me”). Houellebecq is in fact more inclined to fictionalize the tearing up of France’s social fabric through a lens that is both Catholic and rural. Serotonin (2019), Houellebecq’s second-to-last novel, provides a window into a rotten, depopulated campagne where farmers use their own pesticides to commit suicide. Contrary to the oft-peddled narrative, banlieues have not been forgotten—they’ve been showered with a gravy train of public money to the tune of €10 billion a year. David’s made-up story points to the purposelessness of those investments—and, indirectly, to the abandonment of rural France.
Why is a Jewish lens relevant in grasping the profound drivers behind the mayhem that French society is now waking up from? Put simply, the French Sephardic experience is living proof that the country does not seek to integrate immigrants and their offspring in some cruel, discriminatory manner—the problem, rather, are the migrants themselves who wish not to be assimilated. Jews in banlieues like Montreuil were working-class, too, sometimes even poor. Most had owned small businesses in their countries of origin but had to forfeit them in favor of a life where the only energy propelling them forward was their sheer grit and willingness to become French.
French Sephardim were just as vulnerable to the so-called “systemic racism” that allegedly plagues the French state; not only are they physically indistinguishable from Arabs, but French police are often unable to distinguish Jewish family names from Arab ones. They rarely ended up in trouble quite simply because they chose to play by the rules, respect their neighbors, stay out of trouble, and get ahead lawfully. Their experience is a living testament that “systemic racism” is a hoax, that criminality is a choice, and that the only reason why French blacks and browns end up in jail more often is because of individual moral failure. This in turn skews the statistics of proneness to crime within their communities, thus leaving the police with no other criteria to crack down on it than by skin color.
What has changed, as of 2023, since David’s fictional journey from his deliberate and overt French identity to the identitarian Zionism of his adult years? For one thing, new groups have altered the political arithmetic every time some alleged instance of “police abuse” triggers a restless youth into ruthless vandalism. Granted, the restrictionist camp—better incarnated by Éric Zemmour’s upstart Reconquête party than by Marine le Pen’s Rassemblement National—is reaching new heights of support, with even far-right groups emboldened to self-organize into protecting their neighborhoods and towns from the rioters.
But the latter are also given unprecedented cover by the far left, which justifies riots as a just and proportional response to alleged police abuse (Because of this rhetoric, Zemmour is calling for a trial of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Islamo-leftist La France Insoumise party for sedition). Upon oscillating between the two, Macron’s response to the riots is now markedly tilting left, with ceaseless calls to “avoid amalgamating.” He also seems on track to double down on the same failed formula of yore: urban renewal as a pathway to unalienate youths who wish to remain alienated.
The Sephardic community’s alienation toward the 1990s was, in this respect, the canary in the coalmine that all but a few refused to see. Instead, France keeps wishfully thinking that the riots can be dealt with as a law-and-order problem, rather than an immigration one. But what if even that was hopeless too?
The post The Roots of French Disorder appeared first on The American Conservative.
After reporting on a professor’s offer to provide abortion access, student journalists at a Catholic university found themselves being sued for defamation. Despite the troubling nature of the allegation, one good of living in a post-Dobbs world is that being called out for promoting abortion is now received as a defamatory claim rather than a compliment.
Last Wednesday, the Irish Rover, an independent Catholic student newspaper at the University of Notre Dame, filed an anti-SLAPP motion in response to the defamation lawsuit against the publication from university professor Tamara Kay.
In a complaint filed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, Kay’s attorney said two Rover articles from October and March are “defamatory per se and establish a willful intent to portray Dr. Kay in a negative and disparaging manner consistent with a motive of bad faith and a reckless disregard for truth and falsity.”
According to the anti-SLAPP motion provided to The American Conservative, the Rover’s legal representation at The Bopp Law Firm maintain that “the Irish Rover’s statements did not contain defamatory imputation, as they reported on Dr. Kay’s own scholarship and advocacy, and on her statements regarding academic freedom and encouragement to students to advocate for their own sincerely held beliefs.”
