Connexion
A new book examines weaknesses in China’s meritocratic system—and in our own.
The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yasheng Huang, Yale University Press, 440 pages
Whether you are a globalist or a supporter of economic nationalism, a China hawk or dove, you must consider a number of critical questions. What is the basis for the stability of CCP—how has the party managed to survive so many upheavals and not lose legitimacy? Does Xi Jinping’s rule signify a further strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party’s power, or will it lead to a weakening of its foundations? And finally, is China’s system capable of surpassing the West technologically, and therefore militarily and economically? Yasheng Huang’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, offers a careful analysis of these questions that distinguishes it from the biased and predictable speculations of many commentators.
According to Huang, the sources of political stability can be found in the institution of keju, the civil service examination, that molded Chinese mentality and institutions. The tradition of examinations dates back to several centuries before Christ, but it was during the Sui Dynasty in the 6th century AD that the keju system was established. This system remained in effect until the fall of the empire in the 20th century.
Thanks to the keju, emperors were able to create a uniform class of educated bureaucrats. The exam enforced an intellectual monoculture; to pass, one had to master Neo-Confucian philosophy. It advocated absolute submission to the ruler’s will and strictly prohibited questioning his decisions. As Huang points out, the examinations focused on the inculcation of complex doctrines to the extent that “there was no time or energy to do much of anything else, whether that was exploring new ideas and natural phenomena, delving into mathematics, organizing a political opposition, or developing a crucial trait in the development of liberalism and science—skepticism. The human capacity was already taxed to its very limit.” This stifling intellectual environment meant that a culture of democratic discussion never emerged.
The keju also curtailed the influence of aristocracy and its regional power; the emperor no longer had to rely on nobility, having a new class of bureaucrats to carry out his orders. Further, this system monopolized human capital. An intelligentsia like that of Czarist Russia—a country with a lower literacy rate than the Middle Kingdom—never developed in imperial China. The class of civil servants absorbed all intellectuals, instilling in them a Neo-Confucian loyalism. For the same reasons, a bourgeois class never emerged. Emperors viewed trade as a disruptive element, and in the hierarchy of Confucian values, market activities were regarded with contempt.
Thus, the paths to social mobility were narrowed to one: the civil service. The enduring effects of the keju system help to explain CCP’s stability.
The longevity of the CCP is astounding, particularly in view of the shocks the party has weathered. These include surviving not only the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but also the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the SARS epidemic of 2003, and Covid-19. The Party has implemented draconian reforms, such as the One Child Policy and the mass layoffs from state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, during which between 30 and 50 million people lost their jobs. It has withstood internal power struggles, globalization, the growth of the private sector, and the expansion of the middle class.
Some suggest that the resilience of the CCP should be attributed to “performance legitimacy.” Yet a closer examination of the Chinese Communists’ governance reveals that its stability cannot solely be explained in this manner, especially considering its history of explosive growth alongside political catastrophes.
Huang proposes an alternative explanation for the CCP’s longevity: “axiomatic legitimacy.” According to this perspective, the state’s legitimacy is seen as unconditional; it has been deeply ingrained in the Chinese mentality through the keju, which emphasized obedience to the ruler and created a natural inclination towards statism. Given more than a thousand years of autocracy and intellectual homogenization, such a form of governance does not appear abnormal to the populace.
But can the legacy of imperial meritocracy explain why the PRC did not end up like Soviet Russia? Huang suggests that China’s political history can be understood through the prism of a pursuit of balance between heterogeneity—embracing diversity and autonomy—and the homogenization necessary for governing such a massive country. This delicate equilibrium between what Huang refers to as “scale and scope” has been achieved only a few times throughout the history of the Middle Kingdom, most recently by the CCP reformers.
Huang adopts the concept of M-Form and U-Form organizations from managerial theory to explain this. In U-Form organizations, decisions are made through a tight vertical hierarchy by general offices; for example, the sales department is responsible for sales across all regions. In contrast, in M-Form organizations, each regional branch operates its own sales department. This approach mitigates informational overload and conflicts of interest within individual offices. The Soviet economy worked according to the U-Form model, whereas the Chinese economy has adopted the M-Form structure since the late 1970s.
In Communist China, provinces were endowed with a significant degree of autonomy, creating a set of incentives distinct from those in Russia. Unlike USSR, where regions received funding from the central government, Chinese provinces lived off collected taxes from companies operating within their boundaries, encouraging a more pro-business attitude.
The goal to maximize GDP has spurred innovation within the Chinese system. Successful experiments could be, and often were, replicated across other parts of the country. In contrast, Russia dictated all changes from the center, which lacked the feedback from local levels. Huang observes that regional autonomy prevented Beijing from enforcing central planning. The shift towards a market economy occurred not because the central authorities decided to make this transition, but because they lost the capacity to execute central planning effectively.
GDP served as the meritocratic element within this decentralized structure. Regional leaders were primarily evaluated based on this metric, which, in turn, granted them room for maneuver—the focus was on growth, regardless of how it was achieved. When GDP becomes the primary objective, concepts like class struggle or mass campaigns fade into the background, resulting in a more rational and stable system.
The Gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, and CCP schools represent the communist version of the keju meritocracy. Just as in imperial China, human capital today is channeled through the civil service examination system. The route to the top of the party passes through provincial governance, where GDP serves as the most important metric for assessment.
This system may be witnessing a transformation; Xi is eroding its meritocratic character and restricting its autonomy.
According to Huang, Xi’s leadership represents a profound shock to the reformist system established by Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Xi has steered China away from the political moderation that characterized the party’s approach since the 1990s.
Although Xi’s predecessors also engaged in anti-corruption crackdowns, their efforts were surgical and, in contrast to the current campaigns, did not involve millions of people. Another instance of Xi’s new rigidity is the curbing of fintech and gaming industries, private educational services, and the real estate sector. The equilibrium between autonomy and control, or scope and scale, that has been so rarely achieved in China’s history has been unsettled by Xi’s actions, affecting not only the economy but also the very essence of the CCP system. The meritocratic emphasis on GDP has been overshadowed by vague criteria such as “political integrity,” paving the way for arbitrary political decisions. While the author acknowledges that the focus on GDP has led to issues like the fabrication of statistics or a disregard for environmental concerns, it is crucial to recognize that the alternative, that is political criteria, could prove to be far more detrimental.
As for the downfall of the USSR and the survival of the PRC, Xi has his own interpretation. According to him, the culprit is the so-called “historical nihilism”: the regime was destined to collapse as Marxist faith waned. Huang argues, however, that Xi overlooks the strengths of the reformist system built by previous CCP generations. As a result, the scope for political, intellectual, and economic autonomy has further narrowed: University curricula increasingly focus on Marxism and the Xi Jinping Thought, and private companies are required to introduce Party cells into their organizations. Contrary to viewing the private sector as the “crown jewels” of the economy, he believes China’s development stems from the design of party officials.
This is where Huang’s thesis may show an excessive emphasis on market mechanisms. Undoubtedly, Chinese companies have demonstrated remarkable vitality, yet this vitality might not have been stimulated without the subsidies, preferential loans, or tax breaks provided by the state. The term “industrial policy” is scarcely mentioned in Huang’s book, which is regrettable. A more careful consideration of CCP’s neomercantilism could have lent more nuance to his argument.
Nevertheless, this observation does not diminish the strength of the thesis that under Xi, the issue of succession in the CCP has gained unprecedented importance. In the Chinese empire, succession was determined by heredity; in the PRC, its outcome is shaped by political maneuvering and factional struggles. Huang notes that in modern autocracies, 68 percent of power transitions occur through coups d’état. By contrast, in imperial China, violence accounted for only 38 percent of succession cases. While tensions over succession have frequently sparked crises within the CCP, they have not led to systemic collapse.
On the other hand, under Xi, the author expresses concern that China may be drifting toward the pattern seen in modern autocracies. The elimination of internal opposition, the removal of term limits, and the cult of personality mark a clear departure from the “gentle politics” framework established by Deng Xiaoping, within which the PRC has functioned for the past several decades.
To China’s leadership, technology represents the paramount advantage in securing national power. Take for instance this study from a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Security, which argues that in the realm of great power competition, technology is the critical determinant of success—a perspective repeatedly endorsed by Xi.
In addressing the so-called Needham question—that is, why China, despite once having a significant technological advantage over the West, has lost its edge—Huang offers an original answer: the keju system. He argues that the intellectual homogenization and monopolization of human capital undermined the conditions necessary for innovation. The delicate balance between autonomy and control, crucial for the generation of new ideas and innovations, was reestablished only by the Communist reformers and lasted until the Xi era. Two critical factors contributed to the construction of this balance: Hong Kong and scientific cooperation with foreign countries.
Globalization has facilitated the development of international collaborations with research centers around the world, enabling Chinese universities to bypass the need for liberalization. Huang notes that “international collaborations provide access to foreign talent, capabilities, and ideas, as well as to the ‘think-different’ attitude that has been lacking and repressed domestically.”
Hong Kong has played an equally pivotal role in providing Mainland companies with access to venture capital, enabling them to circumvent the constraints imposed on the private sector. Without access to Hong Kong’s financial markets, companies like ByteDance or Lenovo, along with thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises, would have faced capital shortages and would never grow in such a rapid way.
Geopolitical tensions have resulted in a reduced scope and frequency of foreign cooperation. The clampdown on Hong Kong has transformed it from a bastion of free market principles and the rule of law into just another Chinese city (some claim that, to the contrary, a tighter integration would be beneficial for economic dynamism). According to Huang, these actions will ultimately harm the PRC, undermining the very foundation necessary for technological competitiveness.
If this book were read by someone with a hawkish view on China, they might draw two conclusions that could be unsettling for liberal minds. First: Further integration of Hong Kong into the PRC is a good thing, precisely because it will be a self-inflicted wound. Second: There is an argument for tighter restrictions on scientific cooperation (making, for instance, the admission of Chinese scientists contingent upon their agreement to work exclusively in the West).
The Rise and Fall of the EAST is a book about the crisis of China’s authoritarian meritocracy, so naturally it provokes reflection on the state of meritocracy in the West, where the idea that ability should determine success has become controversial in recent years.
While meritocracy once received strong support from the left, viewed as a pathway for social mobility for the working class, today’s attitude towards this ideal has shifted dramatically. Criticism of the SATs, justified by claims that these tests are saturated with bias against racial minorities, increased the importance of factors unrelated to ability like ethnic identification.
Populist critiques of meritocracy highlight two primary failures. First, the elites produced by this system have demonstrated a poor track record: From the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis of 2008, the “best and brightest” have often fallen dramatically short of expectations. Higher education, rather than enhancing their abilities, often inflates their self-confidence to delusional levels. The second accusation targets universities: they have shifted from recognizing the most deserving individuals to perpetuating privilege.
As Adrian Wooldridge notes in The Aristocracy of Talent, meritocracy is the worst system—except for all the others. The principle that an individual’s place in society should be determined by ability and effort arguably represents the most universal ideal uniting the West today. Far from inherently favoring elites, this ideal originally emerged in opposition to the undeserved usurpation of positions within the social, political, and economic hierarchy.
In America, its heyday came at the beginning of the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik raised fears in Washington that the Soviets might win the brain race, and thus the geopolitical competition. It was during the early stages of confrontation with the USSR that standardized tests gained prominence, as tapping into the largest possible talent pool—effectively democratizing education—became imperative for national security. As Julius Krein explains: “Driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit—led by the Ivy League and ‘Saint Grottlesex’ feeder schools, along with regional replications—to a national and meritocratic endeavor.”
With the Cold War’s end, both the role of universities and the nature of American meritocracy underwent significant changes. Neoliberal policies, embraced by both the left and the right, led to the abandonment of capital-intensive sectors and spurred deindustrialization. As factories closed, elites promulgated the mantra that education would provide those affected by offshoring with access to “jobs of the future.” These promises failed to materialize. Universities did not usher in a bright future where everyone became knowledge workers; instead, they turned into a form of job insurance for the offspring of privileged families.
Krein suggests that the Claudine Gay scandal may herald a return to reason, as more colleges started to reinstate SAT requirements. The harsh realities of great power competition may dispel previous illusions. Nevertheless, there remains much work to be done. Alongside Krein’s proposal to eliminate diploma prerequisites for many jobs, another idea worth considering (similar to a practice in Singapore) involves financing the education of the most talented students in exchange for their commitment to work in state institutions for a certain period of time.
The drive towards economic nationalism highlights the importance of achieving a degree of self-sufficiency in domains such as semiconductors. The economist Alex Tabarrok points out that this sector—and many others that are technologically challenging—requires workers with exceptionally high IQs. This raises the important questions of how to select these individuals, and how to prevent their talents from being misallocated in fields like finance or law.
Another issue concerns political meritocracy. The projects that policy-makers aim to implement today are so complex and multifaceted that asking questions about the cognitive capabilities of those making these decisions should be inevitable, yet is often overlooked, as this study demonstrates.
Finally, if America wants to take in immigrants, which ones? Research suggests that their potential to thrive and contribute to the modern economy is influenced by their cultural heritage, with notable effects persisting into the second generation. The effort of rebuilding the American system requires not only inventing a new kind of mercantilism, but a new form of meritocracy as well.
The post Meritocracy and the Great Power Competition appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Could the hush-money case against former President Trump be over before it has even begun?
Today, the hush-money prosecution of former President Donald Trump started in earnest. But could this case be over before it has even begun?
In the prosecution’s opening statement, Matthew Colangelo, on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the jury that Trump orchestrated “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,” to win the 2016 presidential election. Predictably, in his own opening statement, Trump’s leading lawyer Todd Blanche told the jury that the former president is “innocent” and “did not commit any crimes.”
The statements were directed towards the jury composed of 12 members and six alternates. Finding members to serve with impartiality has unsurprisingly proved difficult. When court proceedings began on Monday, one of the twelve jurors met with Justice Merchan and both sides’ attorneys because they were concerned for their safety. Before the jurors were chosen from the 96 prospects, they were among the scores to fill out a 42-question form.
One question, the results of which have been reported by the New York Times, asked about the media appetites of prospective jurors.
Where the Trump jurors say they get their news.
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) April 19, 2024
Amazing marker of how far the NYC tabloids have fallen: Only 1 of the 18 read the @nypost, and zero read the @NYDailyNews.https://t.co/9AaEo7M9Hq pic.twitter.com/0dhK1hs8XT
The most frequent response from jurors on the list: the New York Times. The Gray Lady has been deeply involved in the deep state’s effort to delegitimize President Trump’s election in 2016. Even disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok admitted in 2017 that the Times’ reporting was full of errors. Nevertheless, the Times reporters who worked on this Russian collusion story received Pulitzers.
Only one juror watches Fox News, and only one other reads the New York Post (the outlet that originally broke the Hunter Biden laptop story). One other juror says they receive their news from X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social—which has caused some users on social media to suggest this juror will prevent a Trump conviction.
Maybe so, but to pretend that the jury members’ media appetites suggest anything other than a difficult road ahead for the former president is disingenuous. In fact, that’s the entire point of the operation: get a conviction against Trump before the election by trying him in the most hostile territory imaginable.
The post Trump Could Be in Serious Trouble appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no more notable precedent in recent years for an underdog cause toughing it out.
Same-sex marriage advocates lost 32 times in a row before November 2012, when several states then voted in their favor. Yet at no point during that extensive losing streak did they settle for a “compromise,” like civil unions or domestic unions, as their ultimate goal. Neither should we, pro-life Americans, settle for a compromise—in this case, a 15-week abortion ban that (in the words of a prominent presidential candidate) “everybody can live with.”
After all, who is “everybody”? Progressives advocating for abortion at 40-weeks and denying healthcare to babies who survive an abortion? Conservatives who are simultaneously grateful to SCOTUS for effectively nullifying the bad science of 1973 but who still know that life begins at conception? Especially with Roe gone, a 15-week abortion ban that prevents only 3 percent of all abortions and essentially leaves us more pro-abortion than most of Europe is not winning. Winning is going all the way.
After losing referendum after referendum, same-sex marriage advocates didn’t go away; they went for broke. Just three years after winning their first referendum, they achieved total victory on June 26, 2015 when the Supreme Court redefined marriage for all 50 states with Obergefell. And, less than a decade later, there is no meaningful political opposition to same-sex marriage. We must learn an essential lesson from our opposition’s success: a series of defeats at the ballot box does not mean ultimate triumph is impossible.
Fortunately, the winds are in our favor. People are waking up and rejecting the pseudo-science that has been shoved down our throats by an unholy alliance between radical activists and Big Pharma. Recently, the UK, Sweden, Norway, France, and other European nations pumped the brakes on drugging and mutilating children. Similarly, medical research reveals with increasing detail what we’ve already known to be true: Life begins at conception. Improved prenatal imaging and technology allow us to watch it with our own eyes.
No number of weeks picked out of thin air is going to satisfy our adversaries. The anti-life left just wants us to believe that our righteous cause is politically pointless. But we will not go away. According to the latest polling, abortion is the top voting issue for between 5 and 12 percent of voters. There is no doubt this can impact an election in a closely divided America. But there is no way to know for sure if these voters are pro-choice or pro-life, or if, in the end, they’ll vote on another issue come November.
What we know for sure is that killing babies is evil. Due to that conviction, Republican candidates who flounder and fail to act courageously could lose support among pro-life voters. Donald Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016 without SCOTUS taking center stage following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. He needs that base to retake the White House, and that base, which resides well outside the Beltway, is nowhere near accepting 15 weeks in a post-Roe America.
President Trump, like many Republicans, disappointed many pro-lifers after Dobbs. But he rightly corrected course by bailing on a 15-week ban. There should not be no such ban, federal or otherwise. Not because such a ban is too pro-life, but because it is not pro-life at all. Let’s trust the truth and go to work.
The post Does the Gay Rights Movement Hold Lessons for Pro-Lifers? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Michigan is the latest state to legalize womb rental in the guise of family-friendly policy.
Three weeks ago, Michigan became one of the most friendly places in the country for commercial baby-making. It is no surprise, under its current Democratic leadership in the legislature and executive, that Michigan chose to defend the surrogacy industry and LGBT special interest groups over women and children. It is, however, a monumental change for the state, the true ramifications of which may only be visible in years to come. Overriding a 1988 law that made any form of contractual surrogacy arrangement punishable by fine and/or jail time, the new bill permits all forms of commercial surrogacy that align with “best practices,” as defined by an unelected medical and legal establishment.
Money and identity politics are strong medicine, perhaps the two most effective motivators for politicians today. It is no surprise that Michigan went with the flow. The surrogacy industry is projected to be worth $129 billion in the next 10 years, up from $14 billion in 2022. Legalizing it will bring the Wolverine State an influx of taxable dollars. At the same time, the LGBT lobby has moved well past its “just let us marry” phase to decrying anything less than fertile women renting out their wombs as bigotry. Every gay couple, unmarriageable single, or man in drag has a right to play house with real, live human souls; the only possible injustice is how much it costs them to pay for all the parts, or so we are told. A third incentive, no less influential, is that old blackjack of the spirit: peer pressure. In every state in the nation, with the exception of Louisiana and Nebraska, commercial surrogacy contracts are either protected by law or assumed to be legal because no statute explicitly bans them.
