Connexion
The New York Times frets that Donald Trump might exercise the authority vested in the executive branch.
There is an ideal version of the federal agencies that make up the American executive branch, even for a conservative. We would not call them the administrative state—a pejorative for the pride of positivism, which sees individual human beings as only pieces of humanity, mere components for manipulation. Rather, they would make up a mediating state, of sorts. For it is true that, in an era as complex as our own, the normal American needs many champions of great awareness, ability, and precision to stand between life at the human scale and the forces that shape our world.
These civil servants would protect Americans’ liberties and the American Main Street from historical-political conditions, rather than protect progress from pesky human freedom. They would take on awesome power and responsibility—that is, exercise authority—on behalf of a president and the people who elected him. Indeed, our technological and bureaucratic age offers the human person as full play for spiritual maturity as any ages past. For few are they who possess the strength of character and inner freedom to withstand anonymizing structures of power, structures that ever tend to more total systems of control; few are they who would choose to be Tolkien’s Gandalf rather than Huxley’s Mustapha Mond. Certainly not the staff of the federal agencies we have.
The New York Times is right: Donald Trump and his allies plan to increase presidential power in 2025. Not because, as too many liberals on Twitter seem to think, he would be a dictator. Instead, because there is disorder and imbalance in the power, authority, and responsibility of the American presidency and his executive branch, which can only be rectified by increasing the president’s power.
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman report—if it can really be called reporting when all has been discussed openly for almost half a decade—that team Trump 2024 would like the president, as the constitutional executive, to be in charge of the executive branch. They have people on the record like John McEntee, who was head of White House personnel (and, disclaimer of sorts, who interviewed me when I joined the U.S. EPA as White House liaison), and Russ Vought, who was head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, explaining that if Congress is going to cede authority and power to the executive branch, then the elected president is certainly the one to pick it up. Congress can check and balance the president by passing laws and budgets, instead of hoping bureaucrats will manage everything. The president should be able to hire and fire the people who work for him. Big news.
The breathless tone of the Times piece comes, fundamentally, from basic “orange man bad” Trump derangement syndrome and a liberal friend-enemy distinction; the administrative state is, after all, the judiciary’s chief partner in bending the arc of history towards progress, if not justice. Intellectually, however, the teacher’s-pet hyperventilating springs from a conflation of power and authority, and an ignorance of responsibility. As the reporters write, the Trump team hopes “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
But the president, as head of the executive branch, already has the authority to run the executive branch, and is supposed to be responsible for its workings. What he needs to do so is the power.
This confusion in concepts shows us why there is no version of the administrative state as we know it that works for human ends. If the president cannot unite in himself the personal authority and power required to fulfill his responsibilities on behalf of the people, then how can any particular bureaucrat maintain any sense of responsibility for her own power and authority? If she does not answer to the American president then she does not answer to the American people. The system shows itself to be a faceless, dehumanizing machine all the way up and all the way down.
In a terrible sense, this simply reflects the reality of the social world we live in. While altering our experience and self-understanding in important ways—ways that present opportunities as well as hazards—the digital era continues the perpetuation of what has been called mass man. The mass is caught up in technological disruption and subject to systems of rationalization. The march of progress, in scientific or legal terms, has produced a general attitude of passivity to power set apart from apparent human agency. As a result, the mass man accepts claims that powers like a national lockdown emerge from scientific, technical, or political necessity, independently of personal responsibility. Our technocratic elite have simply internalized this dynamic better than the rest, only a few exploiting it consciously for their own ends. As the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini put it, they “are not merely conscious of the influence of the machine; they deliberately imitate it, building its standards and rhythms into their own ethos.”
What Trump and members of his team are proposing is to restore real responsibility to the presidency. This is the opposite of modern dictatorship, which subsumes a human personality into an avatar of the popular will and of the state. Far from a proposal to make President Donald Trump a law unto himself, these policy plans are an attempt to restore human accountability to an executive branch that has too long exercised power with neither responsibility nor authority, but only license—and in the only way we have in a representative constitutional republic, through political elections. Populism is the last attempt of the many to defend themselves from the irresponsible and unaccountable rule of the few; MAGA is the gasoline that some Americans are throwing on a machine they know will swallow them up.
The promise of Trump has always been that he is too much a human being, too fully himself, with all his vices and virtues, to be a mere functionary, surrendering his personality to a disempowered office. He might fail to drain the swamp, but he would never join or be allowed to join it. And now the New York Times is spreading his chief 2024 campaign message for him: Donald Trump means to match the greatness of executive responsibility with sufficient executive power—to become a president in full.
The post A President in Full appeared first on The American Conservative.
Constitutional litigation should be more rare, and should involved fully developed and not assumed facts.
Today’s discourse about legal issues is characterized by two phenomena: partisan polarization and indifference to history.
Recent comments on the decision of Judge Terry Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana to condemn and enjoin pressures on social media companies by the Biden administration depict the opinion as a screed by a Trump-appointed judge in a rustic jurisdiction. A reader of some of the op-eds would gain the impression that Judge Doughty is a semi-literate creature who drools on the bench and suffers from pellagra, rickets, hookworm, and various other deficiency diseases—and is probably a disciple of Huey Long, Theodore G. Bilbo, or both. The cure, according to at least one commentator, is to center suits challenging the constitutionality of federal actions in a truly knowledgeable and worldly court: the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Its judges, all sophisticated persons who have the print Washington Post delivered daily to their doorsteps, can be counted upon to do “the right thing.”
Those whose visceral response to adverse decisions is forum-shopping or court packing ignore the lessons of history.
Once upon a time, in the 1920s and early 1930s, there were no limits on the jurisdiction of rustic district courts, save those wisely provided by the Johnson Act, limiting interference with state public utility commissions; the Tax Injunction Act, protecting the new state income taxes; and the Norris-La Guardia Act, limiting labor injunctions. In those days, direct suits against the Federal government were disfavored, so the conservative critics of federal legislation brought shareholders’ derivative suits in rural jurisdictions to enjoin national corporations from complying with contested federal legislation. Injunctions freely issued, especially since the national government had no notice of and was not represented in the litigation.
The New Deal’s lawyers responded to this in two ways, as described in a chapter of Paul Freund’s slender On Understanding the Supreme Court (1949): first, by including in President Roosevelt’s court-packing plan a provision, actually enacted, requiring notice to the U.S. Attorney General of suits contesting federal legislation, and second, by including in all subsequent New Deal legislation, including the securities laws, provisions that agencies could be sued only at the place of their official residence, i.e. Washington, D.C.
For good measure, appeals from agency judgments were channeled directly to the Circuit Courts of Appeal, rather than the District Courts. This was a great boon to the District of Columbia Bar. Charles Horsky wrote a book describing the newly enfranchised Washington Lawyer. Firms like Covington and Burling and Arnold and Porter prospered mightily, as did lawyers like Dean Acheson, Abe Fortas, and Clark Clifford.
In the summer of 1962, the sainted JFK was in the White House and the Columbia Law School reformer William L. Cary was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which enjoyed a lustrous reputation denied most of the other, more sclerotic federal administrative agencies. I was employed as a summer law clerk and was assigned to prepare a comprehensive memorandum on defenses against suits against the commission. This I did, though not without something of a guilty conscience. I prepared pre-cooked memoranda of about fifteen pages each asserting various pleading, jurisdictional, and venue technicalities that were traps for unwary lawyers in Des Moines and Pocatello.
At the end of the summer, such was the purist liberalism of the period that about 80 percent of my work was swept away by the enactment of the Mandamus and Venue Act of 1962. This law, signed with enthusiasm by President Kennedy, returned much agency litigation to the wide-open spaces. This was the offshoot of a much-noticed Harvard Law Review article by Clark Byse, an administrative law professor at the Harvard Law School, who thus became the benefactor of Judge Doughty and countless provincial lawyers. This reform did much to vary the dockets of District and appellate courts outside of Washington.
The District of Columbia federal courts in 1962 were divided between establishment and extreme liberals. The D.C. Circuit was adorned by such as Barrett Prettyman, Henry Edgerton, Charles Fahy, Harold Leventhal, and, for a time, the redoubtable and original Thurman Arnold. It also featured some judges who got there because they could not be confirmed elsewhere, and who benefitted from the District’s lack of U.S. senators. Chief among these was a Louisianan, Judge J. Skelly Wright.
The best comment on Judge Wright was furnished by Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School in correspondence with Professor Alexander Bickel: “Every night, when I put my three little girls to bed, they say to me: ‘Daddy! Tell us again the story of how Judge J. Skelly Wright desegregated the public schools of the District of Columbia!” Judge David Bazelon was another judge of the same ilk, noted for an enthusiasm for psychiatry, which for a time gave the District of Columbia the Durham rule for insanity cases, never followed elsewhere and ultimately repudiated in the District. There were some economic populist judges who got their economics from the libretto of Finian’s Rainbow; Judge Bazelon got his psychiatry from the libretto of West Side Story.
The D.C. Circuit had ceased to be a favorite forum for liberals. The second Bush administration unsuccessfully sought to substitute it for the Supreme Court as the Court of last resort for terrorism cases, and Senator Joe Machin of West Virginia prefers it to the Fourth Circuit as a venue for pipeline cases. Proposed forum-shopping changes of this sort are not really reform measures but products of partisan pique.
The United States is virtually alone in allowing all of its judges, federal and state, the power to invalidate legislation. Each judge is equipped with a field marshal’s baton in his or her knapsack. In foreign systems like those of France and Germany, power over legislation is restricted to the highest Constitutional Court; in Britain, to four high courts, subject to parliamentary override. In America, the district courts should be allowed to grant declaratory judgments, but not injunctions, when legislation is contested. Their function should thus be restricted to making up a record. The power of invalidation should be restricted to the circuit courts, sitting en banc.
It is true that the Second Circuit no longer consists of Judges Learned Hand, Augustus Hand, and Swan and the Fourth Circuit of Judges Parker, Soper, and Dobie, but the proposed reform would be a powerful inducement to dissolution of the thundering herd that is the Ninth Circuit, with some fifty-one judges. Existing restrictions, including those requiring detailed findings of act and conclusions of law should be more zealously enforced, as should the disallowance of injunctions when there is an adequate remedy at law. The Civil Rights Attorneys’ Fees Act, a one-way fee-shifting statute that stimulates constitutional litigation and which terrorizes smaller and poorer jurisdictions, should be repealed. Constitutional litigation should be more rare, and should involved fully developed and not assumed facts.
There is a problem of “juristocracy,” and it needs a principled cure. That cure is to be found in denying both district judges and three-judge Circuit Court panels alike the power to enjoin federal or state statutes.
The post On Centralized and De-Centralized Federal Courts appeared first on The American Conservative.
A foreign policy that puts Americans first does not require isolationism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union freed the world of a horrid tyranny and global menace. However, it also unleashed an orgy of hubris in Washington. Convinced that America won—with little consideration of the contribution of the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev, who kept the Red Army in its barracks—members of America’s foreign policy elite viewed Moscow’s collapse as only the first step. They considered themselves custodians of the globe’s unipower, with the mandate of heaven to remake the entire world, regardless of the cost to Americans and other peoples.
The first Gulf War reinforced Washington’s illusion of omnipotence. “What we say goes,” intoned President George H.W. Bush, acting as the proverbial master of the universe. Alas, Uncle Sam’s arrogance only grew. The Clinton administration’s secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, declared: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
At the time her comment looked like comedic bluster, what you would expect from a wannabe generalissima who had been denied the presumed pleasure of sending masses of people into battle to their deaths. But in three short years, the endless wars initiated by President George W. Bush in response to 9/11 turned the outburst into deadly policy. Two decades later who on earth, other than an Albright-wannabe, could believe that American policymakers see further into the future?
Unfortunately, this unbridled hubris, which suffuses those who command the world’s most powerful military, has had catastrophic results. In the world imagined by members of the blob, Ben Rhodes’s inelegant label for the foreign policy establishment, U.S. policymakers are entitled, indeed, required to kill and destroy to create a better world.
Again, Albright led the way. As she infamously asked Colin Powell: “What’s the use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” It evidently didn’t occur to her that the lives of military personnel, few of whom joined to be gambit pawns in her global chess game, deserved consideration. Perhaps even worse was her answer to the question of whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from U.N. sanctions were worth the price. Of course, she insisted: “We think the price is worth it.” Yes, American policymakers, anointed by God, or whatever is the modern, secular equivalent, are entitled to decide who lives and dies halfway around the globe. Indeed, these otherwise unimportant foreigners presumably should feel honored to die in Washington’s service.
What else to make of the invasion of Iraq, based on a lie, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? What about two decades of war in Afghanistan, which turned the countryside into a rural abattoir? How else to defend aiding the overthrow of Libya’s dictator, while ignoring the decade of intermittent warfare that followed? Even more grotesque was helping Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed “Slice ‘n Dice” bin Salman impoverish, starve, and kill hundreds of thousands of Yemenis. Current U.S. policy is to punish the suffering masses in Syria and Venezuela, since nothing else has succeeded in overthrowing the dictators who, unlike the Saudi crown prince, Washington dislikes. As Madeleine Albright explained, we think the price is “worth it”—at least when others bear the cost.
Despite its endless failures of late, Washington never changes. True, President Donald Trump made some effort to challenge the status quo, but he allowed the generals to beat him into submission when it came to questioning the NATO alliance and South Korean “mutual” defense treaty. He was equally weak in overcoming resistance to withdrawing from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.
Now the Biden administration is moving in the opposite direction. After criticizing the murderous Saudi tyranny, President Joe Biden submissively begged Riyadh to increase oil production—only to be dramatically snubbed. Yet he apparently is pressing the Kingdom to allow American military personnel to act as bodyguards for the licentious, dissolute royals. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put unusual pressure on the Europeans to do more in defense, but the administration has rushed more troops to the continent, even calling up reserves, and spent far more money than the Europeans to aid Kiev. Today the United Kingdom, one of the most hawkish European governments, is reducing the size of its army because, well, it can with America on station. Biden is begging the South Korean government to let Americans risk nuclear strikes on their homeland in order to defend Seoul.
All these policies put the interests of foreign governments before those of the American people.
Recognizing that Washington’s duty is first and foremost to this nation does not mean a policy of “isolationism,” as crudely caricatured by critics. Trade, investment, immigration, and travel all offer enormous benefits to Americans. The U.S. should be a commercial and cultural giant.
Today’s members of the blob, however, evince little concern for those to whom they are supposedly responsible, instead designing policies that serve foreign interests and the latter’s domestic allies. Businesses back foreign aid, think tanks crave foreign attention, bankers want foreign deals, arms makers need foreign wars, lobbyists serve foreign clients. While gorging themselves through their Washington influence, they gird themselves in sanctimony. Yes, Uncle Sam may be enriching them while sacrificing the interests of the American people, but it really is for the good of humanity, just trust them!
The Democratic Party, which once worried about the ferocity of the Cold War, battled President Richard Nixon over Vietnam, and fueled protests against Dubya’s disastrous misadventure in Iraq, has taken the lead in waging a proxy war against Russia and matching GOP hostility toward China. Although Republicans have become more skeptical of global social engineering, the GOP leadership in Washington is even more militaristic and belligerent than the Democratic Party. The bipartisan War Party has been busy campaigning for conflict with Russia, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, Venezuela, and China. Now Mexico also is on their list. For such dubious crusades they have sacrificed American lives and wealth—and are prepared to do so again and again.
The American people can no longer afford to leave decisions over war and peace to the president. They should insist that Congress fulfill its constitutional role in voting whether to declare war, which allows them to make their voices known on Capitol Hill. Indeed, they are the last, best bulwark for peace. For instance, when President Barack Obama tossed to Congress the question of bombing Syria over its alleged use of chemical weapons, the American people resoundingly told legislators no.
More fundamentally, Americans should insist that all policymakers treat war as a last resort, rather than just another policy tool. Today, Albright acolytes think nothing about loosing death and destruction on a massive scale for essentially frivolous reasons. To answer her question, what’s the use of having the nation’s superb military? To meet existential threats and protect vital interests, not remake the globe in the image desired by the arrogant elite filling America’s imperial city. The nation’s founders recognized the seriousness of war, not only to combatants but to civilians and domestic institutions. That is why the constitutional scheme was designed to discourage war.
Resisting the military temptation is even more important when facing significant military powers. Analysts who didn’t expect Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine insist that he would never use nuclear weapons, no matter how hot our involvement in the ongoing proxy war might become. The same people claim that China can be deterred from attacking Taiwan by simply warning the former off, with nary a thought as to how hard it would be to prevent a serious conventional clash from escalating. And the same people propose doing more of the same with North Korea, even as it expands its nuclear arsenal and builds ICBMs capable of targeting America.
What could possibly go wrong in any of these cases? Nothing, insists the War Party.
Americans tend not to vote on foreign policy. The issues seem so far away. No longer. Thousands of Americans died and tens of thousands were wounded, many grievously, as a result of Washington’s bloody hubris. With the U.S. moving to confront China and Russia simultaneously, the future could prove far more dangerous, even disastrous.
Donald Trump offered a glimpse of how a tough-minded but better-prepared president could reorient U.S. policy back to a focus on the American people. The blob’s shock at his election was enormous and salutary. Today those benefiting from Washington’s imperial policies, both domestic and foreign, tremble at the thought that Trump might return.
Although repeating the past is no solution, a more serious leader with a policy that truly placed America first could break today’s coalition of warmongers, social engineers, and political profiteers. It is time to design a foreign policy as if the American people mattered.
The post America Requires a Real Foreign Policy Debate appeared first on The American Conservative.
The right-wing meanies of the ’90s predicted correctly—the self-esteem movement destroyed society.
A Monday article in the Wall Street Journal announces a new fad for parties celebrating divorces. A cottage industry of divorce-party decorations has sprung up. Gold foil balloons spelling out bad puns, fake rose petals, parlor games—they’re about as tasteless as you’d expect. They are tasteless the way all parties thrown by lonely professional women are tasteless.
Adamson had friends from Los Angeles fly to New York and they booked the hotel suite where she had stayed when she got married. “It felt like closure in a really beautiful way to be in the same hotel with the same view,” she says.
The four of them burned sage in the suite, to rid it of negative vibes, filled the place with balloons, dined out and then had a sleepover.
Light witchcraft and overpriced charcuterie and explicit performances of the regression into childhood. That kind of thing.
“Divorce used to be something to be ashamed of due to societal pressures and stereotypes,” commented the aptly named Nicole Sodoma, a divorce lawyer who has written about how people should in fact celebrate the fruits of her sorry trade. “But today people have really decided to nip that societal shame and instead embrace being divorced as another stage of life that some of us experience.”
(To her credit, the etiquette maven Liz Post, guardian of the Emily Post Institute, told the Journal that “divorce parties” as such were not, in her book, very cash money. Who doesn’t dread the future in which bourgeois prejudice is finally swept away?)
The divorce rate has been declining for years, which is on the face of it a good thing. It seems, however, that this is downstream of the decline in the marriage rate. (It is worth noting that, for the over-50 set, divorce rates are climbing.) Yet a massive portion of the American public—upwards of 70 percent—sees little or no moral problem with divorce. (By contrast, in 1968, 60 percent of Americans believed that divorce laws should be made stricter.) So the parties with the depressing decor sporting sassy slogans shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The progress from acceptance to celebration is the defining dynamic of our era.
Our own Micah Meadowcroft wrote recently about how we live in a “negative world”—a society where the opposites of traditional and Christian morality are valorized. You made a decision of enormous consequence, both public and private, and you were incapable of following through on it? Congratulations! Don the “Finally Divorced” sash. Celebrating objects of shame is the fashionable thing. It is a point worth making that this valorization of perversion and error, the “negative world,” is just the mature stage of a classic 1990s bugbear for conservatives—the so-called self-esteem movement.
Low self-esteem was thought to be the root of every social dysfunction, from teenage pregnancy to carjackings; it is little surprise that the California legislature established a task force on bringing the good news of I’m-okay-you’re-okay to the people. (Needless to say, John Vasconcellos, the state senator responsible, also supported legal dope.) “I Love Me” lessons were introduced in the schools.
It is not terribly surprising that the children formed by the era of the participation trophy have come to expect that every aspect of their lives, no matter how repulsive, get the cake and balloons treatment. “Adulting.” “Shout your abortion.” The public promotion of previously unnamed sexual vices. Body positivity. The insistence that the mentally ill have a right to express their mental illness unimpeded. It is all of a piece. Rilke, not the straightest arrow in the quiver, wrote about something like the call to repentance: “Here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” This is a sentiment as foreign to modern sensibilities as Cato’s suicide or the gruesome deaths of the Roman martyrs.
Yet the divorce celebrations still cut deeper in some way. Something has gone badly wrong. Curiously, none of the divorced people interviewed for the Journal article seems to have had children; that straightens the road on the way to the sage-burning and the rest, but is a historical oddity. It raises the question of what people think this is all about, anyway. It is difficult to unring the bell on stable, monogamous family formation, which has proven time and again to be the foundation on which public life stands.
In the early principate, Augustus attempted to cajole the leading families of Rome to have more children with a variety of carrots—subsidies—and sticks—crackdowns on divorce. (Against the modish argument disputing the late Republic’s decadence blows the chill morning air of birth rate statistics.) Briefly, he failed. By the second century A.D., all but a handful of these families had fallen from the rolls of history and been replaced by enterprising Spaniards and Narbonensians.
And that canny old Roman didn’t even have to deal with the divorce party industry. If footmen tire you, what will horses do?
The post Where’s My Parade? appeared first on The American Conservative.
I was returning from work the other day, and Green Day’s “Holiday” was on the radio. A lot of the kids won’t remember how it was to be a conservative and listen to a left-wing anti-war punk band and feel like you agree with most of the words. Those days are now gone, obviously. The major anti-war sentiment has returned to its natural home, the conservative realist right.
The left, on the other hand, is now the party of forever war and imperial progressivism.
Politico reports: “President Joe Biden has authorized the military to call up 3,000 reserve troops to support operations in Europe after tens of thousands were sent there last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a top general said Thursday.” This comes after the very odd and sudden call by President Biden for reserve troops to be ferried to Europe, “for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility.”
The move might very well be illegal, as Senator Mike Lee of Utah pointed out over Twitter. “USC 12304 gives the President the authority to ‘augment’ the forces of any ‘named operational mission’ to active duty for NOT MORE THAN 365 consecutive days. Operation Atlantic Resolve has existed since 2014 and is an official ‘named’ U.S. military mission that deploys forces on a rotational basis mainly to the Baltic states and Poland,” he wrote.
But legality aside, this shouldn’t be happening for more structural reasons. Given Russian performance in the Ukrainian theatre, there absolutely shouldn’t be an American force posture increase in Europe. The American nuclear umbrella and naval power presence are understandable, but Europe’s GDP ($18 trillion) is ten times that of Russia ($1.7 trillion). Europe has four times the manpower: The Russian population is around 143 million, and the European Union’s 447 million.
Europe shouldn’t need American infantry, artillery, logistics, and armor. Europa can defend herself. The only reason they do not is because they feel no incentive to. If you have someone else pay your rent as well as stand guard on the doorstep of your gated community in a rough neighborhood, why on earth would you take their initiative anyway?
So why is Biden doubling down on this strategy that is flawed at best and dangerous at worst? It is flawed, as Europe is the last continent that should free-ride on American generosity. It is dangerous, because it is essentially akin to opening a gas station and fuel depot next to a raging forest fire.
It is in part a stunt—a way to calm some Euro nerves after a fraught NATO summit showing visible rifts within the alliance and the limits to tolerance towards Ukraine’s arrogance and juvenile sense of entitlement. But it is perhaps also the last gasp of overt Atlanticism. Biden is one of the most pro-Europe presidents in modern times. The other side’s front runners are all “restrainers.” Consider a recent House vote on a burden-sharing amendment from Ohio’s Rep. Warren Davidson: It failed 218–212. When was the last time it was this close, with so many Republicans voting to slap Euro wrists? And how long will the status quo continue?
The post Trying to Fight Fire by Setting Another Fire appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Wall Street Journal report published this morning found that some of the main beneficiaries of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act are foreign-owned corporations, who have finagled unimaginable sums in green technology subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred nearly $110 billion in U.S. clean-energy projects since it passed almost a year ago, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. Companies based overseas, largely from South Korea, Japan and China, are involved in projects accounting for more than 60% of that spending. Fifteen of the 20 largest such investments, nearly all in battery factories, involve foreign businesses, the Journal’s analysis shows.
This report is instructive on a number of points: the difficulty of reshoring supply chains, and specifically the degree to which China is eating our lunch on battery production, even when that production occurs outside China; the fact that massive, unfocused subsidy programs are subject to abuse; and, ultimately, how the ongoing imbalance of trade hamstrings domestically owned industry.
The past few years have been all about splashy budget numbers and expansive subsidies. Rebuilding American industry—the creation and execution of industrial policy—is the foremost economic task before us today, but, as with all things, it can be done well or poorly. The IRA, for all the good intentions behind it, seems to tend toward the latter.
The post Funding Rivals appeared first on The American Conservative.
Progressives don’t let things like facts get in the way of the war on men.
Progressives don’t like to admit that men are suffering. In part, that’s because male suffering is a feature of their politics. The on-campus kangaroo courts, the constant derogation of “white men,” and the feminization of our institutions are the program, not a betrayal of it.
To admit that there is a problem with American men is to admit that there is a problem with progressive gender politics. And by the numbers, the problem is impossible to dispute. For every 100 women who graduate college, only seventy-four men graduate. Men drop out of high school at higher rates, abuse drugs at higher rates, and commit suicide at significantly higher rates than women. Men represent nearly 75 percent of all suicides and drug overdose deaths in the United States.
Progressive and mainstream outlets have run a series of pieces this month reluctantly acknowledging the crisis and investigating its origins. Christine Emba wrote a thoughtful column in the Washington Post on what she called the male “identity crisis.” She saw something “weird” happening to American men and the growing appeal of figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and wondered why a Canadian psychologist and accused human trafficker had such purchase among young men.
There’s no disputing, Emba says, that men are falling behind. But in some sense, men had it coming. “Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified,” she said. And while it may be “harder to be a man today, in many ways, that is a good thing.”
Emba concludes that, while older visions of masculinity were harmful to women and ought to have been discarded, progressives—the implied subject of her article—need to offer men an alternative version of masculinity. Otherwise, men are likely to revert to less desirable forms of masculinity, such as that embodied by Andrew Tate.
There is some merit to this argument. It’s debatable the extent to which older versions of masculinity, predicated on aggression and assertiveness, were actually undesirable—testosterone won the Second World War—but, stipulating that its excesses needed to be tamed, an alternative version of masculinity was necessary to replace it.
But there is another element to male backlash. Emba concedes that progressives and progressive-coded institutions have done a great deal to push men into the arms of more disreputable figures by their constant denigration of men and masculinity as “toxic.” She cites the American Psychiatric Association’s 2018 declaration that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.”
Others have made this allusion, but it is worth repeating. Just as Shylock, the Jewish banker in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, famously attributes his villainous behavior to stereotypes—“Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs”—progressives’ insistence that all men are pigs might well lead some men to act like pigs, or worse.
The other major entry in the “men in crisis” genre came from Politico. It labeled its most recent print edition the “Masculinity Issue,” and featured a roundtable with Democratic “experts” on the male exodus from the Democratic Party along with three pieces on masculinity, each of which was, of course, written by a woman.
In the roundtable, filmmaker Jackson Katz told the magazine that the Republican Party succeeds in appealing to working-class men by granting them cultural recognition. The GOP, he says, tell working-class men that “they are the ones who built this country—they, meaning the white working-class male who was providing for his family. And those people—meaning multiculturalist, feminist Democrats—hate you. They detest you.”
The upshot of Katz’s comments is supposed to be that the Republican line—that Democrats hate men—is ridiculous. Is it, though?
One of Politico’s feature writers, Virginia Heffernan, argued in her piece the so-called “malaise” of American men was just a response to pluralism—in other words, American white men expressing their hatred for black people. “Just about every time elite American men look at virtually any sociological change,” she said, “they see a crisis of masculinity.”