Rover editor W. Joseph DeReuil, told The American Conservative that “because Kay’s claims are baseless, we wish to put this behind us as quickly as possible so that we can reorient our focus upon promoting the Catholic identity of Notre Dame…. I know that everything we published is true and written in good faith, so I firmly believe that the lawsuit can only be decided in favor of the Irish Rover.”
Indeed, the publication has built its mission around “preserving the Catholic identity of Notre Dame,” with DeReuil referring The American Conservative to an op-ed where the editors expressed their “hopes to continue discussions that secular culture considers closed.” They added, “We write to defend those teachings of the Church that are hard to accept, those that are more readily ignored.”
I grew up in South Bend and was there long enough to witness Notre Dame’s continued transformation from a quaint Catholic school run by the Congregation of Holy Cross to an institution increasingly preoccupied with prestige, climbing the college rankings on U.S. News & World Report and engaging in extravagant building projects like the $400 million football stadium expansion.
To explain the mission drift, many, such as previous Rover editor and TAC contributor Mary Frances Myler, point to the mid-century Land O’ Lakes gathering that redefined academic freedom at Catholic universities and “traded submission to the Vatican for submission to secular academic standards.”
Yet, whatever the cause of the decline, most distressing about the recent events at Our Lady’s campus is the fact that Kay herself is Catholic. At a gathering of college Democrats in March, she said that her “Catholicism is about social justice, liberation theology, and the Farm Workers’ Movement,” causing her after the Dobbs decision to “feel compelled—from a deep, deep, faith-based place—to speak up.” While commitment to social justice undoubtedly has deep Catholic roots—the very term originated from 19th century Jesuit Luigi Taparelli—Kay’s position could be more accurately described as the misappropriation of faith by political ideology.
Buried on campus in the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the prolific writer and famous convert Orestes Brownson foresaw a similar pattern among his 19th-century countrymen, writing that his fellow Catholics, “fired by political ambition, and engrossed in political affairs,” had come to embrace the ideology of political liberalism in “ignorance of its real anticatholic character, supposing they might adopt it and act on it, without injury to the church.”
The corrosive effect political ideology has had on faith in this country cannot be overstated, but even in his day Brownson saw a cause for hope in people like those at the Irish Rover:
But there is a large class of Catholic young men, graduates from our colleges, whose minds are fresh and malleable, whose hearts are open and ingenuous, who love truth and justice, and who take a deep interest in the future of their country. We write for them to warn them against the dangers which threaten us, and against which there were none to warn us when we were young like them.
The post Whose Social Justice? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Christ has tasked us, in the words of St. Faustina, to “proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God.”
Faith turns predictable into providential. It was raining all day here in Krakow. Our group toured the Sanctuary of St. John Paul II, and then we made our way to the Divine Mercy Sanctuary.
The Divine Mercy Sanctuary, rather an architectural atrocity, is adjacent to a cloistered convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. In one of the convent’s chapel, St. Faustina now rests. Above her hangs the Miraculous Image of Merciful Jesus by Adolf Hyła. We spent some time praying there as rain pattered on panes of stained glass, and then celebrated Mass in one of the chapels in the basement of the large sanctuary. When we emerged, the sun had broken through.
My colleague, John Hirschauer, recently wrote a State of the Union blog post about the comments of then-Bishop Americo Aguiar, whom Pope Francis recently named a cardinal.
“We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” Aguiar said. “That we all understand that differences are a richness and the world will be objectively better if we are capable of placing in the hearts of all young people this certainty.”
Aguiar later attempted to walk back these statements. Nevertheless, Hirschauer, while being charitable to Aguiar, delivers sharp and succinct analysis. “Catholics, particularly Catholics in positions of authority, should act as though they believe Catholicism is true—not just that it can be used to create a more just society, or make life meaningful, or tell a compelling story about God’s relationship to human beings—but actually, really true,” Hirschauer writes.
And, “if Christianity is true,” Hirschauer says elsewhere, “we must—not should, but must—’want to convert the young people to Christ.’ If that’s impolite, so be it. Christ came to bring the sword, not to set up an NGO.”