Michigan falling to the surrogacy lobby is so consequential because of commercial surrogacy, paying women to rent out their wombs. Though surrogacy advocates say women gestate children for others out of the kindness of their hearts, the industry all but disappears when women are not permitted to be paid for the use of their wombs. Thus, while Louisiana and Nebraska technically permit a few very narrow instances of unpaid surrogacy, the effect is close to a total ban.
Prior to April, only Michigan banned surrogacy outright. The fall of this last symbolic hurdle is a harbinger of what happens when such weighty questions as the power to create children at will—and destroy them, for that matter—are left to the states to decide. As Stephanie Jones, founder of the innocuously named Michigan Fertility Alliance, put it, “We hope Michigan can serve as an example for other states where outdated laws still leave families vulnerable.”
It may be years before we see the full effect. Gestational surrogacy, in which the egg is purchased from a third party or extracted from one of the paying couples, rather than supplied by the gestating surrogate mother, is still very new. As such, those born of such arrangements are mostly too young for long-term effects to be clearly assessed. Women like Jessica Kern, however, born of “traditional” surrogacy, in which the surrogate mother is also biologically related to the child, have already spoken out about the childhood trauma they endured as a result of their confused genetic makeup and upbringing. Predictably, like adopted children, surrogate children often wrestle with feelings of confusion, disillusionment, depression, or anger over their origins.
This hasn’t stopped surrogacy advocates from calling Michigan’s new surrogacy provisions both “family-focused” and “safe.” What is meant by “family-focused” is that anyone may now purchase and rent the materials needed to purchase a baby—no background checks, home checks, or personal references required. What is meant by “safe” is that those who want to become parents in this way are finally allowed to put their names on the birth certificate even when, in some cases, their contribution to the creation of a new human was exclusively financial.
It is easy to see how such logic merges naturally with another fight around reproduction that is happening in countless other states this year, the fight over a right to family destruction. Where in vitro fertilization provides a positive means of control over childbearing, abortion provides the negative. Where surrogacy demands multiple human embryos be created that the fittest might survive, abortion provides a tidy disposal for the extra babies. And, of course, both abortion and surrogacy are hot button issues which politicians at the national level have thus far preferred to leave to local leaders, or direct democracy, to decide.
The powers of creating life and destroying it are far too dangerous to be left to the whims of Big Pharma–backed medical associations and those who stand to benefit from couples using expensive, invasive procedures rather than cheaper, more natural ones.
The post Is Gretchen Whitmer’s Surrogacy Law Too Extreme for Voters? appeared first on The American Conservative.
It is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion.
NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory and end this unprovoked aggression,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2, “because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
Smith is not the first to warn that Ukraine is the dam that is holding back a Russian conquest of Europe. U.S. President Joe Biden told Congress on December 6 that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that, “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” On March 28, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, insisted that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.”
“If Ukraine loses the war,” he said on April 7, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”
Aside from the value these warnings have in convincing the public—and the U.S. Congress—to continue sending money and weapons to Ukraine, the insistence that Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine but have their sights on Europe is based on two historical myths.
The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”
Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.
The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease.
The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.”
The same selective use of quotations is applied to Putin’s comment that “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster.” Though quoted as proof of Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and his desire to reestablish it, the strategy requires lifting the quotation from a context that makes it clear that the disaster Putin is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”
There are at least three points that need to be factored into Western calculations of Putin’s ambitions that should temper the confidence of the forecast that he is bent on conquering Europe and on war with NATO.
The first is that there is no evidence for it. After her warning that Russia will “keep going,” Smith admitted that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory, and I really want to be clear about that.”
The Baltic countries complain that their warnings of the expansionist threat posed by Russia have been dismissed by the West. “For years,” Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski says, the West was “patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.’” Estonia’s former President Hendrik Ilves complained that the West does “Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia.”
Smith responded, “I don’t want to give our friends in the Baltic states the impression that somehow war is coming to NATO territory overnight. We take it seriously, but we do not see this to be an imminent threat.”
The second point is that the Western statements of Putin’s ambitions are not consistent with the historical record of Putin’s statements of his ambitions.
Putin has said that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those fundamental principles have consistently included a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO, a guarantee that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian bridgehead on its border, and assurances of protection of the rights of Russophile Ukrainians.
There is nothing on the historical record to suggest that conquering Europe or confronting NATO have ever been among the stated goals of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This point has been conceded by Ukraine and by NATO. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” He says that a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. Most importantly, Zelensky has said that the promise not to join NATO “was the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement…was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”
The third point is that the historical record suggests that Putin went to war in Ukraine, not as a step toward war with NATO, but to prevent a war with NATO.
“Listen attentively to what I am saying,” Putin said just three weeks before the invasion. “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary…. Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member…. Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.”
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine “to prevent NATO…close to his borders” may have been motivated by concern that a Ukraine in NATO that attacked Donbas or Crimea would draw Russia into a war with NATO.
Just three days before launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin said that “the reality we live in” is that if Ukraine is “accepted into…NATO, the threat against our country will increase because of Article 5” since “there is a real threat that they will try to take back the territory they believe is theirs using military force. And they do say this in their documents, obviously. Then the entire North Atlantic Alliance will have to get involved.”
If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO.
Since the claim that, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Putin will keep going and bring war to Europe and NATO, is wielded to justify continuing the fight instead of encouraging a diplomatic solution, it is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion. The frequently made warning rests uncertainly on myths and misreading of the historical record that, when examined, recommend a less confident forecast of Putin’s intentions.
The post Is Putin Bent on Conquering Europe? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The days of free and cheap riding are numbered.
The wailing is getting louder across Europe. Elites in Brussels and national capitals are clutching their pearls as they view American opinion polls. Their U.S. friends, the usual Masters of the Universe who dominate political and economic affairs, are reacting similarly.
Although the presidential election is more than six long months away and much can happen before November 5, they all are sharing nightmares featuring Donald Trump. Such is the consequence of spending the last eight decades treating Europe’s protection as America’s responsibility.
Europeans are only slowly waking up to reality. For instance, the British historian and journalist Max Hastings observed, “Some of us have repeatedly asserted that without America the Ukrainians could become toast. That proposition looks like it is being tested.” He didn’t blame America. Rather, he admitted that “there is also a realization that the United States has tired, probably forever, of leading and largely funding the defense of Europe.”
Then he criticized Europeans for lagging despite their professed fears of Russian aggression. He wrote “The Germans have discovered a €25 billion shortfall in their defense spending plan, overlaid on national economic stagnation. President Macron is shipping 100 howitzers, but these cannot make good his earlier refusal to back Ukraine.” That’s not all; leading states such as Italy and Spain still can’t be bothered.
Hastings was even tougher on his own nation, citing the ugly truth about its disappointing efforts: “Though successive British prime ministers have professed to embrace Ukraine, which is essentially our proxy in facing down Russian aggression, they have done almost nothing to sustain the supply of munitions, once the army’s cupboard was emptied.”
Indeed, he added, “since the end of the Cold War it has been the all-party fashion to treat defense not as a vital element in our polity but as an optional extra to the main business of government.” He targeted the Conservative Party, the home of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: “Since 2010 the Tories have refused to make the necessary defense spending commitments.”
Also credit Hastings for admitting that the Europeans were warned about Russia’s likely response to NATO expansion: “It was recklessly insouciant to take no steps to prepare ourselves, both morally and militarily, to fight if the Russians responded with force.” He called for Europeans to step up: “Europe must send Kyiv yesterday every gun and shell it can purchase—we cannot manufacture the hardware ourselves in real time.”
Finally, and most important, he acknowledged that the continent’s residents must work hard to protect themselves: “If we wish to avoid having to fight another big war we must create a credible military deterrent in which nuclear weapons are the least relevant, though still necessary, component. Even granted the will, which is problematic, Europe requires a decade of enhanced spending to make itself remotely capable of self-defense, in the absence of the U.S.”
Still, the situation is a bit less dire than Hastings suggests. He overestimates the danger facing Europe. Although Russia’s Vladimir Putin is ruthless, the latter has shown little interest in conquest during his quarter century in power. Indeed, he began his presidency friendly to the U.S. and Europe; he was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and gave an accommodating address to the German Bundestag shortly thereafter.
Moreover, Putin’s much-cited remark about the Soviet collapse did not suggest recreating the Russian empire, as commonly claimed. He declared,
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Far from backing the return of the Soviet Communist Party, he contended that “the time that our young democracy…was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” His discussion of how “to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state” looks ironic in retrospect, but nothing in the speech suggested reconstituting the USSR.
Of course, his attitude hardened over time, but for obvious reasons reflected in his famous talk at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. He highlighted what faithless and dishonest allied officials subsequently sought to deny, Moscow’s displeasure over NATO expansion and Washington’s aggressive military policy. U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state knew that they were recklessly crossing a red line for Putin and most of Russia’s top political leadership. For instance, in 2008 intelligence officer Fiona Hill, more recently with the Trump NSC, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, currently CIA Director, warned the George W. Bush administration that NATO expansion was likely to spark a violent response.
Two years ago, Putin made the decision for war, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. Yet he is no Hitler. Russia has not found Ukraine easy to conquer. It would be difficult for Moscow to swallow its victim whole. Moreover, Putin acted out his explicit threats, not the West’s imagined fears. Never has Putin or the rest of the leadership shown interest in conquering the Baltic States, let alone more of Europe. The question would be, To what end? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal, but he did so for reasons known in the West for decades. What would he gain from attempting to overrun the rest of Europe? When asked by Tucker Carlson if he might invade Poland, Putin replied, “Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest.”
Of course, Europeans should not trust Putin with their continent’s peace and stability. However, they—not America—should make their security their priority.
An important issue raised by Hastings is whether Europe should develop a continental nuclear deterrent. The U.S. promised to use nukes to defend Europe during the Cold War and the Soviets never tested American resolve. Whether or not the continent was worth the risk to the U.S. then, it is not now. Observed the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Would an American president, especially a re-elected Donald Trump, be willing to risk nuclear war for Helsinki, Tallinn or Warsaw? And if not, could Europe’s own two nuclear powers—France and, to a lesser extent, the UK—provide enough deterrence of their own?”
Both Paris and London have nukes, but their forces are national and independent. Germans have begun to debate contributing to a European arsenal or developing their own. Even the Poles might be on board with a Eurobomb. Friendly proliferation has obvious drawbacks but may be the best practicable option. Today Russia relies on nuclear parity to make up for conventional inferiority compared to America. Europe could do the same vis-à-vis Moscow.
Nevertheless, as the Europeans move ahead, they also should seek a future in which they will be safer and more prosperous, which means reaching an understanding with Russia over a new security structure. Although European officials routinely demonize Putin, they share responsibility with him for the war. Fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian is not the best means to establish long-term stability and peace.
Kiev’s determination to battle on is understandable and, indeed, courageous, but Ukrainians should remember that the allies have consistently played them false. NATO made a commitment in 2008 that no European government and no subsequent US administration was prepared to keep. For 14 years, every alliance member along with the Brussels bureaucracy lied to Kiev, falsely insisting that they looked forward to Ukraine joining the alliance. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continued the deception when he visited Kiev in late 2021 in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion. At the same time, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Moscow when a commitment not to include Ukraine might have kept the peace.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion Washington and London apparently discouraged Kiev from negotiating with Moscow over the same issue, when the conflict might have been ended with relatively modest casualties and destruction. Moreover, NATO members continued to promise alliance membership to Kiev; at last July’s NATO summit Austin said that he had “no doubt” Ukraine would join. Yet the allies steadfastly refuse to enter the war when their support is most needed.
A couple weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken reassured Kiev, “We’re also here at NATO to talk about the summit that’s upcoming in the summer in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
But no one expects a formal commitment this year or next; realistically, Kiev shouldn’t expect one this decade or next. Ultimately Ukrainians will have to make their own deal with Russia. And that will turn out better if done sooner rather than later.
It is Europe’s turn. Observed Hastings: “If Putin or China’s President Xi today demands: ‘How many divisions has Britain?’—or, for that matter, Europe—the truthful answer deserves the scorn it must inspire in both tyrants.” Europeans should act like grownups and take over responsibility for their own defense.
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In January, Curt Mills took over as executive director of The American Conservative. This is the first print issue commissioned and edited entirely under his leadership.
In January, Curt Mills took over as executive director of The American Conservative. This is the first print issue commissioned and edited entirely under his leadership. There is no better way to launch his tenure than with a blockbuster cover article written by the boss himself, “How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican Universe.”
If you think of Ohio politicians, the first name that comes to mind is probably J.D. Vance. He’s certainly the most exciting figure on the right today, but he’s not the only one from that part of the country. Ohio is also home to names like Vivek Ramaswamy, Jim Jordan, and Warren Davidson, as well as newly minted Senate nominee Bernie Moreno.
The surprising thing about all this new energy is that, not long ago, Ohio was dominated by establishment figures. Rob Portman and John Kasich were the face of the Ohio GOP. Needless to say they did nothing to give voice to the concerns of their Rust Belt constituents on issues like trade.
So the emergence of so many fresh-thinking populists in Ohio is a puzzle. The cover essay offers an answer—and serves as an introduction to the brilliant writer now helming this organization.
Staff reporter Bradley Devlin visited Kentucky, just across the river, for his reported feature in this issue, but he didn’t meet any politicians. Just hillbillies. Bradley has been doing mission trips to Appalachia for a decade. The first time, he went as a high-school student. This time he returned as a chaperone.
Appalachia has seen some changes in the last ten years. The drugs are cut with fentanyl now. On the plus side, a national politician finally gave voice to their suffering and tried to do something about it. Leslie County is Trump country. What do they think of him these days? Bradley found out that and much more.
South Korea is a fascinating country. Its right-wing party, in particular, always seems to echo Western trends in the most unlikely ways, as in the 2022 race that Western pundits dubbed the “incel election” for candidate Yoon Suk Yeol’s excoriations of feminism.
During its Asian Tiger era, the South Korean right rehabilitated the reputation of Park Chung-hee, the assassinated dictator whom many remember fondly for the economic development he promoted, from which modern Koreans hoped to draw inspiration.
Now there are stirrings of a similar rehabilitation of South Korea’s founding president, Syngman Rhee, also a dictator with some positive qualities. What is it about Rhee that matches the current moment, the way Park Chung-hee matched the 1990s? Rob York, an expert on Rhee, explains. We hope the documentary he discusses, which has apparently created a stir in South Korea, will be made available to American audiences.
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Tabling the DHS secretary’s impeachment is an insult to the American people.
The House managers have officially delivered the letters of impeachment for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate. For weeks, I have been calling for the Senate to conduct a full and fair trial. Now is the time for every Senator to go on the record.
Do you think Mayorkas has done a good job at the border? Has Mayorkas fulfilled the oath he swore before this body to protect and defend our country against all threats, foreign and domestic? Is our border secure?
The answer is simple. Mayorkas has intentionally failed to do his job. Now, Senator Schumer and the globalist Democrats have the opportunity to conduct a trial before the entire Senate and the public.
Unfortunately, that’s not how this is going to play out. Democrats are going to try to table—or dismiss—the articles of impeachment, which has never been done in the history of the Senate. They’re going to attempt to sweep the border crisis that President Biden has created under the rug. Every single House Democrat voted to save Mayorkas’ job. They endorsed our wide-open borders that have allowed terrorists, drug traffickers, and murderers into our country.
Democrats are lying to themselves and risking the lives of every American. Senator Schumer and the Democrats can’t say they want to fix our border while voting to save Mayorkas’ job. Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the border in the three years he has been in the job.
Our border is the least secure it has ever been; in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. Our Border Patrol agents are so overwhelmed, and receive such little support from the Biden administration to enforce our laws, that they have been forced to release millions of illegal immigrants into the U.S. To make matters worse, those who are released on parole are given work permits. The Biden administration is more concerned with taking care of illegal aliens than it is about protecting American citizens. We might as well start mailing every criminal, drug trafficker, and terrorist an open invitation to cross our borders.
I have spoken numerous times on the Senate floor to highlight stories of Americans who have died at the hands of illegal aliens. Their tragic deaths are a direct result of Secretary Mayorkas’ inaction. Mayorkas and Joe Biden have blood on their hands. The most important responsibility of any sovereign nation is the safety of its citizens.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security just announced they plan on sending another $300 million dollars to communities receiving illegal aliens from this border crisis. The top priority of this administration is to let as many people in as quickly as possible, regardless of how many American lives are lost in the process.
The number of people crossing into the U.S. who are on the terrorist watchlist is unprecedented. Just last week, it was reported that an Afghan on the FBI terror watchlist has been in the U.S. for almost a year. He is a member of a U.S. designated terrorist group responsible for the deaths of at least nine American soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. ICE arrested him in San Antonio just this past February. Unfortunately, this known terrorist has been released on bond and is now roaming our neighborhoods.
It isn’t just terrorists we have to worry about. Fentanyl flows freely across our borders, and it has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Law enforcement officers in Alabama tell me time and again how their officers must wear heavy equipment and carry Narcan spray to protect themselves from the fentanyl that is pouring into our communities.
Despite the critical need to secure our borders and discourage illegal immigration, Mayorkas has been traveling the world, lecturing other countries about their national security, while his refusal to enforce U.S. laws has exposed his own country to invasion. It’s embarrassing.
In February, he traveled to Austria to speak with Chinese officials about counter-narcotic efforts. Did he discuss with them the flood of Chinese illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. through the southwest border? 22,000 Chinese nationals have been arrested by border patrol agents at the southwestern border since October of last year.
Most of these individuals are single adult males of military age. Yet the media tries to act as if all these people crossing the border are innocent women and children. Some of them are, but most are not. This invasion is more than a border crisis. It’s a national security crisis. And yet, I seriously doubt Mayorkas even brought that up in his meeting with Chinese officials.
In February, he was in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. The Munich Security Conference is the largest international security meeting in the world. Mayorkas was there, giving speeches on strengthening global security and partnerships. Meanwhile, the border he is responsible for is wide open.
The secretary’s priority should be here—securing our borders and protecting our citizens. President Biden has made the U.S. a joke on the world stage. Under this administration, nearly 10 million people have illegally invaded our country. Every state is now a border state.
This is not a gray area. Secretary Mayorkas has intentionally failed to do his job. It is high time that the Senate take action.
To my Democratic colleagues: Have you read the heartbreaking stories of innocent Americans who have been murdered by illegal aliens? Are you concerned about the safety of your spouses, children, nieces or nephews? Does it worry you that hundreds of terrorists are flooding into our country? Do you know someone who has died of fentanyl, which was trafficked into our country by cartels?
This isn’t about politics. Our national security and our country’s future is at stake here. Americans deserve to know the truth about how Secretary Mayorkas has intentionally failed to secure the border.
I will be voting to hold Mayorkas accountable.
This text is adapted from a floor speech delivered by the senator.
The post Mayorkas Must Be Held Accountable at His Senate Trial appeared first on The American Conservative.
Americans should read more about the Naxalite movement. There are echoes of the past in current American left-wing activism.