You can feel the contempt dripping from the page. Katz himself and his co-panelists regularly denigrated men in general and white men in particular. Katz, for instance, said the gun debate in America “is about white men’s sense of themselves as protectors,” and white men’s anger at having “lost their jobs as providers because of macroeconomic shifts … and the ascendance of women and people of color.”
Is it really a stretch to think that Katz or the Democrats he describes “detest” men?
Politico’s coverage conveys the nature of progressives’ men problem. Mainstream American institutions and elected Democrats only speak of masculinity to condemn it or to assess its effects on women and minorities. Men, as such, are never objects of concern in the progressive moral universe. Men are the ones doing the oppressing, not the ones being oppressed. To legitimize male grievances is to court backlash against feminism and women’s liberation.
In the early days of the pandemic, for example, data revealed that men were more than 50 percent more likely to die from the virus than were women. Major outlets published a series of think pieces arguing that women, not men, “bore the brunt” of the pandemic. The lockdowns led to working women returning home and doing more housework than NPR correspondents would have liked, which, apparently, was a fate worse than death.
But that is how goes: Men in droves drop out of schools all but designed for women, lose their jobs due to conscious policy choices, lose their children in custody disputes, and numb the pain with opioids. Some kill themselves. All the while, almost every institution in our society tells men they are “oppressors,” privileged, and their masculine identity is “toxic.”
When the people doing the mocking pause a moment and take stock of the carnage, the only people they can’t think to pity are the ones they mock.
The post Unsex Me Here appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: If Ukraine says it is winning, what does losing look like?
“Ukraine is winning,” a June 21 headline from POLITICO read in part.
The author of the piece was none other than Denys Shmyhal, the prime minister of Ukraine. “More than a year after the big war began, it’s obvious that Russia hasn’t reached its strategic goals,” Shmyhal writes, “which means Ukraine is winning.”
Certainly, Russia has had a tougher go of it in Ukraine than expected, but nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory lies in Russian hands; even when Shmyhal published this piece, it was clear Ukraine’s counteroffensive was failing. The only basis that Shmyhal can claim Ukraine is winning the war is through blatantly misstating Russia’s objectives, which he says is “to destroy Ukraine.”
Shmyhal’s framing allows Ukraine to proclaim victory as long as it remains on the map, even when settling the conflict with Russia will likely include forking over large portions of Ukrainian territory and the abandonment of any NATO or E.U. ambitions. Clever, but not clever enough, especially in light of the events in the month since.
In the last week, Ukraine has decided to pause its counteroffensive and adjust its tactics. The Ukrainian advance, if one can call it that, has come at the expense of heavy personnel and equipment losses, and has fallen far short of expectations.
American and European officials reportedly told the New York Times that, in the first two weeks of the six-week counteroffensive, a quarter of Ukraine’s weaponry was damaged or destroyed. In the weeks that followed, the weaponry loss rate hovered around 10 percent.
Ukraine itself has been hesitant to speak about the losses sustained in the counteroffensive; by no means a surprise, given how they’ve treated releasing casualty numbers. President Volodymyr Zelensky, however, has acknowledged the pause in the counteroffensive. Though Zelensky has not said anything concrete about Ukraine weapons losses, he has blamed the pause on insufficient equipment and munitions (where did it all go?), imploring the West to expedite more aid.
President Joe Biden’s administration has answered the call. This week alone, the U.S. has announced an additional $2.3 billion in aid to Ukraine, with $1.3 billion going towards military equipment and munitions. As part of this package, the Pentagon will fork over four more air-defense missile systems, howitzer munitions, attack drones, and landmine clearing equipment.
If this is winning, what does losing look like?
The post A Counter-Counteroffensive appeared first on The American Conservative.
Easing restrictions on accessory apartments will allow us to maximize the housing stock we already have.
Thirty-three years ago, I published an article urging states and localities to relax zoning restrictions on accessory apartments and home occupations. After being rejected by the principal student-edited law reviews, which favor articles by legal academics and political celebrities, I succeeded in publishing the article in the Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Journal, edited by and for legal practitioners.
There was a brief flare-up of interest in accessory apartments in the 1980s. The definitive book on the subject, Accessory Apartments in Single Family Housing by Martin Gellen of Berkeley was published in 1985. A Department of Housing and Urban Development official, Patrick H. Hare wrote several monographs on the subject for HUD. Two states, California (the Mello Act) and Hawaii, had enacted ineffective legislation requiring local governments to reconsider, but not to reform, their restrictive zoning policies.
The promoters of accessory housing pointed out that since the first single-family zoning ordinances were enacted in 1916, there had been drastic demographic changes in the United States. Between 1960 and 1980, one- and two-member households increased by 140 percent, while new construction of efficiency and one-bedroom housing units increased by only 54 percent. The percentage of women over 65 living with families of kin fell from 58 percent in 1952 to 18 percent in 1982. By 1985, 25 percent of men and 18 percent of women had never married, and the average number of children in each family had drastically fallen. Today, nearly 63 percent of young American men are single, and marriage rates are plummeting.
These changes underscore the need for more accessory and duplex apartments. Objections to allowing those developments in single-family neighborhoods are frivolous. In the era of large families, population density in single-family neighborhoods was much greater than it would now be if accessory apartments were allowed in those neighborhoods. Today, new families will add relatively few burdens on open space and public utilities.
The more serious and politically salient objection to these developments is the fear that they will change the character of neighborhoods. This fear is aggravated by the new liberal panacea for the nation’s housing programs: local laws prohibiting landlords from discriminating against recipients of federal housing vouchers. Some fear that allowing such developments will bring an influx of crime to the suburbs. This is not a frivolous fear; in the early 1980s, I successfully represented objectors to a multi-family housing project, almost all of whom were black. They had worked and saved to move to the suburbs and did not welcome the arrival of persons who had done neither.
As Patrick Hare and others have suggested, this fear can be obviated by restricting dwelling permits for accessory apartments to houses in which the principal apartment is owner-occupied. Each new arrival in the neighborhood will thus be vouched for by a continuing resident. Upstanding teachers and policemen, whatever their race, will become tenants; criminals, or those associated with them, will not. Accessory-apartment landlords and their neighbors will also be insulated from the “friendly” attention of the federal civil rights agencies by the so-called “Mrs. Murphy’s Boardinghouse Exemption” to the Fair Housing Act.
Governor Kathy Hochul of New York recently proposed legislation liberalizing the construction of accessory apartments and duplexes in residential neighborhoods. It has been ritualistically opposed by many New York Republicans. Those Republicans will be hard-put to explain why home-owners cannot install second kitchens in their own properties to accommodate parents and in-laws, who usually want both propinquity and privacy, and who are presently zoned into the next county.
Why should the rights of property-owners continue to be perversely impaired? Why should extended families be discouraged? Why should voluntary association be prohibited? Why should the deserving but less affluent be relegated to slums or tent cities on the one hand, or to new subsidized housing units constructed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other? The existing housing stock is the sleeping giant of housing policy, as was recognized by scholar Bernard Siegan in his study of zoning in Houston half a century ago. Accessory housing reform is now being discussed in virtually every major metropolitan area. Even the Atlantic recently featured an article entitled “The Housing Revolution is Coming.”
There are reasonable approaches to accessory housing. Republicans and conservatives should embrace them as long-overdue reforms enlarging property and family rights.
The post A Built-In Solution to America’s Housing Shortage appeared first on The American Conservative.
H-1B visa holders are not the world’s best and brightest, so Canada is welcome to them.
That didn’t take long. Earlier this month, Canada announced that it would offer 10,000 work permits to H-1B visa holders in the United States. These workers would be able to move to Canada without having a job offer in place and would be on a path to permanent residency. Within 48 hours of the application portal going live, all 10,000 slots had been filled.
All I can say is: Good luck in Toronto, guys, and make sure you check out the botanical garden.
This move is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s broader immigration plan, which has the goal of raising the annual number of new immigrants to Canada to 500,000 by 2025. That is about twice the number that came in 2014. Canada’s population increased more in the last year than ever before in its history, and the country’s housing market is already deranged from such rapid growth, especially in cities where immigrants tend to settle, such as Toronto and Vancouver.
This new H-1B scheme is aimed at improving Canada’s tech sector and taking advantage of recent layoffs in Silicon Valley, which have hit H-1B visa holders hard. If an H-1B worker is laid off, he has 60 days to find a new job or else he must go back home.
If Canada thinks it is going to scoop up America’s best and brightest with this move, the joke may be on them. The H-1B program was designed to bring in highly skilled workers in science and technology, but it has long since devolved into a way for tech companies to undercut the wages of American programmers by bringing in foreign labor for routine tasks.
The program is rife with corruption, which is not surprising considering that the vast majority of H-1B visa holders come from India, and Indian business culture is characterized by laxity in that department. Common problems include faked qualifications, managers demanding bribes from workers to place them in jobs (several executives at Tata Consulting Services were fired last month in a scandal over exactly this), and collusion among the large Indian consulting firms to flood the visa lottery with applications.
More than half of the computer programmers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. Many of these are H-1Bs or former H-1Bs. The practice of bringing in foreign guest workers totally transformed the tech industry, and not for the better. It has made it harder for Americans to find jobs at these companies and lowered the salaries of the ones who do.
President Donald Trump took several steps toward H-1B reform. He restricted the types of jobs for which H-1B workers could be hired, making it so that many entry-level computer programming positions were excluded, and tightened up the requirement that visa applicants demonstrate “specialized” knowledge or skills. The denial rate rose from 6 percent of H-1B visa applications in 2015 to 32 percent in 2019. He also attempted to raise the “prevailing wage” requirement, which would have made it harder for companies to use H-1Bs to undercut American salaries.
That is what America needs in terms of its foreign tech workers: fewer and better. If Canada wants to move in the opposite direction, they will inflict no harm on the United States by doing so.
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State of the Union: If you believed that a given behavior were moral, would you react like this if a sixth grader disagreed?
Elie Cantin-Nantel, a journalist with the Canadian media organization True North, obtained a 15 minute recording of a teacher at Ontario’s Northwood Public School berating her Muslim students for having skipped the beginning of the school’s annual Pride Month celebration.
The teacher called the students’ abstention an “incredible show of hatred” that was “incredibly disgusting to have witnessed.” The “whole staff,” the board of education, and the superintendent were, she said, disappointed in their refusal to participate. Northwood’s principal later denied that the teacher’s views reflected the school’s.
The recording contains several exchanges between the Muslim students and the teacher that are worth listening to in full. Here’s a particularly revelatory one:
Student: “It’s not that we’re hating on [gay pride], it’s just that we don’t want to support it.”
Teacher: “What would you think if I said, ‘It’s not that I hate Muslims, it’s just that I won’t support them.'”
Student: “But that’s a religion.”
Teacher: “This is the same thing.”
I think the teacher meant that disapproving of a person’s sexual behaviors is just as “bad” as disapproving of his religious beliefs. I don’t think either is bad, frankly. But the plain-text reading of her remarks—”This is the same thing”—implies that gay pride, like Islam, is a religion. I think that’s right, and I think you can tell it’s right by the way people like this teacher insist on converting young children to their faith. As the teacher said:
“You have all voiced to me that you cannot change your religion in order to support LGBTQ. And that is wrong.”
Notice that the teacher assumes, here, that Islam is not true. I agree that it’s not, but that’s not the point: She is begging the question. If Islam is true, and its teachings about sodomy are true, Islam can’t be “changed” to “support LGBTQ” without changing Islam into something else. Once you say two plus two equals five, you’re not doing math anymore.
One last thought. If you believed that a given behavior were moral, would you react the way this teacher did if a sixth grader disagreed?
The post Teacher Heckles Students for Opposing Pride appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nebraska teen who used pills to murder her daughter gets 90 days in jail for burning and hiding the corpse.
The baby-killers have found their first post-Roe martyr.
Celeste Burgess was roughly thirty weeks pregnant—seven and a half months. At that point in development, her child would have been about three pounds and nearly sixteen inches long. You can almost imagine holding her: the little hands, the little eyes and nose, the bald head and shriveled skin. She would be tiny and fragile, but she’d have a pretty good chance of surviving in a hospital if delivered at this stage.
Celeste Burgess, it seems, does not have a healthy person’s moral imagination—to say nothing of maternal instinct.
In messages to her mother disclosed during court proceedings and dated to April 2022, the Nebraska woman discusses the arrival of abortion pills she had purchased with the intent to kill her child, in violation of a state law that permits murder only prior to 20 weeks gestation.
In two messages, Celeste reminded her mother, “Remember we burn the evidence…after everything is out.”
Jessica responded, “Yep.… Yep.… Thought u would b happy 2 hear the stuff came in.”
Celeste: “Yes. … I will finally be able to wear jeans.… F—k yes.… I jumped outta my seat.”
Two months later, police uncovered her infant child’s corpse, burned and buried in a field outside of town.
The details of the investigation that led them there are almost as chilling as the discovery of the child. In an arrest warrant affidavit, Detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk Police Department reported the findings of his initial inquiry, that
Burgess unexpectedly gave birth to her child at home in a bathtub/shower. … Burgess claimed the baby was stillborn. They did not know the exact date but stated it occurred in the early morning hours sometime after midnight. C. Burgess stated after she miscarried she tried to contact J. Burgess via phone but could not wake J. Burgess. Eventually C. Burgess went downstairs and woke J. Burgess up and explained what happened. C. Burgess ended up placing the body of the fetus into a bag, and then they placed the bag into a box in the back of a cargo van on their property.
The affidavit mentions additional messages between the two women in which Celeste discusses how she “can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body.”
Celeste Burgess’s callousness is shocking. The messages disclosed above would horrify any decent human being. To top it all off she could not even remember the date that she supposedly lost her child. She had to scroll through Facebook messages to find an indication, which led to the warrant that uncovered the messages that finally brought her arrest.
Her conduct was profoundly depraved, and the fact that she was sentenced this week for a secondary crime alone—concealing the body of her victim—is far from an overreach. We do not charge bank robbers for speeding on the getaway.
A good many observers, though, seem to see things rather differently.
David Frum, the far-left Canadian warmonger who aided in the murder of countless Iraqis and the senseless deaths of thousands of American soldiers, is horrified at the wrong people.
“They swore up and down they wouldn’t send girls and women to prison for having abortions,” Frum wrote on Twitter Thursday. “They lied.”
He went on: “Will the policing and punishment of women be an important issue in 2024? It sure seemed important to the outcome in 2022 – and that was while the new surveillance regime was still mostly hypothetical. Now it’s becoming real.”
Harry J. Sisson, a Gen Z DNC TikTok activist, pushed similar lies about the Burgess case, writing: “Wow. A teenager in Nebraska was just sentenced to 90 days in jail for using the abortion pill. This is the America Republicans want.”
“Republicans will not let women control their own bodies,” Sisson warned. “According to them, teenagers are old enough to be mothers. It’s horrifying.”
“It’s insane,” the young activist bleated. “A teen doesn’t want to become a mother, and for that, Republicans send her to jail. This cruelty needs to end.”
The New York Times is similarly disturbed. A Thursday report on the killer’s sentencing is headlined “Nebraska Teen Who Used Pills to End Pregnancy Gets 90 Days in Jail.”
In a saner society, the bait of that implicit outrage fishing would be the leniency of that sentence. It takes sixteen paragraphs for the Grey Lady even to admit, “Prosecutors did not charge Celeste Burgess under Nebraska’s abortion law.” The preceding fifteen are devoted to thinly veiled fear-mongering about whether other women might also be jailed for killing their kids. CNN has produced similar coverage fretting about the use of Facebook messages to prove the Burgesses’ crimes.
Never mind that she got off scot-free for the murder. Never mind that the consolation charge of concealing human remains actually concedes the fact of the graver crime. Even the prosecutor “said the sentence ‘seems reasonable,’ since Celeste Burgess had no criminal history,” as recorded in the Times.
Through the lens of pro-choice radicalism—or even of misguided lenience—this might make some sense. Here on earth, the facts remain. For two months a child’s body lay desecrated in the dirt just north of the town where her mother should have raised her. She was killed, and then her corpse was set on fire by the woman God appointed to keep her safe.
This child will never see the light of day, and she will never see earthly justice if 90 days is all that can be rendered.
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The once revolutionary brewery was a victim of its own success.
Last Wednesday, Japan’s Sapporo announced plans to liquidate San Francisco’s iconic Anchor Brewing Company. Amid a frothy market for craft brews, another victim of creative destruction rarely constitutes more than a local story. Yet Anchor’s impending closure is different.
The century-old brewery represented a tangible link between America’s pre-Prohibition beer culture and the nation’s craft-brewing renaissance. After saving the near-bankrupt brewery in 1965, Fritz Maytag earned a place on craft beer’s Mount Rushmore by reviving American brewing with a radically traditional approach. Anchor’s failure not only reflects corporate mismanagement amid macroeconomic headwinds, but also marks the maturation of the movement Maytag pioneered.
At Anchor’s 1896 founding, America’s beer came with a distinctly local flavor. Budweiser’s Clydesdales and Pabst’s never-ending boasts about its blue ribbon at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition both trade on their brands’ nineteenth-century legacies as brewers that harnessed scientific and industrial advances to turn beer into big business. Yet the big four shipping breweries (also including Schlitz and Blatz) accounted for only 8.8 percent of the national market in 1893. George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery and Newark’s Ballantine nearly equaled Anheuser-Busch and Pabst’s scales while providing the New York area with some of its distinct brews—Bavarian-style lagers and hopped pale ales prefiguring the IPA boom, respectively. Hundreds of smaller brewers also held their own by contracting to bring the saloons where Americans drank a local flavor.
In San Francisco, that flavor was steam beer. It was the product of frontier brewers improvising to sate 49ers’ thirst for refreshing lagers—whose yeast ferments best at temperatures below 55 degrees—without cool bierkellers, easy access to ice, or the wave of refrigeration technologies brewers would pioneer over the ensuing decades. Instead, these brewers harnessed Pacific breezes to chill their fermenting beers in shallow, open vessels on brewery roofs called coolships. This process added a steamy presence to the already-foggy San Francisco skyline and likely gave the beer its name. This process’s imperfect temperature control also imparted the bready lager with a high ester profile, giving it fruity notes. It gained a reputation as a “clear, refreshing drink, much consumed by the laboring classes” of San Francisco.
In late 1871, the middle-aged German immigrant Gottlieb Breckle bought a Pork Gulch pool hall and converted it into the Golden City Brewery. The small, old-fashioned brewery went through a quarter-century of new owners and name changes before reorganizing as Anchor Brewery in 1896.
By the turn of the century, Anchor was one of twenty-four breweries in San Francisco, employing fifteen to produce 10,000 barrels of steam beer per year. This placed its sales at half the national average—perhaps tempering its owners’ expectations when they rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake. Even as their rivals invested in state-of-the-art plants, they rushed to rebuild Anchor according to its already antiquated specifications, earning them a quick profit but leaving it a thoroughly unremarkable local brewery through the Prohibition Era.
Prohibition did what the 19th century’s corporate consolidation had failed to do, eliminating many of the nation’s smaller brewers. Some survived by producing near-bear, repurposing their refrigeration equipment to produce ice cream, or selling malt extract—marketed explicitly as a health product and implicitly for homebrewing. Nevertheless, only 756 breweries reopened following repeal, leaving the nation with a thousand fewer breweries than before the Prohibition movement had begun gaining steam in the 1890s.
These trends only accelerated in the post-Prohibition years. New regulations like those establishing the three-tiered distribution system often reflected bootleggers-and-Baptists coalitions between prohibitionists and big brewers hoping to hamper smaller rivals. More importantly, suburbanization meant Americans were increasingly bowling and drinking alone. Rather than enjoying draught at the corner bar, they increasingly drank canned beer at home by the sound of the lawnmower or television simulcasts of the game—brought to you by Miller!
Drinkers of canned beer expected a cheap, consistent product. Both producing and distributing such products came with major economies of scale. Once-competitive local brewers such as Wisconsin’s Effinger Brewing thus received reports from consultants that their products were “a little too flavorful” to compete with “national beer of light and bland character” before admitting defeat. By 1967, America—a nation that had boasted 1,771 breweries in 1895—was down to 124 brewers operating 153 plants producing largely homogenous lagers. This concentration would accelerate as the five largest breweries claimed a 75 percent market share by 1980.
In 1965, Anchor appeared poised to join hundreds of other local breweries in failure. At a time when brewing, canning, and distribution improvements saw the industry’s minimum efficient scale rise to a million barrels per year (a volume only met in a good year by the nation’s biggest brewers before Prohibition), the brewery boasted a mere 50,000-barrel capacity. Worse still, it sold barely 1,000 barrels of oft-spoiled steam beer per year by 1965.
By then, the 27-year-old Stanford grad-school dropout and washing-machine scion, Fritz Maytag, had developed a taste for steam beer—a 19th-century anachronism then only produced at the beleaguered Anchor Brewery. Learning about its impending demise, a curious Maytag visited the brewery and made an impulse purchase: Having already lost thousands and wishing to avoid adding bankruptcies to their credit reports, the brewery’s owners jumped to sell him the majority stake for $5,100. He did not know what he was getting into.
Though it would take a decade for Anchor to turn a profit, the appliance heir had the financial runway to learn the trade and experiment with a radically traditional approach to brewing. Making Jean de Clerck’s two-volume Textbook on Brewing his bible, Maytag would quickly conclude that he had purchased “the last medieval brewery on earth.” Not only did it rely on nineteenth-century equipment, but its brewers also followed techniques of a similar vintage—rather laxly. Given their informal attitude toward sanitation, drinkers were perhaps lucky that Anchor had long brewed too infrequently to maintain its own yeast strain—instead begging yeast off larger Bay-Area brewers, or sometimes using Red Star’s baker’s yeast. Seeking to mitigate the steam beer’s resulting sour, off flavors, the greenhorn brewer set up a small lab where he put his schoolboy’s microscope to use beneath an old engraving of Louis Pasteur—whose studies of beer had not only yielded germ theory but also led to modern, controlled yeast cultures.
Over the following years, Anchor isolated the source of unwanted microbes and adapted stainless-steel equipment from the dairy industry to ensure its beer remained uncontaminated. This meant replacing San Francisco’s last steam-beer coolship with shallow fermenting tanks in a room artificially maintained at 60 degrees. It also embodied the “radically traditional philosophy of brewing” Maytag developed. This approach preserved tradition by going to steam beer’s open-fermentation roots, while harnessing modern precision-brewing techniques rather than merely reproducing the beer as it was made in 1965—an approach that would prove a blueprint for the larger craft movement.
Maytag’s entrepreneurial leisure would also prove the basis of craft beer culture as he branched out from steam beer to reintroduce other beer styles that would become mainstays. First came Anchor Porter, which required sourcing chocolate malts from bakery suppliers. This porter earned praise as “the finest beer made in America” and proved an inspiration for other malty brews.
Still more influential was Anchor’s celebration of the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride. Though mild compared with subsequent West Coast hopstravaganzas, 1975’s Liberty Ale tasted radically bitter at the time, introducing adventurous drinkers to Cascade hops. Recently developed at Oregon State University—ironically with funding from big brewers looking for hops resistant to downy mildew—this piney, floral hop with grapefruit notes would define early craft beers from Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo IPA to Sam Adams’s Boston Lager. The same year Anchor would also introduce the thick, boozy Old Foghorn Barleywine and its annual Christmas Ale, a spiced winter warmer with slightly different recipes each year that not only became a beloved tradition among beer nerds but also pioneered the now-popular strategy of marketing premium beer through limited releases.
Anchor became a place of pilgrimage for many homebrewers inspired by this stable of beers. There, Maytag shared what he had learned while becoming—after building a new factory in 1979—the operator of America’s most modern small brewery. By the late-1970s, these visitors included Sierra Nevada’s Ken Grossman and the short-lived-but-influential New Albion’s Jack McAuliffe, whom Maytag also helped secure supply-chains for malt. These efforts reflected the craftsman’s enthusiasm for his art, but they also reflected a recognition that a rising tide could lift all boats in a tiny, growing market. Publicity for any craft brewer was good publicity for all craft brewers, as America’s ninety breweries became more than a thousand by the mid-1990s with Anchor’s sales topping 100,000 barrels for four consecutive years starting in 1994.
The late ’90s, however, witnessed craft beer’s first shakeout with many weaker breweries collapsing ahead of the sector’s boom in the following decades. Customers were becoming more discerning and increasingly recognized that small didn’t necessarily mean good. Though Anchor weathered this storm better than most, it would prioritize sustainable growth over rapid expansion until a retiring Maytag sold it to two liquor-industry veterans in 2010.
Seeking to maximize the return on their investment, Anchor’s new management reprioritized expansion. They bought new equipment that brought the company’s output to new highs by 2014. They also opened a new taproom to showcase experimental beers that would help Anchor’s then-staid portfolio keep up with craft-brewing trends from fruited sours to milkshake IPAs. Finally, they flirted with building a second brewery to expand capacity to 600,000 barrels, before selling to Japan’s Sapporo in 2017.
At the time, Anchor was the 22nd largest craft brewer in the U.S. Under the Brewers Association’s definition—small, independent, and using adjuncts to barley malt only to enhance flavor—this acquisition saw Anchor joining many others such as Goose Island in losing its craft status. Despite initial optimism about this partnership, it proved ill-fated, culminating in Sapporo USA announcing plans to liquidate Anchor.
Last week’s announcement came after several difficult years. From a peak of over 159,000 barrels in 2014, Anchor’s sales had gradually declined to 35,000 by 2022. For this, many employees and observers have blamed Sapporo. Company spokesman Sam Singer, however, blamed macroeconomic trends and the cost of doing business in San Francisco. “The stake through the heart…was the pandemic,” he added. They’re both right. Brewing in San Francisco has grown increasingly expensive even as the craft market has grown more competitive. And, with draught sales to bars and restaurants having constituted 70 percent of Anchor’s revenue, government diktats closing them was a major blow.
But Sapporo’s management fundamentally misunderstood its acquisition. It initially planned to use the brewery’s excess capacity to make its signature rice lager in the U.S.—despite Anchor’s open-fermentation equipment for steam beers and ales being ill-suited to make rice lager. Like Bud Lite, Anchor has also been the victim of brand mismanagement. Attempting to stave off declining sales amid competition not only from newer craft beers but also alternatives such as hard seltzer, it introduced a major rebrand targeting a younger demographic in 2021. The bland redesign received immediate criticism for looking more like Twisted Tea than Anchor’s foundational craft brew—reflecting the multinational’s limited understanding of Anchor’s brand appeal.
Maytag’s revival of the brewer had depended not only on producing a more flavorful product than macrobrewers but also upon commoditizing California’s brewing tradition. Trademarking the term “steam beer,” Anchor had cultivated a traditional image with Jim Stitt’s hand-drawn labels complementing the handmade beer. The multinational’s rebrand thus antagonized Anchor loyalists while failing to build on a marketable brand and 125-year history that increasingly stood out in a craft beer market, where firms have sought attention through avant-garde packaging or provocations like Revolution’s Baphomet-themed Bock (“a powerful adversary brought forth from traditional German ingredients and a long, cool fermentation time. All hail!”).
Beyond challenging macroeconomic trends and Sapporo’s mismanagement, Anchor has been a victim of its own success. Craft sales have held fast amid the 3.1 percent contraction in American beer sales last year, but the once-collaborative market has become cutthroat as it has matured. Over 9,000 breweries now produce quality lagers, ales, sours, and stouts with Anchor’s radically traditional approach, leaving this pie dividing into ever-more slices.
These slices have also grown increasingly localized. Though a few firms such as Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head, and Deschutes have successfully claimed national markets, others who have expanded with national ambitions may soon fall victim to another craft beer shakeout in a market emphasizing local loyalties and novel experiences over nationally distributed classics like Anchor’s non-Christmas offerings. The rise of family-friendly taprooms, such as Anchor Public Taps, in place of less-inviting beer bars has reinforced this trend, shifting more consumption onsite.