Today’s gospel reading, Matthew 10:34 to 11:1, contains the passage Hirschauer references above:
Jesus said to his Apostles:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.“Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is righteous
will receive a righteous man’s reward.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because he is a disciple–
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”When Jesus finished giving these commands to his Twelve disciples,
he went away from that place to teach and to preach in their towns.
Children against parents. Brothers against brothers. Such is the price of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us—many received him, others received him not.
As Hirschauer writes, “Take Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam make mutually exclusive claims about the most fundamental matters of theology and philosophy: the nature of God, the person of Christ, the path to salvation, and more.… It is not possible that both Christianity and Islam are true.”
I’ve spent the last two weeks intensely studying Catholic Social Teaching here in Krakow, as developed predominantly through Pope Leo XIII and Pope John Paul II. The body of literature most commonly understood as Catholic Social Teaching, we’ve learned, emerges out of a transitional period in Church history.
In the centuries separating Leo XIII’s papacy and the Protestant Reformation, the Church had a reasonably defensive posture. In the throes of Protestant reformers and political repression, the Church adopted a kind of ecclesio-centrism that sought to be a bastion of tradition, and more or less succeeded in that effort. But when what historians call the long 20th century came around, it was time for the Church to open the gates and reclaim evangelization.
I’m unqualified to say whether or not this mission has been a success on the whole, but I certainly owe my Catholic faith to the Church’s continued effort.
What I will say, however, is that missionaries aren’t sent out empty-handed. They carry with them powerful tools for evangelization. One of the most powerful tools at their disposal is the Church’s tradition, ironically thanks to periods of fortification that successfully preserved it. Exposure to this tradition—spiritual, intellectual, and physical—is in no small part why I’m Catholic today.
What Aguiar originally proposed is a view of the Church that is neither a bastion nor evangelical. It takes one of the worst aspects of certain forms of the new evangelization—making concessions to the modern world—and pairs it with one of the worst consequences of withdrawal—passivity. It strips missionaries of their mission, to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you.”
Christ brought the sword, but He also brought His Divine Mercy. And He’s tasked us, in the words of St. Faustina, to “proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God.”
The post Missionaries Without a Mission appeared first on The American Conservative.
Right-wing parties are on the rise across the Old Continent.
Across Europe, right-wing and national-conservative parties have scored remarkable victories in recent elections and are riding high in the polls. Disgruntled voters come in droves. Some liberal observers express fear of a coming right-wing “tsunami” in Europe.
Establishments have for a long time excluded right-wing newcomers from power. But that is changing. Italy has had a staunchly right-wing government since the fall. The right is now on a roll in many countries of Europe, from Germany to France and Spain, as well as in Scandinavia and central-Eastern Europe. The “firewall” or “cordon sanitaire” policies to keep right-wing parties away from power have failed or are set to fail.
The main driver of support for the right in Europe is opposition to out-of-control mass immigration. Rising costs of living and high energy prices since the Ukraine war have also fueled discontent. Most right-wing parties are also skeptical of the E.U. But foreign policy leanings are not always consistent; attitudes towards Russia since the war in Ukraine have been a source of discord among the parties of the right. I will return to the issue later in this essay. First, let’s go on a short political tour d’horizon to acquaint readers with the scale of changes in the “Old Continent.”
We’ll begin in Germany, a country that, until ten years ago, did not have any noteworthy party to the right of the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), then led by Angela Merkel, and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU). Merkel made the strategic decision to shift to the left, abandoning the traditional conservative wing and creating a vacuum on the right. This was filled by the Euroskeptic newcomer party Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013 during the Euro crisis. Merkel’s decision in 2015 to keep the borders open for more than one million migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa boosted the challenger party. Despite headwinds and ostracism from the political establishment and the media, the “far right” AfD entered the federal parliament, the Bundestag.
In recent polls, support for AfD has doubled to 20 percent or more, boosted by public anger at a controversial proposal for a gas boiler ban by the Green Party minister of economics and climate. In polls, AfD is now clearly ahead of the ruling Social Democrats party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. His three-party coalition government (made up of the SPD, the Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats Party) has plunged to unseen levels of unpopularity. A full 79 percent of voters say they are unhappy, a recent survey for public broadcaster ARD revealed.