A man accused of firebombing an anti-abortion lobby group office last year in Madison, Wisconsin pleaded guilty to the crime and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. A PhD biochemist by profession and researcher at U-Madison, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury apparently started the pro-abortion group “Jane’s Revenge” and used his connections and grant money to gather incendiary chemicals to create the device he used to firebomb the office. He has also, according to reports, been uncooperative with the federal agents, and has been speaking to Antifa and “Stop Cop City” comrades in prison. He was indicted for RICO violations, terrorism, and money-laundering charges. Before the bombing, he threatened that “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.” He was identified from a half eaten burrito at the terror scene, and was nabbed while trying to flee the country for Latin America.
It is an interesting case with several layers. Even a man who has a PhD in biochemistry apparently isn’t wise enough to not throw a half-eaten saliva-covered burrito at the crime scene. Being intelligent isn’t the same as being wise or prudent; a data point in the case-study against the “cult of expertise” that runs in this country. Universities also should be far more strict about whom they let in. The job of academia is not to allow just about everyone to aim for the upper echelons of society, but to promote merit towards the betterment of the nation. One can make the case of more, not less gate-keeping in higher-education.
But the arrest of this man also provides a historical lens to look at a very strange form of insurgency that is now haunting America. The American understanding of left-wing radicalism is steeped in its formative years in the 1930s, the labor unions, and the Cold War against the USSR. Leninism is what most Americans think of when they imagine left-wing radicalism. Only in recent years have intellectuals and scholars started to talk more about Antonio Gramsci and “the long march through the institutions.”
But there is a precedent in what we are seeing in America now. The early 1970s Naxalite movement in India was fundamentally decentralized; compared to other grassroots peasant or worker led communist movements across Europe and Asia, it was dominated by upper-middle class college students. The core of the movement was Calcutta University, one of the oldest and most prestigious Indian schools, but the movement had different rhetoric and local policies depending on where it was operating. Similar to the modern iteration of Antifa, it wasn’t centralized; it was based in different states; it never had a consolidated information center or coordinated action plan, it combined different splintered groups; it had medical, assault, and scouting groups; and it organized via hand-to-hand communications across state lines.
Most importantly, it was heavily upper-middle class, with students often using their parents or sympathetic university professors for bail money, sometimes aided by lenient local attorneys and laws. Although the movement had broad shared ideological commitments about “class enemies,” it never had a party line, and therefore most terrorist actions were against local businesses, mom-and-pop stores, small landlords, and the hapless homeguards and beat cops walking the roads at night.
But it showed what impotent and repressed middle-class bloodlust against both upper and lower class of society is, and how deadly it can be. The Naxalites never truly threatened the existence of the republic of India, nor did they much harm the rich in the 1970s India, who could afford private security and militias. But it made the life of those commoners who pay tax expecting to be protected by the state an absolute hell.
The moment it appeared that Beijing was even rhetorically sympathetic to a Maoist insurgency within India, the state cracked down with a ferocity that became a byword of counterinsurgency studies. Hundreds of diehard students simply disappeared without a trace. But most of the normies, mellowed out after a thorough beating (and after their parents were bankrupted paying bail funds). The public opinion shifted rapidly against the needless violence of the Naxalite groups against individuals they considered to be “class enemies.” As often is the lesson of history, most pretend revolutionaries don’t survive a dedicated reaction. Violence goes both ways.
The most haunting paragraph from one of the greatest series of novels written about that era, the Bengali polymath and author Samaresh Majumdar’s “Animesh Quartet,” shows a police officer lamenting to another that the items found during the raid in a commune were some revolutionary literature and a whole bunch of unused condoms. The Naxalites were a weird mix of wasted upper-middle-class students who fancied themselves Che Guevaras in a movement that was itself a weird mix of the Parisian 1968ers and the Maoist Red Guards.
For the uninitiated, Roychowdhury is an Indian and Bengali surname denoting “landlord,” an acquired title that originates from the Mughal era and was continued by the British. Somewhere in the past, this chap’s forefathers formed the backbones of two empires. Like most modern descendants of older elites, this man, born with perhaps above average intelligence, decided to ruin his above average life for momentary nihilism in the cause of a rudderless movement dedicated to a heady mix of hedonism, impotent rage, and violence. As a philosopher of our time once noted, “Many such cases. Sad!”
The post An Indian Precedent for American Upper Middle Class Radicalism appeared first on The American Conservative.
Taking the bus can be a harrowing experience.
Americosis: A Nation’s Dysfunction Observed from Public Transit by Sam Forster (2024, Sutherland House), 129 pages.
Public transit has always asked its patrons to assume undefined risks. In exchange for a few dollars, the transit authority offers that you can get from the general area of your origin to the general area of your destination along with others who have the same goal.
There’s the rub. Marketing materials for public transit rarely feature their patrons, and for good reason. The promoters tend to favor a driver standing with a sense of authority at the step of a bus or a train conductor glancing through his window. The patrons offer something less predictable: a mix of those who are in a hurry and those who are decidedly not in a hurry, a reserved majority and an extroverted minority, a quiet consensus to give peace a chance interrupted by someone who’s still thinking that one over.
The experience generally works out as a net positive on the individual level. Though the risk is a small price, some are unwilling to pay it. Sam Forster was willing, and he has compiled his observations in a helpful little book called Americosis. A blend of cultural analysis, data collection, and bright journalistic color, Forster offers a delicate treatment of coarse content.
The author, a Canadian, travels south to get a sense of the environment surrounding the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system. The situation he describes is nothing short of disorder. As drug use and mental instability pervade, normal customers are relegated to a position of inferiority. Loud ramblings overcome the otherwise universal hope for quiet, a standard to which most riders have resigned themselves.
To illustrate the point, Forster recalls a bus ride during which the passenger behind him warned, “DIS MUH’FUCKA GON’ GET IT…dis muh’fucka really gon’ get it!” For the veteran rider, these pronouncements have become unsurprising; the regular exposure has worn down his capacity for fear.
But for the uninitiated, such a threat could portend a serious problem. Despite an elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, and a heightened sensitivity to all that’s around him, the amateur tries to get a sense of the accuser’s intentions and does all he can to distinguish himself from the accused.
The man, Forster says, smelled of weed and liquor; in one hand “was a revolver that was being casually twirled around his index finger like a set of car keys.” For the better part of half an hour, Forster says he watched the man in the reflection of his phone until the bus reached the next stop.
Though half an hour is on the long end for the average distance between stops, Forster’s experience points to the center of public-transit angst: you can only get off at the next stop. When the door closes, your presence is required until it opens back up. What happens in between is anybody’s guess, but that’s for you to find out.
Lest riders think these concerns are imaginary, DART confirms they are real. Forster identifies the advertising on DART buses and trains as an historical marker for what would otherwise be a psychological bother. “Assaulting a DART employee is a felony,” one sign advises. “Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” For the normal rider, this informal legal counsel reminds them that, presumably, one of DART’s drivers or conductors has been assaulted in the past and that the only thing stopping a criminal from doing the same to themselves is the threat of a criminal charge.
The author’s observations indicate a culture of poverty and desperation on Dallas’s public transit system, then turn to a critique of personal automobiles as the norm for transportation. His frustration with the current state of public transit is couched in a greater appreciation for the idea of public transit. In theory, this idea of public transit should elevate social life; it’s one remaining cultural structure that involves strangers taking part in a goal that’s common yet distinguishable among individuals.
Car culture, Forster laments, will remain so long as public transit retains its reputation as being unsafe and the car retains its reputation as a representation of success; women have a greater interest in the former and men in the latter, he says, though both groups have an interest in both factors in their own ways. Though his critiques of the car as the norm for transportation are compelling, they are unlikely to be received well by an American audience. The car is too ingrained in our culture.
Despite his romantic description of the park outside of his Montreal apartment and his prescription, one of the few in the book, for universal basic income as a cure for what he calls “the great economic absurdity of America: the fetishization of employment and the demonization of unemployment,” Forster offers a clear picture of a dim reality. Americosis should not be read as a blueprint for revived urban policy or a formula for enjoying public transit as it was meant to be, but as good journalism from a dejected transit system. Some of it sounded familiar; I read most of it on the train.
The post America’s Public Transit Nightmare appeared first on The American Conservative.
The women who opposed their own enfranchisement in the Victorian era have little in common with the “Repeal the 19th” fringe of today.
Not long ago, a high-profile conservative woman of my acquaintance was cornered at the National Conservatism conference by a pimply young man who put to her that women should not vote. And, he declared furthermore, women should take no part in public life at all. What did she think?
She relayed this story to me with some amusement, but we both recognize that this young man’s views are not unique on the fringe Right. In the United States, this proposal propagates as “Repeal the 19th” and tends to base itself in arguments from physiological differences, which reportedly render women unfit for the vote, or else in perverse incentives. Examples are legion. Novelist Michael Walsh, for instance, explains that the typical female mind is characterized not by “calm thinking and reasoned judgment” but “inflamed emotions absent any rational thought.” Such views are not confined to men. The internet personality Pearl Davis argues that granting women the vote has resulted in a state welfare system that replaces husbands, “paying women to be single mothers.”
One of the frustrating aspects of such debates is how weak a grasp these people typically have of the history of the women’s movement. This is, to some extent, the fault of the winning suffragist side, whose narrative on feminism often situates Year Zero at the campaign for women’s suffrage. One casualty of this self-aggrandizing move is popular recollections of the 19th-century women’s movement.
We can sketch the outlines of this missing movement in the person of one of its most prominent anti-suffragists: the prolific and wildly successful novelist Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), better known by her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward. A brief study of her life challenges both feminist and anti-feminist narratives. First, it reveals that much of the pre-suffrage women’s movement viewed the vote as a marginal issue. Secondly, it challenges my friend’s NatCon interlocutor with the fact that even high-profile opponents of woman suffrage were strongly in favor of women’s education and participation in public life. Lastly, it reveals the larger-scale social forces that eventually scotched opposition to woman suffrage, along with the ways these have subsequently changed again. The nature of this evolution suggests that those who seek to disenfranchise women today would, if they succeeded, find their victory a hollow one.
Born in Tasmania into a prominent literary family in 1851, Mary Augusta Arnold married the Oxford fellow Humphry Ward when she was 20. As an Oxford wife, she helped widen access to the university for women, including playing a central role in the foundation of Somerville Hall, Oxford University’s first women’s college, in 1879. She was also an active social reformer, setting up an adult education center in east London that is still in operation today. She involved herself vigorously in local and national politics and wrote prolifically, producing 26 novels, along with lectures, articles, and nonfiction books.
By the outbreak of the First World War, she was the best-known Englishwoman in America. She was also the founding president of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League in 1908.
Why would such a public and political figure oppose women’s enfranchisement? From a contemporary perspective, this seems quixotic in the extreme. But Mrs. Ward baffles today only because our world differs so sharply in its moral assumptions. From a modern perspective characterized by dogmatic egalitarianism, it has come to be seen as illegitimate by definition to map asymmetries of power, agency, or status onto givens such as sex or social class. Seeking to entrench such differences, meanwhile, is viewed today as deeply immoral. Whether or not we support this premise, it is not possible to understand Victorian England without grasping that there, the inverse generally obtained.
The Anglican hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful, written in 1848, is still popular today. The extent of the moral sea-change we have undergone in between is illustrated by how rare it is to find modern churches singing the second verse:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
By contrast, the established social world Mrs. Ward bestrode so influentially viewed political access and agency as necessarily unegalitarian, because power was contextual and relationship-bound—not just for women, but for everyone. One’s social station was as given as one’s sex. The power relations implied by such a worldview are compellingly described in Mrs. Ward’s many novels. The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) depicts a glittering prewar politics whose terrain is not, or not only, Parliament, but also wider networks of association across great families, gilded Mayfair parties, and grand country houses. It is a world of parliamentary candidates chosen among friends and cousins, of landed-interest power bases, and deferential farmhands and servants. In this world, elite women exert all the influence they could desire, just obliquely: The plot of William Ashe turns on the hero’s disastrous marriage to a woman too emotionally erratic to play her allotted part as a charming political wife. Conversely, in the book, the notion that non-elite individuals of either sex should have much say in the country’s government is scarcely considered. In Delia Blanchflower (1913), meanwhile, the figure that most closely articulates Mrs. Ward’s own view of the issue muses at one point that feminists “attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case of men.”
In the view of influential antis such as Mrs. Ward, being denied the vote was no impediment to women making full use of their abilities. By her time, the women’s movement was in fact very well-developed. Industrialization disrupted families and settled social norms. As men and women grappled with how to live together in a world transformed, the result was a vigorous, culture-wide debate on sex roles and relations. A consensus gradually emerged from this on “true womanhood”; in its wake came an increasingly organized women’s movement that was both maternalist and often strongly religious.
If this movement is largely illegible from the liberal feminist vantage-point, this is because its core assumptions leaned into the very “sexist” distinctions that liberal feminism seeks to dismantle. Its vision was of women’s role as flowing from motherly values of kindness, selflessness, nurture, and moral uplift. Ideas spread via reading circles and public lectures. At scale, this coalesced into networks dedicated to public service and moral improvement. Organizations such as the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Mothers’ Union worked to propagate sexual “purity,” frugal living, and strong marriage across society, especially among the lower classes. Women linked domestic and public maternalism and drew parallels between all forms of caring work: The National Union of Women’s Workers, formed in 1895, explicitly framed all women’s domestic, voluntary and professional activities as “work,” whether paid or not, emphasizing the common element of public service.
In an age with very little state welfare, the maternalist women’s movement played a transformative role in areas such as poor relief, social work, education, and health care. After the 1869 electoral reform extended the local government franchise to rate-paying women, this extended to voting for and standing in local government and school board elections. But, by and large, this movement did not view suffrage as anything like a main priority. Instead, as Julia Bush shows in her book Women Against the Vote, within such organizations suffragists and antis often worked side-by-side. The NUWW leadership, in particular, fought to preserve the institution’s neutrality on the suffrage question, hoping to preserve a space where women could continue collaborating on the many common projects to which the franchise was a side issue.
This movement was the distaff side of Britain’s industrial and imperial ascendancy, and members often framed their labors explicitly in the context of this larger patriotic project. Though later decried as the tyrannically moralistic “Mrs. Grundy,” their philanthropic and reformist efforts helped soften the disruptive social costs of industrial urbanization. And anti-suffragists such as Mrs. Ward based their arguments against women’s enfranchisement on the fact—obvious to them, from the labors of Mrs. Grundy—that women were already involved in public life. Their domain was just distinct from those of men.
This reasoning is set out in an 1889 open letter against female suffrage, co-authored and organized by Mrs. Ward. It argues that women should be active in every area where they have equal skin in the game. They should pursue higher education, lead in “the State of social effort and social mechanism,” and aspire to “that higher State which rests on thought, conscience and moral influence.” As the government began to take on more of the social functions first innovated by reformist women, Mrs. Ward and other antis argued for a representative delegation of women to advise Parliament on policy in domains where women were prominent. But, they argued, it was not physiologically possible for women to play an equal part across the board, especially in areas of public life predicated on the capacity to exert physical force, such as heavy industry, shipping, imperial governance, and the military. There, women’s influence was already proportionate to their contribution.
What, if anything, can we learn from Mrs. Ward about the contemporary right-wing suffrage debate? Today, far fewer of her objections to woman suffrage apply. The Britain I live in is no longer the industrial, imperial, naval one of the 19th century. Industrial modernity prompted debate on the “woman question,” and its depredations also ended the settlement dubbed “true womanhood”: slowly, through the 19th century, then, with the World Wars, all at once. Ironically, one of Mrs. Ward’s last major works approvingly documented its end. England’s Effort: Letters To An American Friend (1915) was commissioned by England’s Propaganda Bureau with the aim of tilting American public opinion toward the English side of the war. In it, Mrs. Ward outlined England’s total wartime mobilization, an effort that mingled social classes, drew women into manufacturing, drove industrial innovations that weakened the bargaining power of labor, and legitimized the hitherto unimaginable intrusions of an emerging managerial state into previously private domains of English life.
She applauded all these initiatives in the name of the war effort. But they proved to be the final nail in the anti-suffrage coffin. Wartime social changes shattered the stiffly hierarchical prewar social order upon which Mrs. Ward’s view of womanly public service was premised. It lent moral force to the working-class claim to political participation and normalized the presence of women in the workplace. In its aftermath, the franchise was granted at least in part in recognition of the fact that working-class goodwill was now in the national interest. England needed its industrial workers, and those workers therefore had leverage with which to demand political access. This went for women, too. Their direct participation in national economic life had, by this point, been so impressed upon the public that withholding the franchise seemed perverse and cruel. Mrs. Ward lost her battle, two years before her death, in the 1918 Representation of the People Act.
In light of all this, a better question than “Should women be denied the franchise in 2024?” might be “Who, in 2024, actually has it?” Since deindustrialization, the franchise may be nominally universal but the electoral goodwill of the lower orders is not, as it was in 1918, needed. It should therefore surprise no one that, as Peter Turchin has noted, where popular opinion today diverges from the elite on a policy issue, it is never decided in favor of popular opinion. Politically speaking, the masses are now once again as peripheral to the business of decision-making as they were in Mrs. Ward’s day: a force not to be wholly disregarded but without any kind of decisive power.
The real counter to right-wing calls for the disenfranchisement of women is not outrage but: What difference would that make? Within this increasingly pseudo-democratic order, and especially across its mechanisms of consensus-formation and moral conditioning, something not dissimilar to the 19th-century “women’s movement” is once again in the ascendant. In the 19th century, reformist women dominated education, health, philanthropy, and moral reform; the same is true today, across education, the charity sector, and the guardians of contemporary moral conformity known as HR. The chief difference is that, whereas in Mrs. Ward’s time such institutions were run on a voluntaristic basis by women of independent means, motivated by Christian piety and noblesse oblige as well as the usual human quest for status, today these are run on a salaried basis by elite women with household bills to pay and ordered to a more post-Christian moral framework.
For those agitating to disenfranchise women, this invites a further question: Disenfranchise how? Which forms of political agency would the repealers remove? I defy anyone to compare the literary output of Mrs. Humphry Ward with (say) that of Michael Walsh and conclude that men are always and everywhere the intellectual superiors of women. Given this, we can reasonably assume that, whether directly enfranchised or not, clever women will continue to wield the influence they have always possessed. In the softer, less accountable, and now palpably post-democratic political order we inhabit, where at least as much of the Overton window is shaped by today’s equivalent of Mrs. Grundy, this influence would if anything be increased.
Even supposing a consensus could somehow be mustered for withdrawing the vote from women, I submit that male advocates of this policy would be surprised to find themselves as politically henpecked as ever. Whatever we choose to call our formal political settlements, the reality today is—as it was in Mrs. Ward’s time—that men and women must, once again, grapple with how best we can live together.
The post When Feminism Was ‘Sexist’—and Anti-Suffrage appeared first on The American Conservative.
Members of Congress should nominate new officers for the U.S. Foreign Service, just as they nominate candidates for the military service academies.
The State Department is failing to recruit a Foreign Service that fully represents the American people, as required by the Foreign Service Act of 1980. One of State’s most glaring recruitment shortcomings is its inability to hire new Foreign Service officers (FSOs) who come from all geographic regions of America. This ongoing failure helps to perpetuate the mindset of the current Foreign Service and shape its policy attitudes.
Fielding a U.S. diplomatic and consular corps that truly reflects the geographic diversity and values of the American people, and not just elite foreign-policy opinion, will require Congress to end the State Department’s hiring monopoly.