Thus, Bay-Area investors, such as Steve Matthews, who have voiced ambitions to repeat Fritz Maytag’s 1965 rescue mission have mooted the possibility of embracing New Glarus’s successful strategy of deepening local market penetration rather than reentering national markets, which never exceeded 30 percent of Anchor’s sales. Happily for Californian drinkers awaiting another—doubtless very different—Fritz Maytag, it is merely Anchor’s Steam Beer and Christmas Ale that await saving within a flourishing craft.
The post Rest in Peace, Anchor Brewing Company appeared first on The American Conservative.
Martin Peretz’s memoirs are an exercise in shallowness.
The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center, by Martin Peretz, Wicked Son, 336 pages.
The first thing most people remember about Martin Peretz, the longtime owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, is a dust-up that almost seems quaint now. In 2011, Peretz wrote on his blog, The Spine, which he used mostly to bolster American support for Israel, that “Muslim life is cheap” and “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.”
I say quaint because, on the one hand, hardly anyone writes in such a blunt way anymore, and on the other, thinking in this manner is commonplace. Much public debate now is conducted like this: It assumes the same form of glib, thoughtless, and caustic generalizations. In any case, 2011 was a different country—most of us were caught up in Barack Obama’s heady first presidential term—and the incident marked the end of Peretz’s career as a public figure. A few weeks later, he was shouted down by Harvard students at a dinner in his honor (“Racist fool!”), and, the following year, he regretfully sold his magazine and essentially retired.
More than a decade later, Peretz is back to set the record straight with a memoir, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center, in which he settles old scores and makes a case for what he calls “humanized technocracy,” the idea that “smart people who came up through and eventually ran the institutions”—Harvard and The New Republic, in his case—“could make the country better, could save it from extremes.”
The book is a fascinating document, and, in its way, the definitive history of one of the two great political magazines Washington, D.C., produced in the twentieth century. (The other magazine is The Weekly Standard.) But, as I am sure Peretz is well aware, his history makes a case against his own ideals; far from humanizing the Left, The New Republic and Harvard in the second half of the last century nurtured two whole generations of soulless, social-climbing, and ultimately disappointing technocrats, who, once they had learned all the tricks they could from the likes of Peretz, dispensed with him roughly.
There is a fundamental bitterness underlying The Controversialist, and that is in large part its attraction. Peretz has lived a long, varied life, divided among Cambridge, New York, and Washington, D.C. (He also maintains a residence in Tel Aviv.) By his own admission, “one of my greatest flaws is I remember everything,” so he has a lot of gossip. Some of it is benign: he presents the ancient Martin Buber as casually flirting with Susan Sontag at Brandeis—“Young lady, come sit here next to me.” Some of it, in a petty way, is belligerent: he speculates that Hillary Clinton personally uninvited him from state dinners honoring Václav Havel and Ehud Barak. And some of it is just bizarre, as when he defends his old friend Leon Wieseltier from accusations of sexual impropriety: “When you’re as much of a genius as Leon, you get to live in a fantasy world, at least for a while.”
Wieseltier gets off easy because Peretz respects his work and intellect. He also lays off—and even praises—Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kinsley, Charles Krauthammer, and, weirdly, the fabulist Stephen Glass. Other friends and colleagues are not so lucky. Out of his deep memory, Peretz dredges up ugly reminiscences of pretty much every swamp creature who has swum through the national aquarium in the past fifty years.
The worst of it is reserved for his former staffers. Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, was a “nut.” Peter Beinhart, who edited The New Republic during the early Aughts, was “the most self-absorbed person I’d ever met.” And Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder to whom Peretz sold the magazine in 2012, was “a pleasant man—and I don’t really mean that as a compliment.”
But looming over all the gossip is Peretz’s catalog of disappointments. There are many. His own father, of course, was the first, but Julius Peretz was little more than a brute terror. Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of The New Republic, practically on his deathbed urged Peretz to abandon Zionism, a fatal offense. Peretz’s professor at Brandeis, Herbert Marcuse, once a hero, turned out to be a communist sap. (The two had a falling out over the correspondence section of Ramparts.) Norman Mailer wasn’t much better. The great prophet of sexual liberation had become so diminished in Peretz’s eyes near the end of his life that when the two met in a coffee shop, Peretz smirked at him, and Mailer, sensing, rightly, a judgmental bearing, socked him in the gut.
The most painful of Peretz’s disappointments, however, are those that came from people younger than him, the ones whom he had mentored and trained to carry on his project of humanized technocracy. Samantha Power is the prototypical example. In the late Nineties, Peretz had such high hopes for her: She was writing essays on foreign policy that were “brave, motivated, intellectual, dazzling, and idealistic but rooted in reality.”
Power collected them in a book, and, after many publishers turned down the manuscript, Peretz used the magazine’s publishing arm to bring them out in 2002 as A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer and became a classic in its genre. But only a decade later, Power, as ambassador to the United Nations, shocked Peretz when she did not protest the Obama administration’s pussy-footing in Syria. “I was so disappointed in her,” Peretz writes. “She had written the book, and now she was fronting for an administration that had failed in exactly the ways she’d laid out.” But, Peretz sighs, that’s how it is now. Power kept her head down because she was one of “the achievers,” and ultimately, for that set, personal advancement is more important than civic duty.
Much to his dismay, Peretz finds this tendency abounding in the Boomers and Gen Xers he trained either at Harvard or The New Republic. The point of his classes and of the magazine had always been to host the debates that enliven a liberal society. “We thought totalisms were the worst thing there was,” he writes of the magazine. “And we thought maintaining a society of multiplicity meant taking a firm line against totalisms, wherever, whenever, and in whatever guise they existed.”
But when the Clintons and the New Democrats came to power in 1992, many of Peretz’s former acolytes turned out to be the very thing he feared: absolutists, who, having realized that the liberalism of the Sixties was a dead end, embraced a new ideology of bland managerialism, cloaked in the language of popular culture.
The worst offender, of course, was Bill Clinton himself, whom Peretz characterizes as a man who “didn’t care much for history,” and who was “shallow and needy; he thought in images, in photo-ops.” But his staffers and boosters were almost as bad too. John Podesta and Sidney Blumenthal, for instance, the latter of whom was a New Republic staffer, were little more than vain careerists, the representatives of everything tinsel surrounding the administration. “To call them disappointments was an understatement,” Peretz writes. The only one of the New Democrats for whom Peretz reserves praise is Al Gore, one of the few real humanist technocrats (and long Peretz’s favorite student), in his eyes, the tragic hero of the Nineties.
When he looks back on his career in politics, Peretz, unlike many memoirists, is able to diagnose almost exactly what went wrong. It wasn’t a problem with liberalism or with his intentions. It was simply that he never sat down and seriously reflected on his decisions or their consequences. While he was engaging in free and open debate for its own sake, many of his students were discovering that speech, when used artfully, is more powerful as a weapon. (Hillary Clinton once famously claimed she would “crush” those who spoke out against the Clinton health care bill.)
And the most clever soon discovered that speaking artfully doesn’t actually require all that much knowledge; all that is needed is glossy, magazine-grade confidence. And Peretz admits freely that he is to blame for imparting these sensibilities on his followers (and, I add, the readers of his magazine). Early on in college, his professor Frank Manuel told Peretz that he was “skimmer not a plumber”—a compelling, but shallow thinker. “I never forgot these words of his,” Peretz writes. “Alas, they were true.”
In the end, Peretz draws up a ledger dividing good and bad in what he sees as his legacy. On the good side, through Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic was the first and most eloquent voice in the fight for gay marriage (Peretz is gay himself). The publication of The Bell Curve was also a point of satisfaction, as was torpedoing Hillarycare (even if the actual article that did the deed was riddled with error). So was the publication of A Problem from Hell, even though Samantha Power turned out to be a flake. And then of course, there is everything the magazine said and did for Israel, which Peretz regards as his life’s major achievement.
On the bad side, the ledger is less filled out. Peretz regrets that the magazine didn’t publish more on racial issues. He also feels badly about supporting the war in Iraq, though he sees that blunder more as a matter of misplaced faith in the Bush administration than of principle. This is a short list of shortcomings. I feel duty-bound to lengthen it a bit. Peretz recalls that just nine days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he and Wieseltier signed an open letter to the president, urging greater American involvement in the Middle East. The letter was drafted by Bill Kristol. Peretz writes that it was published in the Washington Examiner, which anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of D.C. publications knows cannot be the case (the Examiner was founded in 2005). And anyone with a little understanding of internet caching knows how Peretz made that mistake (the Examiner now hosts The Weekly Standard’s archives). But why should we expect diligence from a dilettante? He was always a skimmer, not a plumber.
The post A Skimmer, Not a Plumber appeared first on The American Conservative.
Sharing dissent cables with Congress is a surprising betrayal of State Department tradition.
Something quite significant in American diplomatic history is taking place—a State Department Dissent Channel message, concerning the evacuation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, is going to be officially shared with members of Congress.
Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, announced that his panel investigating the final days of American presence in Afghanistan will view the Dissent Channel cable. McCaul threatened to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt if he did not provide him access to the diplomatic cable, which came from a “dissent channel” that allows State Department officials to discuss views that differ from White House policy.
It is believed the July 2021 cable discussed concerns from the rank-and-file diplomatic staff not fully shared by senior embassy executives and management about the upcoming American withdrawal from the country, warning that the U.S.-backed Afghan government could fall. The cable specifically advised an earlier withdrawal date than was ultimately chosen by the Biden administration, and may have addressed the decision to conduct one of the largest-ever civilian evacuations from a single airport under fire in Kabul.
So, what is the Dissent Channel and why is this particular cable so important?
The Dissent Channel was set up in 1971 during the Vietnam War era as a way for Foreign Service officers and civil servants at State (as well as United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the former United States Information Agency) to raise concerns to senior management about the direction of U.S. foreign policy without fear of retribution.
The cables (formal, official State internal communications are still referred to as “cables,” harking back to early diplomatic days when telegrams were used exclusively to communicate between Washington and embassies abroad) are sent to the State Department’s policy planning director. He distributes them to the secretary of State and other top officials, who must respond within 30 to 60 days. There are typically about five to ten each year. “Discouragement of, or penalties for use of, the Dissent Channel are impermissible,” according to the State Department internal regulations.
Historical messages include a dissent over the executive branch’s decision to “initiate…no steps to discipline a military unit that took action at My Lai” in Vietnam and the “systematic use of electrical torture, beatings, and in some cases, murder, of men, women, and children by military units in Vietnam.” These actions by U.S. soldiers were “atrocities too similar to those of Nazis.”
Another dissent was over the “hypocritical” U.S. support of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, bemoaning that the U.S. missed a “unique opportunity to intervene for once on the right repeat right side” of history. One older atypical dissent cable complained about having to arrange female companionship in Honduras for a visiting U.S. congressman. One now-declassified cable says, “the Dissent Channel can be a mechanism for unclogging the Department’s constipated paper flow.”
What the channel does is one thing; who gets to see it is another. Until now, dissent messages have generally been regarded as something sacrosanct, not to be shown to outsiders and not to be leaked. “Release and public circulation of Dissent Channel messages,” State wrote to one inquirer, “would inhibit the willingness of Department personnel to avail themselves of the Dissent Channel to express their views freely.”
The messages were first withheld from the rest of government (and the public) by State under the rules that created the system, and later under the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) “predecisional” Exemption 5, until the 2016 FOIA Improvement Act amendments made it illegal for agencies to use this exemption after 25 years. So, sharing the Afghan dissent cable with members of Congress, especially so soon after the administration’s evacuation policy failed in Afghanistan, is a very big deal at the State Department.
One publicized exception to how closely held dissent messages are took place in 2017, when nearly a thousand State Department Foreign Service Officers signed a five-page dissent message opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which prohibited seven additional Muslim nationalities from entering the U.S.—a.k.a., “the Muslim Ban.” As a result of an anti-Trump contingent inside the generally liberal and mostly Democratic-leaning State Department, the message was leaked in its entirety. Even more against precedent, Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer issued a public rebuke to the diplomats: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? They should either get with the program or they can go.”
An almost-leak (a State Department official provided a draft, though the final version was not published, to The New York Times) took place in 2016 during the Trump-Clinton presidential election. Fifty-one Foreign Service Officers criticized the Obama administration via the Dissent Channel for failing to do enough to protect civilians in Syria in what was widely seen as an endorsement of Hillary’s pseudo-promise to put U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Other Trump-era dissent cables not shared outside the Department called for consultations on Trump’s prospective removal from office and rebuked the secretary of State for not forcefully condemning the president over January 6.
To understand fully what the Dissent Channel is requires a better understanding of the State Department culture: academic in nature but frighteningly risk-averse. The academic side reflects the Department’s modern origins: a body composed of members who are “male, pale, and Yale,” a place where a tradition of loyal opposition holds sway. But it is the risk-averse side that explains how important revealing the Afghan cable is. Dissent messages are signed; anonymity is not allowed. While Blinken promised to not show the names of those who signed the Afghan cable to Congress, State senior management will know exactly who wrote what.
In addition, Dissent Channel messages must still be cleared at the post of origin for transmission to the secretary of State, although there is no requirement everyone at the mission agree with the contents per se (authorization does not imply concurrence). Thus, one’s colleagues also know who wrote what, potential dynamite in an organization where dissent is otherwise not encouraged and corridor reputation plays a deciding role in promotions and future assignments. It is a significant step to write or sign a dissent cable and, despite the regulations’ admonishment that use of the Dissent Channel not be discouraged by supervisors, it is often discouraged anyway.
Nobody at Kabul who signed that dissent message, basically telling the ambassador and the Biden administration that they were wrong, expected to have their opinions shown to Congress; quite the opposite. Blinken, by sharing the cable with Congress, is breaking faith with his institution and with his frontline workers in an uncollegial way that they could imagine only during the Trump administration. Once upon a time, something like that would have called for dissent.
The post Blinken’s Breach of Faith appeared first on The American Conservative.
The incoherent nattering about religious liberty in Ukraine shows that “liberal values” are beside the point.
If the Ukraine war has a winner, surely it must be Patrick Deneen. Apparently both Russia and NATO are conspiring to prove that liberalism has well and truly failed. Russia’s case is more obvious, but NATO’s is far more interesting. Take, for instance, the recent clash between the Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
For those who don’t know, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was founded in the 10th century by Byzantine missionaries, back when Kiev was the political and spiritual capital of the Slavic world. Until the 1990s, it remained formally united to the Moscow Patriarchate, also known as the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The UOC has long since been surpassed, however, by the Orthodox Church in Ukraine (OCU).
The OCU traces its roots back to the 1920s, when Ukrainian nationalists made their first bid for a “patriotic” church. For decades, pro-Western politicians like Volodymyr Zelensky openly backed these patriotic churches—including the OCU—against the UOC for nakedly political reasons. So has NATO, as a matter of fact.
In the past, the Ukrainian government was content merely to seize UOC property and bequeath it to the OCU. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, however, Zelensky’s government has waged all-out war against the UOC. Asset seizures have escalated, while members of the clergy are routinely arrested on trumped-up charges of collaborating with the Russians.
Even if the UOC were pro-Russian, the Zelensky government’s actions would violate the basic principles of liberalism. What’s insane is that the UOC’s bishops have condemned the invasion repeatedly. They have also severed communion with the Patriarch of Moscow over his support for the war.
So, why does the Zelensky government hate the UOC? Because it’s not anti-Russian. It doesn’t reject Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s roots in the ROC. Culturally, it’s more “Slavic.” Its priests are more likely to study in Russian seminaries.
Zelensky and his comrades, then, are just plain old bigots. They’re like those American Protestants who complained that, because Catholic priests sometimes go to seminary in Europe, they must secretly be agents of the Habsburg Empire.
This is exactly the point Carlson was making in his exchange with Pence. He demanded to know why the former vice president, as a “prominent Christian leader,” failed to condemn Zelensky for persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Pence responded that he’d spoken with Zelensky and “the leader of the Orthodox Church” at “St. Michael’s in Kiev.”
He assured me that the Zelensky government in Ukraine was respecting religious liberty even while recognizing that there were very small elements of the Russian Orthodox Church that were being utilized for advancing the Russian cause in Ukraine and they were taking steps to hold them to account.
First, St. Michael’s is the headquarters of the OCU. The bishop of a pro-government church assured Pence that the government was respecting the religious freedom of its rival. Second, by the Russian Orthodox Church, he means (of course) the Ukrainian Orthodox. That’s a moniker used by the UOC’s opponents, both in Ukraine and the West. The ROC has no presence in Ukraine.
The Zelensky government hand-fed Pence this propaganda. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he spewed it back out on international TV.
If Pastor Mike had spent just five minutes googling “Orthodoxy in Ukraine,” he could have spared himself this embarrassment. Of course, that’s asking way too much from an American politician. What’s striking is that conservative journalists—intelligent, thoughtful, informed chaps—are coming to his defense.
Over at National Review, for instance, Noah Rothman declares:
Ukrainian security services conducted raids on pro-Russian religious enclaves after, in one instance, congregants were filmed singing hymns to Russia’s “awakening.” At the regional level, Ukrainian authorities have pursued bans on the Russian-aligned Orthodox Church of Ukraine, citing the ways in which it “ideologically validates and supports the war, and justifies the war crimes that Russia commits on Ukrainian territory.”
It may be anathema to Americans, for whom the Bill of Rights is a civic religion, to violate the separation of church and state in wartime. But that is not the social covenant that prevails in Eastern Europe, and certainly not amid the closest thing the world has seen to total war since 1945. Those separations are observed by neither the state nor the church.
Here we have the perfect example of Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility. It will never happen, and when it does, you Russophiles will deserve it.
Michael Brendan Dougherty has done a bang-up job pointing out all the problems with Rothman’s article. Still, I do think there’s one further point that has to be made.
One could argue that Pence and Rothman have no idea what they’re talking about. That would be correct. Yet, in both cases, that ignorance is totally willful. Neither of them really cares about religious freedom in Ukraine.
Pence clearly doesn’t care, because he knows less about the issue than the average Fox News viewer. And Rothman clearly doesn’t care, because—well, he said so. He doesn’t actually believe that the principle of religious liberty established by our Constitution is self-evident, inalienable, established by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” In fact, he talks about the Bill of Rights the same way a Catholic integralist might—as though it’s some quirky American superstition, part of our “civil religion,” which Ukraine is right to reject. “It’s good that Ukraine has no First Amendment,” he seems to say. “This way, they can really take a swing at reactionary Russkies.”
To be fair, I’m not a First Amendment absolutist either. Then again, no one is. That’s kind of the point.
Zelensky’s apologists say the Ukrainian government must use illiberal means to defend liberal ends. But, of course, there are no such things as “liberal ends.” The whole point of liberalism is to be value-neutral. It’s only concerned with procedure. To a liberal, it shouldn’t matter whether Ukrainians are UOC or OCU or Catholic or Muslim or Scientologist—so long as every man gets to choose his own faith.
That’s not what Zelensky wants. It’s not what Pence wants. It’s not what Rothman wants. It’s not what anyone in the pro-Ukraine camp wants. And, for the record, I agree with Deneen: I don’t think they can see their own hypocrisy. They may even prefer religious liberty. But they won’t insist on it. For them, the most important thing is to defeat the Russians. The ends justify the means.
This is the point that anti-interventionists have been making all along. NATO isn’t pro-Ukraine: It’s anti-Russian. We aren’t fighting to make Ukraine safe for “liberalism.” We’re fighting to make the world safe for progressivism.
Both Ukraine and Russia are corrupt oligarchies. Both countries’ rulers violently suppress their political opponents. Both countries were murdering civilians in Donbas before the 2022 invasion. The difference? Ukraine embraces Western decadence, while Russia rejects it.
This is a war between ideologies: Russian illiberalism and Western illiberalism. Indeed, the War in Ukraine has exposed just how little our own ruling class—“conservatives” like Pence and Rothman included—care about freedom of religion.
No doubt that our elites would love to deal with Christian dissidents the way Zelensky has dealt with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (i.e., the same way China deals with the Roman Catholic Church). And when that shoe drops, there will be no shortage of “conservatives” to explain how much Christians love the taste of jackboot.
The post Ukraine’s Illiberalism, and Ours appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Dan Snyder, and potentially the Washington Commanders, are on the way out.
Last Thursday, the NFL approved Dan Snyder’s sale of the Washington Commanders to a group led by investor Josh Harris. The sale represents the end of Snyder’s often incompetent but always entertaining ownership of one of football’s most historic and embattled franchises.
People in Washington will remember Snyder for having fielded a consistent loser. He contributed to the collapse of Robert Griffin III’s career and squandered what, by any standard, was the most talented coaching staff any NFL team has assembled in two decades.
They will also remember him for caving and changing the franchise’s “Redskins” moniker in 2020. Snyder, a lifelong Redskins fan who bought the team with borrowed cash, told reporters in 2013 that the team would “never change the name” on his watch. “It’s that simple,” he said. “NEVER—you can use caps.”
Polling from the Washington Post consistently showed that Native Americans didn’t mind the “Redskins” name. But Native American advocacy groups had long touted studies purporting to show that Native imagery had a negative effect on children’s self-worth, and their cause to ban Indian mascots had gained momentum with the broader embrace of racial and identity politics on the American left.
In 2020, after a black man died in Minneapolis police custody, an array of progressive forces—media, activists, and corporations—insisted that his death “raised questions” about the appropriate use of Native American imagery in sports, and turned up the pressure on the Cleveland Indians, Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, and Washington Redskins to change their names.
A group of investors, collectively worth more than $620 billion, pressured the owners of Nike, FedEx, and Pepsi to sever their connections with the Redskins organization in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Nike, the NFL’s uniform and primary retail provider, dropped Redskins merchandise from its stores. FedEx threatened to pull its name from Washington’s stadium if Snyder didn’t change the name.
Snyder, sensing the costs of standing his ground, capitulated. He determined the club would be called the “Washington Football Team” until a new name was agreed upon. In 2022, the team settled on “Commanders” as its new nickname.
An ESPN reporter told Rich Eisen there is a “pretty good chance” the new ownership will change Washington’s team’s name again. ’Skins fans may not be able to get two decades of bad football back, but reinstalling their old name would be a bit of poetic justice.
The post Farewell, Dan Snyder appeared first on The American Conservative.
Half of Spain is furious at the sociologists and pollsters for having been so wrong.
Old G.K. Chesterton urged us always to drink because we are happy and never because we are sad. Yesterday I failed to comply with the advice of the sage Londoner, but there were compelling reasons.
All the polls that assured us a swing to the right in Spain’s July 23 general election were wrong. All hopes that a country with weight in Europe would join Giorgia Meloni’s Italy in stopping the E.U.’s leftward drift have vanished. All hopes that change in Spain and Italy could represent a major force at the U.N. in bringing the West back to common sense, abandoning the predations of wokeism and environmentalism have also gone to hell. There was not enough whiskey in Spain last night for us conservatives to wash down so much disappointment.
Explaining what has happened to people outside of Spain is difficult, and not only because of the hangover. The center-right Popular Party, led by Alberto Nunez Feijoo, won the elections, but it would be easier for Al Gore to pass through the eye of a needle than for the P.P. to govern. The Spanish electoral system is not presidential but parliamentary. To govern with full powers, with an absolute majority, a party needs to obtain at least 176 seats, or else make a pact with another friendly party until they reach that majority.
The Popular Party has obtained 136 seats against the 122 of the current prime minister, the Socialist Pedro Sanchez. But even adding the friendly votes, from the right-wing Vox to like-minded minority parties, the P.P coalition would be five representatives away from being able to govern. Feijoo says he wants to govern in minority, but in order to be invested the Socialists would have to abstain in the vote. That, less than a possibility, is a joke.
Sanchez is an unscrupulous individual capable of doing anything to stay in power. He embodies something akin to Sanders’s political program, albeit with Biden’s moral laxity. To achieve his investiture, Sanchez would have to enter a pact with Communists, Basque and Galician independents, the heirs of the terrorist group ETA, and those convicted on charges related to the secessionist coup in Catalonia in 2017 whom he subsequently pardoned. None of these parties offer their support for free: All are already demanding power. They want the independence of their regions and the construction of far-left republics in, at least, Catalonia and the Basque Country, which would mean the end of Spain as we know it and a new problem for the whole of Europe.
Internationally, the allies of the Spanish left are neither Brussels nor the Atlanticism with which Aznar and Bush brought the United States and Spain closer than ever, but Latin American Bolivarian tyrants and obscure allies from nearby, where Islam is the official state religion. Sanchez is about to form a government in Spain with the sum of each and every one of Spain’s enemies. What could possibly go wrong?
His case should be studied everywhere. He represents the most dangerous type of leftist because, though he does not believe in anything, he is capable of oscillating between progressivism and populist extremism without batting an eye if it allows him to stay in government. His administration has been rife with scandal and yet he has obtained many more votes than expected.
His incompetence is endless, and it is hard to understand why he has been voted for by nearly 7,700,000 people—compared to the little more than 8,000,000 who voted for the P.P. If I had more faith in mankind I would be inclined to believe that this is a result of rigging, but then I would be a leftist. Actually, I feel closer to H.L. Mencken here: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
What is happening in Spain is happening all over the West. The left has so triumphed in its cultural, educational, and media wars, has so inoculated relativism and sectarianism, that its leaders can commit the worst barbarities and still receive millions of votes. This forces the conservatives to draw up a plan that goes beyond winning the next election. Although, unfortunately, the only way to implement it would be to start by winning the next elections.
Returning to Spain, the Vox party of Santiago Abascal has lost power, but has remained above what the polls were saying, with three million votes. Vox is important because its seats are necessary for the P.P. to hypothetically govern at some point, and Abascal will never let center-right Feijoo turn social democratic and dangerous like Emmanuel Macron.
The other good news, if we can call it that, points to the fact that Sanchez—in order to buy the support of Catalan separatists and the Basque philo-terrorists—will have to take steps that the Spanish constitution does not allow him to take. He has two ways forward: to dismantle the constitution (most likely), and perhaps even dethrone our beloved King Felipe VI, or to condemn the country to an institutional blockade until new early elections end this unexpected standoff between right and left…if they end.
Now half of Spain wants to hang sociologists and pollsters for having been so wrong and having created false hopes. It so happens that, as a sociologist by training, I already had the worst possible opinion of us and our scientific techniques before knowing the election results. Speaking of hanging: Vox campaigned on throwing the U.N. Agenda 2030 into the wastebasket. Both Davos and the European Commission expressed concern about the dangers of a government with Vox, but you can bet that no liberal institution will say anything about the imminent possibility of Spain becoming a Venezuela at the heart of the E.U.
Nevertheless, do not look for me amongst the mourners. Centuries ago, a Spain devastated by Islam and almost rendered extinct raised its morale and mounted the Reconquista—thanks, in large part, to the protection and the apparitions of St. James. We continue to trust in his protection, although it does feel today like he wants us to beg for it.
The post Spain Has Fallen Before appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senator Marco Rubio’s new book takes leaders of both parties to task for selling out American workers.
Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity, Marco Rubio, Broadside Books, 212 pages.
In practice, the neoliberal order is alive and kicking: If you’re a wage-earner, your employer can minutely surveil your activities and subject you to coercion in a thousand unjust ways, and your job, wages, and benefits might all spell precarity. If you are the owner of a brick-and-mortar store on Main Street, your business is ever menaced by Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies. The social media company you use to access information and voice your views, meanwhile, wields an enormous amount of power over you, an unaccountable power you can’t challenge in court or at the ballot box. And the real-world downtown you grew up in may well be strewn with needles and lost to the blessings of free trade.
All this and more are the baleful effects of the neoliberal era that displaced the New Deal order beginning in the 1970s, and we are still a long, long way from a real turnaround. But at least in the realm of ideas, it is safe to say that neoliberal ideology is under severe pressure from left and right. Free-trade skepticism, once confined to the anti-globalization left and the paleocon right, is now the conventional wisdom on the editorial pages of the Financial Times. Many in the international shipping business believe that they will never get to restore the capillary supply chains that spanned the pre-Covid world. CEOs whine about the “end of globalization.” And no less important a figure than National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan proclaims that the Washington Consensus has failed at home and abroad.