The rise of the right in Germany has generated alarm and even hysteria among the other parties. They almost suffered a stroke when an AfD candidate gained a historic first district election victory in Sonneberg, in the eastern state of Thuringia. The Verfassungsschutz (a domestic spy agency tasked to “protect” the constitution, but prone to political abuse by suppressing inconvenient opposition groups) has denounced AfD as a “suspected case” of extremism. But official stigmatization appears to have become a blunted weapon. Voters simply don’t care anymore about such a public warning.
The CDU is trapped in a difficult situation. They have pledged to uphold a brandmauer (firewall) against the right-wing rival. But this policy is getting increasingly harder to sustain, especially in the eastern states of Germany, the former GDR, where between a quarter or even a third of voters support AfD.
Strategies of total exclusion, whether named “firewall” (or cordon sanitaire as they called it in France and Belgium), are bound to fail if they run against political reality. When a rival party on the right gets too big, it cannot permanently be excluded from participating in legislative and executive power in a democracy.
We are witnessing this in France. An Ifop poll in April found that Marine Le Pen was now the most popular politician in the country, ahead of President Macron, who is seen as aloof, especially by the ordinary people struggling with his unpopular pension reforms. Now France is again faced with violent unrest in the banlieues, the suburbs, predominantly populated by migrants of African and Arab descent. Race riots have recently erupted in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and many smaller places.
The nights of anarchy and fiery vandalism confirm Le Pen’s case that something has seriously gone wrong with immigration and integration. Amid widespread pessimism about the future of France, Le Pen might well become the next president. In mid-June, before the riots broke out, Jacqueline Maquet, an M.P. with Macron’s “Renaissance party,” told the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche: “I have the impression of a tsunami advancing.” Faced with this tide shift, the cordon sanitaire will break.
Likewise, in Sweden, excluding a successful right-wing contender to the status quo has not worked. After years of fighting among immigrant drug gangs, with almost daily shootings and explosions, voters’ anger about lax migration and security policies has strengthened the right-wing Sweden Democrats. To gain respectability, they opted strategically for moderation in language and removed some of their more radical elements. Eventually, the firewall against them crumbled.
The Sweden Democrats broke through in the elections last September. Now, the new center-right coalition depends on their support. Neighboring Finland has also turned to the right with the “populist” right-wing Finns Party last month becoming a formal part of the new coalition government (though they are already embroiled in scandals about alleged racism).
Most remarkable of all recent right-wing successes, Giorgia Meloni’s party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) also achieved their breakthrough in September, and as first female prime minister she has since led a remarkably stable right-wing government. Despite being vilified by the left as being “post fascist,” the smart, hard-nosed, and charming Meloni gained a broad following, confronting the “woke” left, their ideas of social engineering, and LGBT propaganda.
Her party is by far the most popular in Italy, out-flanking Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Her government combines traditional social conservatism with a harder line against illegal immigrants. The recent decisions of the E.U. leaders to redouble their efforts to halt small boats with asylum seekers in the Mediterranean reflect a shift in the consensus. What was once a “far right” demand is now the new normal.
Spain is the latest case-in-point of a turn to the right. Recent regional and local elections have handed the conservative Partido Popular (P.P.) huge gains while the more hard-right Vox party, established in 2013, greatly increased its number of councilors. Embattled socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was forced to call a snap general election. The likely outcome of the election on July 23 is a victory for P.P., led by the moderate conservative Alberto Nunez Feijoo, and a coalition with VOX (“Vox” is Latin for “voice”). Under the leadership of Santiago Abascal, it has rapidly become Spain’s third-largest party. Despite the left’s cries about a return to “Franco-era” politics, VOX is now becoming socially accepted.
This short journey through several European countries shows the extent to which right-wing movements are on the advance. We see signs of an emerging “Conservative International” or “Right-Wing International.” This was evidenced at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Budapest in May. More than 600 conservatives from Europe and North America attended, seeking common ground and understanding. Hungarian Prime Minister Orban opened the event with a speech entitled “No migration, no gender, no war.”