Congress should change the law so that FSOs are recruited and qualified in a process similar to congressional appointments to the U.S. service academies. Empowering senators and congressmen to appoint qualified FSO candidates, recruited in their states and districts, would ensure a Foreign Service that is genuinely “representative of the American people,” as required by the law.
An invigorated, congressionally-led nomination process could easily meet State’s quotas for new FSOs who can pass the entrance exam and meet high standards of knowledge, professionalism, and integrity. Ending State’s hiring monopoly and transferring that selection authority to senators and congressmen, supported by their state and district offices, would initiate new interest in the career and potentially bring hundreds of Americans, currently overlooked in “fly-over” regions, into the Foreign Service.
Historically, the congressional appointment process to West Point, Annapolis, and the other academies has served to counter elitist tendencies. It was crucial to democratizing and interweaving all aspects of American society into the U.S. military officer corps, and it would do the same for the Foreign Service. FSOs from diverse geographic backgrounds will bring the mosaic of American values, different political points of view, and genuine racial and ethnic diversity that the Foreign Service so desperately needs.
Consider the data. An analysis of the 2,013 FSO appointments made over the past seven years reveals the alarming geographic imbalance in current State Department recruiting. Four states plus the District of Columbia, with a combined population of about 19 million, produced a staggering 691 new FSOs, more than a third of the total.
By contrast, five of the most underrepresented states (Indiana, Arkansas, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Mississippi), also with a combined population near 19 million, produced only 16 FSOs. While one in six thousand residents in D.C. became a diplomat, the odds were worse than one in a million for applicants from some states. Considering their state’s population, five North Dakotans should have been hired during this period, yet in seven years, State failed to recruit even one resident as an FSO.
It is no surprise that 2023 public records indicate no senior State Department recruiters even went to ten states: Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Monopoly and privilege fiercely resist change. State’s current hiring system also serves to perpetuate the department’s political biases, wherein senior diplomats recruit new officers who are cut from the same cloth. Of the same group of 2,013 FSOs hired over the past seven years, 608 joined the service from DC, Virginia, and Maryland, reflecting that about 30 percent of all newcomers were probably young careerists already in the Washington foreign-policy world of think tanks, NGOs, and federal government jobs.
At the same time, these same Metro Washington–area recruits, as well as the lion’s share of those who come from outside the Beltway, are almost all products of university graduate schools that overwhelmingly inculcate the left-liberal political values of those institutions. Most graduate school foreign-affairs professors, who direct many students to Foreign Service careers, are committed disciples of the Obama-Biden internationalist view of America’s role in the world.
Thus, all these new officers are already pre-programmed to take their place in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. No matter what new administration the American people might elect, these careerists are all schooled in the same “interagency process” (to use the vernacular) of shaping U.S. foreign policy in a manner that often protects government’s institutional interests, not the country’s. To change Washington’s default tendency, for example, that all international crises must be met with U.S. resources, engagement and leadership—no matter the national interest—requires injecting new values and new thinking into our diplomatic corps.
Most damning, consider the 2016 presidential voting outcome, which revealed an American public basically evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. To no one’s surprise, the record of financial contributions to the two candidates made by employees at Foggy Bottom was monumentally one-sided. State Department employees provided the Trump campaign a total of 39 contributions, while they gave Hillary Clinton 2,518 donations.
Meanwhile, the situation at Foggy Bottom becomes worse with each new FSO A-100 entering class and with ongoing civil service hiring. Not only is the Obama-Biden internationalist perspective the default position of new State hires, the status quo has been further hijacked by the ongoing imposition of a radical vision of “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA).”
This DEIA agenda is all about imposing quotas and identity politics on the department, and it has nothing to do with hiring new officers with a diversity of policy views or who fairly reflect the geographic distribution of the American people. Those core elements are very much not part of the DEIA agenda.
Embracing the Biden administration’s DEIA tenets has become mandatory for entering—and maintaining—employment at Foggy Bottom. Per Executive Order 14035, DEIA Kommissars are well-established in State—indeed, across the federal workforce—and embracing the Biden version of “social justice” inside the bureaucracy has become one of the core building blocks of federal employment.
The State Department is among the worst offenders as DEIA ideology commands all the career staff, how they view their colleagues, and the performance of their duties. In one recent instance, an event “intended only for women of color” was promoted through official department channels. How many lawsuits would (rightfully) be filed if the genders and racial identities had been reversed? Just as bad, aspects of this divisive ideology have also been shoehorned into regular U.S. diplomacy with foreign partners.
The department’s recent deployment of artificial intelligence to screen applicants for the Foreign Service, labeled innocuously as the “computer-QEP,” raises significant questions of political bias. Particularly concerning, this AI was added to the screening processes during a major overhaul primarily intended to increase the number of DEIA-aligned applicants who make the final cut. Protecting its monopoly to hire, State has refused to grant anyone with oversight authority, even union officials, access to the underlying code in order to ensure fairness in selection.
By controlling the intake of new FSOs, as well as using extreme DEIA ideology in making promotions and career-enhancing assignments, Secretary Blinken and his department leadership are continuing to resist the authentically diverse mandate spelled out in the Foreign Service Act of 1980. The objective of that statute was to build a professional diplomatic corps that represented the American people and “operated on the basis of merit principles.”
While it is true that the 1980 Act acknowledged that “affirmative action” could be a tool, it did not open the door to today’s DEIA extremism. In the face of what Blinken is doing, Congress has no alternative but to end State’s hiring monopoly and re-make its promotion authority. Both are ignoring merit principles the law requires:
The objective of this Act is to strengthen and improve the Foreign Service of the United States by assuring, in accordance with merit principles admission through impartial [emphasis added] and rigorous examination, acquisition of career status only by those who have demonstrated their fitness through successful completion of probationary assignments, effective career development, advancement and retention of the ablest, and separation of those who do not meet the requisite standards of performance (Sec. 101(b)(1)).
DEIA is just the latest expression of diplomatic elitism that often corrupts State and runs counter to the best interests of the country. Too many at State believe their mission is not about representing U.S. values in international affairs, but about instructing out-of-step Americans to change their outdated attitudes.
Thus, the DEIA phenomenon is part of a larger more deep-seated problem of elitism at State. Henry Kissinger, writing in his memoirs decades ago, reflected that State careerists often had a “supercilious attitude” that would lead them to put aside the national interest as the lodestar of U.S. foreign policy.
In an honest assessment of the Foreign Service, Kissinger pointed to a weakness that continues to this day: the tendency of State officials to remake instructions from their political leadership instead of implement them. Kissinger wrote:
The Foreign Service has the best personnel among American public officials—dedicated, well informed, and, if led decisively, highly disciplined. But they start from the conviction that their elected or appointed chiefs could probably not have passed the Foreign Service examination. Hence, they consider it their duty to persuade the Secretary and the President to their point of view and, failing that, to maneuver bureaucratically and with the media in such a way that their superior knowledge prevails by indirection. Their convictions are conventionally Wilsonian [emphasis added]; diplomacy and power are often treated as discrete realms—and diplomacy as separate from any other enmeshed in the area of national policies.
Kissinger is right on the mark when he labels most FSOs as committed foreign-policy Wilsonians. That Wilsonian perspective, of course, more often than not, gives FSOs vast common ground with internationalist Democrats. Some FSOs may be Wilsonians of the right, even comfortable with aggressive neocon perspectives, but most are Wilsonians of the left, and both groups have little patience for those who see America’s role in the world in restrained, non-Wilsonian terms. It is past time for congressional planners to take up the cause of re-legislating the Foreign Service Act of 1980 to end State’s hiring monopoly. Involving Congress in selecting and qualifying new FSO candidates will bring the State Department authentic diversity in thought and values. Senators and congressmen selecting officer candidates will guarantee geographic distribution in commissioning new FSOs; it will bring authentic racial and ethnic diversity, not the phony quotas that Blinken’s Kommissars are imposing.
It may be the only way to ensure that Foreign Service officers, like their military officer counterparts, truly reflect the values of modern America.
The post A Plan to Infuse American Values into State Department Hiring appeared first on The American Conservative.
What does it mean that many more young women than young men are leaving American churches?
Young women are leaving American churches in droves. A new survey from the American Enterprise Institute demonstrates what some have already begun to speculate: As young women move politically left as a group, they also become more irreligious.
AEI’s survey of some 5,500 Americans of various ages examined the sexed breakdown of which Americans are leaving churches of every denomination to identify as “disaffiliated.” Per the survey, Millennials, Generation Xers, and Baby Boomers who left their childhood church numbered more male than female, by 6 to 14 percentage points. Generation Z flipped this; the majority of disaffiliated are female by 8 percentage points. The same survey subjects seemed to blame the church’s lack of feminism: Nearly two-thirds of Generation Z women in the cohort disagreed with the statement that “most churches and religious congregations treat men and women equally.” The conclusion from these two findings, presumably, is that churches should become more egalitarian to win over young women.
There are many problems, of course, with letting the opinion of modern irreligious women override centuries of Christian theology. But what is more interesting here is how neatly this picture maps onto another interesting development in our modern era, that of feminized higher education. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report titled “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College.” The report detailed the ever-widening education gap between men and women: Both in acceptance rates and graduation rates, men are falling far behind women. Even those schools putting a gentle thumb on the scales have not been able to close this gap.
What might it mean for young women to outnumber young men at elite universities, while young men outnumber young women at church? Certainly, these two pieces—women leaving church and men leaving college—say something about the relative status of men and women today, and perhaps also about the two sexes’ penchant for prestige. To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. High status jobs, meanwhile, are cordoned off by advanced degrees, and therefore inaccessible to men who do not graduate college. (It is worth noting the difference between high-status jobs and high paying jobs: Real estate, trucking, and trades jobs are highly lucrative, but do not infer the social status of titles like “professor,” “lawyer,” and “doctor.”) Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.
Most young women, and indeed most young adults today, are more readily shaped by peers and power than by deeply held moral convictions. This squares with the education trends, too: The atmosphere on most college campuses is not merely irreligious, but often anti-religious. Students have great negative incentives to leave the faith while pursuing an advanced degree. This might begin at the peer level, but it is also often advanced by faculty and staff, since the general milieu is one which views religion, especially Christianity, as a belief system opposed to intelligence. The men who have left higher education might be influenced by the same phenomenon, but in the opposite direction: Once they have rejected the prestige of the Ivory Tower, what is there to lose, in terms of social status, by becoming or staying Christian? As it turns out, not much. Indeed, young men today are developing parallel status economies quite comfortably, and quite without regard to what young women think of them.
It should be obvious here that the conclusion is not to stuff women in a closet to keep them Christian. Rather, it is unmistakable that the education to be found in most elite institutions of our day is not worth a fraction of the tens of thousands of dollars too many have paid for it. If the result of higher education for women is not increased humility, wonder, and curiosity, of the same sort that drove men and women to God in earlier eras, we can safely assume that they are not being taught much of worth.
Another piece worth considering in this puzzle is happiness. Religiously affiliated Americans are, apparently, happier; they are also more likely to be married, and less likely to get a divorce, which factors probably contribute to that happiness. Happiness is an ambiguous term, and very poorly measured by surveys, and it is worth asking, as my colleague Nic Rowan did recently, whether “happiness” is the point. Nevertheless, the term used by sociologists is helpful for a broad-brush analysis of something that Christians themselves have never needed a survey to understand: That is, young women leaving the church are trading it for a worse life, not a better one.
It is right to look at these trends and have pity. In terms of status, higher education achievement, and religion, there exists a real gender gap. One half of young Americans are less likely to be brainwashed in college, less likely to take on enormous debt for a job, and more likely to find purpose and satisfaction in religion. The other half are women.
The post The Gender Gap in Religion appeared first on The American Conservative.
On June 2, Mexico will elect a new president.
The era of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is coming to an end. Most Americans, particularly those following the disastrous events at the southern border, are likely to say good riddance to the cantankerous AMLO, who is completing a six-year term and legally prohibited from running again.
The Mexican leader has been the hemisphere’s loudest voice in promoting a universal “right to migrate,” sometimes colluding with President Joe Biden to help migrants illegally enter the United States, and sometimes masterfully manipulating him.
Although he will leave office by October 1, AMLO will almost assuredly be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, his protégé candidate who is fully expected to continue his administration’s policies.
For months, Sheinbaum has held a commanding lead in Mexico’s national polling, and most experts predict she will easily win the June voting. She is campaigning cautiously, confident that AMLO’s endorsement and popularity—he has almost 60 percent approval levels—will carry her to victory.
Sheinbaum is an experienced politician, who proved her leadership mettle, and won AMLO’s support, by previously serving as mayor (governor in function) of the greater Mexico City capital region (population 22 million).
Sheinbaum’s personality is cut from a different cloth than AMLO’s. She has an academic background, holding a hard-science Ph.D., and tends toward a less combative approach than the outspoken AMLO. However, she very much shares his leftist vision: critical of so-called “neoliberal” economics, while advocating the radical-chic woke agenda that is everywhere in leftist politics. Predictably, she ordered a statue of Christopher Columbus to be taken down in the capital.
If Sheinbaum is elected, the identity-politics-driven international media story will headline her status as Mexico’s first Jewish-heritage woman president. The gushing reporting about her identity will help sweep AMLO off Mexico’s national stage, but Sheinbaum’s expected electoral victory, unfortunately, will certainly further entrench his political agenda.
Sheinbaum has embraced AMLO’s views on immigration: borders should be porous and the priority is addressing “root causes.” When it comes to handling Washington, Sheinbaum is more analytical, but her first instinct is an AMLO-like defense of Mexican sovereignty. She may have some differences on environmental policies with the Mexican president; AMLO is fine burning fossil fuels, while Sheinbaum, the green physicist, is deeper into climate change orthodoxy.
While there are several candidates running, Scheinbaum’s main opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech-industry businesswoman and former senator who heads a coalition put together by Mexico’s two main opposition political parties, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional). Gálvez is seeking to restore something of the pre-AMLO dynamic in Mexican politics; although she brings a new twist as an indigenous-heritage woman, that era is not likely coming back.
For decades, the PRI and PAN dominated Mexican politics in an establishment manner similar to our own Democrats and Republicans. It was in 2018 that AMLO finally overturned their dominance when his insurgent party, known as Morena (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional), took him to the presidency in a landslide victory.
AMLO discredited both the PRI (the old statist, establishment left) and the PAN (conservative and business-oriented) as Mexico’s corrupt ruling class. The fact that the two previously dominant parties, once bitter rivals, have come together, somewhat desperately, to nominate Gálvez says volumes about how much AMLO has remade Mexican politics.
One key element of the AMLO realignment was his large expansion of federal welfare and pension plans. In modern Dickensian Mexico, some 20 million workers are in the informal economy that creates 30 percent of national income. AMLO has brought this significant and neglected segment of society into the welfare state for the first time, an effort that doubtless undergirds his popularity.
The left praises AMLO’s welfare policies for “institutionalizing” Mexican support programs, like FDR’s in the 1930s. The country’s conservatives and the old establishment liberal-left, on the other hand, condemn his policies as populist vote-buying, a disreputable political tactic nevertheless regularly used to win Mexican elections.
All of this contributes to why Gálvez has a hard path to victory. She has already gone to Washington to suggest that the Organization of American States (OAS) send election observers to Mexico.
Gálvez would be marginally preferable to Sheinbaum when it comes to U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. Gálvez does talk about collaboration on the common frontier, and she might, at least rhetorically, open up to a better law-enforcement partnership. But her security vision has little in common with securing the border in an American sense.
While Gálvez denounces the unprecedented human trafficking that is taking place in both countries, her immigration “solution” is more visas and legal work opportunities for foreigners, particularly Mexicans, in the United States. This is not surprising, since Mexicans living in el Norte can still vote in Mexico’s elections.
Mexico’s endemic corruption is another major campaign issue that directly impacts the U.S. national interest, because our large southern neighbor is both our greatest commercial trading partner and source of migrants. Both candidates, of course, denounce corruption, but neither proposes viable solutions because everybody is out of ideas.
Sheinbaum is almost philosophical, rejecting the notion that Mexican corruption is a “matter of culture”; she improbably calls for “peace dialogues” among governors, judges, and police to address “impunity.” Sheinbaum claims, dubiously, that fundamental change is already under way as AMLO’s administration is not only setting a new tone, but has begun to historically remake the country—AMLO pompously calls it the “Fourth Transformation”—by overturning corrupt privileges deeply embedded in Mexican society.
Gálvez of course rejects Sheinbaum’s positive spin and has made credible charges that AMLO is no different than past presidents, specifically accusing his adult sons of illicitly profiting from the government-led, massive construction effort of the Maya train line in southern Mexico. This train line is AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, and its costs have ballooned from about $8 to $28 billion as contractors wheel and deal.
Gálvez’s criticism is certainly more valid than Sheinbaum’s optimism. Mexican society, by measures like Transparency International’s annual rating, is still hopelessly sunk in widespread corrupt practices. These continue despite Mexico’s success in attracting significant new foreign investment and trade, which comes to the country mainly because of its nearness to the U.S. market. Outsiders who seek to do business with Mexico—and increasingly Chinese businessmen are first in line—simply navigate around corrupt practices or participate in them.
Where AMLO has succeeded on the corruption issue, however, is in fiercely defending his own, highly valuable, personal reputation as being incorruptible. For millions of Mexicans, accustomed to watching their politicians become vastly wealthy (sadly, not unlike in the U.S.), AMLO’s clean record, if it is indeed true, is something remarkable. It certainly helps Sheinbaum’s campaign as she, too, is substantially free from charges of illicitly using politics to become wealthy.
In this context, AMLO has been a grandmaster of symbolic acts that his grassroots supporters never forget. For example, he canceled Mexico City’s massively over-budget new airport project (thought to benefit the corrupt rich); he refused to use and sold off the president’s luxury jet, a Boeing 787 “Dreamliner”; and he never took occupation of the chief executive’s elaborate living quarters known as “Los Pinos.”
While this was brilliant political theater, no president’s policies can remake a country as vast and complex as Mexico, particularly on corruption, in a handful of years. There is a case to be made, perhaps, that the long road of reversing Mexico’s ingrained corruption must start by examples from the top. Certainly, nothing else is working. Sadly, however, when it comes to daily governance issues, such as overhauling the country’s dysfunctional criminal court system, AMLO’s gameplan is as empty as those of Mexico’s previous presidents.
Perhaps there is no higher U.S. national interest than curbing transnational organized crime from using Mexico to strike into our country. Mexican politicians, of course, approach their widespread criminality crisis differently, but they acknowledge that “insecurity” is the main concern this election cycle, which includes campaigning for Congress, state, and local offices, too.
Mexico’s 2024 election kickoff was accompanied by the murders of two local candidates, tragically symbolizing how violence infects all aspects of Mexican national life. Understandably appalled and frightened, most Mexicans are resigned to their fate that, no matter who is elected president, the country is likely to continue to just muddle through in dealing with a gigantic national crisis.
Both candidates have called for a larger National Guard, since Mexican state and local police are unreliable or even part of organized crime. Gálvez is recommending doubling the number to 300,000 guardsmen, but the record of the National Guard, first created by AMLO to replace the corrupted Federal Police, has been unimpressive. AMLO basically backed away from his own National Guard strategy, gradually moving towards putting more and more authority in the Mexican military to deal with crime (and many other issues).