The latest and most impressive sign comes courtesy of Marco Rubio, via his stunningly forthright new book, Decades of Decadence, in which the Florida senator takes on neoliberal elites of both parties, but especially his own, for pursuing the doctrine heedless of “the consequences that their actions might have.” The book reaffirms Rubio’s status as one of the brightest stars of the right’s new political-economy constellation, and a worthy champion of a latter-day American System for promoting a production-oriented economy that works for workers.
What struck me most reading Decades of Decadence was the author’s willingness to call out Republicans, and especially the Republican donor class, for their role in bringing about an economy in which it takes the median male worker “sixty-two weeks in a fifty-two-week year” to earn enough to pay for basic necessities, compared with 40 weeks in 1985; an American economy that had become so dependent on Chinese industry, it couldn’t produce masks and many medicine ingredients at the height of the pandemic; an economy in which the bottom half of the labor market hasn’t enjoyed any growth in real wages for the better part of two generations.
Rubio lays plenty of blame at the feet of neoliberal Democrats from the 1990s for all this, but he doesn’t spare Republicans. The reason the Republican Party has abandoned the working class, he argues, isn’t all that complicated. It is because of the GOP “donor class” and the way their beliefs are “treated as gospel” by most Republican lawmakers, even though those beliefs are “so often wrong for the country.” Attending donor meetings, he recalls, “one thing I rarely heard was that this Fortune 500 company CEO is really interested in moving supply chains back to America. Or that Wall Street guy is very concerned about China’s exploitation of our capital markets.” After all, “for these people, the economy is working just fine.”
Likewise, Rubio has no patience for conservative ideologues who preach virtue and self-improvement but pay no mind to how the material order removes these things from the reach of ordinary workers. “Cultural decline,” he writes, “isn’t an issue that is isolated from economic decline. Dignity comes from a job, and so a difficult economy is a drag on the dignity of workers in that economy. For a long time it has been impossible to acknowledge this inside America’s conservative movement.”
Another sign of the times: In addition to allies like the brilliant Oren Cass, Rubio approvingly cites the progressive Economic Policy Institute (which indeed does excellent work on issues like arbitration abuse in the workplace, unions and de-unionization, free speech in employment, and much more). And he heaps praise on Sen. Bernie Sanders and several other left-of-center figures for presciently warning about the consequences of neoliberal ideology years and sometimes decades earlier. These are all optimistic indicators that a post-neoliberal consensus may truly be around the corner. And it suggests that such a consensus can and must be forged in the middle, between left and right.
The post Rubio’s Reveille appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Machines seem “objective,” but often reflect their designer’s subjective preferences.
Michael Toscano’s review of Matthew Crawford’s books and thought on technology was published in our latest print issue and is now featured on our homepage. It is one of my favorite recent pieces at TAC.
Toscano describes the distinction that Crawford draws between tools that “extend human mentality outward” and those, like social media, that “foster a different kind of selfhood.”
The sense one has when scrolling is universality—of being lifted out of one’s immediate surroundings to wherever the spirit leads. Does a conversation bore you? Then scroll. Driving? Then scroll. This sense of seamlessness and easy mastery is reinforced by social media, which relocates “connections” into placeless electronic networks, where one cannot be seen and one’s flaws can be hidden. One’s online avatar is a fully controllable brand.
Social media promises users greater connectivity with their peers. Paradoxically, though, it alienates users from one another by offering a highly addictive, curated experience designed to keep them scrolling:
Rather than unburden the user, these machines contract his mental and physical extension by addicting him to a device that apes mastery but provides none. This makes him more manipulable by choice architects who are secretly pushing the user down predetermined channels. Every click is nudged, tracked, analyzed, and either sold for profit or marked for divergences. As Crawford puts it, “the diversity of human possibility [is] being collapsed into a mental monoculture—one that can more easily be harvested by mechanized means.”
On its face, the technology seems neutral. Social media companies call their products “platforms” to evoke in users a sense that they can “build” their own identities on the apps without interference. But it is a patina of neutrality. Behind the curtain, people, whom Toscano calls “choice architects,” are making conscious value judgments about users’ experiences.
We assume that machines—a speed camera on the roadway, a self-driving car—are inherently more “objective” decision-makers than are the human beings they replace. But in each case, human judgement has not been eliminated, only been bumped up a level. The builders of these machines make value judgements, which appear to end-users as being “objective,” but are only objective inasmuch as they execute, without discrimination, the creator’s subjective designs:
If you have ever passed a state trooper going fifteen over and he just lets you drive on, it’s because, in his judgment, you were driving safely, whatever your speed. Law enforcement by camera knows no such nuance. It is deferred to as “objective.” “Machines don’t make judgments,” Crawford says. “They do, however, offer an image of neutrality and necessity, behind which the operation of human judgment becomes harder to make out, and harder to hold to account.”
Take, as a low stakes example, the debate over baseball’s potential embrace of a robotic strike zone. The rulebook defines a strike as a pitch that crosses home plate below the top of a batter’s chest and above the bottom of his kneecap when “the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Deciding when a batter “is prepared to swing” requires human judgment. A robotic strike zone would take the necessary judgment call out of the hands of on-field umpires and delegate it to nerds in a skybox.
In other words, what appears to be an objective judgment from a machine often reflects the subjective choices of the designer, and raises questions about the responsibility of users and designers in contexts far more important than baseball, such as in traffic fatalities:
Driverless cars, Crawford believes, will drive a rift between human beings and their actions that may very well disrupt our self-understanding as ethical beings. If you are being chauffeured about in an automated Google device and the A.I. makes a dumb move and a child is fatally struck, who is to blame? You? The engineers to whom the A.I. is a black box? Google? Do you have any confidence whatsoever that anyone will be held liable?
Proponents of these technologies will have to answer. And Toscano, in his piece, performs a service in asking the right questions.
The post Men or Machines? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Christopher Nolan is the foremost cinematic proponent of the Great Man Theory of history.
What causes tragedy? Common wisdom dictates choices. Choices have consequences. Nemesis follows Hubris. The ancients, however, argued that fate is a much stronger determinant.
Sometimes humans do not have a choice. The great war was destined in Mahabharata. Paris was cursed, regardless of his particular choice among three of those who had power over his fate. Penelope was doomed to sit and wait for Odysseus in the prime of her youth, purely because her fate was entwined with that of a hero whose choices would have epoch-defining consequences. Those who truly have power over your fate are often not merciful.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a cinematic tragedy of a scale that we have not seen in a while, and will perhaps not again in a long time.
Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus; the Promethean theme of attempting to imitate the gods at a formidable and unrecognized cost is eloquently showcased throughout the movie. It traces the backstory of the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, and presents his personal haunting at the time of his supreme triumph, and the seeds of subsequent tragedy.
The book depicts our protagonist as borderline neurotic and somewhat sexually awkward in his formative years, although his womanizing was notorious even by the standards of those days. The movie avoids most of that for the sake of plot. The cerebral Oppenheimer finds himself out of place at stuffy Cambridge, the ever-present ritualistic social conformity of a dying empire that might be familiar to comparativists and historians. But he is in Europe, so he meets Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Already a rising star and a legend in his own mind, Oppenheimer wants to bring the “new science” back to the new world—to help man conquer nature and unleash the power of the gods.
Back in America, his research is punctuated by his tormenting affair with a young communist and psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh. Tatlock, haunted by her own demons, took her own life at the height of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project. “You think the rules don’t apply to the Golden Boy?” a broken and depressed Tatlock asks Oppenheimer a year before her demise after he says he needs to be disconnected from her, due to his duty to the nation (and to his wife and family).
“You drop in and out of my life,” she says. “That’s power.” History often forgets the muses of great men. Lord Nelson died a hero. Emma Hamilton died a heavily indebted alcoholic, drinking laudanum. There is never a blue plaque for every inspiration.
The story follows Oppenheimer’s recruitment by Leslie Groves—a laconic Matt Damon—to lead an all-star secretive project. Hitler was already ahead in pursuit of the ultimate weapon, but Hitler and Heisenberg had one significant disadvantage. European conformity coupled with Aryan supremacy and antisemitism led to the continent’s greatest brains moving to America. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Feynman, and Teller design the “gadget” under the fathomless and hyperventilating score by Ludwig Göransson. Oppenheimer named the project “Trinity,” an allusion to both three-headed Brahma and to the memory of the then-deceased Jean Tatlock, who introduced Oppenheimer to the 16th-century metaphysical poems of John Donne.
Nolan is the foremost cinematic proponent of the Great Man Theory of history, a master depictor of tortured souls who are better than their fellow men, the agonists of history, heroes who are doomed to suffer for a higher calling.
“The bigger the star, the more violent its demise,” says Oppenheimer, played in by a gaunt Cillian Murphy with a bemused and stoic half-smile in his greatest performance to date. Fate eventually caught up with Oppenheimer. Despite not acting on behalf of any hostile foreign state, his Platonic “global government” sympathies and communist associates—including his formerly card-carrying wife, Kitty—made him an enemy of the state.
The result was a show-trial, and the demise of the age of larger-than-life great men and the dawn of the age of bureaucracy. In Socratic irony, Lewis Strauss (a superlative Robert Downey Junior) sets the trap to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. “Amateurs chase the sun and get burned. Power stays in the shadows,” he muses. An ethos that has only gotten more powerful in our unaccountable imperial bureaucracy.
Interestingly, another great man of history was close to Oppenheimer during those days. George Kennan, who similarly suffered a fall from grace, watching his theory of “containment” completely co-opted by the mindless swarm bureaucracy, became close to Oppenheimer. Kennan and Oppenheimer exchanged letters and were colleagues at Princeton; they shared similar realist aims of co-existence and global equilibrium.
In one of the most interesting quotes, Edward Teller tells Oppenheimer, “You see beyond the world we live in. There is a price to pay for that.”
Oppenheimer was by no means a moral force or a saint. But modern history is rarely made by ascetics. It is made by tortured, haunted, detached, amoral men, who are often the cause of untold suffering to their loved ones. They are despised by simpletons but pave the path to painful progress of the species. There is always a price to pay.
Greatness is inevitably entwined with tragedy.
The post Oppenheimer and the Roots of Tragedy appeared first on The American Conservative.
Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago, or even 30 years ago.
Last week, Magic Johnson, one of the new owners holding a minority stake in the Washington Commanders, said that the capital’s football team may well be renamed again in the next few years.
“Everything’s on the table, right? Especially after this year. We’ll see where we are with the name,” Johnson told NBC. “We’re going to spend this year understanding what we have in place. The name of the team will come up eventually.”
The franchise’s majority owner, Josh Harris, has also discussed the potential for a name change. While he said that his top priority for the team is winning—a welcome change from the previous owner—he also indicated that he cares about pleasing the fans. And a name change would be a big part of achieving that goal. Within 24 hours of the NFL’s approval of Harris’s purchase, he received multiple requests from fans begging for him to ditch the Commanders’ name.
Most people, of course, want to revert back to the Redskins. After more than 20 years of controversy, capped by a painful, protracted transition to the new name, the Redskins is still the name by which most Washingtonians call their team. The evidence of its longevity is everywhere: The logo is still plastered on many city playgrounds, as well as the old highway signs indicating the exit for RFK Stadium (whose closure in favor of an all-but inaccessible suburban monstrosity is another sore spot). The Redskins have a powerful pull, not just on the grandpas who wear burgundy and gold polos to church on Sunday, but also on the college kids down the street from my house, who, every weekend in the fall, play beer pong on a table painted to look like the Joe Gibbs–era FedEx Field.
I am sympathetic to these longings, but, when I consider the proposition practically, I don’t see it becoming reality. Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago when the team’s founder, George Preston Marshall, successfully marketed the Redskins as the “team of the South,” bringing with him all the baggage that appellation entailed. It’s not even the city it was a little more than 30 years ago, when, under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership, the Redskins won their last Super Bowl. In that era, the ’Skins still played in RFK, a formidable inner-city stadium with a dirt field, crumbling locker rooms, and grandstands so small that fans practically participated in the games themselves.
There’s no going back to that time. These days, D.C. is a big, professionalized town, populated more or less permanently by transplants uninterested in the locals’ backward old ways. Even if, by some miracle, the new owners did toss the Commanders name and revive the Redskins, I suspect it would be in some ersatz, unsatisfying manner. The diminishment would leave fans wishing they had let the dead bury the dead.
Instead, I propose that Josh Harris et al. do something truly bold. The Redskins aren’t coming back, and the Commanders can’t stay. Barring another pathetic attempt at a rebrand (Would anyone really accept the Pigskins? the Redtails? the Red Hogs?) that leaves us with one option, and I think it is the best one: The Washington Football Team.
That name, which we enjoyed only for two years, was not so much chosen as it was bestowed on the team. The strange conflation of a summer’s worth of racial unrest and credible allegations of sexual impropriety in July 2020 finally forced Dan Snyder’s hand, and he dropped the Redskins name. But since the beginning of football season was just weeks away—and Snyder’s legal team didn’t have the wherewithal to secure the rights to another name—he was forced to settle on what most people decried as a bland placeholder.
But even at the time, I saw things differently. Washington Football Team is a simple statement of fact—a plainspoken advertisement for itself, like all great American brands. And the fashion in which it fell upon the city was oracular: the name neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign. (And for die-hard Redskins fans, it was a tabula rasa. When someone said The Team, with a certain emphasis, you knew exactly what he meant.) And the name probably would have stuck around, too, after Taylor Heinicke’s miracle play in the 2021 Wildcard playoff game, had he led the team to victory and ended Tom Brady’s career early. How I wish he did! The thrill of a real win—the team’s first in the playoffs since 2005—would have been enough to make the placeholder permanent.
It wasn’t meant to be then. But now, with new ownership, there’s time again to make amends. “If one cannot attain to a high standard,” Shirley Hazzard wrote of her time at the United Nations, “the least one can do is to be disappointed in oneself.” That maxim could be applied to Washington and its football team as well. The past 20 years have been a mess of mismanagement, resentment, and wrecked quarterbacks. We’ve been given ample time to be disappointed in our shortcomings. Now it’s time to get back to basics: Washington. Football. Team.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the last Redskins Super Bowl was over 40 years ago. It was in fact in 1992, over 30 years ago.
The post The Case for the Washington Football Team appeared first on The American Conservative.
The White House has an obligation to explain, explicitly and officially, what we are trying to achieve in Ukraine.
Within a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced during a press briefing that President Biden was traveling to Europe to send a “powerful message that we are prepared and committed to this for as long as it takes.”
Soon after, other top officials in the administration, including the president himself, began parroting this same message. Yet to this day, it remains unclear to Americans what “victory” means for us in Ukraine.
One theory suggests the United States should facilitate peace talks to prevent the spread of the war from entering a NATO member country. While that’s a just cause, our government has thus far guaranteed a continuous stream of funding and weaponry to Zelensky and scuttled efforts for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Another theory, that proffered by Secretary Blinken, entails removing all Russians from Ukraine, including Crimea, a territory that Ukraine has not controlled since 2014. This mission would require drastically different resources from our government—and it’s one that Congress should debate before sending another dime of assistance to Ukraine. Meanwhile, if this is the mission, Ukraine lacks the means to achieve it. Zelensky has been unable to garner the combat power necessary to achieve that decisive outcome.
The most radical theory, championed by acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, would entail a war crimes tribunal for Putin, and potentially regime change in Russia. Fundamentally, this approach would require active combat directly with Russia and would be an act of aggression on our part.
Make no mistake, the United States is currently in a proxy war with Moscow. The Biden administration is obligated to inform Americans if its mission is to facilitate a broader war with Russia—and Congress must hold the White House accountable.
To date, Congress has appropriated more than $113 billion to Ukraine, even though it’s impossible to properly allocate resources to a cause without first defining what the United States intends to accomplish. While Zelensky has inspired our support and Ukraine has waged a strong defense, the war has reached a stalemate that ultimately favors Russia.
To sustain the status quo, war hawks here will doubtless push for another Ukraine supplemental appropriations bill this fall, even as our citizens have grown increasingly skeptical of America’s participation.
Congress should not contemplate additional funding until the administration provides us with a comprehensive strategy. Instead, I constantly hear war hawks espousing the phrase, “If only Ukraine had more weapons, they could defeat the Russians.” This logic has failed repeatedly. While it is grinding down part of the Russian army, it is destroying Ukraine and depleting their ability to sustain combat.
After Zelensky rallied Ukraine’s defense against the Kremlin’s initial invasion, we were told Javelin missiles would alter the course of the war in Ukraine’s favor. Not long after, certain war hawks claimed a no-fly zone, enforced by the United States Air Force, was the answer to winning the war. Proponents of this policy skipped the details: An American-enforced no-fly zone would effectively declare war against Russia. Our military would not only shoot down Russian planes, but also attack any Russian anti-aircraft systems on the ground.
As the war drags on, calls have grown for “bigger and badder” weapons, shifting from Abrams tanks to long-range missiles to F-16 fighter planes to cluster munitions. As the cost and weapons employed escalates, the Biden administration still parrots the same “as long as it takes” approach without specifying what they want to do.
Meanwhile, the lack of accountability and in-depth media coverage leaves the American people in the dark about our involvement in Ukraine—as was done in prior endless wars.
In recent weeks, NATO issued an announcement from their Vilnius summit stating, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO….”
As a former Army Ranger, I recognize that without a defined mission from the Biden administration, there is no way to develop explicit objectives, allocate the proper resources, hold anyone accountable for failure, or honestly claim “mission accomplished.”
That is precisely how the United States ended up with former President George W. Bush aboard an aircraft carrier flight deck with a “Mission Accomplished” banner draped behind him on May 1, 2003. Everyone knew Bush’s infamous speech was not the end of the war; the United States proceeded to stay in Iraq until officially withdrawing in 2011. Despite this major foreign policy failure, no one has ever been held accountable.
While the circumstances are different, the lessons learned from that moment should be applied now. Congress, and the American people, must be given a mission statement for America’s involvement in Ukraine. It’s the only way to seriously debate our participation and ensure the American people aren’t sleep-walking into another endless war.
The post Define the Mission appeared first on The American Conservative.
Some things should not be done again.
I look forward to calls for peace talks in Ukraine from National Review and worry what it will mean for global plate tectonics if Japan migrates into the North Atlantic. The Oppenheimer movie seems to have Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the brain of two of the country’s most prominent hawks; Monday saw John Bolton in the Wall Street Journal suggesting NATO go island hopping in Asia and Rich Lowry at NRO rearticulating the case for dropping the atom bombs. Like Christopher Nolan’s films, their arguments explore inconsistency, ambiguity, and a questionable relationship to reality in eye-catching ways.
To be clear, I’m no fan of consistency for its own sake, and apparent inconsistency is sometimes the sign of a deeper principle or impulse at play. I’m all for changing one’s mind; man is not machine, and no two situations are exactly the same. Nevertheless, it is striking to read in Lowry’s defense of bombing civilians that “we were fighting a merciless foe in a savage war where every day brought more suffering and devastation, to combatants and civilians alike and across Asia. The best thing that could happen was ending the war as soon as possible.” Quite.
This is not a column about how WWII should have been resolved, and will not present a historical counterfactual. What is done is done, but it remains a question whether it was well done. Indeed, I raise the ethical concern on Lowry’s terms. The justification for using Oppenheimer’s gadget was the same as for earlier indiscriminate targeting of civilians. He writes, “There’s really no moral case against the atom bombs that doesn’t also apply to the firebombing.” Just so, and I am as grateful as any other American that Japan’s surrender spared many, many G.I.’s lives.
Yet that only shunts the morality of the thing to the side or back a step in a glib and modern way: It worked, so it must be right. However performed or sincere J. Robert Oppenheimer’s personal guilt about the bomb was, it was good to have some, and to voice it. And President Harry Truman was right, too, to take responsibility for the terrible thing’s use.
No, we will not settle the ethics of total war here in this column any more than Lowry did in his. We agree on much and yet arrive at distant destinations. But the utilitarian calculus he presents suggests the conservative establishment could consider changing tune about endless support for a dragged-on hell in Ukraine. There too each day brings more suffering and devastation to combatants and civilians alike. There too a swift end to the conflict appears the surest guarantee that as few American lives will be risked as possible. The conflict cannot continue at this scale without our support; the more we support it, the longer it goes on, and the greater the chances that we climb the escalatory ladder to a place from which we cannot descend without all of Europe, and perhaps all the world, falling into an abyss. It has happened before.
Meanwhile, John Bolton has called for tying together more and more climbers on this dark mountain. He concludes his opinion piece in WSJ with this remarkable ode to a shrinking planet: “Washington should give careful, strategic thought to expanding NATO’s Asian role. It need not admit Asian members tomorrow, but it can certainly work toward that goal.” Never mind that South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand remain, as of this writing, in the West Pacific; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is having a moment back in the sun and Bolton is not about to let that go to waste. I suppose we can say, to give him another argument for next time, that Canada and the U.S. are Pacific powers, and they are founding NATO members, so why not more?
What is NATO for? Traditionally, as the organization’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, famously said, it was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” It has, of course, evolved. But as it has expanded eastward, if it has any purpose its members can agree to, it remains to keep Russia out of Europe, the Americans in, and Germany and France playing nice (a role now supplemented by the European Union).
What it means to “keep the Americans in” has changed a bit in 74 years. The concern that the U.S. would go home and forswear continental interventions, as we had after World War I, quickly disappeared with fusionism’s defeat of the Old Right. That America First-ers of today question NATO’s post-Cold War utility does not signal total withdrawal from Europe, but rather represents a worry that, in metastisizing after victory over the Soviets, the organization has ceased to be a guarantor of American interest and become only an instrument of American empire—the “American-led liberal order,” I mean. But in making clients and keeping them in line, we undermine our republican character and accrue new costs and risks.
Bolton likes that empire part, and as the Russian bear has made NATO newly glamorous, proposes to keep a good thing going. China—dragon, perhaps of paper, although only time can tell—is clearly the United States’ chief strategic rival. But on the China issue, faced with an economically disastrous choice, Europe is unreliable. Bolton writes, “after victory in the Cold War, NATO seemed marginal to many Europeans (and Americans), the EU strengthened institutionally, and Franco-German economic objectives increasingly centered on China.” As Bolton acknowledges in his piece, France’s Emmanuel Macron not unreasonably believes “a Sino-American confrontation over Taiwan is ‘a trap for Europe.’” Meanwhile, China remains Germany’s primary trading partner. What to do? By increasing NATO cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners, and eventually adding Asian countries to the organization, Europe will be committed to siding with us if we become involved in a confrontation over Taiwan.
The proposal is a little desperate, making the best of a weak hand, an attempt to shore up an imperium that appears already to be passing. Any real crisis in the Pacific will force the cooperation of our partners there in the region without making the North Atlantic compass that ocean, too. But of course that is not the point for Bolton. Yet to stretch NATO that far is to stretch it past meaning and to breaking. Such a crisis, if it comes, will throw everyone’s calculations out the window, and new choices will be made in a new moment whatever commitments are held now.
But there is a certain movie magic to that new Cold War arrangement, just as there is a certain movie magic to the flash of an atom bomb, that makes it still appealing to those who resist the reality we face today: The United States is no longer a hegemon alone, and the bipolar or multipolar world of today does not fit into the easy categories of the recent past. To face the future, we must be able to admit that some things no longer work, and some things should not be done again.
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All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.
Move over, boomers. It’s the millennials’ time now.
Greta Gerwig, director and co-writer of Barbie, is a millennial mom. There are not very many of us. Women born between 1981 and 1994 are on track to be an exceptionally childless generation, giving birth later and marrying less frequently than our parents and grandparents.
Her directorial breakout, Lady Bird (2017), has been called a coming-of-age movie, but the hero of the film is not so much teenager Saoirse Ronan but her psychiatric nurse mom, who puts in double shifts at the hospital to keep the family together after dad loses his job. Beneath the surface plot about whether Lady Bird will get into NYU, Lady Bird is a movie about how mothers will do anything for their daughters even though daughters are inevitably too immature to appreciate it.
When Lady Bird came out, Gerwig was on the cusp of motherhood; her children were born in 2019 and February 2023. (Doing the Barbie promotional tour less than six months postpartum—you go, girl.) It’s the age when a person starts getting used to thinking of herself as an adult even though it feels like the prom was just yesterday.
Now her oldest son is four years old, and Gerwig, like a lot of millennials, is putting youth behind her and settling into middle age.
That is where Noah Baumbach comes in.
Baumbach is Gerwig’s romantic partner and co-writer of Barbie. A constant theme of his films is that youth is awful. The only redeeming thing about youth, in a Baumbach movie, is that it’s the way to become old.
His debut, Kicking and Screaming (1995), came out when Baumbach was 26 years old but all the best lines in it are about how much he would prefer to be at least 56 years old. “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now.” Even the climactic love scene is about age:
“The way I see it, if we were an old couple, dated for years, graduated, away from all these scholastic complications, and I reached over and kissed you, you wouldn’t say a word, you’d be delighted, probably, but if I was to do that now it’d be quite forward, and if I did it the first time we ever met you probably would hit me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just wish we were an old couple so I could do that.”
When Baumbach joined up with his muse Gerwig, he added another theme to his dissection of youth: how careless young people are about hurting others.
Ten years ago, Gerwig starred in a trilogy of films about being a young woman in New York City: Lola Versus (2012), Frances Ha (2012), and Mistress America (2015), the latter two collaborations with Baumbach. Most young-woman-in-the-city movies are about our protagonist overcoming obstacles and heartbreak. The Gerwig trilogy is all about a young woman realizing that, for many of the people around her, she is the obstacle. She’s the one causing the heartbreak.
In Mistress America, youth is not a time of endless possibility. It’s a time when you cause pain to the people in your life and don’t even realize it because you’re so caught up being the hero of your own story. It’s also a time in life when you throw away opportunities because you don’t yet grasp how scarce they are. “You can’t really know what it is to want things until you’re at least 30,” Gerwig’s character says.
Which brings us to Barbie. Barbie is a symbol of youth, beauty, and possibility. She can be anything, and everyone is drawn to her. But it’s all meaningless because the reason she’s so beautiful and perfect is that nothing has ever happened to Barbie. All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.
When she comes to the real world, Barbie finds herself on a bench at a bus stop next to a grandmotherly looking old lady. She has never seen an elderly woman before. No one ages in Barbie Land. Barbie gazes at her face and says, “You’re so beautiful.” The woman smiles and says, “I know it.”
According to Gerwig, studio executives wanted her to cut the scene, because it doesn’t move the plot along. She told them, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”
America Ferrera’s character in Barbie describes herself as “just a boring mom with a boring job and a daughter who hates me.” It is her sadness about her unglamorous life that draws Barbie into the real world in the first place. By the end of the movie, she and Barbie have both realized that that a boring mom is sometimes a wonderful thing to be, a lot more wonderful than living in a plastic dream house.
Barbie is a movie about how being a woman is difficult, just like Lady Bird is about how being a mom is difficult. In both cases, the difficulty is worth it because it connects a person to the deepest kinds of love known to womankind, sisterhood and motherhood.
Middle age hit the baby boomers hard. They glorified youth, so when they lost it, it felt like the end of the world. Denial was how many of them coped, refusing to ever see themselves as grown-ups.
Millennials are more likely to agree with Baumbach that the best thing about being young is that you get to be a grown-up at the end of it. Maybe it’s because we’ve been infantilized all our lives by our boomer elders. Whatever the reason, Barbie is a millennial director’s way of saying to the world now that her generation is hitting middle age: We are ready to put our toys away.
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The University of Michigan’s head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, is reportedly facing a four-game suspension from the NCAA. His crime? Buying two recruiting prospects cheeseburgers, which apparently may be a violation of the association’s rules about incentivizing prospects. His team is also accused—quelle horreur—of texting prospects during the Covid pandemic “dead period.” (The state of emergency and its special rules and non-rules come even for college sports.)