There is consensus on the European right against mass migration and the aggressive promotion of gender ideology. However, what exactly Orbán meant by “no war” was left in limbo. He evaded explaining how to stop the war in Ukraine. This is one of the current key issues that divide the different rightwing parties or prevent them from effectively forming a true “Right International.”
In the European Parliament in Brussels, the rightwing parties have failed to form a unified group. Instead there are two major competing rightwing factions: the Eurosceptic ECR and the more hard-right ID (plus a dozen non-affiliated MEPs from Hungary’s Fidesz party, which got expelled from the center-right European People’s Party (EPP). All these parties are opposed to the formation of a European super-state to replace the nation-states, and all of them are opposed to the left’s social engineering experiments.
If they would combine, an allied right would easily secure around 150 seats in the Brussels parliament (of the total 705), becoming the second-largest faction right behind the European People’s Party—the party of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. A combined right could be far larger than the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) faction.
However, a unification of all the parties on the right is unlikely to happen. There are too many differences of opinion. During the Euro crisis, those differences were mainly about the Euro, ECB policies and fiscal transfers and subsidies, and now, since the war in Ukraine started, there is major dissent on foreign policy and Russia.
Some right-wing parties are vehemently pro-NATO and support the U.S. foreign policy line. Poland’s conservative PiS party is the most vocal proponent of large arms supplies for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. (Ironically, a national-conservative, anti-woke government in Warsaw finds much common ground in foreign policy with the woke Biden administration, which does not reciprocate the favors and has supported LGBT protests in Warsaw against the PiS government.)
Other right-wing leaders side strongly with Ukraine as well. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has made this clear; she does not waiver in her support for NATO. On the other hand, Hungary’s Victor Orban (with whom both Meloni and VOX’s Abascal are good friends) has been reluctant in his support, and many other right-wing parties like Germany’s AfD are opposed to weapons deliveries fearing that the war might escalate and become a pan-European conflict—a war of Russia against the West waged on Central European soil. Some currents on the right also harbor Russian sympathies.
Some of the skepticism of the war is a reaction to the overbearing enthusiasm for the conflict on the part of the left. Germany’s Greens have turned from pacifists to bellicists; left-wingers who refused to serve in the army now call for the most lethal tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles for Ukraine. It could be argued that their stance is irrational and inconsequential because it contradicts their otherwise anti-nationalist attitude while Ukrainians are fighting a nationalistic fight to defend their homeland. Ukrainians at the front are not rainbow warriors but nationalistic patriots, which the Left usually loathes.
But because support for Ukraine is now, in the eyes of many, intertwined with other woke causes such as diversity, LGBT rights, and the rest of the Biden administration’s globalist agenda, some on the European right believe that Russia might be a counterforce against a woke West. For years, some European right-wing parties, like the Austrian FPO and France’s National Rally (R.N.), entertained close relationships with Putin’s party. Le Pen’s party even received a large credit from a Russian-affiliated bank.
Many have come to regret this. At Rassemblement National (R.N.), the young president Jordan Bardella acknowledged “a collective naivety” concerning Putin’s intentions with the R.N. Since the invasion, the party has somewhat departed from its traditionally pro-Russian course and pledged to support Ukraine while at the same time not falling for absolutist, hawkish rhetoric.
Other right-wing movements are, however, more confused. You find odd neo-neutralist ideas and even absurdly naive pacifist musings in some corners of the European right. Some advocate “Eurasian” conceptions, some dream of a dissolution of NATO without giving any realistic answer about what might replace it. Albeit relatively marginal, these voices obscure the debate and, at the same time, underscore the need for an authentic and realistic conception for a common European security policy.
The right in Europe does not have one. They lack serious think tanks and thinkers on security policy who could lead a conversation about a future European security architecture that would be less dependent on the dominant influence of Washington. While American cultural and military hegemony is waning globally, the E.U. does not appear to be in a position to become a real foreign policy power that is able to define and pursue its geopolitical interests. First, they lack the necessary military power; second, they lack a clear conception of their geopolitical interests. Some on the left even deny that one should pursue geopolitical interests beyond the spreading of human rights globally.