The national armed forces should not be in the forefront in the fight against organized criminals, but Mexico’s disastrous law-enforcement performance—corrupted police forces, dysfunctional courts—reflects a vicious societal struggle that more resembles guerrilla war than a crime wave. No state security institutions except the army and marines seem capable of keeping things from getting even worse. It is certain that la Presidenta Sheinbaum will have nothing behind the curtain to deal with this national catastrophe.
When Mexico’s voting is over, and elected candidates take office, there will be little hope, unfortunately, that U.S.–Mexican bilateral relations will get a meaningful new start. More than a new president in Mexico, what is needed is a new chief executive in the White House. We need an American president who will reverse the Biden administration’s calamitous open-borderism and use forceful U.S. diplomatic leverage to focus Mexico’s political leadership, whoever it is, on our mutual security problems.
The post Mexico’s Presidential Election Will Not End the Nation’s Crisis appeared first on The American Conservative.
The New York attorney general’s political battle extends beyond the presidential campaign.
After spending several years hauling the former President Donald Trump through court in an attempt to puncture his bottom line, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James is now employing the same lawfare tactics against VDARE, an anti-immigration website. This appears to be a war, not of laws, but of ideology, where the stakes are nothing less than the foundational principles of free speech and dissent.
“I launched VDARE.com on Christmas Eve 1999,” wrote Peter Brimelow, VDARE’s founder and editor, on Friday. “So it is perhaps appropriate that, on Good Friday 2024, the anniversary of Christ’s death, I must announce VDARE.com’s crucifixion by New York State’s communist Attorney General Letitia James.”
VDARE has not been charged with any crime, yet has “fought NYAG Letitia James, at a cost of up to $1 million, for nearly three years.” An onslaught of onerous subpoenas marks not a quest for justice but an orchestrated attempt to financially and morally bankrupt those who dare resist the liberal creed.
Letitia James’s electoral platform was built on this very promise: she vowed to “shine a bright light into every dark corner of [Donald Trump’s] real estate dealings,” just like she promised to “take tougher legal action on organizations that engage in…online hate speech against protected classes.” Except, James cannot actually take legal action against VDARE for their “hate speech against protected classes” because everything that VDARE writes is protected by the pesky First Amendment.
So she has been digging for a reason, any reason, to bring them both down, desperately searching for anything that could be construed as a misstep. “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men,” said Cardinal Richelieu, “I will find something in them which will hang him.”
After years of aimless fishing expeditions, what James has latched onto is VDARE’s real estate dealings, just as she latched onto Trump’s real estate dealings. In 2020, the VDARE foundation bought a castle for $1.4 million in West Virginia to use as a conference space because hotels kept canceling their meetings. (Similarly, VDARE can’t get any bank to enable credit card donations.) They needed a cancel-proof event space.
VDARE is hardly the first charitable organization to buy a nice conference space. The American Institute for Economic Research has its own mansion, and the Aspen Institute has its own ski resort. And who can forget Black Lives Matter buying a $6 million dollar mansion to use for parties?
The legal case against VDARE’s castle now appears to hinge on whether or not the founders of VDARE use it as their personal dwelling. In December, President of the VDARE foundation Lydia Brimelow (Peter Brimelow’s wife) denied she lived there: “It’s not our home. It’s our office,” she said. “That’s a very important distinction. It is not our home. We do not live here. We have a house with our family, which is not this house.” One month later, New York trial court judge Sabrina Kraus ruled that the Brimelows “paid rent to live in the cottage [on castle grounds]…and Lydia Brimelow signed the document as both landlord and tenant.”
Was it wise for VDARE’s management to buy a flashy castle and pay their own 501(c)3 rent to live on its grounds? Probably not; they painted a target on their back, but Letitia James is taking shots at it only because they’re conservative. This has become familiar. For example: Think of how many thousands of real estate moguls have inflated their asset values to obtain favorable loan terms, and think of why Donald Trump is the only one to be prosecuted for it. VDARE’s case is as much about their castle as Donald Trump’s case is really about favorable loan terms.
As part of this investigation, Letitia James is demanding that VDARE hand over 40 gigabytes of emails which “could in fact reveal the names of [our] pseudonymous writers, as well as our donors.” VDARE’s donors and writers wish to remain anonymous because they will lose their jobs—or worse—if their identities are linked to what they support online. While the court has ostensibly extended a courtesy by permitting VDARE to redact their names from these emails, the estimated fees for such redactions are projected to come to $150,000. This presents VDARE with a stark dilemma: incur a hefty $150,000 expense to protect the anonymity of its donors and writers, or risk revealing their identities. The lesson here is that if your speech falls outside the Overton window, the state of New York will aggressively attempt to bankrupt and/or doxx you.
In this crucial moment, when the principles of free speech are under direct threat, the silence from prominent conservative outlets is deafening. The American Conservative is not afraid to stand up for free speech, but where is Con Inc.? Crickets. Fox News, Ben Shapiro, National Review, and the MAGAverse, among others, must recognize the slippery slope they tread by allowing VDARE to face this battle alone. Today’s targeting of VDARE sets a precedent for the suppression of any form of dissent tomorrow.
This moment demands more than passive support for free speech—it requires active defense, especially of unfashionable speech that challenges or discomforts. The absence of solidarity today not only betrays a lack of genuine commitment to free speech but also risks validating a future where such “lawfare” becomes a standard tactic to silence opposition, leaving no voice safe from suppression.
This article has been updated to clarify that VDARE’s 501(c)(3) is the recipient of castle rents.
The post Letitia James’s Offensive Against VDARE is Harrowing for Free Speech appeared first on The American Conservative.
That won’t stop those who believe in priorities from being dubbed “unpatriotic conservatives” anew.
Longtime readers of The American Conservative are no stranger to making common cause with people on the left when necessary. The effort to forestall decades of disaster in Iraq may have failed, but it was not TAC alone in that defeat; the magazine’s editors were dubbed “unpatriotic conservatives” not only because they were antiwar and David Frum loved the war, but explicitly because in seeking to avert a debacle they had made “common cause with the left-wing…movements.” So doing, it was suggested, and is still suggested, violated a friend–enemy distinction that placed them outside the political bounds of, if not the country, at least the conservative movement. The war party dismissed appeals to prudence and constraints, conflating resistance to the war with terrorist sympathies.
Today, you can be a patriotic conservative and agree with Democrats, apparently, but only if it is about Trump—not about liberal overreach. The war party still resists the prudential recognition of limited resources, and its right wing will find such recognition all the more difficult when it entails agreement with members of the traditional left. But the national political distinction that matters in our moment is between those who put the interests of American citizens and their posterity first and those who don’t, often hiding behind gestures toward an abstract idea of America. This is a distinction that cuts across conventional affiliations, leaving both parties in upheaval, as the Democrats become the party most comfortable with liberal internationalism and the global financial elite. Everyone should be prepared, going forward, to find perhaps temporary allies of convenience to both his right and left.
For those who seek to put America first, NATO reform presents a new risk of being associated with people neoconservatives will dismiss as leftists. So be it. A recent essay in Foreign Affairs by Max Bergmann, currently of the Center for Strategic and International Studies but formerly of the Center for American Progress, argues for a “more European NATO.” His call pairs nicely with what Sumantra Maitra, my colleague both here at TAC and at the Center for Renewing America, calls a “dormant NATO” strategy for the United States, something Bergmann acknowledges negatively, framing his case as a matter of insurance against such policies.
Nevertheless, the two perspectives are harmonious. In a time of limited resources, and thus ruthless prioritization, American policymakers must focus on managing our relationship with China and responding to China’s relationship with the rest of the world. If, as Bergmann suggests and Maitra has proposed, Europe can fulfill the core purposes of NATO without America as principal, then embracing that reality gives U.S. policymakers one less distraction. The benefits are not one-sided in the long term. Bergmann writes that the main problem facing Europe collectively “lies with NATO’s overdependence on the United States.”
In a world where even President Biden’s Democrat administration is preoccupied with the situation in the West Pacific, this is an obvious vulnerability for martially atrophied European member states. The traditional major threat to U.S. grand strategy is the emergence of a hegemonic power that dominates the Eurasian landmass and thus, surpassing the United States in material and cultural resources, can afford to strike North America across the oceans. The reality now of the global political and economic situation is such that this threat slouches not toward Europe, as it did in the 20th century’s conflicts with Germany and Russia, but instead moves its slow thighs in Asia. American focus is turning, if still in starts and stops.
Thus NATO should be, or will be by events, demoted from a critical global institution to a vital regional one. As Bergmann writes, “After decades of drift, the alliance has found new purpose in deterring Russian aggression, its original raison d’etre,” and the European members of the alliance are capable of such deterrence largely without the United States. Bergmann acknowledges that “when Americans travel to Europe, they see sophisticated infrastructure and citizens who enjoy high standards of living and robust social safety nets.”
Being one of those rare professional liberals with enough imagination to model a normal person’s thoughts, he adds, “They cannot understand why their tax dollars and soldiers are needed to defend a well-off continent whose total population far outstrips that of the United States.”
This highlights, however, a peculiar pretense in discussions of NATO’s future. What Bergmann passes over as “decades of drift” have also been decades of enthusiastic enumeration of new responsibilities for the alliance, as it transformed itself from a straightforward defensive arrangement into a full-suite security organization executing military interventions far outside the European theater, let alone the North Atlantic. For decades, NATO has been looking for things to do, and finding some. So when officials outraged by the dormant NATO proposal claim there is nothing to scale down, nothing for America to decline to participate in, that the alliance is just what it has always been, there should be some outrage in return.
In fact, the alliance has evolved, so it can evolve further. Defenders of a smaller role for the United States will have to be prepared, however, just like defenders of the status quo, to set aside compunctions about agreeing with members of “the other team.” As NATO has become so much more than for keeping Russia out, it has not ceased from also being, in Lord Ismay’s famous words, for keeping “the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Conservative interventionists will resist a European-led or dormant NATO with invocations of future war on the continent; reliance on American firepower, they say, is the only thing keeping member states off each other’s throats. In making this argument, they will probably have the support of both small states concerned at the prospect of further dependence on France and Germany and a European left happy to keep the defense burden squarely on American shoulders.
Meanwhile, a coalition for making American troops the backstop of last resort, rather than the backbone of forward defense, will be no less offensive to American prejudices. France may be our oldest ally, but after two World Wars, bickering with Charles De Gaulle, and observation of the country’s creative riot and vacation schedule, her reputation with American conservatives is the stuff of jokes. That reflects the shortness of U.S. memories far more than France’s civilizational status, and will need to be overcome. France has always wanted to play a larger role in NATO, repeatedly snubbed by the Anglo-American special relationship. A French-German-British triumvirate backing up the alliance’s Eastern border states would work as well at preserving peace for the foreseeable future as the current imbalanced consulship.
Foreign policy does not fit tidily within domestic partisan divides, because it deals with delimiting that domestic area. It is too large. Like immigration policy, it conditions these other debates, creating what I have described before as a political order of operations. At the beginning of this column, I defined our new disruptive national political distinction in domestic terms, but I conclude now with the distinction that divides foreign policy, because it is the distinction that bounds other debates. The defining division in American foreign policy today is over the status of unipolarity.
No one denies that, after 1989, the U.S. experienced a period of hyperpower; the question is whether three decades of bipartisan liberal hubris at the end of history undermined that hegemony beyond repair. Committed liberal internationalists believe unipolarity can be salvaged, that America needs only assert herself on the battlefield and further entrench in the multilateral institutions of the last century. They still think in the Cold War terms of “hawks” and “doves,” and accuse those who have come to terms with reality—an increasingly bipolar global order and a multipolar future—of inviting and even ushering in these conditions. (Never mind who has been at the controls for the last 30 years). The advocates of making the best hard choices can be sure they will still be called “unpatriotic conservatives.”
The post ‘Dormant NATO’ Is the Best Hard Choice appeared first on The American Conservative.
The retired professional wrestler preaches a positive message of person-centered self-improvement.
With his grit and populist charisma, legendary wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, aka DDP, rose to the height of pop culture in 1997–1999 as he brought the wrestling world to the broader public with crossover appearances and matches with Hulk Hogan, the NBA star Karl Malone, and the Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Since then, he has maintained his influence in the culture by successfully reinventing himself as a motivational speaker and health guru through his work in his eponymous yoga program.
However much confidence he has mustered to achieve these successes has not allowed him to lose touch with his servant-leader attitude. He is infectiously down-to-earth yet confident. I recently sat down with him for an in-depth discussion to learn about the secret to his success in business and what America can learn from it.
As so many raised in the latter 20th-century America, Dallas Page was a victim of a broken home. He also suffered from conditions diagnosed as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Early on he had visions of being a professional athlete but was hit by a car in 7th grade—shattering his knee and his sports plans. Nevertheless, this crisis of people telling him he cannot do something sparked in him a lifelong mindset of resilience and positivity that has influenced millions around the world.
Today, DDP’s main enterprise, DDP Yoga, has worked to bring longevity-increasing exercises, discipline, and mindset training to people not traditionally interested in yoga—particularly men. His videos of people’s transformations and interviews on programs like the Joe Rogan Experience have gone viral to millions of people looking for solutions in our negative culture and toxic dietary landscape. From his wrestling mentor Jake the Snake’s dramatic turnaround from addiction to the late Scott Hall’s journey to sobriety and, more recently, the retired boxer Butterbean’s health transformation, DDP has become a name associated with a never-give-up, positive spirit of healing.
DDP credits Napoleon Hill, the early 20th century positive thinking and hard work advocate, as an influence in his personal philosophy. Hill, the author of the popular book Think and Grow Rich, had a big impact on another WWE Hall of Famer: The former president Donald Trump, who credits the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale, a student of Hill’s philosophy, with shaping his own worldview.
DDP has no interest in national politics. “Who owns the government? Big business. We don’t have government anymore, bro,” he said.
Keeping with his populist perspective, he continued, “People say, ‘Your vote matters.’ No, it doesn’t.” When it comes to voting, he says he is the first guy to vote in local elections where change can happen. As for the 2024 presidential election: “They both suck…but Trump did do some pretty cool things.”
Surveying the irreparability of politics, DDP quickly pivots back to the mind. “You can think you’re in control but, constantly, each one of us is hit with one adversity after the other, most of which we cannot control. The only thing we have control over is our mind.”
Whatever one thinks of concepts like “the power of positivity” or figures like Hill and Peale, there is no denying that there is something quintessentially American about the message DDP preaches. His American dream story of overcoming poverty with hard work and beating serial health and career setbacks with discipline and visualization harkens back to an earlier time in America wherein the culture celebrated underdogs overcoming challenges. This is in sharp contrast to today’s dominant culture of victimism in which people are encouraged to wallow in trauma and identify as oppressed in order to gain social status.
Asked how America can get rid of its victim mentality in the workplace and the culture, DDP says, “The first thing you need to do is learn how to breathe…. When you own your breath, it’s like having a superpower. When you start to really own your discipline—those are two superpowers I have.” Rather than indulgence, he says, “Discipline is the truest form of self-love.”
Whether you are in a car accident, giving birth, or reading an emotionally manipulative piece of propaganda from the news media, DDP says it’s the same physiological response. “If you start to get anxiety, I will guarantee you you are not breathing,” he predicts. “When you’re deep breathing, you are literally sending neural hormones to inhibit the stress producing hormones which triggers a relaxation response in the body.”
Asked what his state of the union speech would be to the American people, DDP rejects grand impositions of policies and brings it back to the person. He calls the public to take sovereignty over their minds and bodies: exercise, eat real foods (he eats organic and avoids seed oils), and practice daily deep breathing. It is reminiscent of President Kennedy’s calls for fitness.
Amid the chaos of foreign affairs, border invasions, inflation, crime, and social distrust, it is easy to want a hero to come save us from it all. That desire is the seductive recurrence of politics, especially presidential elections. However, DDP’s message cuts against that delusion. For years, he called himself the “people’s champion”; the message he is championing now at nearly 68 while standing on one foot with his other held above his shoulder is this: no one is coming to save you. Take your thoughts captive. Your emotions, including pride and fear, are not you. These too shall pass. Eat real foods and see your emotions improve. Stay out of debt. Exercise, even if you are trapped in bed or a chair, even if you are severely ill or obese. Breathe deeply when bombarded by a media owned by hostile interests. Find a way to serve others and watch how much more abundant life becomes in the process.
So many negative thoughts invade our minds daily when we challenge ourselves. When DDP approached the podium of the WWE Hall of Fame as an inductee surrounded by his daughters, he thought, “The only voice I will allow to come in: This is going to be the greatest thing I’ve done in professional wrestling.”
The post Diamond Dallas Page Tells America to Breathe appeared first on The American Conservative.
The National Interest editor’s latest volume lacks both the tenability and generosity of his first. But he’s been nothing but rewarded.
America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn, Liveright, 264 pages
Jacob Heilbrunn’s first book was an attack on a faction of the right, and so is this one. The difference is that his earlier book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008), was tempered by a grudging admiration for its subjects. The neocons were Heilbrunn’s sort of people, with whom he shared a sensibility, a demographic background, and professional connections. He feels no such fondness for the populists described in America Last. The tone of the book is one of unrelenting contempt.
Vituperation is the book’s biggest weakness. Abusive language abounds. Supporters of President Donald Trump are called “lackeys,” criticism of American policy is called “self-abasement before foreign tyrants,” opponents of open borders are credited with “simple hatred for migrants.” This editorializing tone would be forgivable if Heilbrunn made a solid case for his argument, based on facts, but he does not. He fails to draw any distinction between, for example, respectfully engaging with Hungary’s popular head of state and having “a man-crush on Orbán.” Can an American be curious about Fidesz’s domestic accomplishments without being a starstruck fanboy? The entire thesis of Heilbrunn’s book rests on a refusal to see any difference between the two.
Heilbrunn sees admiration for foreign strongmen as the primary motivation for conservative policy positions. On the Ukraine war, he writes, “The complaint about NATO was not about foreign policy realism. It was rooted in real admiration for Putin—for his disdain for LGBTQ rights, for his support for the Russian Orthodox church, and for his cult of masculinity.” In support of his contention, he cites an old column of Pat Buchanan’s and a few offhand remarks by Tucker Carlson about Putin, such as “He’s not Adolph Hitler.” (Does that qualify as admiration?) He ignores the literally millions of words published in this magazine alone explaining the folly of NATO expansion, not in terms of good guys and bad guys, but in terms of costs and benefits for each side of the conflict—small benefits for America, massive costs for Russia—and the likely result of this imbalance of interests.
Attempts to discredit foreign policy realism in this way are based on emotion, not reason. In 2019, journalist Bari Weiss, then still working at the New York Times, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a skeptic of Syrian intervention, “She’s an Assad toady.” When Rogan asked her, “What does that mean? What’s a toady?” Weiss replied, “I think I used that word correctly. Jamie, can you check what ‘toady’ means? ‘T-O-A-D-I-E.’ I think it means what I think it means.” She connected the congresswoman to the Syrian dictator using a word she could neither define nor spell. It was a slur, not an argument.