Laying aside my affinity for Harbaugh, who is one of maybe five conspicuously decent men in high-level American sports, this seems like de minimis stuff. It is especially comical as that grand old authority is angling to broker the single greatest compromise of collegiate sporting integrity in history—profit-sharing with companies exploiting our newly free market for sports gambling. Come on!
The post The NCAA Is Stupid appeared first on The American Conservative.
Emerging alternatives to traditional four-year degrees are shaking up the education industry.
K-12 education issues are often cast today as a story about Americans divided on what we want from our schools, a culture war between left and right. While there are fundamental disagreements, this story is mostly wrong. The result is a collective illusion—a false narrative—that ignores a stubborn fact. Americans broadly agree that we should end what’s been a central goal of K-12 education for many years: “college for all.”
In its place, Americans want a new opportunity program for young people, in which a college degree is one of many pathways to success. Facilitating this “opportunity pluralism” is a common-sense governing agenda for policymakers, based on a more flexible K-12 system. It also empowers the domestic realists of the ideological heartland, led by civic pluralists who nurture civil society by building different K-12 education pathways programs for young people. These programs can develop a young person’s agency by providing him or her with the knowledge, relationships, and networks—profitable knowledge and priceless relationships—he or she needs to pursue opportunity and human flourishing.
The name “opportunity pluralism” suggests broad appeal. What faction, left or right, could argue with a plurality of pathways to success? Yet K-12 education for many years has been dominated by the singular ideal of “college for all.” This model aims to move nearly all K-12 students down the same path, from elementary to middle to high school to college to a degree and, finally, to a job.
Certainly, college degrees are valuable, both professionally and personally. But the fixating on the degree as the golden ticket to employment has led to a harmful phenomenon Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel terms the “credentialist prejudice.” Credentialism describes the bias that makes the college degree the preferred engine of upward mobility and key pathway to a flourishing life—to the growing exclusion of the uncredentialed. Credentialism harms workers and employers by barring people, particularly the disadvantaged, from meaningful work opportunities, and sharply limiting the pool of qualified workers whom employers can hire.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is ample evidence that today many Americans, including young people, no longer subscribe to college for all. There are at least four reasons for this change.
First, the pandemic changed what Americans want from K-12 education. A March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found nearly six in ten (56 percent) Americans say a four-year degree is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” A “Purposes of Education Index” by Populace, a Massachusetts nonprofit, reports that Americans ranked preparing students for college 47th out of 57 on their list of education priorities, despite having perceived it as one of school systems’ top ten priorities before the pandemic. Americans’ number one priority is for students to “develop practical skills,” but only one in four (26 percent) think students in fact do. This is followed by being able to “problem solve and make decisions,” “demonstrate character,” and “demonstrate basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.” The K-12 education policy agendas of many of the nation’s governors align with these sentiments—further evidence of a growing consensus.
Second, current Gen Z high-schoolers do not see college through the same rose-colored glasses as did prior generations. Five national surveys of Gen Z high schoolers show a collapse in enthusiasm for college. In January 2022, around half (51 percent) said they plan to attend a four-year college, down 20 percentage points down from a high of 71 percent in May 2020. Nearly one-third of Gen Z respondents indicated a preference for post-high school educational experiences of two years or less, rather than a four-year college experience.
Third, employers are turning from degree-based hiring to skills-based hiring, shifting from using college degrees to evaluate a job seeker’s qualifications to using the prospect’s practical knowledge and experience. This approach is used by major companies such as Google, Apple, IBM, Mastercard, and Bank of America. The federal government and some states are turning to skills-based hiring for their personnel needs. This change is popular. A Gallop survey reports that seven in ten Americans believe that employers should hire job candidates based on skills and experience instead of a college degree, though fewer than half say that their employers do so.
Finally, some of the benefits associated with a degree are fading. A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis study shows that the college income premium declined for recent college graduates, while the wealth premium fell among all cohorts born after 1940. Additionally, for any non-white head of household born in the 1980s, the wealth premium associated with a college degree cannot be distinguished from zero. This is true also for those with a postgraduate degree. As the authors conclude, “the economic benefits of college may be diminishing.”
For these reasons (and more) the credentialist bias at the heart of college for all—which would universalize college and direct young people through a single pathway to opportunity—should give way to an approach that expands the number of pathways to opportunity. Today, civic entrepreneurs are creating different K-12 career pathways programs with better ways of preparing young people to pursue opportunity and human flourishing. They integrate education, training, employment, support services, and job placement—spanning K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development.
These programs include approaches like apprenticeships and internships, career and technical education, dual enrollment in high school and postsecondary education, career academies, boot camps for acquiring specific knowledge or skills, and staffing, placement, and other support services for job seekers. In general, they acquaint students with the demands of the workforce and employers by engaging them in work with adult mentors. Such connections produce new forms of social capital by fostering cross-class friendships, social networks, and information sources among students, teachers, work mentors, and other program supporters. They also nurture the development of local civil society by involving many sectors of the community that, through these programs, help individuals lay the foundation for opportunity and human flourishing.
These education pathways programs are bipartisan. Consider the statewide initiatives created by governors and legislators from both political parties, with Delaware and Tennessee serving as prime examples of well-established initiatives. Similar programs exist in such politically diverse states as California, Colorado, Texas, and Indiana. Local programs feature collaborations between K–12 schools, employers, and civic partners.
Five common features characterize these programs:
There is convincing evidence that these programs succeed. A Fordham Institute analysis showed at least five benefits. First, these programs are not, in fact, a path away from college, as those who take career-oriented courses are just as likely as their peers to attend college. Second, they increase graduation rates. Third, they improve college outcomes, especially for women and disadvantaged students. Fourth, they boost students’ incomes. Fifth and finally, they enhance other skills, such as perseverance and self-efficacy.
These pathways program create an opportunity program built on two elements, which I call the “opportunity equation” and “opportunity pluralism.” The elements of the equation are knowledge and relationships—what students know and whom they know. Simply put, young people need more to succeed than general cognitive and specific technical knowledge, or habits of mind. They must also cultivate relationships, or habits of association. These habits are the building blocks of individual opportunity. In short: Knowledge plus Relationships equal Opportunity.
Habits of mind and habits of association are closely linked, as the economics of skill-development illustrates. Harvard economist David Deming showed that the significance of cognitive skills has declined as a predictor of labor-market wage success, while the predictive importance of non-cognitive skills, especially social skills, has increased. As I have written previously, these social skills include “high levels of nonroutine, interpersonal exchanges with others” such as communication, cooperation, collaboration, social intelligence, and conflict resolution.
Further, after age 35, life-cycle wage growth is substantially greater in occupations that entail nonroutine, high variance jobs that are decision intensive and require worker adaptation.
In other words, there’s a clear wage premium to having social skills. Deming writes, “strong cognitive skills are increasingly a necessary—but not a sufficient—condition for obtaining a good, high paying job. You also need to have social skills.” The implications are clear: Students who are able to cultivate interactions and build networks with a variety of community stakeholders will be much better positioned for career success than those who have taken a schooling-only path. We must build pathways on the opportunity equation.
The second part of an opportunity program is opportunity pluralism, offering individuals many different paths to opportunity. This approach is consistent with efforts to help people acquire credentials that are valued in the labor market and that young people begin earning in school. Opportunity pluralism is not about discouraging individuals from pursuing a college degree. Rather, it positions a variety of options as valued credentials—recognizing the ways that knowledge, networks, skills, and experience lead to good jobs and a fulfilled life. It does not try to equalize opportunity on a single pathway (such as college for all) but rather makes the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic, valuing both educational and employment outcomes. In short, opportunity pluralism ensures that every young person—regardless of background—has multiple pathways available to reach good jobs, a satisfying career, and a flourishing life.
This new opportunity agenda differs sharply from the vocational education of old, which placed students into different tracks and occupational destinations based mostly on family background. That sorting process often carried with it racial, ethnic, and class biases: Immigrant students, low-income students and students of color typically enrolled in low-level academic and vocational training, while middle- and upper-class white students took academic, college-preparatory classes. The opportunity pluralism paradigm also presents non-degree credentials as building blocks toward associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, rather than as a lesser alternative to such degrees. It allows colleges to “unbundle” the four-year degree into building blocks, or stackable credentials, that are earned while working and, as a career progresses, that lead to an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.
Pathways programs also provide young people with social and psychological benefits. By exposing young people to occupations and having them explore and experience them, students are able to “try on” different futures and envision themselves as productive workers, thereby developing an occupational identity. Students in these programs can also develop a broader sense of clarity about who they are and what their interests, values, and abilities are in life, thereby developing their vocational selves. Finally, opportunity pluralism helps develop a young person’s self-agency, along with the dynamism and innovation that local initiatives and the institutions of civil society nurture.
Opportunity pluralism isn’t simply a good idea. It is also broadly popular, and already beginning to take place. Americans want a new educational paradigm for young people that replaces college-for-all with opportunity pluralism. This approach does not discourage young people from pursuing a college degree but rather offers multiple ways to receive valuable credentials based on habits of mind (the knowledge that pays) and habits of association (the relationships that are priceless). We must cast aside the collective illusion and false narrative of irreconcilable culture war differences in education. This opportunity program recognizes that Americans are creating a new K-12 ideological heartland, a term coined by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, that describes not a physical place but rather a shared state of mind.
The ideological heartland is where domestic realists live. It’s the terrain of those not given to ideological political extremes. Domestic realists may lean left or right, or even be part of that forgotten group called moderates, but they care more for practical action than culture-war posturing. The narrative of deeply entrenched disagreement on K-12 issues might lead us to think of domestic realists as a small minority. On the contrary, roughly two-thirds of Americans live in this ideological heartland. Right now, domestic realists are hard at work creating programs that nurture civil society through the new social networks and communities made up of the young people and adults who participate in them. While the full fruits of this growing movement have yet to be reckoned, cumulatively they suggest a sea change in education that will enable people to thrive in the 21st-century workforce.
This article is part of the American System series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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The solicitude U.S. shows for Americans in foreign custody, even those who freely choose to defect, paradoxically puts Americans abroad in greater danger.
On the 70th anniversary of the armistice ending combat in the Korean War, relations between the United States and North Korea face a new challenge. Last week, 23-year-old U.S. Army Private Travis King apparently defected to the North. The Biden administration wants him back. But his race to tyranny isn’t worth squabbling over.
King was in legal trouble and apparently thought a trip to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was the way out. Jailed by the Republic of Korea after a violent drunken escapade, he was headed back to the U.S. and expected separation from the service. Although facing shame rather than prison, he didn’t board his flight and joined a public tour to the border—apparently booked before he did his South Korean time, indicating that his sprint north was well-planned. Indeed, he had previously told his superiors that he would not “return to post or America.”
However, the U.S. government won’t accept his bizarre choice. Opined Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: “I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop.” Similar were Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sentiments: “We are very concerned, of course, about his well-being. We’d like to know his whereabouts.” The National Security Council spokesman John T. Kirby declared that the administration is “making it clear that we want to see him safely and quickly returned to the United States and to his family.” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, added: “I think it was a serious mistake on his part, and I hope we can get him back.”
The North has said nothing about King, though apparently military-to-military conversations have begun in what is known as the Joint Security Area, where he made his escape. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, to whom such an issue certainly would go, must be trying to decide what to do with his unexpected foreign guest.
In recent years, a score of Americans ended up in North Korean custody. Only one claimed to want asylum in the North. In 2014 Matthew Todd Miller tore up his tourist visa and said he wanted to defect, apparently planning to write about his experience in the DPRK. All were released, usually after a high-level American visit and expression of goodwill. Most did not suffer unduly despite their prison sentences, though those who came to evangelize typically received the harshest punishment. (Miller said he was surprised at how well he was treated.)
Student Otto Warmbier’s sojourn ended tragically, but the cause remains a mystery. Back in the U.S. his doctors and the coroner found no conclusive evidence of physical torture. Although the North Korean regime is capable of most any barbarity, it also has proved pragmatic in such cases. Americans have political value only when alive.
Closer to King’s case were four U.S. soldiers who defected during the 1960s. All were motivated by personal reasons. Three died in the DPRK. The other was Charles Robert Jenkins, who feared deployment to Vietnam. In 1965, fortified by alcohol, he deserted his patrol and hiked into North Korea. He hoped to end up in the Soviet Union and be traded back to America. Instead, he spent almost 40 years in the DPRK, physically mistreated and used in propaganda films. During a brief spell of warming relations between the North and Japan he was allowed to leave to be with his Japanese wife, who had been released earlier. He died in Japan in 2017.
McCaul worries that the North might demand a high price for King’s return. The best response for the U.S. Army would be to indicate that the latter is welcome to return and there would be no retribution for his unexpected jaunt, which violates no law. Going AWOL should matter little since he was likely to receive a dishonorable discharge.
Then Washington should wait to see what happens. If the North wants an American diplomat to visit, that would be a plus. So far, Pyongyang has refused to talk with the Biden administration, causing the latter to essentially beg for attention. Until now the only way to jump start talks appeared to be to drop the demand for denuclearization. If King causes North Korea to engage, Washington should not offer concessions for his return. However, the administration should be ready to discuss substantive issues.
The fact that today the DPRK is rejecting rather than requesting talks makes it more likely that it will keep King for propaganda purposes, at least in the near term. Although he appears to lack both political motivation and useful intelligence, the North Korean authorities could put him to use. Jenkins and his fellow defectors appeared in movies, a favorite propaganda medium at the time. King might be more useful online.
Or the North could return him without conditions lest he cause more trouble than he’s worth. He obviously is going through personal rough times. Anyone who imagines that fleeing to the DPRK is the answer to anything has shown extremely poor judgment. He hardly seems friendly to typical authorities, let alone one as harsh as the Kim regime. Dumping him back at the border also would appear to be magnanimous.
In such a case, with the American wanting to defect, the U.S. government should take a relaxed approach. Still, in the past Washington still felt pressure to act. For instance, the Obama administration traded five Taliban prisoners for a soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, who left his post and was captured by the Taliban. The details of his behavior remain controverted, but other Americans apparently died searching for a deserter.
There is much greater sympathy for Americans arrested as a bargaining chip to spring foreign prisoners from American institutions. For instance, in March the Russian government seized Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges. The claim is almost certainly false, with his detention aimed at winning the release of Russian prisoners, and the Biden administration is willing to deal. Before that Moscow arrested the WNBA player Brittney Griner on drug charges, which, in contrast, apparently were true, though still perhaps politically motivated. She was swapped for a major Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, then in U.S. prison.
Surrendering major criminals for civilians who voluntarily venture to authoritarian states hostile to Washington is a dubious practice. First, it releases people thought to have endangered all Americans and who may be capable of doing more harm. Second, it creates a market for American hostages. Had Bout not been traded for Griner, would Moscow have taken Gershkovich? The Putin government may be cruel and brutal, but simply filling its jails with innocent travelers offers little benefit. Washington’s willingness to yield Russians valued by Moscow is what greases the wheels of this peculiar commerce.
Of course, we should sympathize with those held unjustly. Personally, I would support the U.S. threatening nuclear war if necessary to recover Americans kidnapped by evildoers—if the victim was me. After all, my “vacation” spots have included North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Pakistan, Haiti, and Zimbabwe. I’ve even wandered around active conflict zones in Afghanistan, Burma, Kosovo, and Indonesia.
However, why should other Americans be held responsible for my global peregrinations? Ironically, I might have been safer if Washington hadn’t made such a fuss in the past when Americans were treated badly by countries and groups.
Consider the case of Austin Tice, grabbed a decade ago after voluntarily venturing into the Syrian civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of people died. Damascus says it does not have him. The U.S., which supported insurgents seeking to overthrow the Syrian government and continues to impose brutal economic sanctions on the country, has given Damascus no reason to cooperate. At this point the al-Assad regime could not easily admit to holding him, even if Washington offered a good price for his release.
Families understandably want action but ignore the role played by their loved ones. Another victim in Syria, kidnapped and murdered by jihadists, was journalist James W. Foley. The foundation named after him complained that “every day we wonder how much longer our loved ones must endure their captivity, not knowing when they will return home, and not being able to fully understand the efforts the United States government is undertaking to secure their freedom.”
His case is tragic. Yet in no way are Washington or the American people responsible. Foley, though courageous, was foolish. Syria was his second capture. Before that he was seized, but thankfully later released, in Libya. He had been warned in the most dramatic fashion of what can happen to journalists in a war zone. Alas, mocking fate a second time proved fatal. Even so, the Obama administration attempted a military rescue, which failed.
U.S. officials should press other governments to treat visiting Americans fairly. Diplomatic pressure can be backed by issuing travel warnings, expelling foreign personnel, and cutting financial aid. Only rarely should Washington exercise coercion—most notably economic sanctions and military action. Of course, the U.S. has a special responsibility to those who represent it overseas, typically diplomatic and military personnel. For that reason, Washington should be especially cautious before putting them in danger.
Indeed, the best way to protect all Americans, whether acting in private or public capacities, is for the U.S. to make fewer enemies and intervene in fewer conflicts abroad. Unfortunately, every entanglement seems to beget additional entanglements. Over the last three decades no country has been more aggressive, with Washington sanctioning, droning, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations and peoples essentially at will. Millions have been displaced, wounded, or killed in those conflicts. America possesses the most powerful military, so other governments and organizations seek to respond asymmetrically. Most dramatic are terrorist attacks on civilians, an evil but predictable response to Washington making someone else’s fight its own. Imprisoning American citizens is a lesser but similar indirect tactic.
Americans should wish the best for Travis King. Nevertheless, he might not want to come home. His northern rush, though irrational, was not rash. While welcoming King’s return, Washington should make no special effort to win his release. Or that of other Americans, even those imprisoned by hostile governments and movements. Unfortunately, past efforts have perversely put the rest of us at greater risk.
The post No Return of King appeared first on The American Conservative.
Our southern neighbor’s ascent to top American trade partner is hardly a resounding victory for the people of the United States.
Mixed news. Per a mid-July report, Mexico continued to surpass China as the United States’ primary trading partner this year. For the interests of national security, this is good news. China, which had muscled its way back to the top American trading partner slot on the tsunami of Covid relief cash–fueled consumer spending in 2020, is now a distant third behind Mexico and Canada.
The good part of the mixture is, of course, China’s falling share in American trade. Even the densest heads in our political class have noticed that the Reds do not in fact have our best interests at heart, WTO membership or no; doux commerce has failed to discourage the construction of naval bases and a growing squeeze on the wayward province that happens to be the world’s premiere supplier of microchips. Further, the Chinese communist regime is not very nice, and strategic and moral considerations happily coincide. Despite the gremlinesque Janet Yellen’s protests, giving Xi Jinping fewer American dollars to oppress his people and antagonize the United States is an all-around worthy cause.
The bad parts of the mixture are variform. First is that the trade numbers still give a fairly dire diagnosis of the underlying dysfunction of the American economy. The American trade deficit remains high. In the modern American context, “trading partner” means mostly “source of imports.” Roughly $107 billion of exports to our southern neighbor have been matched and overmatched with $157 billion of imports.
As shown in Robert Lighthizer’s excellent new book on trade policy, which I reviewed recently, trade deficits matter. The outflow of American dollars for goods is funded by selling American assets by the pound to the very countries that are funded by our imports; this seemingly untenable dynamic is propped up by the artificially strong American dollar.
And of course, there’s Mexico itself: the Syria on our southern border. As Lighthizer details, Mexico has been a persistent cheater on trade deals since NAFTA, from labor and climate standards to country of origin regulations. While the USMCA that he brokered on behalf of the Trump administration took steps towards remedies, one may be excused for doubting that the America-haters in Mexico City have completely abandoned their penchant for covert economic parasitism. Further, Mexico has proven generally willing to deal with states hostile to American interests, especially China, despite the current administration of Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador taking steps to bring strategic sectors of the Mexican economy under Mexican control.
The mere economic relation does not give a full picture of the problems in the American-Mexican relationship. Mexico is a weak state; a recent study found that lynchings are a widespread problem in Mexico because of the profound dysfunction of the state justice system, both in its inability to stop vigilantism and its inability to render justice with speed and equity for the people it nominally serves. Hence it is no surprise that organized criminal syndicates can go toe to toe with the Federales for sovereignty over large and prosperous portions of the territory claimed by the Mexican state. The cartels have at various points held entire cities under their direct sway.
The cartels, unfortunately, are a problem for the United States. They are deadly, and, worse, they are sophisticated. Some 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses last year—a multiple of the casualties of the 9/11 attacks and our moronic wars in response. The cartels in part directly administer ongoing madness, murder, and rapine at our southern border. When the lackadaisical grandees at Mexico City decide to intervene against them, they muster the powers of the incoherent international human rights regime and NGOcracy to win friends within the nations whose commonweal they are directly attacking.
So, at best, one half-hearted cheer for our new top trading partner. As sanity in the form of foreign policy realism begins to percolate into the political mainstream, we must consider what is to be done about Mexico. Some have suggested an American military intervention against the cartels, a proposal that has been met with great indignation by the Mexican state.
Others—including the estimable Phillip Linderman, former American consul at Nuevo Laredo, writing for The American Conservative—have suggested bringing economic punishments to bear to prod the Mexican state into doing something. Perhaps something in between—for example, a policy forcing American companies using Mexican labor and facilities rather than keeping American capital in America to take a modicum of responsibility for Mexican stability and welfare—is the solution. (So long as the policy-making class has its sights set on Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan, we are unlikely to find out.)
Decoupling from China is well and good—very well and very good—but it is not enough. Reducing the trade deficit must remain an American policy priority. Keeping America’s strategic industrial base under American control must remain an American policy priority. (Do you sleep soundly knowing that the largest American pork concern is Chinese-owned?) American industrial policy programs must be carefully considered and written—the splashing of American subsidy money to foreign businesses, as has been rampant under the Orwellianly named Inflation Reduction Act, undercuts the very point of those programs. (The misty-eyed sentiments of Atlanticism aside, our supposed allies are still very happy to abuse our economy as they can.)
We have previously wondered about making the perfect the enemy of the good. In the case of America’s trade situation, we have yet to achieve the good. Improvement is not the same as success.
The post Go, Go, Mexico? appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new report casts doubt on the old “underfunded schools” trope.
It is hard to think of a pathology in American urban life, from crime to poverty to fatherlessness, that is not blamed on “underfunded schools.” Progressives conjure up images of a run-down schoolhouse with moldy walls, tattered decades-old textbooks, and musty blackboards to explain away the decades of academic underperformance and high drop-out, truancy, and delinquency rates in inner-city schools.
A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, highlighted in a recent column by the Institute’s policy and editorial associate, casts serious doubt on the proposition that most poor children in America attend “underfunded schools.” In fact, in many states, the opposite is true.
The report’s author, Adam Tyner, found that “students from poor families generally attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families.” He found that all but three states now use a progressive school-funding scheme, meaning they compensate for disparities in local tax revenue with state and federal dollars to ensure more-equal funding of students across school districts.
It wasn’t always that way. Many schools in the early 20th century were racially segregated, and conditions across those schools were manifestly unequal. Even after the Court overturned school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, inequalities persisted for decades. Since states often financed their schools with local tax revenue, the mass urban exodus in response to crime, rioting, and disorder cratered those cities’ tax bases and plagued school districts well into the 1980s and ’90s, leaving them understaffed and underfunded.
Today, however, policy changes and legal action have not only corrected but reversed these disparities in most states. At least twenty-seven state supreme courts have overturned school-financing systems for being insufficiently egalitarian, prompting states to implement progressive funding schemes to correct for local revenue disparities. The gap between per pupil funding in wealthier and poorer school districts closed nationally in 2005.
States typically now spend more on poor students than on wealthier ones. The most comprehensive national study of states’ school funding found that states on average spend $529 more per student per year in school districts with poorer populations than in those with wealthier populations. Many states now have funds set aside to subsidize the educations of poor students, such as Tennessee, which last year passed a student-based education-financing bill giving each child a base dollar amount to spend on his education, regardless of his socioeconomic status, and gives “disadvantaged” students an additional stipend beyond the base allowance.
While schools districts within states now largely receive equal or near-equal funding regardless of the districts’ tax revenue, states’ preference for poorer students is actually stronger when you look at student-level, rather than district-level, data. In addition to state and federal aid to poor students, boards of education typically allocate more of their district’s resources to schools serving poorer children than to those serving comparatively wealthier ones.
Because complaints about “underfunded schools” no longer have a factual basis, Tyner notes that “equity-minded school-finance reformers now advocate for ’adequacy’ funding,” that is, spending more on poor children’s educations than on rich children’s. Maybe you agree with that approach, and given the other obstacles poor children have to overcome, I certainly could see an argument for it. But it is debatable whether, or to what extent, increasing school budgets will improve students’ academic performance at all.
Studies on the question are gate-kept by education professionals who, in addition to not being very impressive—one Rutgers education professor’s study concluded that “sufficient financial resources are a necessary underlying condition for providing quality education,” which just begs the question—have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. Some localities, where that gatekeeping isn’t so strong, have found that the relationship between a school’s per pupil expenditure and student performance is either weak or nonexistent. Chicago school districts, for example, spend more than $17,000 per student per year—the figure jumps to almost $30,000 when you include all sources of funding—and only 20 percent of the districts’ students can read at grade level. Other research indicates that money can improve students’ outcomes, but it depends how the money is allocated—spending more on things like teachers’ pensions or on superfluous tools such as “SmartBoards” is unlikely to move the needle.
It is harder, no doubt, for a child in an inner-city school to get an adequate education than it is for a similarly endowed student in a suburban school. But it is harder for those students for reasons that have little to do with the funding and much more to do with the school environment itself and disorder in the community at large. Urban schools have significantly higher suspension rates than do suburban and rural school districts, and it’s not because the (largely black) staffs of these schools are racist. It is almost impossible to learn in an environment where your peers are constantly acting out. No amount of funding, or electronic devices in the classroom, will change that.
The post The Myth of the ‘Underfunded School’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
Barbie world created the male-as-accessory, but women found it deeply disappointing.
Ruth Handler was a girlboss. Her daughter, Barbara, was just a girl playing with baby dolls, to her mother’s chagrin. It was 1959 and tensions over a woman’s role in society were growing.
Inspired by a Swiss sex doll, which portrayed in miniature a full-grown, buxom woman, Handler launched the pop culture phenomenon that would earn the Handlers millions and change the way girls played for generations: the Barbie doll. Named after Handler’s daughter, and intended to empower girls to imagine a future apart from babies, the toy would echo its maker’s sentiments toward homemaking: “Oh, [expletive], it was awful!”
The world Handler envisioned is, in many ways, the world we live in today. Like Barbie, American women have achieved high-level career success, especially in higher education, where their performance has notably surpassed that of American men. Like Barbie, American girls from a very young age have learned to flaunt their bodies and to call this empowerment. And like Barbie, Ken is only an accessory to female success today.
A man, to the high-achieving woman, has become little more than emotionally supportive arm candy. Just ask Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, husband to Vice President Kamala Harris and the progressive ideal of manhood, whose existence has apparently peaked at “happily praising his wife as he leads the U.S. delegation to the FIFA Women’s World Cup,” as one Politico writer put it. This description of peak manhood comes from a review of the new Barbie movie, released last weekend. The female critic’s conclusion was that Emhoff, like the Ken dolls so easily defeated by their female counterparts in a beach standoff, is “Ken the way the girls would have him be.”
Undoubtedly, this pink world is not so rosy for the guys. Greta Gerwig, director of the blockbuster movie, herself seems to realize this when she includes a character arc in which the sidelined Ken wrestles to overcome his second-class status. As the New York Times explained, “If you are making a movie that is trying to take the contradictions of modern womanhood seriously and you have a character in your movie who cannot define himself or understand his own worth—a character who kicks sand all day hoping just to be looked at by someone with power—you have to take that plight seriously, even if the character is male.”