Germany, the economic heavyweight but militarily a sick man of the continent, is a case-in-point. The industrial powerhouse (now struggling because of irrational Green energy policies and waning traditional sectors like the car industry) is a country that is intensely insecure about its approach. It has long generated resentment among its European neighbors who feel dominated and, in turn, seek ways to make Germany the paymaster in the E.U. At the same time, Germany has attracted the largest numbers of (irregular) migrants and has destabilized the continent with an irrational open-border policy. With its more generous social benefits, “Germoney” is a magnet for migration. And Berlin left the dirty work of securing the outer borders to others in Southern Europe while simultaneously accusing them of racism.
For decades, Germany naively believed they needed neither borders nor a proper military. The Bundeswehr, Germany’s army, is in a pitiful state after 30 years of underfunding. Former U.S. President Donald Trump was right when he accused Europeans, and Germans in particular, of underinvesting and free-riding in defense matters.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz announced a zeitenwende, a turning point in history. More investment in security and the army was promised, but it has not yet materialized. One also hoped for a more realistic foreign policy. But this hope has been dashed. Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock from the Green party, a relatively young politician, is taking pride in her “feminist,” human rights-based approach. Unfortunately, Baerbock is also very inexperienced and gaffe-prone.
In January, she declared out of the blue, “We are fighting a war against Russia,” a statement that her aides quickly dismissed as “lost in translation.” Luckily, not too many take her words seriously. Baerbock is considered a bit of a joke by quite many in Germany. Her English-language mistakes are regularly mocked. Two weeks ago, in Pretoria, she congratulated South Africa for being a “bacon (!) of hope”. The German Green party exemplifies an embarrassing mix of ignorance and arrogance when lecturing others on becoming enlightened, modern, diverse and post-national world citizens.
For decades, Germany’s left-liberal intellectual and political elites indulged in the fancy dream of a pacifist, multicultural, post-national identity, as advocated by philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Berlin’s morally arrogant posture and even bullying against those who do not share those ideas (such as Hungary and Poland), and those who resist mass migration and the woke progressive agenda have since backfired and generated resentment against Germany.
At the heart of the problems lies a broken national identity on the part of Germany, which is incapable of seeing itself as “normal nation” with national interests. Therefore, Germany is also incapable of understanding why other nations—the East Europeans, Italians, Spaniards, French, etc.—want to be nations and want to preserve their nation-states, independence, and self-government. Germany’s elites now look with horror at the wave of right-wing governments in several neighboring countries. But Germany must come to terms with its own identity and cease trying to escape reality into post-national fantasies.
Europe will be transformed if the center of political gravity shifts towards more conservative, realist positions. At the same time, the world is moving from American dominance towards a multipolar geopolitical setting, with the U.S. being challenged by China. This poses huge challenges for Europe, and Germany—whose industries, like the car manufacturers, have already become dangerously dependent on the Chinese market—especially. Europe needs to devise a security strategy that promotes competitiveness, greater innovation, and resilience, while decreasing dependencies on Chinese markets and critical raw materials.
Europe cannot abandon the alliance with the U.S., since that would expose European military and economic weaknesses and might exacerbate internal rivalries or struggles for preeminence. But Europe must emancipate itself from ill-judged interventionist U.S. military adventures. We should become more restrained and more focused on solving our problems—and America should, too.
The post The Rise of the European Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
Human ingenuity remains the greatest (and most renewable) resource of all.
Perhaps the most serious effect of climate change in America thus far relates to its impact on young people. College students, once upbeat and optimistic about the future—or at least their individual futures—now seem increasingly pessimistic, even dour about the road ahead. It’s easy to understand why. Given the doomsday climate scenarios laid out in the media and in the gloomy lectures of bien pensants professors, fear of the future, anti-development ideologies—“degrowth” and “ungrowth” among others—and safety-ist fixations have become the default options on the quad.