Heilbrunn can spell “toady” correctly, but otherwise the ploy is the same. The test is simple: Is there any imaginable objective assessment of Vladimir Putin’s leadership, one that tallies the pluses and minuses as dispassionately as possible without proceeding from facts to moral judgment, that Heilbrunn would not deride as the work of a Putin-lover? There is not. We know this because a preeminent example of such an assessment, Christopher Caldwell’s 3,000-word essay in Hillsdale College’s magazine Imprimis, “How to Think About Vladimir Putin,” is enough to put Caldwell on Heilbrunn’s list of America Lasters. Does Heilbrunn not see the danger in walling off vitally important topics from rational analysis? Is America likely to make better decisions if debate is conducted in the hysterical tone he advocates rather than the pragmatic tone Caldwell exemplifies?
The book projects this putative right-wing love of dictators back over a century of political history. Heilbrunn opens his story with World War I and continues through the rise of fascism up to the Cold War and beyond. The biggest weakness of these historical chapters is a fixation on minor characters. Was Merwin K. Hart really such a titan that his name deserves to appear almost a hundred times in America Last? Lonnie Lawrence Dennis was a mixed-race Harvard graduate who chose to pass as white and left a diplomatic career to become a public speaker and author of such right-wing books as The Coming American Fascism. A fascinating story, no doubt, but does Heilbrunn really believe that any conservative alive today was influenced wittingly or unwittingly by Dennis’s example? If not, then in what sense is he evidence of a “long-standing tradition” to which Donald Trump also belongs?
The thinness of Heilbrunn’s case has not stopped the book from being a media sensation. He has had promotional interviews on MSNBC and CNN where he has publicized his fear that Trump “fetishizes the strongman” and represents “creeping fascism” and “a new world order based on tyranny.” His book is popular among many of the same journalists who promoted the Russiagate hoax, which Heilbrunn to this day endorses. He claims that Trump in 2016 “was plotting against America—with the not inconsiderable help of Russian president Vladimir Putin” and refers to “the so-called Russia hoax, which was none at all.”
Clearly there is an appetite for public intellectuals who will argue, in the face of all exonerating evidence and common sense, that Trump is a Russian agent. It’s a living, I guess. But what’s good for Heilbrunn’s career is bad for the republic. Tearing down Trump on this false basis will have the effect, among others, of strengthening the same foreign policy establishment that brought us the Iraq war, the Libyan intervention, and other costly errors. Ironically, few people know better than Heilbrunn, the one-time dissector of the neocons, how much damage that establishment has done to American interests.
Heilbrunn ended his 2008 book with a prediction that, despite all of their manifest errors, the neocons would maintain their hold on the conservative movement because the young people were on their side. “Unlike the neoconservatives, the realists have cultivated no successor generation,” he wrote. “There has been no real attempt to create new generations of realists to replace the Scowcrofts and Bakers and Schlesingers.” How different the scene looks today. The young talent is “behind populism and nationalism, and it is the NeverTrumpers whose ranks are notably gray.
The post Jacob Heilbrunn Returns to the Neocons appeared first on The American Conservative.
Internal dynamics, both political and economic, will determine policy toward the cartels south of the border.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is back in the American news. At his March 22 daily news briefing, the populist Mexican president declared that he was not interested in fighting the cartels on behalf of the United States.
“We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government. Mexico First. Our home comes first,” he said. He added that Mexico would help fight the cartels on “humanitarian” grounds: “Of course we are going to cooperate in fighting drugs, above all because it has become a very sensitive, very sad humanitarian issue, because a lot of young people are dying in the United States because of fentanyl.”
He followed these inflammatory statements with a contentious Sunday interview on the CBS longform staple 60 Minutes. “You know why we don’t have the drug consumption that you have in the United States? Because we have customs, traditions, and we don’t have the problem of the disintegration of the family,” he said, insisting that the cartels pose problems mostly for Americans.
Let us lay aside the recent press investigations that have found evidence that AMLO’s rise to the presidency was backed by the cartels. (What a surprise! The man whose crime policy was “hugs not bullets” supported by organized crime—who would have thought!) The question: Could AMLO do anything about the cartels, even if he wanted to?
Mexican law enforcement is inefficient at best and corrupt at worst. Dissatisfaction with the police and the courts, and their inability to monopolize force, fuel Mexico’s largely undiscussed lynching problem, which, as we emphasized when writing about it last year, is concentrated not in the northern wastes but in the most central and populous parts of the country.
The Mexican Army and Marines have had better success against the cartels, due to their relatively lower penetration by corruption and organized crime. (“Better” is not, however, “invincible”—the cartels have shown themselves able to hold their own in the field on at least one occasion.) The difficulty is that sweeping military operations tend to give short shrift to due process and are, by their nature, volatile and dangerous; this gives an opening for human rights NGOs, in some cases funded by and coordinating with the cartels themselves, to kick up a ruckus at such operations with the support of uncritical media in the U.S. (The same sort of hand-wringing accompanied Nayib Bukele’s mass arrests in El Salvador.) This threatens to make life difficult for the politicians who support these measures.
And there isn’t much motivation to stomach those kinds of difficulties. AMLO, populist though he may be, is speaking for the Mexican political elite when he says the cartels are a problem for Yanqui. The northern provinces are simply too remote from the capital for the good and great of Mexico DF to care that much—think of the attitude of well-off New Yorkers or Washingtonians toward disasters in Kansas or Oklahoma. So, while the answer to our question is probably yes, AMLO could do something about the cartels, he has little incentive to do so.
American efforts to bring the Mexicans to heel on crime and border control issues have mostly been pushing on string. Our earlier efforts to work directly with Mexican law enforcement, modeled on interventions in Colombia, have proved catastrophically expensive and have left the cartels as strong as ever. (Indeed, arguably stronger, as our reform-and-uplift efforts in the Mexican justice system destroyed the traditional networks of corruption, which, unappealing as they were to American eyes, bought a certain amount of restraint from organized crime.) Mexico has been a weak state from its inception, and no matter how hard the U.S. tries, that isn’t going to change overnight. Nor does it make much sense, from the theoretical perspective of sovereignty, for American law enforcement to be performing operations in Mexico directly.
Hence, American policy toward Mexico should focus on realigning incentives rather than getting involved directly (although force is always the backstop in international relations and must not be categorically excluded). Happily, some of AMLO’s initiatives, which will presumably be continued by a PRI successor, fit nicely with such realignment. Counterintuitively, the recent program of renationalizations is the most promising cornerstone. The increased state revenues will increase state capacity, a chronic problem for the Mexican federal government, and it will encourage Mexico to take security concerns more seriously in relatively far-flung physical locales; there is precedent for the Army to serve as the security forces at sites operated by Pemex, the state-owned oil company. The nationalization of the country’s lithium reserves, which are concentrated in cartel territory, will serve as a particularly helpful move. (This has the added benefit of doing down the Chinese state-backed company that has a controlling interest in Mexico’s lithium.)
The U.S. has historically pressured Mexico toward a more open economy, which benefits American investors and importers. (This is in large part how Mexico has grown to be the States’ biggest trading partner.) Yet, in a choice between easing capital investment and national security, the latter must always have pride of place. A pragmatic-minded president—a Trump, perhaps—would see the benefits of getting out of AMLO’s way.
The post Mexico’s AMLO Will Control the Cartels If We Let Him appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Oh, is this what fascism looks like?
If a work of writing is intellectually shoddy, it can be attributed to either stupidity or dishonesty. I have not met Martin Wolf in person, so I have no idea whether he is a functional imbecile or not, and so have no other option than to give him the benefit of doubt. Perhaps his heart wasn’t in it, and he was in a rush to finish his weekly quota of writing. We have all been there.
Whatever it is, it is unjustifiable for the Financial Times to publish his nonsense.
Consider this statement: “One feature [of fascism] is the cult of tradition. Fascists worship the past. The corollary is that they reject the modern. ‘The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason,’ [Umberto] Eco writes, ‘is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.’”
Eco was obviously an arch-liberal, but Wolf’s assertion that fascism is opposed to modernity—and modernism—is frankly so absurd that one almost questions his comprehension skills. Italian Fascists committed state power to crush dissent while perpetuating a novel state-sanctioned version of spirituality, architecture, and art. Early 1920s sanctioned style of architecture in Italy was known as Architettura razionale (one can guess the translation). A noted artistic school that supported fascism to its end was Futurism. The clue is in the name.
Wolf isn’t a historian, so I am guessing he failed to read any original sources, but here is a quote from a book that might be considered an authority on Fascism: Benito Mussolini’s succinctly titled The Doctrine of Fascism.
The Fascist negation of socialism, democracy, liberalism, should not, however, be interpreted as implying a desire to drive the world backwards to positions occupied prior to 1789, a year commonly referred to as that which opened the demo-liberal century. History does not travel backwards. The Fascist doctrine has not taken De Maistre as its prophet…. The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State.
In our times, on one hand you have localized reactionary uprisings, from questions of parental rights and national sovereignty, from Loudon County all the way to Texas, Florida, and Great Britain. On the other, you see the all-encompassing state, all-powerful, ever-growing, capable of shutting down countries and livelihoods for years in the name of science and modernity, albeit backed up by a powerful quasi-theology, its own holy months, holy flags, saints, sinners and sacrilege; a state with the enormous surveillance power and bureaucracy, with five to ten top corporate entities all mouthing the same theological underpinnings of modernity; a state that revises and relitigates the historical memory of the worst of 1920s Euro-American eugenicist ideas, from forced vaccination to abortion to euthanasia; a state that opposed localism of any form, in favor of ideological homogeneity.
Anyone—from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to the Asian nerds discriminated against at Harvard—who dares to oppose the state dicta on any questions of merit, neutrality, race, gender, or sovereignty faces the full wrath from state-aligned major media mouthpieces (and they are somehow all state-aligned), including that of Herr Wolf. They all somehow speak the same language, support the same worldview, and are funded by the same plutocrats and oligarchic entities. All in the name of democracy, future, science, people, and progress.
Which side sounds more fascistic to you?
The post The Financial Times’ Disingenuous Sermons on Fascism appeared first on The American Conservative.
Canceling even milquetoast figures won’t make conservatives feel more heard.
Greater injustices have been perpetrated in the media world than the premature conclusion to Ronna McDaniel’s punditry career at NBC News.
By the end of her tenure at the Republican National Committee, no wing of the party was entirely pleased with her performance and it was not clear which constituency she best represented. But whatever McDaniel’s faults, the revolt against her brief broadcast news star turn was motivated by the belief that a majority of the Republican Party does not deserve representation. At most, very watered down versions of what they want should be granted a place on the 2024 ballot or platformed at major media institutions this side of shortwave radio.
When Donald Trump first took his magic escalator ride nearly nine years ago, his support was so thin even within conservative media that the cable networks had to go out and hire new pundits to speak favorably about him on air.
Sometimes while working at night, I would see the televisions playing in the background of the newsroom with the sound off. If I did not know any better, I would have assumed Kayleigh McEnany was being surrounded by her mother and aunts, who were all yelling at her for failing to clean her room.
That was essentially the most favorable treatment a political operative could expect to receive for appearing on a television channel with a liberal or politically mixed audience and explaining their preference for one of two major-party candidates for president. When nearly half the country voted for Trump, including pluralities in the battleground states that sent him to the White House, the problem got worse rather than improving.
It worked out much better for McEnany’s career than McDaniel’s, even if both experiments were relatively short-lived; other pundits found they had to switch sides to keep theirs going. But the gradual increase in ideological diversity on the networks that once hosted liberal monologues rather than debates was increasingly ghettoized, with each cable behemoth identifying which market segment they existed to outrage and then outraging them all day long.
POLITICO’s Jack Shafter nevertheless published a lengthy, if not quite exhaustive, list of people with resumes similar to McDaniel’s who made the jump from politics to punditry. The greatest pundit of a generation worked for and largely defended Richard Nixon during the height of the Watergate scandal and wrote some of Spiro Agnew’s most famous media-bashing speeches.
Yet not even at the apogee of liberal domination of the media did the network heads and newspaper editorial pages imagine they could indefinitely silence perspectives that were winning 49-state presidential landslides.
Partisan political operatives often lie, or, more charitably, repeat without careful examination suspect claims that are good for the party. This includes things that are of far greater consequence, and come with less public ability to scrutinize, than inaugural crowd sizes, such as weapons of mass destruction before going to war and a family’s ability to keep their doctor under new healthcare laws. Many operatives once involved in that type of spin currently grace the airwaves of MSNBC.
Those airwaves are also routinely full of assertions about the 2000 and 2016 elections that are as dubious as Trump’s nonsense about 2020. It is true, thank goodness, that no one responded to those conspiracy theories and lies as violently as the mobs at the Capitol on January 6 did. A sincerely held belief that the Russians manipulated or altered the 2016 vote totals easily could have provoked such a reaction.
Is Trump the only reason some election conspiracists behaved worse than others, such as the Russigate maximalists or those who believed George W. Bush was “selected, not elected”? Trump certainly insisted on pressing his case far beyond the point of legal or constitutional plausibility, sparking a dangerous and violent national embarrassment that but for the grace of God could have been much worse.
But Trump also appealed to some voters who were already more radicalized, and believed themselves to have less effective representation from the political class and its media allies, than the people who thought Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Stacey Abrams got robbed on Election Day
A few Ronna McDaniel cable hits probably wouldn’t have made these voters less radicalized. But her banishment won’t make them feel better represented, either.
The post Deplatforming Ronna McDaniel Won’t Deradicalize Anyone appeared first on The American Conservative.
American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.
Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.
Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.
The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.
Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’s The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.
Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”
Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.
Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.
Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”
As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:
Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.
Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.
On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”
The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”
Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.
These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.
The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.
These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.
All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.
For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life:
influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.
Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.
The post The Tailspin of American Boys and Men appeared first on The American Conservative.
Russia has already shown that Western ostracism is not necessarily fatal.
Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory in Russia’s presidential elections will act as a mandate to the Kremlin for fighting the Ukraine war to completion. At the same time, attacks on Russian territory have expectedly increased over the past several weeks as Kiev’s strategic position has steadily deteriorated. In addition to targeting civilian population centers with missile and drone strikes, forces of the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) have also unsuccessfully attempted to invade and consolidate territory in the direction of Belgorod; such attacks were meant to coincide with the elections and intended to demoralize Russian citizens, thereby increasing pressure on the Putin regime by sending the message that the current administration does not have things under control.
All of this is and was predictable. What is less clear, however, is how the Western world will respond to the increasingly poor prospects for the Ukrainian war effort moving forward. In a March 15 meeting with the highest-ranking members of the Russian security and defense services, Putin specifically referred to the involvement of “foreign mercenaries” and Western-backed Ukrainian forces in the attacks on Belgorod and Kursk. In his initial remarks to the country upon winning reelection, the Russian president again referred to troops from NATO countries operating in Ukraine, and warned of the potential for escalation to “full-scale World War III.” These statements were made only several days after Putin declared in an interview that he would not rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons, should certain “redlines” be crossed in Ukraine.
But such heightened rhetoric is hardly surprising in response to recent statements by Western leaders. Most notably, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has doubled down on his insistence that the possibility of eventually involving foreign troops in Ukraine is indeed possible, if not likely. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski—husband of Atlantic columnist and prominent spokeswomen of the neoliberal order, Anne Applebaum—lauded Macron’s statements, and reiterated the latter’s evaluation that NATO troop deployments may eventually be called for.
At the same time, the pressure campaign to punish Russia has failed to result in Moscow’s international ostracization, and instead served to accelerate the geopolitical reorientation of the non-transatlantic world. Russia may be just one (and by no means the strongest) of multiple centers of power in this emerging alternative to the “rules-based order”; it has nonetheless illustrated the conditions that must be established in order to successfully break with that previous order, as well as the characteristics of the developing new one.
For one, the Russian economy has largely been able to weather the massive sanctions regime launched against it. A large part of this has been due to its massive capacity for military production. Per the Wall Street Journal, the percent of federal expenditures devoted to defense related industries has jumped by 14 percent since 2020; tank production is 5.6 times greater than it was before the war, and ammunition and drone production are both 17 times greater. NATO intelligence likewise estimates that Russia is currently producing about 250,000 artillery shells per month, which is three times greater than U.S. and European production levels combined.
The broader economic effect of having the country on the war footing has been to stabilize GDP and soften the effect of the sanctions for the Russian population. Russia’s economy beat expectations by growing at 3.6 percent in 2023, higher than all other G7 countries. The IMF predicts growth levels of 2.6 percent this year, twice as much as its previous forecasts; this looks particularly favorable when compared to the 0.9 percent growth level predicted for Europe. And while inflation remains rather high, its effects have been somewhat mitigated by an all-time low unemployment rate of 2.9 percent.
The Russian rouble has likewise proved to be more resilient than expected. The percent of Russian export settlements being conducted in the U.S. dollar or the euro has plummeted from around 90 percent at the beginning of 2022 to less than 30 percent today; meanwhile, those in the rouble have increased from about 10 to more than 30 percent, with the share of transactions being conducted in other currencies—mostly the Chinese renminbi—higher than 40 percent. Despite Western boasting of its campaign to destroy the rouble, the currency has remained relatively stable despite temporary fluctuations, disproving the promises of its impending demise thanks in large part to capital controls (and perhaps an element of loyalty on the part of Russia’s exporting firms).
There is of course legitimate criticism that an economy built upon weapons production inevitably siphons investment from other sectors; Russia’s inflation level may also be representative of the more widespread systemic dangers of relying on massive state spending to keep things running hot. Still, as long as Moscow is able to keep revenue coming in, its deficit should remain manageable.
No single factor in keeping that revenue flowing and subsequently fortifying the Russian economy is more significant than that of its energy trade. At the same time, no single example stands as a better representation of Moscow’s defiance to the West’s punitive measures than the circumvention of Washington’s $60 price cap. Instituted around the beginning of 2023, the intention was to punish Russia by decreasing its revenue from the oil trade; the mechanism through which these caps are enforceable is that Russian ships transporting oil use Western maritime insurance and financial services.
Expectedly, enforcement was largely ineffective at the outset, although the United States has since attempted to crack down. For instance, Washington pledged to increase its enforcement of the oil caps at the end of 2023, with sanctions placed on two tankers due to their flouting of the regulations last October. Most recently, oil shipments headed to India were rerouted to China due to New Delhi’s apprehension of tougher enforcement.
Almost exactly one year since the sanctions really started to bite, and Russian seaborne crude shipments remain high. Even with its massive budget amid the significant defense spending mentioned earlier, Moscow’s current deficit remains manageable at somewhere between 1 and to 2 percent, and the massive windfall from oil revenues will certainly keep the state coffers buoyed for the foreseeable future. Despite temporarily falling below $60/barrel for its Ural crude blend at various points over the past year, the average price has stayed above the price cap; and after starting off 2024 at around $60, the price per barrel at present stands close to $80.
The politics around the oil trade further demonstrates Russia’s hardly isolated position in the international economy. Increased revenue based on such prices as those listed above can be expected for at least the next several months—if not beyond—as OPEC and its partners initiate coordinated oil cuts that will drive up prices. Cuts will take place over the next several months, with Russia choosing to focus on decreasing production rather than exports. One factor in the latter decision is that Ukraine and its Western backers recognize the independence and geopolitical maneuverability that the oil trade gives to Moscow, and have therefore specifically targeted refining facilities with drone and missile strikes as part of their attacks on Russian territory. The cuts to production could provide the needed space to implement repairs.