The implication seems to be, for the critics, that Ken is getting a taste of the perennial female plight of existence. Still, it is a suggestive allowance from a feminist director that, at least in some places, the tables have well and truly turned. This second-class status Gerwig recognized is not limited to the world of dolls. For young men today, the picture looks a lot closer to what Barbie envisions than many care to admit.
In a recent essay for the Washington Post, writer Christine Emba detailed the male problem at length, including her own anecdotal experience with male acquaintances who, she writes, lack friends, ambition, purpose, and even basic social skills. But this is not merely anecdotal: While older men still hold many high-level jobs, young men coming of age today demonstrate little promise of following in the same footsteps. Data from Pew Research Center show today’s 25-year-old women are just as likely as their predecessors in 1980 to work full time (both 61 percent) and more likely to be financially independent (56 percent versus 50 percent). By contrast, today’s 25-year-old men are significantly less likely to find full-time work than 40 years ago (71 percent today versus 85 percent in 1980) or to achieve financial independence (64 percent today versus 77 percent in 1980).
As male career prospects worsen, so do male marriage prospects, predictably. For now, women still seek a spouse who earns as much or more than they do.
For those who have been paying attention, this behavior is not caused by unexplained, sourceless apathy. As higher education has moved to a model which favors female strengths, men have been leaving it, and with it many of the higher paying jobs which require an advanced degree. For those already in the workforce, expanding H.R. departments—overwhelmingly staffed by women—and the politically charged sexual politics typified by the Me Too movement, have meant that formerly healthy male behaviors have been routinely coded as “toxic.” It is not an exaggeration to say that culture, writ large, has declared masculinity unwelcome. Men are being told to kick sand.
Are these men on the margins “Ken the way the girls would have him be”? Perhaps on its face, but female social behavior, especially in romantic relationships, suggests another conclusion. After all, men being “in their flop era,” as one Substack writer put it, is not an isolated problem. Indeed, for the vast majority of American women who hope to date and marry one of these males, the problem is theirs as well. Whether they blame male chauvinism, male inadequacy, or merely rising standards of acceptable relational behavior, women are incredibly vocal today about their dissatisfaction with the dating pool, yet unwilling to admit the causes.
Men, meanwhile, may be beginning to reject the paradigm. The response of young men to living in a Barbie world has been a mixed bag, especially on social media, with some following unsavory media personalities like Andrew Tate to embrace a kind of Hugh Hefner “masculinity” that consists more in flaunting material wealth and injuring women than any thoughtful critique of a world after feminism. (The Romanian government has charged Tate with rape and human trafficking.) More probing responses have come from online pseudonymous communities, like that on Twitter around the poster known as Bronze Age Pervert. While some of these reactionary personalities are better than others, and esotericism can make it hard to tell which is which, the women who critique them in magazines or TikTok clips are missing the point: The so-called manosphere exists because of an excess of feminine naysaying, and will not be answered by more of it.
As the culture Handler and others dreamed of plays out, it is worth asking who is better off. Men are obviously not. What about the women?
In 2014, a study of child play habits found girls who grew up playing with Barbie dolls could imagine the future Barbie promised, with women as astronauts, doctors, and pilots. However, they did not imagine themselves in that future. Indeed, even within Handler’s lifetime, girls were clamoring for a Ken for Barbie to marry, a pregnant Barbie, and a Barbie with a baby. (Mattel responded to the latter wishes with a babysitter Barbie and, eventually, a pregnant Midge doll, but Barbie herself never had a child.) The promise of a successful career, it seems, was not enough to overrule many women’s desire to raise children.
Unfortunately for those women who have followed the Barbie model, many now find themselves childless and unsatisfied. Emasculated men, apparently, don’t father many children.
The post Desiring to Rule over Him appeared first on The American Conservative.
Another NFL player, the Denver Broncos’ defensive end Eyioma Uwazurike, has been suspended for gambling on play in his own league, per a Monday announcement. The suspension is indefinite, but will last at least a year. He is the tenth player to receive a sports betting–related suspension this year. In a Tuesday interview, the Broncos’ head coach, Sean Payton, blamed the league for being insufficiently clear in communicating the gambling guidelines to players.
That may be; I’m always happy to knock the cretinous Roger Goodell and his cronies, particularly his grotesque flip-flop on gambling legalization. Sad to say, I doubt that even the clearest league dictates are going to prevent competitive young men from engaging in a widely available (and completely legal) activity. Sports betting is not unique in this regard; every year, there are disciplinary actions for drug use and violations of league weapons policies.
What makes sports betting different, of course, is that it compromises the integrity of the game. So long as omnipresent legal bookmaking persists, so will questions about every score and statistic produced at an American sporting event. Policymakers must ask whether they prefer gambling tax revenue or sports integrity; so far, their choice has been pretty clear. Maybe WWE is set to be the bellwether in yet another aspect of American public life.
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Two new books about Beethoven and Mozart refer us back to the composers’ works directly—with mixed results.
Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces, Norman Lebrecht, Pegasus Books, 352 pages.
Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, Patrick Mackie, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing.” In other words, latent talent is no good; to matter, it must eventually be actualized in discrete accomplishments. This is especially true for artists, who can be encountered as artists only in their creations. We must ultimately put aside the high-minded theories and intentions and simply go to the artist’s corpus to see what we find.
New books on two of the greatest musicians show the fruitfulness of this approach by reminding us just what genius sounds like. Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces and Norman Lebrecht’s Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces share an emphasis on the composers’ works themselves, but they also reveal alternative conceptions of the relationship between artist and environment.
Lebrecht’s view is simple: “The place to meet Beethoven is in the music.” Why Beethoven’s approach follows from this basic conviction, with each chapter, most only a few pages, considering a particular work, or sometimes a grouping of works. Moving roughly chronologically, Lebrecht touches on pieces’ premieres, vignettes of Beethoven at work, and the ways that listeners have experienced the works over time.
Lebrecht is nicely personal and idiosyncratic, including anecdotes about exploring record stores, memories of conversations with conductors, and observations about Beethoven’s reception around the world; Fur Elise is somehow even more maddeningly overplayed in China than it is in America. He also gives substantial space to his opinionated but informed recommendations of the best recordings of each piece, and a handy Q.R. code in the prologue directs the reader to performances on YouTube.
These are all nice to know, but Lebrecht frequently offers only minimal analysis of what is actually going on in the compositions themselves, by his own lights the most important topic—a strange flaw that would make the book confounding for the Beethoven beginner. For example, discussing Beethoven’s third piano trio, he notes that the elder composer Joseph Haydn warned that the audience would find it inscrutable. But then Lebrecht doesn’t tell us a thing about the piece, beyond that it “snorts defiance.” Why was Beethoven’s aggression so startling for a Vienna accustomed to the gentility of Haydn and Mozart? We don’t learn.
Compounding the book’s inaccessibility is its scope: One hundred pieces would be a lot of Ludwig for anyone, especially when Lebrecht opines that some of them are not very good. But for someone already familiar with his work who is eager to move beyond the hits, Why Beethoven is a helpful guide to the broader canon and its interpreters.
Now, Sartre also correctly notes, “When one says, ‘You are nothing else but what you live,’ it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man.” It can therefore be immensely valuable to understand the context in which an artist worked, even if we must ultimately refer back to the outcomes of that work. Mackie’s Mozart in Motion takes this approach, considering both his music and the times that shaped it.
In contrast to Lebrecht’s strong emphasis on Beethoven’s oeuvre, Mackie argues that “thinking more deeply about the world in which he worked should also change how we hear his music.” For Mackie, Mozart’s world and work had a symbiotic relationship of sorts, the world setting the constraints and possibilities of the work, and the work giving voice to the sentiments and spirit of the world. Chapters accordingly weave together a part of Mozart’s life with a corresponding work. For example, the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra occasions a discussion of Mozart’s relationship to his father, an accomplished violinist and Wolfgang’s early business manager, while a discussion of The Magic Flute, an opera full of Masonic imagery, is aided by Mackie’s investigation into the ideas in the air, from Enlightenment philosophy to Romantic literature.
Sometimes this strategy goes too far. A musician can be influenced by his surroundings without his music becoming a commentary on them. Mackie tends to “psychologize” the music; one piano sonata is a “nimbly strident analysis of the frustrations of late enlightenment culture and of the artist’s place in it,” and another work “suggests that the highest relationships have values of equality built in.” Well, maybe. As Freud (apocryphally) told his overzealous followers, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; in music, sometimes a chord is just a chord, no matter how beautiful. Elsewhere, the writing devolves into Zen koans, as when Mozart’s twenty-fifth piano concerto prompts Mackie to muse, “A free life does not abscond from fact and fate but recognizes and transforms their ceaseless impacts.” Overall, however, Mackie’s remarks effectively call the reader’s attention to what is noteworthy in a piece.
Together, Mackie and Lebrecht’s approaches reveal two ways of understanding the artist: In the former case, as rooted in a particular time and place, inevitably positioned in, though not reducible to, some context; in the latter, beyond time and place altogether, a sheer force of creation on its own terms, or perhaps on the terms of an eternal, unchanging beauty. For Lebrecht, Beethoven is an absolute musician, untainted by external factors: “Unbothered by practicalities, he touched the ethereal.” He even draws a comparison to Mozart, who “writes within the conventions of his time, where Beethoven has one foot way outside of them. Mozart is concerned with the here-and-now, Beethoven with the great beyond.” For Mackie, in contrast, Mozart’s significance is at least in part a matter of his encapsulation of his epoch: “Europe was wavering on the brink of modernity, and Mozart became the key artist of the modern world because his music was richly fired by so many of the factors and energies at work in this process.” To borrow Ben Jonson’s famous remark about Shakespeare, Mozart was “of an age”; Beethoven was “for all time.”
The question of which approach to the genealogy of genius is right may be impossible to answer, but it is worth noting that the composers themselves seem to endorse their respective writers’ views. Mozart acknowledges his influences, writing his “Haydn” string quartets in tribute to the master; Beethoven tells friends that he “learned nothing” from Haydn, his former teacher. Mozart often writes to please an audience, conceding his surroundings’ relevance; Beethoven writes for himself, contemptuous of his fans. At a performance of his thirteenth string quartet, featuring a contrapuntal monstrosity, the Grosse Fuge, audiences love the second and fourth movements; Beethoven, Lebrecht notes, “is furious. ‘Why these trifles?’ he shouts. ‘Why not the fugue?’” One cannot imagine Mozart turning apoplectic about an audience’s incorrect enjoyment.
Happily, we can enjoy both composers, and both books, without having to choose between their opposing visions of artistry. In his novella An End in Paris, Richard Wagner puts into the lips of a dying musician the credo, “I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.” (Lebrecht mistakenly credits this to Carl Jung; fittingly, psychoanalysis seems to inspire false attributions.) These books don’t have much to say about God, but discovering, or returning to, the music they call us to celebrate shows us that Wagner knew of what he spoke.
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Let’s end the war in 24 hours.
Donald Trump will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. That alone is reason to support his candidacy.
Trump’s plan for doing so is, admittedly, light on details. In an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump claimed his “very good” relationships with Zelensky and Putin would put him in position for a swift negotiation. “I would tell Zelensky ‘no more, you gotta make a deal’,” the former president said, “I would tell Putin ‘if you don’t make a deal, we’re gonna give ‘em a lot’.”
The Washington Post called it “a remarkably simplistic—even nonsensical—plan to end the conflict,” and labeled the boast that he would end the war within 24 hours “basically his new ‘build the wall and make Mexico pay for it’.”
It’s an apt comparison—but perhaps not in the way the Post meant it.
For the past eight years, the standard response of Trump’s critics to his bombastic rhetoric has been incredulity, frantic fact-checking, and ridicule. A 2018 analysis showing that Trump communicates at around a fourth-grade level frequently comes up in response to his more grandiose and straightforward claims. But while the elites of both parties may snicker at those who want to win “bigly,” Trump’s rhetoric is rewriting the political map.
Whether one is convinced by his plan to end the war (or to build the wall, or stop the steal, or any other Trumpian turn of phrase) is beside the point. Electoral politics is no longer about policy proposals. The issues we now debate in the political arena don’t really belong there; they are pre-political, stemming from fundamental disagreements about the nature of the country, of the good, of man himself.
As a result, the GOP-primary and unaffiliated voters that make up “the base” want their candidate to paint a clear vision for the country. They want a vision that stands in stark contrast to the onslaught of contempt for them and their way of life, and that is capable of stirring aspirations of what once was—and could be again.
Trump’s clear goals, not plans, stand in stark contrast to focus-group tested soundbites that dominate the rest of the political conversation. On substance and rhetoric, Trump consistently challenges the failed vision for America upheld by the bipartisan ruling class. And that is what people want to hear.
“China is ripping us off.” “Total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.” “Greatest jobs president that God ever created.” “Very fine people on both sides.” The “China virus” and “Kung flu.” “Impeachment Hoax 1” and “Impeachment Hoax 2.”
At its best, there is a self-assuredness about Trump’s speech that evokes an America that can’t be bullied by the commissars of diversity, equity, and inclusion. His rhetoric baits the gatekeepers of our discourse to denounce it, and him. This is all to the good for the vast swaths of this country left behind by the march of Progress.
“End the war in 24 hours” is the latest Trumpian mantra in this vein. And it shows why Trump’s political rivals for 2024 continue to falter. Take, for example, the Ron DeSantis campaign’s response to Trump’s Ukraine boast.
The DeSantis campaign correctly pointed out that Trump’s plan could leave the door open to an even more hawkish, escalatory Ukraine position than that of either the current administration or of most GOP rivals: “We’re gonna give ‘em a lot.” It is a valid concern for those who want a swift diplomatic settlement to the war: Could Trump inadvertently escalate the war by publicly announcing his hardball negotiating tactics?
But the criticism hasn’t, and won’t, land with voters. DeSantis has yet to settle on his own vision for the war in Ukraine. He may well have a coherent policy plan in mind for ending the war, but voters wouldn’t know it. The Florida governor’s messaging and rhetoric on the conflict has been all over the map, first calling it a “territorial dispute,” then walking that back and calling Putin a “war criminal.” Absent a coherent vision, even valid policy critiques won’t register.
Elizabeth Warren learned the hard way that “having a plan for that” doesn’t translate into electoral success. If he doesn’t change course, DeSantis may be well on his way to the same lesson. The comparisons are already there.
To his credit, the Florida governor held his own at the Blaze’s presidential confab with Tucker Carlson earlier this month. But the event still served as an example of the power of Trumpian rhetoric—even without the 45th president in attendance.
Among those in attendance, the clear winner of the summit was Tucker himself, in no small part due to the clear contrast between Tucker’s straightforward questioning and the candidates’s carefully couched, focus-group tested responses.
In his interview with South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Carlson was not content to allow Scott to dodge hard questions about deporting illegal immigrants with vague platitudes. “Wait a second, the federal government knows where everyone is,” Tucker said, “We know anyone using a fake social security number. So why not just like drop them off in Tijuana? Bye bye. A sincere question.”
It is a question most politicians would write off as unfeasible and unserious. Most GOP voters seem to disagree. The audience roared.
Tucker and Trump’s propensity to cut through Beltway jargon and speak to a coherent and aspirational vision of this country is why the two are the most powerful figures in Republican politics. One was able to command almost every serious presidential candidate to run his rhetorical gauntlet. The other knew he didn’t need to.
The fact is, for better or for worse, Trump’s straightforward rhetoric is the key to his continued sway over the Republican Party. It may be light on the details, but doubling down on “End the war in 24 hours” will do more to bring pressure to bear for the cause of peace than any fifteen point plan for diplomacy. It is up to those who share Trump’s vision for America to provide the policy pathways to achieve it—and to keep those who want to undermine that vision out of government.
The post Trump Still Has the Best Words appeared first on The American Conservative.
Americans’ free speech is threatened as never before.
Orwell, again. 1984 seems written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.
George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (in our own time and place, think of “unhoused,” “misspoke,” LGBTQIAXYZ+, “nationalist,” “terrorist”).
Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and to accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (think mandating masks that do not prevent disease transmission). The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (think war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)
Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.
Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.
In 2023 America, the medium is social media, and the Ministry of Truth is the executive branch, primarily the FBI. Topics that the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include, but are not limited to, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab-leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, and even parody accounts mocking the president (for example, one about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter).
When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made-up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, as “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to January 6 marchers to BLM protesters to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time, but it can be all those things at different times, as needed.
The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement, which is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the mainstream media, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine, yet it seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?
In simple words: The government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.
How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued subpoenas to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, and Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent. Documents obtained revealed that the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.
Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, which is down from the nearly 3 million spied on in 2021.
Does all that sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (communism, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection—Biden himself accused social media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism era’s “blood on their hands”—with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know.
The target in name is always some Russki-type foreigner; in reality, what happens is the censorship of our own citizens, who are tarred with the suspicion of being “pro-Putin.” Yet Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era that the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and obtained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.
The post Disinformation and Censorship, 1984–2023 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Presidents Biden and Lopez Obrador promote open-border extremism.
Three cheers for Governor Greg Abbott’s recent efforts to halt the flow of illegal migrants into Texas by placing floating barriers in the Rio Grande. On behalf of his state and the entire country, the Texas governor is desperately fighting open-border radicals in the Biden administration and the Mexican government. The unlawful migrant diaspora intentionally sparked by President Joe Biden is fundamentally disrupting both countries and feeding Mexican criminal cartels more opportunities than ever before for illicit profits and human exploitation.
It was the candidate Biden in the 2020 campaign who recklessly set these dangerous human waves of migration into motion; he personally bears the responsibility for this policy folly, which will doubtless be his main presidential legacy. Today, Biden officials make token calls for unlawful migrants to use the so-called new “legal pathways” that the administration has dubiously cobbled together, but the reality is that all unauthorized arrivals on the southern border are still admitted—and continue to come.
Statistics vary, but nobody disputes that the vast movement of clandestine migrants, urged by candidate Biden to “surge” to the U.S. southern border, is producing billions in new criminal cartel profits. Even President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security estimates that the human blood money paid to get across the U.S. southern border has grown from about $500 million in 2018 to an incredible $13 billion in 2022.
Meanwhile, south of the border, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), in step with Biden, has denounced Governor Abbott for engaging in “very vulgar publicity stunts” to fool the American people. In rejecting the right of the U.S. to defend its frontiers, AMLO quotes biblical scripture as ordaining an eternal right for migrants to cross any borders, anywhere, in search of a better way of life.
These comments are bizarre even by AMLO’s standards, and for good measure he urged Mexicans in the United States, particularly in Texas, to vote against Abbott and Republican legislators who support the governor’s border-security measures. Standing in front of his banner honoring Pancho Villa, El Señor Presidente clearly sees no irony in his constant demand that foreign critics, particularly Americans, not voice una palabra of opposition to his policies, while he is free to constantly instruct Washington on everything from managing Cuba diplomacy to outwitting conservatives; and now he is regularly advising American citizens of Mexican heritage in Gringolandia on how to vote.
Only strong diplomacy, along the lines exercised by the Trump administration, can push AMLO in another direction and bring sanity and security back to U.S.-Mexican relations. With Biden and Lopez Obrador paired, however, facilitating illegal immigration has become the heart of our bilateral security policy.
Of course, Lopez Obrador’s comments also reflect a long-standing unofficial attitude that favors a porous border to enable Mexicans easy clandestine entry into the United States. It is doubtful that AMLO fully appreciates, however, that Mexicans clandestinely entering the U.S. have been falling steadily for years. down from over 90 percent two decades ago to a figure that fluctuates in the last couple of years between 20 and 33 percent. Most migrants today are third-country nationals that many Mexicans wish would stay home.
It is beyond the policy imagination of Lopez Obrador to grasp how the constant furtive flows of hundreds of thousands of migrants across his country are part of Mexico’s own epic rule-of-law chaos. While Lopez Obrador may romantically believe—as does his counterpart in the White House – this clandestine human movement is sacrosanct, a noble human search for a better life. But unlawful migration is a brutal game, full of criminal bargains, and enlightened modern leaders should try to discourage it.
Countless stories of abuse from the Darien Gap jungles to Texas ranches document the destruction. The policies of Biden and Lopez Obrador deserve not only the scorn of border-security conservatives, but also of human rights advocates.
“Irregular,” which is to say unlawful, immigration into Mexico continues to increase dramatically. The Mexican government measures encounter “events” with irregular migrants, which officials concede grew by 44 percent from 2021 to 2022. Holders of Mexican visas have little more protection than border jumpers.
Mostly undocumented and some not speaking Spanish, these migrants are basically hiding out on the margins of Mexico’s poorer communities, often overwhelming border towns, reducing health standards and straining sanitation capacities and social services. Unable to work lawfully to finance their movement, some pilfer, steal, and disrupt normal life in their desperation to survive.
They are also fodder for exploitation. Many are women or unaccompanied children, who are routinely victimized in crimes ranging from robbery to rape. They are also preyed upon by an array of unethical actors from corrupt local officials and organized scam artists to brutal cartel syndicates, who ultimately control all clandestine entry into the U.S. The fact that both Biden and Lopez Obrador, policymakers, and almost all their allies, turn a blind eye to this human misery they have set in motion is one of today’s great untold stories.
The State Department publishes an annual trafficking in persons (TIP) report on all countries; the report is supposed to expose factors and scenarios, such as corruption and immigration scams, as well as counterproductive official government policies, that cause people to fall victim to human trafficking. The 2022 TIP report on Mexico asserts:
Migrants and asylum seekers in or transiting Mexico are vulnerable to sex trafficking and forced labor, including by organized criminal groups; this risk is particularly high for migrants who rely on smugglers. Observers, including Mexican legislators, noted links between violence against women and girls and between women’s disappearances, murders, and trafficking by organized criminal groups. Observers reported potential trafficking cases in substance abuse rehabilitation centers, women’s shelters, and government institutions for people with disabilities, including by organized criminal groups and facility employees. Trafficking-related corruption remains a concern. Some government officials collude with traffickers or participate in trafficking crimes.
Not surprisingly, while the TIP report calls out acts of official corruption in Mexico, it does not dare to condemn Lopez Obrador’s open-border policies for facilitating the entry of over a million undocumented migrants into the country, representing endless targets for human traffickers. Lamentably, most U.S. anti-TIP officials also advocate open borders even knowing illegal migrants are ripe to be trafficked.
It is often useful to read what our enemies report about us. China’s human rights report on America, admittedly a jumble of communist resentments, phony charges of racism, and other cheap attacks, blasts U.S. immigration and human trafficking abuses. The PRC’s Foreign Ministry writes: “In fiscal year 2021 alone, 557 illegal immigrants died along the southern border of the United States.” While the PRC’s overall criticism is confused and propagandistic, the charge that the Biden administration’s immigration policy is causing widespread disruption and death is valid.
Presidential leadership in both the U.S. and Mexico is vulnerable to international condemnation because it recklessly urges and facilitates desperate people to pick up and travel without permission across legal borders. Nailing down comprehensive data on this surreptitious movement, particularly into Mexico and then northward to the U.S., is difficult. Mexican statistics are unreliable and the Biden administration obfuscates the numbers collected by American officials.
Secretary of State Blinken says that 20 million people are on the move in the Americas, a diaspora that doubtless is concentrated on Mexico and the American frontier. For simplicity, and drawing on available DHS data, most analysts document that on the order of 4 million unauthorized migrants have been “encountered” under President Biden’s watch in 2021-22; most of these are temporarily detained by the American border authorities and then released into the country, while others who are uncounted, entering undetected.
Mexican nationals still constitute the largest single group of U.S. Border Patrol encounters, but available statistics also reveal the staggering jumps in third-country citizens both entering Mexico and moving northward. Pew Research Center reported that in 2021 some 63 percent of Border Patrol “encounters,” more than a million migrants, were not Mexicans but third-country nationals—the vast majority, of course, having used Mexico as their platform to enter the U.S. Moreover, the majority of people moving through Mexico, 62 percent, according to a study by Rice University, cited economic reasons when asked why they left their home countries.
Considering recent statistics, the lion’s share of these non-Mexican encounters, not surprisingly, are still attributable to the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras (213,023), Guatemala (231,565), and El Salvador (97,030), a region that continually produces a long-standing illegal flow into Mexico and towards the U.S.
These data are not new, but what is more noteworthy has been the surge from other regions. Comparing available U.S. encounter data across two years, from 2020 to 2022, we see phenomenal growth in furtive migration from nations whose residents hadn’t previously appeared in significant numbers on the southern American border. This two-year time period represents the end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden administration; while the impact of Covid doubtless pushed the 2020 data downward, the incredible jumps in the 2022 numbers corresponds exactly to Team Biden’s open-border messaging to the world. Here are the regional data on encounters, by nationality, from 2020 and 2022:
From the Caribbean: Cubans (13,410 to 220,908); Venezuela (2,787 to 187,716); Haitians (4,535 to 53,910);
From Central and South America: Nicaraguans (2,291 to 163,876); Brazilians (7,161 to 53,457); Colombians (404 to 125,172); Peruvians (484 to 50,662); Ecuadorans (12,095 to 24,060);
From outside the Americas: Indians (1,120 to 18,308); Turks (109 to 15,455); Ukrainians (93 to 25,364); Romanians (276 to 5,992); Russians (467 to 21,763); Chinese (1,768 to 2,176).
These encounter statistics are incomplete; they do not document many third-country nationals for whom the data are difficult to obtain but for whom concerns exist, such as African and Middle Eastern countries. Nevertheless, these available numbers make a powerful case that Joe Biden’s reckless 2020 public call for a migrant border surge, with the complicity of an irresponsible Mexican president, has encouraged unprecedented and tragically dangerous illegal migration. It has brought about untold human misery and continues to feed the strongest criminal cartels in the Americas.
The need for new U.S. and Mexican presidential leadership has never been greater.
The post Biden Is a Boon to Mexican Cartels appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Some of our legislators are dying, but it appears the art of legislating died long ago.
“Just say aye.”
Free advice from Patty Murray of Washington to her Senate colleague, the senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein.
A clip of this exchange quickly made the rounds on social media, along with more commentary on the geriatric nature of our regime. The day before the “aye” affair, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze during a press conference and had to be escorted away by fellow senators.
As my friend Logan Hall tweeted, “our nation declines/decays in tandem with our leaders.”
“Sadly, his face is the face of our entire Gerioligarchy,” tweeted new Blaze Editor-in-Chief Matthew Peterson (congratulations, by the way, Matt).
Sadly, his face is the face of our entire Gerioligarchy. pic.twitter.com/8JurxOP5BW
— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) July 27, 2023
The criticism is well deserved. Between the 90-year-old Feinstein who puts the senior in senior Senator, our octogenarian Senate Minority leader, and a doddering president stumbling through an equally doddering presidency, there’s always fresh material for those commentators who analogize our over-the-hill elites to our over the hill empire. But even that narrative can get old on occasion.
The “aye” affair, some say, is evidence of “gerontocracy” because it was the wrong place and wrong time for Feinstein to get on the stump. But watch the full clip of Feinstein closely:
NOW – 90 years old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told to "just say aye" at vote on the defense appropriations bill.pic.twitter.com/d7V5RDclWY
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 27, 2023
Feinstein seems surprisingly lucid while delivering her remarks on defense spending. She even seems to roll her eyes when she’s repeatedly told to “just say aye,” and laughs.
Surely, Feinstein’s continued presence in the Senate is alone enough proof of our “gerontocracy.” But Feinstein’s comments illustrate more than just our increasingly elderly elite. The truth is that this is how most elected representatives, not just senile senators, go about the work of legislating—following the lead of staff members, agencies, and experts while hardly bothering to inform themselves.
Staffers and colleagues tell them “vote yes” or “vote no”—and they listen. Most, except for a few standouts, haven’t even read the bill they’re voting on, if they know which one they’re voting on at all.
It’s not just a problem in the United States, either. It’s endemic throughout the western world. In the European Parliament, the most useless parliamentary body ever assembled (members can’t even propose legislation), MPs vote on so many rules and regulations that typically parties have a representative sitting in the front of the chamber signaling how party members should vote during voting sessions.