I learned this lesson all too well when, in an honors class this spring, I gave a guest lecture on the future of agriculture. I argued that, among other things, over the course of the century we’re going to have to find ways to grow more food of better quality more efficiently. I compounded this mistake by stating that advances in science, new technology, and agribusiness entrepreneurship would be crucial to these tasks.
Judging from the students’ reactions, I would have been better received had I argued for a 21st-century “Modest Proposal” and suggested that, in the future, we dispose of excess children by adding yet another “protein” to the options recited by “wait staff” at trendy eateries.
The climate is changing in significant ways, as it often has in the past. Human actions are probably responsible for many of the current changes; if pushed, I can even go along with the new nomenclature being used more and more to denote our new epoch of history: the Anthropocene. That all said, I’m not overly fearful of, much less terrified by, the climate possibilities going forward for a couple reasons.
First, as Bjorn Lomborg has often pointed out, there are other more immediate and arguably more serious problems out there. Lomborg focuses on various diseases and persistent poverty, but population aging and the coming population bust pose real problems as well. We should be paying more attention to such problems instead of getting our collective knickers in a twist and planning for our extinction because the temperature is rising a bit.
Second, I am an economic historian and have taken note of how humans have generally reacted to significant challenges in the past. While prominent environmental historians cherry-pick cases where (some) pre-industrial peoples have failed to respond effectively to environmental stresses, resources constraints, and the like, in the modern era humans have almost always answered the call.
For example, think of the answers governmental policymakers, journalists, and the intelligentsia would have had given in 1900, when the world’s population had reached 1.65 billion, if asked whether we would feed 6 billion people by the end of the century and 8.3 billion in 2023? Most likely, incredulous stares and cries of “impossible,” followed by a pshaw or two. Yet we now produce ample food to feed the world’s population today—although it is five times larger than it was in 1900—and still have plenty left over to convert into ethanol, to use to feed livestock, and, alas, to rot, spoil, or waste.
Why? Because the human brain, or rather, human brains collectively, are the ultimate resource, as Julian Simon put it over 40 years ago. That is to say, our formidable ability to innovate and adapt make me optimistic regarding present and future challenges, climate change among them. Turning again to food: Over the course of the 20th century and the first few decades of the 21st, the efforts of research scientists, policymakers, agribusiness professionals, farm organizations, and individual farmers have transformed production possibilities in profound ways.
The invention of the so-called Haber-Bosch process of combining nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia is a case in point. When used as fertilizer (synthetic nitrogen), ammonia allowed for massive increases in yields, particularly of cereal crops in the postwar era. The distinguished historian of technology Vaclav Smil has gone so far as to call synthetic nitrogen fertilizer the most important invention of the 20th century, helping mightily to feed growing populations all over the world.
Yet this is but one example, as other biological, mechanical, and organizational innovations—ranging from tractorization to the Green Revolution, from the introduction of various risk-reduction and income-smoothing mechanisms (futures markets, crop insurance) to glyphosate-based herbicides and G.M. crops—have played key roles as well. Who knows?Cellular or microbial meat may be next.
Humans are creative problem solvers, who, regarding food supply, have relegated once celebrated hand-wringing naysayers forecasting mass starvation in the 1970s—Dennis Meadows, the Paddock brothers, Paul Ehrlich, and their ilk—to the dustbin, or, more aptly, the compost pile of history. To be sure, human solutions to the “food crisis,” however successful, were themselves not without problems and must always be considered provisional, but they do create a sense of historically-grounded optimism going forward about our possibilities regarding climate change.
The human propensity to innovate and adapt, particularly when underpinned and reinforced by research commitments, well-designed market incentives, and respect for individual freedom and diverse paths, gives me more than a margin of hope that the well-fed and increasingly wealthy 10.4 billion or so people projected to inhabit the Earth in 2100 may look back and wonder what all the climate fuss was about.
The post Food for Thought About Climate Change appeared first on The American Conservative.
Karabakhi Armenians shouldn’t have to sacrifice their safety and autonomy.