Of course, the U.S.-led West still exerts enormous influence on the world stage, as represented by India’s denial of the shipments of Russian crude in the face of mounting pressure. Yet Russia at present remains near the top of India’s oil imports, specifically due to the discounted prices since the start of the Ukraine war; New Delhi started off the year with a 41 percent year on year increase of shipments from Russia. It is hard to believe that India will permanently shun Moscow at the behest of Washington, rather than figure out a way to circumnavigate the sanctions regime.
India may look to the United States in helping to balance China, but Russia’s growing relationship with both of the two Asian heavyweights has provided leverage in its geopolitical maneuvering. (Xi and Modi were both among the first to call and congratulate Putin on his electoral victory, as was Mohamed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.) The diverted Sokol oil shipments from India ending up in China is likewise no coincidence; Beijing subsequently set a record for the amount of Russian oil imports for a single month in March. A major meeting between Xi and Putin has also been scheduled for May; it is to be the Russian president’s first trip abroad since winning reelection. Putin reaffirmed that the two leaders share a similar outlook in international relations, ensuring that bilateral cooperation between the two nations will continue to expand in the coming years.
Meanwhile in Europe, Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko announced this past Sunday that his country will refuse to prolong a five-year deal on the transport of Russian gas through pipelines in its territory. The agreement expires on December 31, and besides attempting to harm Moscow’s revenue flows further, the halt in gas transits is undoubtedly intended to leverage Ukraine’s position between Russia and energy-hungry NATO members.
The hardball tactics are logical, as Kiev needs to do all it can to tip the scales in favor of greater Western intervention. Over the past several decades, the United States has continually placed Moscow in a position either to accept the fait accompli of NATO expansion at the expense of Russian security interests, or to escalate with force and suffer the consequences of increased economic and political ostracization. This disincentive to avoid escalation has been effectively removed. Explicating the altered state of international relations is not cheerleading for the Russian position—although it may be treated as such by those who disingenuously present any realistic assessment of the situation as “appeasement”—but rather illustrating how Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world.
Now, it is Russia that has the West on the horns of a dilemma: It can either watch the Kremlin achieve its strategic objectives, guaranteed in a one-sided negotiated settlement or through the continued attrition of Ukrainian forces, or it can escalate with force. Putin’s statement regarding nuclear weapons was not mere rhetoric—it was the Russian president defining the limits of the current conflict from a position of authority.
Anything short of total Ukrainian victory is therefore an implicit admission that the “rules-based” economic and political order has been irreversibly altered. Despite getting the premises right, Putin may have subsequently erred in his conclusion that Western leaders understand the Ukraine war as a mere matter of improving their tactical position. With the likelihood of official NATO deployments increasing by the day, the world stands on edge to see where things go next.
The post The ‘Rules-Based Order’ Is Already Over appeared first on The American Conservative.
The other options are abandonment and a perpetual military presence.
Thanassis Cambanis argued that the United States should withdraw from Syria as it acknowledges its real priorities and makes hard tradeoffs. On the other hand, former U.S. Special Envoy to Syria James Jeffrey believes that the U.S. has multiple missions in Syria and should not withdraw. Both authors have valid points and advocate for different strategic objectives for the U.S.
To achieve both goals, the U.S. should make a tactical compromise and work with Turkey in Syria. The U.S. partnership with the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was described as temporary, transitional, and tactical by officials. Now is the time to act on this official rhetoric.
Although the viewpoints of Thanassis Cambanis and James Jeffrey may appear to contradict each other, the United States can still withdraw from Syria and accomplish its regional objectives. By collaborating with Turkey, a NATO ally, the U.S. can exit Syria while continuing its efforts to eliminate ISIS, limit Iran’s influence, and support the political process in Syria.
The primary hurdle in reaching a Turkish-American agreement is the fate of the Syrian Kurds. The precise definition of “Syrian Kurds” is crucial in overcoming this obstacle. Generally, in the U.S., the Syrian Kurds are considered synonymous with the YPG-led SDF. In reality, the YPG does not speak for most Syrian Kurds and is mostly controlled by Turkish Kurds.
Many Syria discussions often focus on the SDF without delving into its true nature. As highlighted by former CIA officer Nicholas Spyridon Kass, it is crucial to recognize that the SDF essentially represents the Syrian faction of a well-known, originally Marxist, U.S.-designated terrorist group hailing from Turkey: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Over four decades, the PKK has perpetuated a violent and totalitarian revolutionary agenda centered around its incarcerated leader, Abdullah Ocalan. This organization has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and clashes, targeting Turkish security forces, Kurdish civilians, and others, resulting in a reported death toll of approximately 40,000 since its inception in 1984. Notably, the YPG functions as the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, further emphasizing the interconnectedness of these groups.
It is highly unlikely that the U.S. will be able to convince Turkey to accept the YPG-dominated SDF. Any attempts to push for a peace process between the SDF or the PKK with Turkey are doomed to fail. It will not gain any support in Ankara. On the contrary, any such suggestion motivates Turkish decision-makers to search for alternative solutions, including unilateral military operations. The Turkish president recently stated the desire to launch another military incursion into Syria. The failed peace process with the PKK serves as a strong reminder never to attempt it again.
If the U.S. wishes to promote cooperation with Turkey in Syria, it must support Syrian Kurds who are acceptable to Turkey and who represent the majority of Syrian Kurds. The Syrian Kurdish National Council is a pre-existing organization that meets these criteria and should be favored over the YPG.
The Syrian Kurdish National Council is a political umbrella that includes several Syrian Kurdish political parties. It has a close relationship with the Iraqi Kurdistan region, and both the Iraqi Kurdish regional government and the Syrian Kurdish National Council maintain good relations with Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish National Council has offices in Istanbul and Erbil and is recognized as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition. Turkey has chosen it as the Kurdish representative of the Syrian constitution committee. The Rojava Peshmerga is the armed branch of the Syrian Kurdish National Council. They were expelled from Syria by the YPG and are now based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Since then, they have been trained and restructured by the Iraqi Zarawani Peshmerga and have fought ISIS. They have also been deployed to disrupt PKK logistical lines in northern Iraq.
The United States, after abandoning the YPG, should require Turkey to work with the non-YPG factions of the SDF and the Syrian Kurdish National Council. As part of the agreement between the U.S. and Turkey, some form of local governance should be secured for the Syrian Kurds. These efforts should be further strengthened with the assistance of Iraqi Kurdistan. Erbil should be involved in certain aspects of the agreement related to the future of Syrian Kurds. Erbil, a trusted partner of both the U.S. and Turkey, can support the Syrian Kurdish National Council in establishing the new order.
American-Turkish collaboration offers several potential benefits. The U.S. can find a way to withdraw from Syria while also supporting Syrian Kurds and Arabs who are acceptable to Ankara instead of the YPG. It is important to ensure that this collaboration does not lead to conceding Syria to Iran or abandoning the political process for Syria. Bluntly, the U.S. has three options: abandon its goals in Syria, commit to working with Turkey, or commit to an endless presence in Syria.
The U.S. cannot maintain a presence in Syria indefinitely. However, the U.S. reluctance to cooperate with Turkey in Syria may ultimately benefit Iran. If the U.S. withdraws, the only obstacle to Syria becoming a puppet state of Iran would be Turkey. The SDF, which the YPG dominates, would probably make a deal with Damascus and align with Iran. Given the recent regional escalation due to the Gaza conflict, it is worth considering what this would mean for Israel’s security. Additionally, Russia may be too preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine to counter Iran’s growing influence in Syria.
The decision of the U.S. to cooperate with Turkey would help in achieving strategic objectives such as eliminating ISIS, limiting Iran, and adopting an effective approach towards both goals. This decision could have geostrategic importance in addition to accelerating the new momentum in Turkish-American relations, even beyond Syria. It is particularly important in light of the invasion of Ukraine, as resolving the biggest dispute between the two largest armies in NATO would be useful.
If the U.S. decides to withdraw from Syria without coordinating with Turkey and instead withdraws after making a deal with Damascus or continues to stay in Syria, Turkish-American relations will suffer. As I explained elsewhere, Syria—which has a 565-mile border with Turkey—is a major concern that could negatively impact the new momentum in Turkish-American ties.
Given the current systemic situation in Syria, I foresaw that the U.S. would have no other option but to either give up Syria to Iran or collaborate with Turkey. Thus, I drafted a comprehensive plan that outlines how both NATO allies could work together in Syria. The proposed roadmap involves a transitional period where the Turkish and American spheres of influence in Syria are combined. The Turkish army will move into regions where the U.S. has a presence in Syria. The Arab non-YPG elements, the Rojava Peshmerga, and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army will form a decentralized unity in Syria.
After the military transition period, elections will be held across this united territory, where locals will elect their local councils. Following this, a bi-chamber parliament, consisting of local council representatives and the legitimate political Syrian opposition, will elect the Syrian Interim Government (SIG). The SIG will be restructured and function as the primary interlocutor of the U.S. and Turkey in Syria.
With this, the Syrian conflict will transform a three-axis conflict into a two-axis conflict. This development opens the path towards implementing UN Security Council resolution 2254. The SIG areas would benefit from trade with and via Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, oil revenues, and international investments. To pressure the Assad regime and its backers, Iran and Russia, the sanctions against Damascus will be upheld. With each day passing, the negotiating power of Damascus will diminish. This will incentivize Russia and Iran to convince the regime to engage in the political process.
After the end of the transition period, the responsibility of fighting ISIS in Syria will be handed over to Turkey and the SIG. Additionally, the presence of Turkish military forces will prevent Iran from extending its influence over Syria and taking control of the oil fields. The longstanding Middle Eastern principle of Turkey and Iran never being present in the same area would apply, as evidenced by the Turkish–Iranian border being the oldest in the region.
Looking ahead, the Iranian land bridge connecting Tehran and Beirut runs through the important town of Abu Kamal. The PKK leaders depend on Iran to escape Turkish airstrikes, fleeing from the Iraqi parts to the Iranian parts of the Qandil Mountains. Because of this, the YPG-dominated SDF have been hesitant to attack Abu Kamal. This new situation would present policy options that could potentially cut off the Iranian land bridge from Syria to Iraq completely.
After withdrawing troops from Syria, the United States could maintain its air superiority in the region by using NATO assets stationed in Turkey, airfields in Kuwait, and bases in Jordan. With no American troops on the ground in Syria, Iran-backed Shia militias’ ability to target U.S. military personnel would be reduced. The U.S. air dominance would also assist U.S. allies in Syria.
This new approach to combating ISIS would represent a significant shift in perspective. While the current strategy centers on battling ISIS, it falls short of eradicating the group. The YPG-dominated SDF may indeed engage in anti-ISIS efforts, yet they also benefit from the continued existence of ISIS as it bolsters their legitimacy. Without the ISIS threat, they risk losing crucial support from the U.S. and their main source of legitimacy.
The current strategy aimed at defeating ISIS is unlikely to eliminate ISIS due to this legitimacy paradox. To address this issue, a new approach will be taken in the new period where Arabs and the reformed SIG will lead the fight. ISIS is no longer capable of launching assaults like it did in 2014. Now, the root causes of their existence must be tackled with political representation, legitimacy, popular support, and the region’s economic revival.
The strategy to fight ISIS in 2014–2019 had to transform after the de-territorialization of ISIS, but it didn’t. That strategy facilitated a minority rule over the Arab majority, alienating the local Arab tribes who had already revolted. In the new period, once the initial transition is complete, the new fighting force will likely be more capable and more locally embedded than the current SDF with the support of the U.S. and Turkey. As a result of the tradeoff, Turkey will be responsible for ensuring that the strategy against ISIS is working.
In this new phase, the reformed SIG and local councils must address the ISIS threat. As local governance grows, social tensions are expected to diminish, reducing the pool for extremist recruitment. This strategy aims to tackle the root causes of ISIS in Syria. ISIS members and their families will face prosecution according to Syrian law in the courts of the SIG. Unlike the approach of the YPG-dominated SDF, the SIG adheres to Syrian legal standards for prosecuting crimes.
For the U.S. to honor its commitments to not only the Syrian Kurds but to all Syrians who still hope for a political solution, it must change tactics while maintaining strategic objectives. If the U.S. doesn’t work with Turkey, it will hand over control of Syria and the YPG-dominated SDF to Iran, either soon or at a later date.
The post The U.S. Should Work With Turkey to Leave Syria appeared first on The American Conservative.
American interventions only destabilize Haiti further.
Haiti’s simmering political crisis reached a boil late last month when local armed groups, led in part by ex-cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, declared war on Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s government. In just a few weeks, these disparate gangs have forced Henry to step down and enter impromptu exile in Puerto Rico as unrest wracks his country.
But fear not—as Haiti descends into political chaos, Washington’s brightest minds have developed a two-pronged plan to fix it. It’s a classic of the genre.
The Biden administration’s plan revolves around a Kenyan-led police intervention to restore order, which the United Nations Security Council approved last year. On the political side, the U.S. is leading talks in Jamaica to install a transitional council that would take Henry’s place until new elections can be held.
But there’s a catch. Anyone who wants a seat on the council must agree to an international intervention, leaving all Haitians opposed to such a move out of the conversation. Worse, Kenyan courts have serious reservations about sending their police to fix a crisis abroad; following Henry’s resignation, authorities in Nairobi have said they will consider deploying security forces only once a new government is in place and a fact-finding mission can be conducted. This is perhaps why the U.S. has haltingly begun to entertain the idea of sending American troops as part of an international coalition to restore order.
If all of this seems a bit illogical, that’s because it is. In a world wracked by crises, the U.S. has little to gain by imposing a half-baked plan on a country that has long opposed American intervention in its internal politics.
And, as POLITICO revealed this week, “half-baked” may be a bit generous. A 33-page planning document that the White House has been circulating in Congress gives no real detail about how the UN force would be funded, how Kenyan forces would work with local police to beat back the armed groups, and whether foreign troops will engage directly in the fighting. Indeed, it doesn’t even give a clear timeline for success, saying only that the mission will start with a nine-month mandate that can be renewed as needed. Little wonder, then, that congressional Republicans are blocking funds for the vaguely defined effort.
The best path forward is far simpler. As was the case in Afghanistan, the U.S. can best serve Haiti by taking a step back and allowing Haitians to decide their own future. As Jake Johnston—a Haiti expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research—recently told me, the tortured history of U.S.-Haitian relations leaves no other choice. “You can’t impose the government from an external source or power,” Johnston said. “It’s not going to work in the long run, however much we might want it to.”
Conversations about Haiti tend to focus on images of chaos and poverty, but few Americans ask where that chaos comes from. In reality, much of Haiti’s current woes stem from shoddy, short-sighted U.S. policy. Over the past century, consecutive American governments have posed as the island nation’s savior only to undermine its hopes for democracy at every turn.
Haiti’s financial woes date back originally to its founding in 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines squared off against Napoleonic France and, beyond all odds, won independence for his countrymen. The upstart nation got the cold shoulder from its neighbors, many of whom feared that the successful slave revolt in Haiti would inspire copycats across the Western hemisphere.
Haiti would only reach a modus vivendi with Western powers when it agreed, under threat of a new invasion, to pay France a kingly sum to recognize Haitian independence. The ransom strangled Port-au-Prince for over 100 years, forcing Haitian leaders to fork over most of their annual tax revenue just to service the debt.
While President Woodrow Wilson preached sovereignty for all nations, he sent U.S. troops to occupy Haiti in 1915. Wilson’s reasons were twofold: Policymakers feared that chaos in Haiti could threaten U.S. security, and American banks held a great deal of Haitian debt. In short order, U.S. occupation forces rewrote the country’s constitution (including new provisions that legalized foreign ownership of Haitian land and established a national army) and set out to control its political scene, an arrangement that would hold until America’s withdrawal in 1934.
The U.S. continued an uneasy but often close relationship with Haitian authorities in the ensuing years. Washington lent support to a notorious father-son dictatorship from 1957 until 1986, when military leaders forced dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier into exile. A shaky transition gave way to the country’s first ever democratic elections in 1990, won by a leftist Catholic priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
American officials were opposed to Aristide’s redistributionist, left-wing agenda and often accused him of being an authoritarian in democratic clothing. His tenure only lasted a few months before a new coup, backed by intelligence agents who had worked closely with the CIA, forced him into exile. The priest managed to claw his way back and win election again in 2000, only to be deposed in a second coup in 2004, with the alleged backing of U.S. officials anxious to see Aristide leave power.
Things have only gotten worse since. A UN force occupied the country from 2004 to 2017 in a mission that helped stabilize the security situation but also led to a massive outbreak of cholera. When elections took place just months after the 2010 earthquake, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton allegedly intervened to help elect Michel Martelly—an erratic former pop singer who pushed the country toward authoritarianism. (American officials also went to great lengths to oppose Aristide’s return to Haiti despite his continued popularity, as WikiLeaks cables revealed.)
The past few years have been no different. When Martelly was pushed out, the U.S. backed his successor Jovenel Moïse to the hilt, including when he dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree. Following Moïse’s 2021 assassination, American officials threw their support behind Henry as Haiti’s rightful ruler, even though he had only been named prime minister two days before the killing and had never been sworn into office. With U.S. backing, Henry followed in the authoritarian footsteps of his predecessors and gradually lost control of the country.
This history leads to an inescapable conclusion: When Washington puts its finger on the scales of Haitian politics, chaos ensues. This brings us back to the current crisis.
In short, years of corruption and poor governance have empowered armed groups to act like neighborhood mafias, providing some services to local communities while shaking down shop owners for protection money and warding off police attention. These disparate gangs have at times worked with the government, as in 2018 when they helped break up a popular protest movement.
Popular hatred for Henry’s regime led the local armed groups to attempt to overthrow the government last year, but their effort faded within weeks following disagreements over a path forward for the country. This year’s effort has been much more successful, though significant doubts remain about whether the gangs will manage to hold the line this time around. If they do, any military intervention from abroad will likely lead to a protracted civil war.
The latest flare-up in violence is certainly concerning for Haitians, who now face a breakdown of social order that has only worsened food insecurity in the cash-strapped country. Gang violence has pushed at least 300,000 people from their homes over the past year, and some form of humanitarian aid remains necessary to prevent total collapse.
But we have to accept the fact that U.S. intervention—military or political—isn’t going to make the situation better. Haitians are the only ones capable of solving their own crises. It’s time that foreign powers give them the space to try.
The post The U.S. Should Let Haitians Decide Their Own Future appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: When the epitaph of the American republic will be written, the chain of causality will lead to some interesting conclusions.
The most interesting couple of paragraphs about the latest Nigerien saga wasn’t about the country being a battleground for an emerging Sino–American competition in Africa. That much is guaranteed given out emerging multipolarity. It was this:
The last straw seems to have been a meeting between American and Nigerien officials last week. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee criticized a Nigerien deal to sell Iran uranium, growing Nigerien-Russian military ties, and Niger’s failure to return to democracy…. After the meeting, [the Nigerien Col. Amadou] Abdramane went on television to condemn the “condescending attitude” of the Biden administration.