As the European Parliament functions as the body of yes men for the European Commission, American lawmakers have been reduced, oftentimes on their own accord, to yes men for the bureaucracy and the administrative state.
Some of our legislators are dying, but it appears the art of legislating died long ago.
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An appellate case about a Tennessean law restricting sex-change procedures on minors shows how Dobbs has brought the concept of “liberty” back into the realm of sanity.
Recently the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a Tennessee law to take effect barring medical procedures related to the gender identity of minors. Although this was a preliminary ruling, it has broader implications. The decision offers a glimpse at how the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has dimmed the prospects for progressive litigators hoping to end public debate around important social questions through a well-worn dodge: enticing the courts to declare that certain conduct is constitutional “liberty” immune from democratic interference.
Last year, when the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs, the topline takeaways were these: The Constitution contains no right to an abortion, and the scope of abortion access would henceforth be decided by the citizenry and their elected representatives. But even as Dobbs overruled two prominent decisions (Roe and Casey), it revived an approach distilled in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), which appeared to have fallen into desuetude amidst the Court’s more recent ardor for discovering ahistorical constitutional rights—most notably, a right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.
In contrast to the boundary-defying humanism of Obergefell, Glucksberg was both more restrained and more rigorous. It held that conduct could not attain the constitutional status of fundamental liberty unless it was “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and carefully defined by reference to “concrete examples” within that record. Courts were not to deduce fundamental rights “from abstract concepts of personal autonomy.” Indeed, “the mere novelty” of an asserted right was “reason enough to doubt that [the Constitution] sustains it.” Although Dobbs did not overrule Obergefell, it reaffirmed that the Glucksberg approach would govern future cases where individuals asserted that their desired form of personal autonomy was a constitutionally protected liberty.
The present idée fixe in the autonomy genre is that individuals, often young children, ought to be able to “affirm” their gender identities and alter their physical appearances through hormone regimens and surgical interventions. Advocates of transgenderism seek to eliminate state laws like Tennessee’s, which restrict the availability of these experimental procedures; they do so by arguing that such laws are, among other things, unconstitutional infringements on liberty. As the latest exotic liberty claim to enjoy the support of tastemakers, transgenderism’s legal assertions were certain to collide with the Dobbs-Glucksberg line.
Now that they have, those claims are worse for the encounter. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, joined by Judge Amul Thapar, explained that the parties challenging the law “are unlikely to prevail on their due process and equal protection claims” because “in each instance, they seek to extend the constitutional guarantees to new territory.”
Among the difficulties for the law’s progressive detractors is that they are finding the boundaries of the word “liberty” less malleable than they had been before Dobbs. Their task is to make transgender procedures appear constituent of “ordered liberty,” when those novel procedures express a profound indifference towards given reality (biological sex) and enshrine intensely subjective, personal experience as the only valid criterion for assessing one’s identity.
The ethos of the transgender movement is revolutionary, iconoclastic, and destabilizing of foundational certainties necessary to the maintenance of ordered liberty. The movement rejects the concept of authority external to the self, recognizing no higher authority than subjective individual perception. By making the boundaries between the sexes appear fluid, it subverts the concept of distinction: The ability to discern that permits the recognition and articulation of hierarchy and order. And by divorcing language—the “vehicle of order,” according to philosopher Richard Weaver—from reality, it makes language a tool of ideology, demanding that words denoting one sex be applied to the opposite sex. This is nearer to anarchy than it is to any cognizable form of order or liberty.
Moreover, the putative right to inflict massive chemical or surgical interventions on one’s body too closely resembles the very type of liberty that Glucksberg rejected—the right to assisted suicide.
From the constitutional perspective, it simply does not matter how profoundly intimate and personal these choices are. Anglo-American history, which Glucksberg sets as the touchstone, offers no analogue that allows us to understand them as rights immune from law’s application. As Sutton observes, “the challengers do not argue that the original fixed meaning of either the due process or equal protection guarantee covers these claims.” Nor can they identify a deeply rooted tradition of American support for their specific and radical notion of identity-affirming autonomy. The absence of such an understanding has hardly left the nation bereft of justice, as Dobbs and Glucksberg say the loss of true liberty would. American society has gotten on reasonably well for over two centuries without affording citizens an unrestricted right to treat their bodies like playdough.
The implausibility of fitting naked transgenderism under the heading of ordered liberty has forced the challengers to Tennessee’s law to clothe their claims in more venerable garb. Transgender medical procedures are, they contend, part and parcel of parents’ rights “to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.” That right has a pedigree, but that does not mean its boundaries grow with time to shield every parental choice from legal constraint.
Does the ability to subject one’s child to experimental medical procedures occupy the same plane as the ability to direct a child’s education? Whether one talks of parents’s rights or those belonging to some other role, the concept of order implicitly supposes the concepts of design and purpose; that is, the ends or ultimate goods on which society has long agreed. There is an enduring belief that individuals, families, and the republic as a whole benefit from education, even as there is acknowledgement that this good may be obtained by a variety of educational routes. There is no such consensus regarding the personal or public good inhering in novel, medically aided efforts to manifest externally what one perceives about himself or herself internally. Framing the issue as one of parents’s rights does nothing to supply the missing historical consensus.
Lacking history and tradition, the challengers before the Sixth Circuit resorted to empirical science. Sutton noted that “many members of the medical community support the plaintiffs.” Fortunately, in this instance, the court was not disposed to let the challengers perform that peculiar modern alchemy that transmutes expert opinion into binding legal authority. Sutton and Thapar noted that the medical community abroad has expressed considerable doubt about the prudence of using hormone therapy for “off label” uses like gender transitions. And even at home, the Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve the uses the law’s challengers seek to make of hormone therapies.
Still, Sutton noted that while not “dispositive,” the support of medical professionals “is surely relevant” to the merits of challengers’ claims. If it is, then it is only so in an attenuated sense. What if the FDA suddenly approves hormone treatments for the uses the challengers seek to make of them? Would that evidence that transgenderism is in fact deeply rooted in America’s history and traditions? Would that lessen the apparent novelty of transgenderism’s claims? The opinions, however learned, of a specialized subset of society do not seem to answer the question Sutton frames elsewhere: “whether the people of this country ever agreed to remove debates of this sort…[from] the democratic process.” The court is hearing a legal dispute where the inquiry turns on the traditional recognition of certain rights as immune from democratic interference. The medical community’s views on whether transgender procedures are “effective” in some sense shed little light on that question.
To avoid confusing desires with rights, courts must determine the boundaries of liberty, not by reference to the half-empirical, half-political inclinations of certain professional classes, but by reference to history and tradition, the accreted wisdom of Americans and their predecessors across centuries. This was the insight of Glucksberg mercifully rediscovered in Dobbs. Its endurance in our legal system may preserve us collectively from the “moral extravagance” of creating rights “for the sake of novelty,” what Russell Kirk deemed “as dangerous an experiment as man could undertake.”
The post The <i>Dobbs</i> Framework in Action appeared first on The American Conservative.
In Barga and elsewhere, people think it’s still morning in America.
Small, sun-bleached billboards read “The Most Scottish Town in Italy” along the winding roads into Barga. Along the road that splits the old city from the new, the St. Andrew’s Cross alternates with il Tricolore. The town’s Scottish pride comes from Scottish-Italian expats returning to the Tuscan town their forebears left when work was scarce in the 19th century.
Yet, for all the Saltires, Barga’s residents have an equal appreciation for Old Glory.
Locals sport cheesy American shirts and tank tops. By day, vintage shops sell a wide array of second-hand Americana, and the local children’s store is full of Captain America merchandise (though the comic book hero does not evoke as much patriotism since the MCU’s hostile takeover of the cinema). But Barga’s esteem for America can’t be captured by tchotchkes or t-shirts. After the sun sets behind the mountains that hide Barga from the world is when her admiration for America shines through.
The small piazzas that dot the old city are separated by just a few hundred feet of narrow, crooked alleys. They each have their own bars, restaurants, and seating areas. By night, to entertain patrons and passersby, each has their own musical performance. It’s unintentional, but a bar crawl through these piazzas might leave one with the impression that it’s designed to be a tour of American music in the later half of the 20th century.
The sounds of snares and cymbals and familiar chord progressions echoing through the corridors beckoned us to the piazza. The cigarette smoke billowing up from the small square was thick. Settling in on a stone bench, we lit our own.
Across the clearing, a local band played the greatest American hits of the ’50s and ’60s. The lead singer showed off a greaser cut and a red and white bowling shirt. The band all wore bowling shirts, too, theirs black and slate gray.
“Jailhouse Rock,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “The Twist” brought nonnas to their feet. They approached a group of men who looked to be in their late twenties wearing mostly unbuttoned linen shirts and slim-cut pants. They all started to swing, twist, and jitterbug. A beautiful middle-aged woman in white sneakers and red dress made her way to the dance floor and proceeded to dance seemingly an entire number from the movie Grease. As she skipped around the piazza, the crowd cheered. She pointed at her husband, who stood at the cash bar operated by the local football club, Gatti Randagi F.C. He was loving every second. Their three children, however, who stood in front of their father, appeared ready to die of embarrassment.
At another piazza, a young woman played acoustic pop hits from the ’70s and ’80s. Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” was a particular favorite of the crowd. The music rang out into the early hours of the morning. The crowds stayed, smoking cigarettes and sipping wine or spirits until the musicians had to break the news to onlookers that their performance was coming to an end. Without their announcements, I’m not sure the crowds would have gone home.
This American night in the most Scottish town in Italy reminded me of several conversations I had had during my three weeks in Krakow. On several occasions, participants in the fellowship from European nations asked almost the same questions verbatim: “I hear there are serious domestic problems in America right now. Is that really true? How bad is it?” Each time, this line of questioning prompted a long rant—which I don’t think my European inquirers were prepared for—as well as several other comments from Americans in the group.
Our replies ran the gamut of issues, from immigration and trade to abortion and transgenderism. The gist of our replies: “It’s worse than you think.”
It wasn’t the response they hoped for or thought they’d receive. To many Europeans, whether they’re Poles or Italians, America is as strong today as it was when the Soviet Union collapsed. The wars in the Middle East, some think, may not have gone the way America planned, but those were just minor incidents for a hegemon as powerful as the United States. They know our domestic problems—the gutting of our manufacturing and energy industries to our porous border and broken immigration system—are real, but have little conception of the extent of the damage. Surely, Uncle Sam has a solution.
Their unconscious nostalgia for an America they never really knew was oftentimes endearing. Just as Barga’s piazzas filled with music that defined the Cold War era and the West’s eventual victory, the young women who attended the fellowship in Krakow could be overheard talking about how they loved movies like Sixteen Candles and Singin’ in the Rain.
For these Europeans, it’s still morning in America. I pray they are right: Maybe it really is darkest just before dawn. For dawn to come, however, America and her allies need to realize she’s an empire in decline. She needs to understand her limitations. Uncle Sam can’t fight the monster under the bed while destroying chosen monsters abroad. Making America great again begins at home.
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Along the way, he is crushing the dream of many conservative professionals.
In a decade and a half of punditry, I’ve had to eat my share of crow for incorrectly predicting voter behavior. I was notably wrong about Brexit and wrong about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling them for Remain and Hillary, respectively. The opinion writer’s weakness for wishcasting is partly to blame. But voter preferences can also change quite rapidly. What polls suggest today can be completely upended tomorrow, let alone in several weeks or months.
Having said all that—deep breath—I think Donald Trump is poised to sweep next year’s GOP primary. Or as The New York Times put it in a headline summarizing the paper’s own recent polling, the forty-fifth president is “crushing” his primary rivals. Along the way, Trump is also crushing the dream of many conservative professionals: to find a more “responsible” Trump, someone who could channel the same populist energies, but in a more “disciplined” manner.
Ron DeSantis became the locus of such dreams, and it isn’t hard to see why. The Florida governor has boldly confronted the right’s bogeys: from mask and vaccine scolds to the professors, and from woke corporations to the 1619 Project. In the Sunshine State, he whips the media and the opposition (I repeat myself), but he can also reach across the aisle to get things done. And he does it all with bureaucratic competence and mastery over a pliant legislature.
And yet that Times poll finds DeSantis trailing Trump by a huge (37-point) margin among likely Republican voters. The RealClearPolitics poll of polls shows Trump trouncing DeSantis by similarly huge margins nationally and in early primary states. The DeSantis campaign is shedding staff and reportedly fielding nervous calls from donors. Right-wing influencers speak of “RDS” in what-might-have-been tones and past-tense sentences.
So the question is: Which part of the DeSantis formula isn’t working—the populist mojo or the competence-discipline-palatability factor? The answer, I’m afraid, is both.
On the populist front, DeSantis has rendered himself vulnerable on earned benefits and foreign interventionism. Those happen to be two major flash-points between the GOP’s donor class and the party’s increasingly downscale base. As the recent Times poll found, nearly two-thirds of likely Republican voters want their Social Security and Medicare to stay just the way they are, and a majority are done with arming and funding Ukraine.
In 2016, Trump smashed his conventional Republican rivals precisely by bucking the party’s orthodoxy on these two issues: He vowed to protect earned benefits, and he described the foreign adventurism of the post-9/11 years as a “disaster.” There is no reason to believe that the working-class Americans who increasingly rally to the Republican Party, and whose votes are crucial to winning the general in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, have shifted on either issue.
Matching Trump on both is the bare minimum for any who would take him on. DeSantis was vulnerable on earned benefits going back to his time in Congress, when he backed “entitlement reform” and even privatization. It was of the utmost urgency for him to make clear that he now stands with the party’s populist base on these issues, lest he lend credence to Trump-aligned PACs’ brutal ads framing him as a benefit-slasher and -raider. DeSantis failed to do so. Instead, as recently as June, he took to Fox News to clarify that he would only slash benefits for workers in their 30s or 40s. Imagine how genial that idea sounds to the 48-year-old American who has been active in the labor market since age 16 or 17.
On foreign policy, meanwhile, DeSantis needlessly hurt himself by equivocating. No doubt impelled in part by Trump’s dovish message on Ukraine, DeSantis submitted a refreshingly restraint-oriented response to Tucker Carlson’s foreign-policy questionnaire to the candidates. But then, a few days later, he walked it back and sounded more conventionally Republican notes. The New York Times reported that hedge-fund honcho Ken Griffin lodged complaints about DeSantis’s remarks, but I’ve also been told by Republican operatives that donor influence is a far less important factor than the candidate’s own unshakably Reaganite instincts.
In the event, the impression took hold that DeSantis is slippery on restraint—a situation not helped by his tendency to rechannel such questions into safer anti-woke grooves. On the day he launched the DeSantis campaign, a Fox host gently pressed him on his Day One plans for Ukraine, which set the governor on a two-minute-long digression about the scourge of wokeness and gender ideology in the military. “Populism,” for the governor, seems to involve only such cultural issues. To be clear, working Americans are also alarmed by racialized propaganda and gender ideology in the armed forces. It’s just that “woke” and “anti-woke” aren’t the sum of all issues for voters—though they too often appear to be for DeSantis.
Which brings us to the operation’s vaunted discipline. Here, the problem is quite simple. If the substance doesn’t resonate, then no amount of discipline and responsibility can elevate it among voters. At a time when ordinary Americans are worried about health and wage precarity, retirement safety, and the prospect of accidentally stumbling into nuclear war, it doesn’t bespeak discipline to endlessly discuss crypto, “reconstitutionalizing the executive branch,” and similar e-right obsessions.
The post Why Trump Is Winning the Primary—So Far appeared first on The American Conservative.
America’s proxy war with Russia has transformed Ukraine into a graveyard.
Incrementalism—the tendency to inch forward rather than to take bold steps—is usually preferred by political and military leaders in warfare, because the introduction of a few forces into action puts fewer personnel at risk, and, in theory, promises a series of improvements over time, often through attrition.
In 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by the then-chairman General J. Lawton Collins, recommended short envelopments along the Korean coastline that were designed to gradually increase the size of the U.S. and Allied enclave known as the Pusan Perimeter. The idea was to buy time to assemble enough forces to launch a breakout on the Normandy model. But General of the Army Douglas MacArthur disagreed. He argued for a daring, deep envelopment that promised to cut off the North Korean Forces south of the 38th Parallel that were encircling Pusan.
As it turned out, MacArthur was right. Today, we know that the short envelopments were exactly what the North Korean command was prepared to defeat. In retrospect, it is certain that along with their Chinese allies, the North Koreans were familiar with the operational employment of U.S. and Allied forces during WWII. Eisenhower’s insistence on a broad front strategy that moved millions of troops in multiple armies in parallel across France and Germany to Central Europe conformed to the low-risk formula.
In light of this history, it was reasonable for the North Koreans to believe that MacArthur would never split his forces and launch an amphibious assault far behind North Korean lines. It was simply too risky. And the operational concept for Inchon was also inconsistent with the way U.S. forces were employed during the Civil War and World War I—wars won through attrition, not maneuver.
In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin opted for incrementalism in his approach to the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. Putin committed fewer than 100,000 Russian troops to a shallow penetration attack on a broad front into a country the size of Texas. Having failed over a period of nearly 15 years to persuade Washington and the collective West of Moscow’s opposition to NATO’s advance to the east, Putin seems to have concluded that Washington and its NATO allies would prefer immediate negotiations to a destructive regional war with unknowable potential for escalation to the nuclear level.
Putin was wrong. He made a false assumption based on rational choice theory. Rational choice theory attempts to predict human behavior based on the assumption that individuals habitually make choices in economics, politics, and daily life that align with their personal best interest.
The problem with the theory is that human beings are not rational. In fact, the human mind is like a black box. It is possible to observe what goes into the black box and the decisions that come out of it, but the actual decision-making process that unfolds inside the black box is opaque.
In international relations and war, the defining features of human identity—history, geography, culture, religion, language, race, or ethnicity—must also figure prominently in any strategic assessment. For reasons of culture, experience, and innate character, MacArthur was a risk-taker. As Peter Drucker reminds his readers, culture is the foundation for human capital. These realities routinely defeat the unrealistic expectations that rational choice theory creates.
Instead of approaching the negotiating table, Washington discarded the caution, given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, that had guided previous American dealings with Moscow. Washington’s political class, with no real understanding of Russia or Eastern Europe, subscribed to the late Senator John McCain’s notion that Russia was a “gas station with nuclear weapons.”
Putin is not a risk-taker. But he abandoned incrementalism, and rapidly reoriented Russian forces to the strategic defense, an economy of force measure designed to minimize Russian losses while maximizing Ukrainian losses until Russian Forces could return to offensive operations. The Russian change in strategy has worked. Despite the unprecedented infusion of modern weaponry, cash, foreign fighters, and critical intelligence to Ukrainian forces, Washington’s proxy is shattered. Ukraine’s hospitals are brimming with broken human beings and Ukrainian dead litter the battlefield. Kiev is a heart patient on life support.
Russia’s attrition strategy has achieved remarkable success, but the success is making the conflict currently more dangerous than at any point since it began in February 2022. Why? Defensive operations do not win wars, and Washington continues to believe Ukraine can win.
Washington discounts Ukrainian losses and exaggerates Russian losses. Officers present at meetings in the Pentagon tell me that minor Ukrainian battlefield successes (that are almost instantly reversed) loom large in the discussions held in four-star headquarters, the White House, and Foggy Bottom. These reports are treated as incontrovertible evidence of inevitable Ukrainian victory. In this climate, staff officers are reluctant to highlight effective Russian military performance or the impact of Russia’s expanding military power.
The Western media reinforce these attitudes, arguing that the Russian generals and their forces are dysfunctional, mired in corruption and sloth, and that Ukraine can win if it gets more support. As a result, it is a good bet that Washington and its allies will continue to provide equipment and ammunition, though probably not in the quantities and of the quality they did in the recent past.
Warsaw, whose leadership of NATO’s anti-Russian crusade is prized in Washington, finds comfort in the Beltway’s belief in Russian military weakness. So much so, that Warsaw seems willing to risk direct confrontation with Moscow. According to French sources in Warsaw, if Ukrainian forces are driven back, “the Poles may introduce the first division this year, which will include the Poles, the Balts, and a certain number of Ukrainians.”
Now, Washington is misjudging Moscow. The Russian national command authorities may well think that Warsaw’s actions align with Washington’s intentions. President Biden’s executive order to extend hazard pay to American soldiers currently serving in Ukraine (who are not supposed to be there) no doubt reinforces this opinion.
But it is far more likely that the Polish tail wants to wag the American dog. The Poles know their military intervention in historic Galician Ukraine will provoke a military response from both Belarus and Russia, but Warsaw also reasons that Washington’s air and ground forces in Europe are unlikely to sit quietly in Ukraine, Romania, and the Baltic littoral while Polish forces fight a losing battle.
America’s proxy war with Russia has transformed Ukraine into a graveyard. Indulging Poland’s passion for war with Russia encourages Poland to follow the Ukrainian example. The very idea must leave Moscow no choice but to bring all of Russia’s military power to bear simultaneously against Ukraine, before the collective West stumbles into regional war. Make peace, you fools, before it’s too late.
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I’ve written a couple times about the death of the internet as a cultural engine. The basic argument is that the era of intense generalized connection is coming to an end—instead of having some enormous portion of humanity sloshing around together in gigantic social stockpots like Twitter and Facebook, people will separate themselves into little social ramekins based on interest or affinity like hobbyist forums or private Signal groups. Hence the death of the media companies (like Buzzfeed) that tried to exploit the big stockpot for an audience, and the continued success of those that have continued to cultivate their own little ramekins (like HuffPo or the legacy papers), which was, after all, how the internet started out.
I recently came across a delightful little example of this past as future. One Phil Gyford, a British web developer, maintains a website devoted to the 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys, a Restoration-era bureaucrat in Britain’s incipient defense apparatus. You can sign up to receive a day’s entry of Pepys around close of business in your email; even more delightful, in you click through to see the day’s entry on the site, there follows below it a forum discussion where Pepysheads dissect early modern linguistic oddities, the condition of our man Sam’s finances, the geography of London, and the like. Because Pepys kept the diary for roughly ten years, the forum posts come in decadal waves—a burst of activity on the entry on the date in 2003, 2013, and now 2023.
Gyford also ran an associated Twitter account that would post excerpts of the day’s entry. (Pepys, always very frank about life’s coarser difficulties, has some pretty funny Twitter material.) The ongoing technical problems with Twitter have caused Gyford to cease tweeting, per a notice on the diary site; but on the forum itself, Pepys-centric activities will continue unabated, as they have for over twenty years.
The post The Internet Still Has Its Moments appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Washington Post is back with another piece of inadvertent pro-life propaganda.
In the past few years, as states began to pass landmark legislation to protect unborn children, pro-abortion advocates have been casting about trying to find human interest stories about those who have been “harmed” by the birth of their once-unwanted children. Last summer, the Post profiled Brooke Alexander, who gave birth to twin girls as an 18 year old. Its first piece on Brooke’s family ran last June, right before the Dobbs decision came down, under the headline “This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins.” (The horror!)
Now, over a year later, the Post has a lengthy follow-up on Brooke’s life as a new mom. It is, in many ways, an admirable story of two young parents doing everything right and taking responsibility to provide for their (unexpected) children: Brooke married the girls’ father, Billy. He enlisted in the Air Force to support his family, and they since moved to Florida for his job. Brooke cares for the girls full time.
To be sure, Brooke and Billy have their challenges. From the Post story:
[Brooke’s] life quickly started to feel like an endless cycle of tasks, entirely predictable and stretching out into infinity. Cook lunch. Clean up. Play with the girls. Put the girls down for a nap. Change diapers. Cook dinner. Clean up. Repeat.
Billy, too, isn’t exactly thrilled about his day-to-day responsibilities:
It was Billy’s idea to join the military. He wasn’t excited about it, but he couldn’t see another way to support a wife and twins. Everyone in his life — his parents, his favorite teacher — told him it was the right thing to do. So Billy committed, marrying Brooke at the courthouse last summer and signing an Air Force enlistment contract that would keep him in uniform for the next six years.
But this is precisely what fatherhood and motherhood is all about. You sacrifice for your family. You make decisions not based on personal desire, but on the good of the family. Your fulfillment comes not from hobbies, or professional achievement, but from the infinitely more challenging and rewarding vocation of raising children. It’s certainly not easy.
Caroline Kitchener, the Post’s abortion reporter who wrote both pieces on Brooke and Billy, concedes that her initial story “was a Rorschach test, with each side of the abortion debate claiming the teenagers’ experiences as validation of their own views.” It strikes me, though, that this follow-up is the greater Rorschach test. The first piece was about abortion politics; the second is about how we define success and happiness.
There are plenty of moments throughout the piece where we see both Brooke and Billy’s relationship struggles, and their love for their twin daughters. It’s telling, though, that the Post concludes the piece with Brooke talking to a career coach, eager to begin working outside the home once more. The implication is that by pursuing professional advancement, Brooke will finally move beyond the many real challenges that a young married couple raising children face.
As always, country music says it best. Kenny Chesney’s hit song “There Goes My Life” is about a teenage couple experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, not unlike Brooke and Billy. The chorus sings:
There goes my life
There goes my future, my everything
Might as well kiss it all goodbye
Later in the song, after “a couple years of up all night, and a few thousand diapers later,” the chorus shifts:
There goes my life
There goes my future, my everything
“I love you, daddy, goodnight!”
The unplanned daughter is now the father’s life. It’s a profound shift in perspective, and one the pro-abortion movement seems intent on avoiding. It’s the task of the pro-life movement to unequivocally reject the view that children can be an impediment to personal fulfillment and happiness—and support courageous couples like Billy and Brooke as they sacrifice for their daughters.
The post More Inadvertent Pro-Life Propaganda appeared first on The American Conservative.
The judiciary abdicates its duty when it tolerates broad-ranging executive “emergency powers.”
Supreme Court–watchers who try to see beyond the moment have frequently perceived Justice Elena Kagan as a future chief justice. She comes from a family of civil servants and is unlikely to be touched by financial scandal. As dean of the Harvard Law School, she was a conciliator, respectful of opposing views. Most notably, along with Justice Stephen Breyer, she joined the more conservative justices in the Sebelius Obamacare case in finally placing meaningful inhibitions on the conditional spending power in the interests of federalism.
Chief Justice Roberts’s decisive opinion in that case, invoking the taxing power to uphold most of Obamacare, may well have been a wrong turn. He successfully sought to restrain not only the conditional spending power but the commerce power with a principle that it could not be used to define compelled private spending as “commerce.” But on any realistic view, the battle against a national health program of some sort had been lost, notwithstanding some 1920s decisions saying that medical practice was not commerce. Wickard v. Filburn had expanded the commerce power to private actions affecting commerce, and the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act was funded by a processing tax rather than compelled purchases of private insurance. Invalidation of Obamacare, which was a gift to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, would almost certainly have led to a nationalized program like the British National Health Service.
It was too late in the day to urge that Congress could not decisively transform what had become the nation’s largest industry. The invocation of the taxing power in a non-revenue context was itself dangerous, and repudiated the 8-to-1 Bailey v. Drexel case (1922). In Bailey, the Court, with Associate Justice Louis Brandeis joining, had invalidated a child labor tax as what Professor Felix Frankfurter called “a dishonest use of the taxing power”
But those looking to Justice Kagan as an anchor of essential principles in a crisis must be feeling some disappointment; she joining two so-called liberals in the two cases involving the invocation of vague emergency powers to validate moratoria on rent and student loan payments.
For if there is a power more dangerous than the commerce power, or the taxing power, or even the conditional spending power, it is the power assumed by the executive in declared “emergencies.” As Friedrich Hayek observed, “‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded—and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has acquired such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency persists.”
The three cases decided on the same day in May 1935 that aroused President Roosevelt’s ire are landmarks in confining emergency powers and the broad legislative delegations relied upon to legitimize them. Perhaps the central opinion of the group is Associate Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s concurring opinion in the Schechter case on the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) codes.