Azerbaijan’s blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave within its international borders, is now stretching into its eighth month. By blocking the single road that connects Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper, the kleptocratic regime in Baku seeks to squelch the Karabakhi Armenians’ aspirations to self-determination and to humiliate Yerevan.
The good news is that Team Biden seems closely engaged with the crisis. The bad news is that Washington might be preparing to throw the Karabakhis under the bus, even as the administration has been helpful to Armenia proper in recent months.
On July 3, Kristina Kvien, the American envoy to Yerevan, sparked a justified freakout among the Armenians after she said in an interview that “all parties”—meaning the Azeris included—agree that “the rights and security of Nagorno-Karabakh’s residents must be guaranteed.” The subtext, as the Armenian government protested, was that the Karabakhi Armenians could live safely under Baku’s rule, as ordinary citizens of Azerbaijan.
Kvien later clarified her remarks, noting that “the United States does not presuppose the outcome of negotiations on the future of Nagorno-Karabakh” and “supports an agreement that is durable, sustainable, and lays the foundations for peace.” That’s good enough, so far as it goes. Still, the original remarks revealed an alarming naivete about the realities of the conflict.
Home to 120,000 Armenians, a quarter of them children, Nagorno-Karabakh is where the Armenian alphabet was developed. The Armenian people—the world’s oldest Christian nation—maintained a measure of sovereignty there even as the great empires traded control of the South Caucasus for centuries. Known to the Armenians as Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh was also the birthplace of the modern Armenian independence movement inside the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (where it had been relegated by ethnicities commissar Stalin).
Amid the breakup of the USSR, the Karabakhis took control of the enclave in a war with Azerbaijan that saw both sides commit atrocities, including population transfers. Not even Armenia proper recognized the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, however, and the dispute soon emerged as one of the world’s most intractable “frozen conflicts.” In 2020, however, the Azerbaijanis managed to recapture much of the territory, and more recently, the Baku regime has made military incursions into Armenia proper, even leaking “torture porn” showing Armenian troops enduring unspeakable crimes.
It’s conduct like that that makes the Armenians gasp when they hear statements like Kvien’s. The regime in Baku doesn’t even respect the rights of its own population, let alone Armenian Christians whom it views as interlopers, whose ancient cross stones and cemeteries it destroys, and who have been the subject of decades of ethno-sectarian animus from official organs. The notion that the Karabakhi Armenians can “integrate” into Azerbaijan, or that Baku has already agreed to recognize their rights in any meaningful sense, is a dangerous fantasy.
The Azeris’ goal, as the Armenian analyst Eric Hacopian told me during a reporting trip last year, is to conduct ethnic cleansing Nagorno-Karabakh, establish a sovereign corridor across Armenia proper to their exclave of Nakhichevan, and ultimately to bring about the “Gaza-ification” of Armenia: a rump state with which the Azerbaijanis (and their Turkish allies) can do as they please.
The moment is golden, from their point of view. Russia, Armenia’s historic protector, is distracted in Ukraine, and the 2,000 or so Russian troops tasked by the “international community” to protect the corridor between Nagorno and Armenia proper are sitting on their hands. The Azeri fisc, meanwhile, is flush with petrodollars for Western lobbying. Baku promises more gas than it can deliver to a desperate European Union, and sells itself as an anti-Iran spear tip to the Israelis and American hawks.
Even so, the P.R. and political tide may be turning in Western capitals. Notwithstanding Kvien’s naive remarks, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have been quite strong in their support of Armenia; many officials in Yerevan credit Nancy Pelosi for putting a stop to the Azeris’ latest assault by taking a solidarity delegation. Sens. Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, meanwhile, are making a bipartisan push to stop American military assistance to Baku. That pairing is especially notable, since both are normally hawkish on Russia and Iran but have clearly had it with the Azeris’ behavior.
Friends of Armenia, Democratic and Republican, must make it clear to the Biden administration that the safety and autonomy of the Karabakhi Armenians, and their preferences, can’t be sacrificed in any push for negotiated settlement to the conflict. Otherwise, America risks replicating the kind of border-redrawing from on high that gave rise to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem in the first place.
The post A Christian Nation in Trouble appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 