Cardozo was the most liberal member of the Court and stayed on board for almost all the New Deal legislation, but the NIRA was too much. The delegation to the President of power to formulate codes for all of American industry was “not canalized within banks that keep it from overflowing … unconfined and vagrant … a roving commission to inquire into evils and upon discovery correct them.” He continued,
Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to turn over to others the essential legislative functions with which it is vested. This is delegation running riot. No such plentitude of power is susceptible of transfer. Anything that Congress may do can be done by the President without reference to standards that could be known or predicted. The law is not indifferent as to differences in degree.
Journalists and academics have decried the “major question” doctrine invoked by today’s Supreme Court in the rent and student loan moratorium cases, Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS and Biden v. Nebraska—“We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,” per an unsigned opinion. These critics should reread Cardozo.
The second case decided in May 1935 was Louisville Joint Stock Bank v. Radford, ignored in much recent moratorium litigation. In the decision, Brandeis defined the essential rights of which secured creditors could not be deprived without early cash payment:
However great the nation’s need…[if] the public interest requires the taking of property of individual Mortgagees in order to relieve the necessities of individual Mortgagors, resort must be had to proceedings by eminent domain so that, through taxation, the burden of the relief afforded in the public interest may borne by the public.
The third case determined on the same day was Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which denied the President power to summarily remove members of independent regulatory agencies. This case at least partially renounced the “unitary executive” theory so fashionable in recent years and partially embraced the view of Brandeis’s dissent in the Myers case ten years earlier:
The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction but by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.
The nation was well served by the three opinions of May 1935 and their sequels. Subsequent New Deal measures were not the product of executive dictates but of congressional compromises. The Social Security Act omitted medical insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act omitted domestic and agricultural workers. The temporary Republican ascendancy producing the Taft-Hartley Act preserved the rights of labor organization conferred by the Wagner Act and the freedom from private injunctions conferred by the Norris-La Guardia Act.
The extraordinary federal powers conferred by the 1965 Voting Rights Act included time limits; the 1964 Civil Rights Act with its Dirksen amendment refrained from making employment discrimination complaints too easy. The wartime Congress rejected Roosevelt’s grandiose scheme for the conscription of labor and refused to draft strikers. Two recent pieces of legislation increasing debt limits refrained from executive gimmicks and contained concessions to those concerned with fiscal restraint.
The legislature is the agency of compromise in a democracy, and when it is bypassed by “emergency” ukases, either of the executive or judiciary, legislative power atrophies and unacceptable divisions and tensions result. Justice Robert Jackson viewed the decisive event in the Nazi seizure of power as the “emergency” supersession of the powers of the Prussian police before the 1932 election and the irresolution of the German Supreme Court in condemning it, but the historian Richard Evans has pointed out: “[Friedrich] Ebert, as the [Weimar] Republic’s first President, made very extensive use of this power, employing it on no fewer than 136 occasions…. In the end, Ebert’s excessive use, and occasional misuse, of the Article widened its application to a point where it became a potential threat to democratic institutions.” Efforts to forge durable parliamentary coalitions were abandoned, such as one attempted by Konrad Adenauer in 1926, since their existence was no longer necessary to carry on the ordinary functions of government, totally ruled by the Executive.
The oral argument of Biden v. Nebraska was not enlightening, being interrupted by frequent interpellations of the “liberal” justices, including Kagan, about the enormity of the Covid threat as though this trumped all legal values. There were no checks on the scheme imposed by the president, carefully calibrated to appeal to some ethnic groups, and applying to legions of persons unaffected by Covid, notwithstanding Justice Jackson’s one-time admonition that “emergency powers are consistent with free government only when their control is lodged elsewhere than in the executive that exercises them.” The legislation relied upon was prompted by an entirely different sort of military emergency, had no time limits, and no pretense of bi-partisan administration: The Trump and Biden cabinets presiding over the Covid emergency had no Attlee or Bevin, no Stimson or Knox.
It has since emerged that extralegal means may have been used to stifle discussion of the “herd immunity,” which, in addition to vaccines, caused the Covid threat to dissipate; this may also have been true of some “global warming” issues fueling enthusiasm for governmental subsidy of electric cars, potentially another Teapot Dome scandal. In the Olmstead case, Brandeis observed: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
A recent book by a British scholar, Martin Loughlin’s Against Constitutionalism (Harvard University Press, 2023), decries judicial activism as well as judicial ratification of broad delegations to the executive and international agencies, as “instituting a system of rule that is unlikely to carry popular support, without which only increasing authoritarianism and countervailing reaction will result.” Judges who do not wish to be thought of as partisans must curb abuses of executive power no matter who is in office. As Justices Jackson, Frankfurter and Owen Roberts said in their opinion in the Screws case of 1946, which curbed federal criminal jurisdiction even in civil rights cases, “Evil men are not given power; they take it over from better men to whom it had been entrusted.”
Kagan, unlike her two usual liberal allies, Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson, writes in clear and lucid English. In the past, she has demonstrated tolerance and understanding for views that differ from her own. . But excessive tolerance for “emergency powers” is a fatal flaw for a constitutional judge, according their possessor or usurper a trump card which renders all law irrelevant.
The post Justice Kagan’s Apostasy appeared first on The American Conservative.
More and more college students are claiming to be disabled.
More and more college students are claiming to be disabled. A piece making this observation, by professor Colleen Eren, went viral over the weekend.
Eren wrote the piece after she and her colleagues observed that more students were claiming disability and consequently were receiving accommodations, such as extra time on tests, private rather than in-class presentations, and extended deadlines. The students making these claims were not typically wheelchair-bound or otherwise physically impaired. Most claimed to suffer from psychological conditions, such as anxiety or attention-deficit disorder.
When Eren looked at the state and national data, she found that the number of students claiming disability had increased exponentially. The number of college students claiming disability in New York, for example, rose by nearly 30,000 between 2015–16 and 2021–22, even as the number of students enrolled in degree and credit-bearing-certificate programs declined. In 2016, a national study found that one in five undergraduates had been determined by their respective college or university to have a disability, nearly double the rate of disability reported among college students in 2004.
The overwhelming majority of those students were labeled as having learning disabilities, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, or depression. Sufferers of those and other potentially marginal conditions were made eligible for accommodations when Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2008. The amendments inaugurated Section 504, which enables students to claim disability and access accommodations for an array of conditions, many of which would not have met the Court’s substantial-impairment threshold in Toyota v. Williams.
It is possible, in individual cases, that a condition such as anxiety and ADHD could be so severe as to warrant an accommodation, though the circumstances in which that’s true are rare. In any case, such conditions cannot be verified in the way physical disabilities like quadriplegia can, a fact that wealthier students and their families have apparently taken advantage of.
Eren reported that students from high-income families are significantly more likely to receive accommodations than are those from middle-income families. And over the past 12 years, the number of students claiming disability at the country’s top eight liberal art colleges—which have some of the wealthiest student bodies in the country—increased by more than 290 percent.
Emma Camp, an editor at Reason, published a viral post about Eren’s article this weekend. Her tweet included a graph illustrating the surging number of students in New York claiming disability. Camp claimed that Eren’s piece and the increasing number of New York students claiming disability were “pretty strong evidence that a ‘disabled’ label is becoming a [fashion] accessory for rich kids.”
Disability rights advocates were incensed at the suggestion that anyone in New York’s higher education system would falsely claim to be disabled. No one is taking advantage of the system, they argued, because there is no “advantage” to be had.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter argued it was “unintelligent” for Camp to “think ‘these people must be faking,’” when the real explanation is increased “awareness about things that were previously shamed and hidden.’” This is a variation of the why-did-left-handedness-increase-so-much trope, which progressives use in response to revelations like one-third of college students claiming to be gay.
Another poster advanced a similar argument, claiming, “No one’s claiming to be disabled for funsies [sic]. They’re just no longer suffering in silence.”
The only possible explanations for the increasing number of New York students identifying as disabled, on this view, are either a bona fide increase in the number of disabled people in New York, or more people with disabilities feeling comfortable identifying themselves as disabled. There is no third option. To imply that even one person who claimed to be disabled was faking it, or would even consider faking it, would be to perpetuate attitudes that previously kept students with disabilities in the “closet.”
Because progressives refuse to admit that trade-offs exist—consider, for example, their claim that prosecuting non-violent criminals actually “makes us less safe”—they refuse to admit that anyone in New York, or any of the hundreds of thousands of wealthy students diagnosed with conditions like anxiety, is faking it, or could even fake it if they wanted to. They think that to admit any excess is to imperil the entire project of disability rights.
There is a way to make a plausible-sounding, if ultimately unpersuasive, argument that colleges’ permissive approach to disability accommodations is good. You could concede that students who successfully claim certain disabilities are given certain advantages to compensate, and concede students will try to game the system to obtain those advantages, but claim the benefits of a permissive accommodations regime to genuinely disabled students outweighs the costs of potentially enabling malingerers.
Disability rights advocates do not make that argument. Instead, they suggest that no one has ever pretended to have a disability, and insist that conditions like anxiety and ADHD are no more likely to be feigned than is cerebral palsy.
Their dogmatism is rooted, in part, in their belief in the so-called social model of disability. The social model, in contrast to the much-maligned but not-often-defended medical model, holds that disabilities arise from society’s failure to accommodate people with physical or mental differences. Proponents of the social model argue that the conditions we call disabilities are not themselves disabling, and are only such to the extent that the public at large refuses to accommodate them.
The fruits of this view—wheelchair ramps, sign-language interpreters, accessible elevators—have helped millions of people with serious disabilities to participate in public life. It has also enabled some number of people, in this case college students, to claim that the trials of everyday life are themselves disabling social conditions that must be ameliorated.
Tests must be moved for the anxious test takers. Deadlines must be extended to accommodate talk-therapy appointments. The student’s inability to cope with the basic rigors of higher education becomes as an indictment of the institution, not the fortitude or fitness of the student.
It’s possible for a mental condition to be disabling. It’s also possible for a mental condition to be feigned or exaggerated. Unfortunately for many colleges and universities, they don’t have the luxury of drawing that distinction.
The post Matriculating Malingerers appeared first on The American Conservative.
Another effort to restore congressional war powers has failed.
There is an old IBM presentation slide occasionally passed around social media, allegedly from 1979. It reads, “A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE … THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.” It was a wise sentiment then, which—as our ability to violate the maxim has only grown with our digital technology—appears even wiser now. And if we drop “computer” from the phrase, we find a principle that may apply equally to all times and all places: Persons or things that can never be held accountable must never make a management decision.
Can a treaty declare war? Congress seems to think so. Of course, Congress has been happy to let presidents go to war without its declaration for a long time now, so maybe no one should be surprised. Usually, when leaving management decisions to others, not being accountable is the point.
You might, like me, have missed Sen. Rand Paul’s proposed Amendment 222 to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 a couple weeks ago. It was short-lived. Joining Kentucky’s Paul in support were only fifteen senators, all Republicans, including Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and Utah’s Mike Lee. The body of the amendment read as follows: “To express the sense of Congress that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not supersede the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war before the United States engages in war.” Apparently eighty-three U.S. senators think that it is only a matter of semantics whether a president fulfilling American treaty obligations means the country is at war or not—or that it’s just up to him.
In an effort to be superhumanly charitable to these hand-washers, one could perhaps, sophistically, suggest that our NATO agreement, in being approved by the Senate in 1949, was a sort of congressional pre-declaration of war, a check to be cashed at the discretion of a future president. Congress has, after all, not declared war since 1942, satisfied instead with authorizing uses of military force. Nevertheless, if NATO had been signed off on by the House of Representatives in addition to the Senate, which is not how this works, the text of Article 5 leaves plenty of room for fulfillment to fall short of war, even undeclared. It does not demand on its own terms superseding the constitutional requirement of Congress to declare war:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
An authorization for the use of military force, clearly up to a point, but an illimitable pre-declaration of war? Well, unless we as a nation start taking orders from this Security Council, not by a long shot.
In his failed amendment, Paul is continuing his father’s quixotic quest to restore congressional war powers. The unwillingness of the vast majority of his colleagues to affirm congressional responsibility for war is, as already suggested, typical of our legislators of both parties. But it is also typical of our entire culture, beyond deference to an out-of-control administrative state and security apparatus in the executive branch. Legislation, and treaties, are a kind of technology, and we Americans are as a rule highly deferential to our technologies.
Human tools are given ends by their makers, ends that shape the world and shape their users in turn. The American Constitution is such a tool, and in our three branches of government its framers sought to ensure human responsibility for the mechanisms constructed by our laws and institutions. Of course, the men and women who occupy the prescribed offices of authority must exercise their official powers if they are to be a check on that authority’s abuse. As we have discovered, especially in observing the legislative branch, they can in practice voluntarily resign those powers in an effort to evade accountability, and do.
This particular act of evasion makes obvious this legalism’s characteristic moral passivity. Congress’s willingness to let NATO’s Article 5 declare a future war by default, or to authorize a president to use military force without formal limits, is an ethical abdication as much as a constitutional one. It constructs a legal machine in which a future aggressor becomes the only moral agent, and the American people’s representatives need not deliberate over the national interest or consider what course prudence demands. Instead, the executive branch and the military will simply respond on their behalf. Business as usual, then.
The post War by Design appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The foreign policy blob that presided over America’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are asking us to be patient with the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The foreign policy blob that presided over America’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are asking us to be patient with the Ukrainian counteroffensive. After all, these things take time—sometimes decades!
Per POLITICO’s National Security Daily Newsletter:
If Ukraine’s supporters were hoping for a breakthrough after Kyiv’s forces made a new push in the southeast of the country last week, they were sorely disappointed.
The latest attack, which saw Ukraine throw in thousands of Western-trained reinforcements to drive south from the town of Orikhiv, has not yet yielded significant results, U.S. Defense Department officials told NatSec Daily this week, with one noting that the gains are being measured in the hundreds of meters.
One unnamed U.S. Defense Department official told POLITICO “They [the Ukrainians] are making mostly small, incremental gains.”
But, as my grandmother always says, “patience, Prudence!” The DOD official said more American counter-drone systems are arriving at the front, and another tranche of aid is expected to be announced next week, just two weeks after the Biden administration dispensed another $400 million in military aid.
We’ve already forked well over $100 billion to Ukraine, but, surely, with these drone systems and another few hundred million dollars, the long-delayed counteroffensive that’s failed for two months will suddenly make the Red Army part like the Red Sea. If it doesn’t, there’s always next year, and the year after that.
The post Ukraine Counteroffensive: Broken Down or Breaking Through? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Joe Plenzler is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who was strategic advisor for communication to the commandants of the Marine Corps from 2010 to 2015. He would like to draft your sons, and, while they go unmentioned, probably your daughters.
In an opinion piece for Military.com, Plenzler proposes a hybrid recruitment model for the American armed forces.
We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year, and then have the Selective Service draft the delta between the military’s needs and the total number recruited.
This model would alleviate the incredible pressure on our recruiters, lower the cost of finding new troops, and significantly reduce the much decried civilian-military gap by subjecting all of America’s youth — rich and poor — to the possibility of military service via the draft.
In Plenzler’s telling, this arrangement would also solve the disconnect between domestic politics and foreign adventurism, forcing a wider slice of the electorate to pay attention to open-ended operations around the world and hence to hold our leadership accountable.
While from a purely military interests perspective the proposal makes basic sense, the rationalizations supposed to convince us civilians—still in charge for now—are naive at best. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bringing troops home from stations around the globe was long popular among the general electorate, to little effect until the election of Donald Trump and national populist energy forced a few concessions.
The current recruitment crisis is in part a crisis because the de facto American military caste of the so-called Southern Smile feels disregarded by a defense apparatus committed to social engineering projects that place them at the bottom of an identity hierarchy. That and close to three quarters of draft-age men in this country are disqualified by fatness, criminal records, or failure to finish high school. Perhaps a targeted draft enlisting the children of Pentagon brass and members of Congress would prompt reconsideration from our establishment, but at its current wished for size the U.S. military remains too small to be felt by the nation at large.
That is not a call for a bigger military; one can hardly imagine a country in which the institutional interests of the armed forces were more represented. And a recent report from RAND Corporation on the military’s force structure further highlights how much of our troubles are self-inflicted. The report finds we can no longer rely on technological and numerical superiority to our adversaries, that our forces are not configured for a two front or two theater global conflict addressing both Russia and China.
Well, obviously. We spent two decades focused on counterinsurgency in the Middle East, using the weapons and soldiers of the future against terror cells and the Taliban. We still lost, because technology is not everything. The high-tech game against near peer adversaries is even harder, and we have come no closer to defining our national interests or aspirations.
Until we do, and leaders step up who can articulate our purposes both for the American people and the armed forces, directing spending and focus to what matters, the recruitment deficit will continue and we will remain unprepared for the crises of tomorrow. But as I bemoaned in my column today, everything about our national defense arrangements seems designed to avoid accountability.
The post Rough Drafts appeared first on The American Conservative.
The greatest threat to peace is posed by those who claim to oppose going to war while demanding that the U.S. intervene militarily.
Western governments expressed shock at Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian food shipments and missile attacks on Odessa’s port facilities. The consequences are terrible, but as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared: “War is hell.”
Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, and Vietnamese learned this lesson the hard way in America’s recent conflicts. Western nations have imposed starvation blockades, reduced cities to fire and ruin, and dropped atomic bombs on civilians when they have deemed it necessary. Even the most enlightened powers have killed promiscuously. And Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is anything but enlightened.
There has been much discussion about finding a way to renew the grain deal, which had allowed Kiev to sell its production. But diplomatic pressure is unlikely to change Putin’s mind. At the recent meeting of African leaders, Moscow pacified the neediest nations by promising Russian grain.
Still, the usual suspects have begun pushing for war. That’s not the way they put it, of course. Rather, they urge aggressive allied military action against Russia that would risk conflict, while assuring the public that there is no danger, nothing to see, so let the war-happy hawks do their worst.
For instance, James Stavridis, former NATO commander, advocates that the U.S. (mainly) and its allies effectively, if not formally, enter the war by
bundling the merchant craft into three-to-five ship convoys, each escorted by a couple of guided-missile warships. There would be a significant air component to carry out patrols tracking the location of the Russian Black Sea Fleet—which operates largely out of ports in occupied Crimea—and to respond to possible Russian air attacks on the ships. Several squadrons of fighters could be assigned to NATO bases in northern Turkey or, more likely, Romania and Bulgaria. Satellite command-and-control would be necessary; air and naval drones could be integrated.
Moscow would be fully entitled to respond militarily, but, Stavridis says, don’t worry, be happy: “Putin would fume, sputter and threaten—but is unlikely to take on NATO or a US-led coalition of Black Sea warships in direct combat.” What if Stavridis was wrong? As he reluctantly admitted, there are obvious risks:
It would bring Russia and Ukraine’s Western supporters into direct confrontation, if not necessarily combat. It would be crucial, before starting the mission, to give a public explanation of its intent and scope, making clear to Russia that we are not looking for a fight but will do what we must to defend the convoys. There are other risks as well. Turkey, which controls passage to the Black Sea, might prove politically reluctant to cooperate. And there is the possibility of an inadvertent incident of “collateral damage.”
Other than that, what could possibly go wrong?
Stavridis compared confronting Russia today with the 1980s reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq war. Washington then allied with the aggressor, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was being financed by Kuwait. Iran did not challenge the U.S., but, of course, the former did not possess nuclear weapons. That experience may be one reason Tehran is interested in developing them.
Andreas Umland of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs offered a similar idea in March, a no-fly zone against unmanned vehicles over Ukraine “to secure its food production and delivery.” No need to worry, he insisted, about the consequences of actively intervening in a very hot war: “Russia does not use manned combat aircraft in its attacks in the Ukrainian hinterland. If Western fighter jets and anti-aircraft weapons hit Russian flying objects, they will not kill Russian service members.”
Others have proposed going much further. The Ukrainian government demanded a full no-fly zone from essentially day one. Some U.S. and allied policymakers agreed. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi who previously talked recklessly of using nuclear weapons against Russia, opined: “Clearly, in the absence of a U.N. resolution, which Russia would veto, a strong coalition of like-minded nations should step in and seriously consider this.” So did then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
To enforce such a zone would require not only downing Russian planes, but destroying anti-aircraft systems in Russia as well as Ukraine. To assume that Moscow would blithely accept the destruction of its military by Washington in the midst of a war Putin and other Russian leaders viewed as existential suggests a flight from reality. Even scarier, however, have been discussions over how the U.S. might, indeed, should respond if Moscow used nuclear weapons of some sort in some fashion.
For instance, David Petraeus, former military commander and CIA director, before his guilty plea over spilling secrets in pillow talk with his mistress, is back in Washington offering advice. On this issue, he observed: “Just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO—a collective—effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.” Similar ideas, such as a full-scale retaliatory air assault on Moscow’s military, were voiced at a Jamestown Foundation discussion of Russia’s nuclear potential.
Petraeus insisted that there was no reason to fret about a nuclear World War III, since his proposal “does not expand. It is not nuclear for nuclear. You don’t get into a nuclear escalation here but you have to show that this cannot be accepted in any way.” At the Jamestown event, advocates of a massive military response were equally certain that Moscow would do nothing as the U.S. destroyed Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s credibility as a serious leader. To call this a wild, even mad gamble would be a vast understatement.
It is doubtful that any Western policymaker has good insight into Putin’s thinking, as well as the dynamic of the political forces around him. But it long has been evident that he faces more domestic criticism from radical nationalists than from largely nonexistent Western-friendly liberals. No doubt, Putin and those around him raise the specter of nuclear conflict to deter greater allied involvement in the war, but there almost certainly is a point when a serious threat to his nation, regime, or rule would push him toward nuclear use.
Russia’s “special military operation” is unjustified and criminal, but that does not set it apart from similar wars around the world, including ones launched or backed by the U.S. and its allies (Pakistan-India, Iraq-Iran, U.S.-Iraq, Saudi Arabia-Yemen). Nor is Ukraine vital for American or even European security. Before becoming independent in 1991, the territory spent most of the preceding two centuries under Moscow, through the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. No allied government believed that the liberation of Kiev was a vital interest worth war.
Allied cynicism reached its apogee in recent decades. Despite claims of betrayal, the signers of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, most importantly Washington, offered no security guarantees in return for Ukraine’s promise to relinquish its nuclear weapons. The agreement was not a Senate-ratified treaty and pledged only to go “to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine… if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.” This was meaningless boilerplate intended to provide a domestic fig leaf to win Kiev’s approval. No one in the West was prepared to fight for Ukraine.
Similar was the saga of NATO membership. Although the George W. Bush administration pressed for the 2008 commitment to eventually induct Kiev, no one else wanted to add Ukraine. Nor did succeeding U.S. presidents. Hence the allies spent 14 years lying to Ukraine, expressing support for an action they never intended to take. That is why NATO, and especially its most important member, refused to fulfill its past promises at the alliance’s recent Vilnius summit, even after Ukraine was attacked.
Claims that Putin is another Hitler or Stalin, ready to conquer the rest of Europe and perhaps the entire known world if he can defeat Ukraine, are just silly. He has shown no interest in doing a reverse Napoleon and his military has demonstrated no ability to do so. The continent’s vulnerability reflects the decisions of European governments not to take security seriously since they can rely on American lives and money. Washington should tell other European states that it will no longer go to war on their behalf, forcing them to act.
If Ukraine does not constitute a vital or existential interest that would warrant use of military force, then the U.S. should not take steps that would involve a significant risk of war, and especially nuclear escalation. Especially since it is widely believed that Moscow has a lower threshold for employment of nuclear weapons since its conventional forces are inferior to those in the West. No one wants to fight World War III, but at some point conflict could seem unavoidable—and no one knows what that point is. Heedlessly intervening in Russia’s war is likely to discover the answer the hard way.
The Russo-Ukraine war is a great tragedy. But Washington’s primary duty is to the American people. And that means staying out of a conflict that is not their own. The greatest threat to peace today is posed by those who claim to oppose going to war while demanding that the U.S. intervene militarily. No amount of rhetorical legerdemain will deliver a costless American victory over Russia.
The post The Dogs of War Sit Set to Slip appeared first on The American Conservative.
It’s not a story you’ll see in the papers.
In the papers this morning, you will see that Donald Trump, the 45th president, is facing yet another indictment by a federal grand jury for what the Wall Street Journal inelegantly calls “election schemes.” Special Counsel Jack Smith is bringing four new felony charges against Trump pertaining to the disputed outcome of the 2020 election and the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
This indictment joins two other criminal indictments: a federal case pertaining to the alleged mishandling of classified material and a New York state case about a non-disclosure agreement with a pornographic actress. For his part, Trump has dismissed the indictment as an effort to hobble his candidacy before the 2024 election—which is hard to argue with, but also beside the point of the cases themselves.
Here is the truth about Trump: He won. He won in 2016, and he won in 2020. Few presidents in modern history have won as unambiguously as Trump won.
In the 2015 speech announcing his candidacy, Trump told the world what he was all about, politically. He argued that globalist trade policy had weakened the American economy and hurt the American worker, singling out China and Mexico in particular as unfair dealers. He condemned the idealistic adventurism of the Iraq war; he said American security obligations to countries like Saudi Arabia were raw deals for the U.S., and noted that China was using its trade surplus with the U.S. to fund military expansion in the Pacific. He denounced plans to cut entitlement programs like Social Security. He declared that he would close the border with Mexico.
In 2023, less than a decade later, Americans across the political spectrum have stepped back from free trade orthodoxy. The United States has negotiated a replacement for NAFTA, the USMCA, to stop Mexican cheating on labor and environmental standards and Canadian cheating on subsidies; as of now, the U.S. is litigating a trade dispute to keep Mexico honest on energy, steel, and aluminum. We are in the midst of negotiating a reform of the WTO dispute settlement system to be more amenable to American protection mechanisms. Meanwhile, China has fallen from the top American trade partner to a distant third place.
Within the U.S., a fad for industrial policy has gripped both parties. Enormous bills targeting infrastructure and key industries have passed on largely bipartisan bases. The American qua worker rather than qua consumer has become the focal point of mainstream American economic policy. The current administration slow-walked its response to inflation for fear of causing a spike in the unemployment rate. The Biden NLRB is more union-friendly than even Trump’s.
Meanwhile, the American foreign policy establishment has oriented itself toward a long-term rivalry with China. The current secretary of State kicked off his Chinese relationship with a polite shouting match with Chinese diplomats at a summit in Alaska. (Of course, it seems that the blob is determined to bring its characteristic panache to the Chinese question.) The Russia–Ukraine conflict has given our freeloading European allies a kick in the pants, encouraging them at least to start getting serious about bearing their own defensive burdens. Following through on Trump’s attempted pullout from Afghanistan—functionally vetoed by the defense establishment—was one of his successor’s top foreign policy priorities, and one that he followed through on despite resistance from the generals.
While the current administration has dithered in its immigration policy, the American public has grown more resolved. Biden’s handling of the border and immigration is one of his few consistently unpopular policies—a May CBS poll found that 64 percent of respondents disapproved. More than half of Americans think troops ought to be deployed to the border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country. Roughly 70 percent of Americans think that immigration, including legal immigration, should be held at current levels or decreased.
On social issues, Trump’s positions have ended up being uncontroversial and mainstream—pro–gay marriage, a “moderate” on the murder of the unborn, in favor of moderate justice reform. (As has been the usual case for the American people, social issues always rode in the back seat to economics for Trump.) A wag might suggest that concerns about election security have also become universal, although in rather different ways.
In under a decade, almost all Trump’s policies have achieved the status of conventional wisdom. This became clear almost as soon as the man had left 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Few modern presidents have so completely reshaped the American political landscape—FDR, LBJ, perhaps Reagan. It is worth pointing out again that nearly the whole Republican nomination field is populated by candidates who are claiming the Trump mantle, arguing they are improved models rather than departures from the America First mold.
So, as the criminal cases against Trump unfold, as the outcome of the 2020 election is endlessly litigated and relitigated, remember that the 45th president made the political world we’re living in. Right, left, and center, his policies have become the air we breathe. In a word (or two), Trump won. You might almost wonder whether the man is sick of it.
The post Trump Won appeared first on The American Conservative.
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