In the grand scheme of things, Niger isn’t existential or even very important for America, but the extension of Chinese influence in Africa isn’t something to be happy about, especially for realists.
But, fundamentally, it is a relatively new American malaise, easy to cure, but impossible to do given the current elite. Republics and empires have collapsed due to various reasons, from overstretch, to insolvency, to great power war. But never in human history was a single famous, successful, and long-lasting empire or republic that had such incredibly mediocre bureaucracy so determined to promote a rotten ahistorical worldview, in such a ham-fisted way, for such a long term. It’s pretty incredible, if you think about it.
The biggest national security expansion happened under Presidents Bush and Obama, during the Global War on Terror; most of the people who got jobs in that period grew up under unipolarity, studying the same theories from the same professors, having the same credentials, and worldview. Bureaucracy has its own momentum and inertia, of course. But amplified to that is the fact that the American foreign policy is an echo-chamber where the worst people with the dumbest ideas often fail upward. It is more often than not a question of personnel over policy.
And it all goes back to IR academia. For example, here’s a paper from 2008:
Fully half of female IR scholars devote between 6% and 25% of their introductory course to discussing constructivist arguments, while a little over one third of male IR scholars discuss this paradigm to the same extent. More than one third of women report spending between 6% and 25% of the class discussing feminism, whereas only one sixth of men spend a similar amount of time on the paradigm. It is interesting to note that women also give more class time to Marxism than do men—even though women and men are equally unlikely to identify themselves as Marxists (3% and 2%, respectively)…. Higher percentages of women than men teach international organization (15%), human rights (7%), global development (6%), and environmental politics (6%). Although women made up only 23% of the sample, 40% of the respondents who said they teach courses on human rights were women; 34% of the respondents who teach global development were women; and 33% of the respondents who teach international organization were women. Significantly higher percentages of men teach US foreign policy (17%), international security (10%), and IR theory (6%).
It’s presumably far worse now.
It is easy to over-analyze setbacks such as these. Were they due to some complex geopolitical maneuvering? Did Russia or China outplay us? The answer is no. They weren’t; they did not. It is actually remarkably simple.
Most parts of Africa and Asia do not like unoriginal, bureaucratic, corpulent, middle-aged mediocrities lecturing them about human rights and liberal democracy. When the Chinese try to influence a continent, they fund roads and railways, and lend them millions, only to grab up land and real estate after. It’s refreshingly old fashioned, in a way. When the Russians try to influence, they simply provide security for the most brutal of warlords and help them promote order. In short, they do what we used to do. We have forgotten how to play the game. They have not.
There was a famous video of an NGO, heavily funded by our taxpayers, teaching and ostensibly liberating Afghan women by showing them how a stained urinal is the ultimate example of superior Western art. One needs to see it to believe that it is not fake. Anyway, that won the hearts and minds of Afghans, for 20 years, until it stopped. Africa is a similar case.
Once again, for the sake of ideological clarity—Niger isn’t existential for the USA. But that is irrelevant. This will not stop at Niger, because the root of the problem goes deeper.
It is, as always, bad ideas based on faulty notions about human nature, a deep misunderstanding of local culture, and a tragic lack of amoral realism, that lead to repeated damages. Reality has a tendency, as Peter Hitchens once wrote, to slap your face.
The post Niger’s Big Pivot Away From America appeared first on The American Conservative.
Bidenomics hasn’t yanked at the fundamental double-root cause of our economic dysfunction.
The American economy seems to be on a tear. In February, it added 275,000 jobs, another unexpectedly high count even as unemployment inched up to 3.9 percent. Fourth-quarter 2023 GDP growth clocked in at 3.2 percent, after a 4.9 percent expansion in the third quarter. Also last month, the Dow Jones Average hit 39,000. The White House touts these developments as proof Bidenomics is working.
Nothing is really new here—the political class beams over upbeat economic indicators with some regularity. Previous administrations have done the same. But boasting about the latest data distracts Americans from the serious damage being caused by the “twin deficits”: the massive federal budget and merchandise trade shortfalls, each hitting trillion-dollar records in the last few years, per the chart below. These deficits used to be scrutinized and written about regularly but no longer in our spend-now, don’t-worry economy.
Federal expenditures of trillions of dollars that the country doesn’t have—the national debt has soared to an astonishing $34 trillion from $5 trillion in 2000—may create the impression of good times. But it’s an illusion. We are clearly living far beyond our means—and stealing growth from future generations while saddling them with repayment obligations. The unprecedented, and unsustainable, trajectory of the twin deficits threatens our superpower status, the dollar as the reserve currency, our living standards, and the viability of most federal programs, particularly the two most relied on by Americans: Social Security and Medicare.
More than a few Republicans seem eager to gore Social Security by reducing benefits and raising the retirement age; others are calling to “save” the program by allowing all workers to invest in the federal Thrift Savings Plan. Whatever their intention, these conservatives argue that Social Security benefits are unearned, too generous, and will soon bankrupt the system. But far more angst should be directed at the red ink that runs upstream from federal budget shortfalls: merchandise trade deficits.
Many economists mistakenly believe trade deficits don’t matter, free-trade theory holding that markets correct these imbalances. But the cumulative, in-goods deficit of $17.9 trillion since 2000 belies theory and cries for corrective action. Others deceptively cheer increased foreign investment in the United States. But each year we must sell assets—businesses, land, stocks, bonds, and Treasuries—to pay foreigners for their goods and to balance the national account. Foreign-capital inflows therefore don’t necessarily represent new money but are mostly a recycling of already-spent dollars.
Our parasitic relationship with China illustrates the problem. Because we allowed too much of our industrial prowess to be transferred to our adversary, we turbocharged China’s ability to out-produce and undersell us in home and world markets. With the resulting profit stream, Beijing became an enormous purchaser of Treasuries, lending us back the very dollars we sent overseas through our massive trade deficits—and in the process enabled Washington to both finance and supersize federal deficits.
Decades-long trade imbalances—not only with China but also with most of the world, including friends and allies—signal a fundamentally broken political economy: the governing policy consensus that should steer our economic ship to ensure U.S. wealth and strength. Because we have much less wealth-creating industrial capacity due to our trade profligacy, we have less money to pay for critical programs and balance the federal budget—or invest in infrastructure gamechangers and cutting-edge R&D projects, many defense-related, that historically have delivered American exceptionalism.
Our broken system also explains why stimulus plans or tax cuts don’t work as advertised, as much of the money leaves the country for foreign goods or foreign investment, boosting the economies of other countries rather than our own. Nothing therefore quantifies the hemorrhaging of American strength, wealth, and productivity quite like out-of-control trade deficits, particularly in high-value, advanced-technology products, everything from biotech to aerospace.
The real-life consequences have been devastating: the disappearance of factories and industries, the loss of millions of good-wage jobs for average Americans, the collapse of cities large and small—along with broken families, drug abuse, crime, shortened life spans, and a burgeoning welfare state. The twin deficits are proof positive of the epic failure of the American political class.
If current globalist policies are not reversed, our trajectory foreshadows an economic collapse of greater magnitude than the Great Depression. The Biden administration deserves credit for limiting critical-technology exports to our adversaries while trying to build-up onshore two important industries, semiconductors and electric-vehicle technologies (although its full-court press pushing consumers to buy EVs is misguided). And for its recent decision to invest billions in the domestic manufacturing of cargo cranes, a first in 30 years, to enhance port security. Trump likewise deserves kudos for calling for 10-percent tariffs on all imports, although the presumptive GOP nominee should roll his tariffs into a border-adjustable tax that would also inversely credit U.S. manufacturers for exports.
But more industry-specific programs are necessary. Only a combined all-of-government and all-of-industry campaign to re-industrialize and halt the trade (and thus budget) hemorrhaging is the way out of the current morass. Without an effort on the scale of our mobilization of industry to win World War II, we won’t have to worry about Social Security: It will inevitably implode along with the rest of the economy, and the American way of life.
The post The ‘Twin Deficits’ Risk the American Way of Life appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Marines are being transformed to look a lot more like the Houthis.
In the five months since the beginning of the Israeli-Gaza war, the Houthi group in Yemen has undertaken strikes against ships transiting the Red Sea; in response, the United States and allies have conducted retaliatory air strikes. While the episode marks the latest American use of force in the Middle East, the military exchanges will resonate in the Indo-Pacific. The Marine Corps has wholly reshaped itself for conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, but the outcome in the Red Sea will determine whether this was wise.
Last September, the Houthi movement marked the ninth anniversary of its seizure of power with a parade showcasing its military in the capital city of Sanaa. Like other non-state forces, the Houthis are an irregular force that relies on asymmetric methods—especially missiles and uncrewed aerial vehicles. The arsenal on the parade grounds that day, however, evinced an unexpected level of sophistication.
The procession featured a combination of known and newly unveiled cruise and ballistic systems capable of carrying warheads weighing between 100 and 500 kilograms for both ground and maritime strikes. The fleet of uncrewed combat aerial vehicles possessed explosive, fragmentation, and penetrating warheads.
According to a 2024 Defense Intelligence Agency report, the missile and uncrewed vehicles provide the Houthis with the ability to strike targets at ranges of 2,000 and 2,500 kilometers, respectively. At the time, observers feared Houthi military improvements would complicate regional diplomacy.
The next month, the Houthi leadership declared its solidarity with besieged Palestinians in Gaza and began targeting Israeli ships in the Red Sea. By December, Houthis expanded the target list to include all international commercial shipping bound for Israel.
On January 26, the Houthis launched its first attack on a U.S. Navy warship. On February 19, the Houthis shot down an American uncrewed aerial vehicle. On March 6, a Houthi missile strike on a commercial ship resulted in three fatalities, the first since the attacks began. According to the Red Sea Attacks Dashboard, the Houthis have undertaken approximately 50 attacks since October 19.
Initially, the United States responded by intercepting missiles and UAVs, and organizing a multi-national coalition to patrol the waterway. Then, on January 11, the United States led partners in undertaking its first retaliatory air strikes by bombing sixty targets at sixteen different locations. Since then, the United States has launched more than forty strikes against Houthi targets.
Nonetheless, retaliatory strikes have not deterred the Houthis. After a decade of a punishing war with Saudi Arabia and coalition partners, the Houthis are a battle-hardened and resilient fighting force.
Mentored and armed by Iran, the Houthis have developed indigenous arms manufacturing, robust logistics and smuggling networks, and deception tactics, including the use of decoy targets, false electronic emitters, and physical concealment. Similar to Hamas, the Houthis rely on underground hideouts to store weapons and survive air attacks.
In general, the Houthis simply provide few targets for retaliation. The Houthis do not maintain large arms caches and their weapons are hidden in urban areas. The group launches its missiles and UAVs from trucks that fighters immediately drive away.
Where the lethality and resilience of elusive irregular fighters on an austere landscape wreaking havoc on a globally critical waterway has aggravated the West, the United States Marine Corps has found inspiration.
In March 2020, the Marine Corps declared its future force would similarly be small, mobile, lethal, and undetectable light infantry teams on remote islands engaging hostile navies with anti-ship missiles and UAVs—for all intents and purposes, a Title 10 Houthi force.
The transformation initiatives—Force Design 2030—is designed to return the service to its naval expeditionary origins, an imperative demanded by the proliferation of precision-strike and persistent sensor capabilities in general and the ascent of the PRC in particular.
To inform its transformation, the Corps has formulated the concept of a Stand-In Force to confront the enemy below the threshold of war and ensure friendly ingress to contested areas. In essence, a Stand-In Force will turn the anti-access/area denial strategy on its head.
To this end, the Corps has begun redesignating ground regiments as Littoral Regiments. The converted units comprise 1,800 to 2,000 Marines in three main elements: a combat team organized around a long-range anti-ship missile battery; an anti-air battalion with air defense, surveillance, and early warning; and a logistics battalion.
The Corps has concurrently reduced the number of infantry and artillery units. Most controversially, the service has eliminated significant elements of its force structure and equipment, particularly its armored battalions and tanks and aviation squadrons and aircraft.
A robust intellectual debate has been underway in defense media since its announcement, but the current clash in the Red Sea introduces the following, more urgent questions: If the U.S. deters and severely diminishes the Houthis as a regional threat, would the outcome invalidate the Marine Corps’ transformation goals? Alternatively, if the Houthis persist and outlast American air strikes, would that outcome validate the service’s goals?
Fortunately, the answer to the former has already been provided by the Commander-in-Chief. When asked whether the airstrikes were working, President Biden bluntly responded, “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
The president’s rare honesty may have unmasked the futility of American foreign policy, but it did not certify the Marine Corps’ redesign. What works for the Houthis against the U.S. in the Red Sea will fail the Marines against the PRC in the western Pacific.
Most obviously Yemen is not an island and, as such, provides a rear area to which the Houthis can retreat; in the Pacific, the Marines will have no rear to which they can retreat. Even if one considers the 58,000 square miles of Yemen under Houthi control an “island” surrounded by equally sea and desert, the mountainous topography sustained the group amid the 24,000 air raids launched by Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2022.
In contrast, the Solomon Islands, an archipelago whose alignment the U.S. deemed worthy of diplomatic competition vis-à-vis the PRC, is just over 11,000 square miles—across 1,000 islands. Stand-In Forces is an apt moniker since Pacific islands will only provide Marines room to stand in place and little room to maneuver.
Furthermore, the Red Sea may be critical to global trade, but it is only incidental to America’s national security. The U.S. can only dispatch so many forces before it risks becoming vulnerable to a second crisis. In contrast, the PRC deems the western Pacific integral to its national security and would likely employ a “Powell Doctrine with Chinese characteristics.”
The PRC has not waged war since 1979 and whatever circumstances have finally prompted it to use its military for the first time in decades will probably be deemed existential. So, if the PRC discovered Marines in a given atoll potentially impeding its movements, it will probably not hesitate to expend an overwhelming number of its advanced missile arsenal to ensure their elimination.
To its credit, the Marine Corps critically examined the precepts of the National Defense Strategy and the challenges posed by the proliferation of advanced technologies and rise of the PRC and conceived of a transformation in line with the tradition of adaptability and innovation that have been the service’s hallmark. Nevertheless, the engagement in the Red Sea will illuminate the way forward to a course correction for America’s indispensable crisis-response force.
The post Does the Yemen Conflict Show the Future of the Marine Corps? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The cast may change, but the play is the same.
News came last week that, after a long and storied career, Victoria Nuland resigned as undersecretary of state for political affairs at the U.S. State Department. Over the years she gained a reputation as a neoconservative hardliner, having, among other roles, worked as a top aide to the anti-Russia hardliner Strobe Talbott; as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; and as spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nuland’s reputation also derived partly (and perhaps unfairly) from the family into which she married. So there is an understandable temptation on the part of advocates of realism and restraint to breathe a sigh of relief over her departure from government service.
But one has to wonder: Does Nuland’s figurative defenestration actually matter?
Nuland deservedly got a lot of criticism (not least from this writer) for inserting the U.S. front and center into the geopolitical squabbles afflicting Ukraine. It is widely believed that before, during, and after the Maidan Revolution, she steered both the Obama and Biden administrations toward a more hawkish course than was advisable. But this perhaps inflates her influence; after all, both Obama and Biden have been plenty hawkish on their own on issues outside of Russia–Ukraine; just consider their actions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine.
Informed speculation as to the import of Nuland’s resignation requires us to consider at least three questions:
In the end, it would be a triumph of hope over experience for us to expect too much (if anything) of Victoria Nuland’s departure from government service.
The post Does Victoria Nuland’s Departure Matter? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Oral arguments about laws in Florida and Texas did not seem to sway the Nine.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in late February on the fate of conservative thought in mainstream social media. It doesn’t look good for our side.
The Court expressed skepticism at best about Florida and Texas laws (Moody v. NetChoice, NetChoice v. Paxton) enacted in response to social media platforms censoring conservative views after January 6. The state laws restrict social media companies canceling user-generated content and require individualized explanations for editorial choices. Media trade groups challenged the laws, with the Eleventh Circuit blocking Florida’s enforcement while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law. The Texas law is not currently in effect, however, because the Supreme Court barred the state from implementing it with the challenge ongoing.
During the oral arguments, the justices suggested the laws may violate the First Amendment by infringing on companies’ editorial decisions.
The deeper questions are whether or not social media are publishers or conveyors (common carriers), and whether or not they are bound by the First Amendment not to censor content. The first issue tries to draw out the question of whether, say, Facebook (or Google, or X, but we’ll use “Facebook” as a proxy) are publishers in the same sense that The American Conservative magazine and website are.
A publisher by definition has a First Amendment right to select which authors to include or exclude and what topics to write about. It is literally what a publisher does. A conveyance is closer to the phone company; they provide the means of communication fully independent of what is being communicated. The phone company, for example, couldn’t care less whether you are talking to mom about Aunt Sally’s apple pie recipe or organizing to burn the flag to protest an over-emphasis on mom and apple pie.
More issues to resolve: the First Amendment prevents government from suppressing speech and has never been applied to private companies however large and dominant in the marketplace, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says Facebook and others are not publishers. (Technically, the Act shields tech companies from liability for content published by others, i.e., Facebook is not liable for posts from crazy people.)
Nonetheless, Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social media from editorially eliminating (conservative) thought. For example, the Florida law bars social media platforms from banning candidates for political office, as well as from limiting the exposure of those candidates’ posts. The Texas law prohibits companies from removing content based on users’ viewpoints. The laws also would have forced the platforms to explain each decision to delete, shadow ban or otherwise block a specific example of thought.
The social media giants claim such regulation violates their First Amendment rights. They claim the Florida and Texas laws are unconstitutional if they apply at all, independent of who is or is not a “publisher.” The states maintain their laws do not “implicate the First Amendment at all, because they simply require social media platforms to host speech [a conveyance], which is not itself speech but instead conduct that states may regulate to protect the public.” The business model for these platforms, the states say, hinges on having billions of other people post their speech on the platforms – something very different from, say, a newspaper that creates its own content and publishes it.
Associate Justice Elena Kagan was one of several justices to question the constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws, asking, “Isn’t this a classic First Amendment violation [of Facebook’s rights]?” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh also appeared unconvinced. He noted that the First Amendment protected against the suppression of speech “by the government” not private companies and that the Supreme Court had a history of cases “which emphasize editorial control [such as Facebook’s] as being fundamentally protected by the First Amendment.” Chief Justice John Roberts echoed Kavanaugh’s point.
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “it all turns on” whether the social media platforms are exercising “editorial control,” acting as a publisher, when they remove or deprioritize content. Justices also voiced concern that the Florida law was quite broad, potentially applying not only to large social media platforms but also to other sites like Gmail, Uber, and Etsy. The Texas law, on the other hand, specifically excludes standard web sites and tools such as Gmail.
The justices pressed for a discussion of the interaction between the Texas law and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch stated there is a tension between the idea a tech company can’t be held liable for its users’ speech and the idea that moderating that content is the tech company’s speech. Is it speech for purposes of the First Amendment, he asked, but not for purposes of Section 230?
“Just as Florida may not tell the New York Times what opinion pieces to publish or Fox News what interviews to air, it may not tell Facebook or YouTube what content to disseminate,” the tech companies emphasize in their argument. Is content moderation just a euphemism for censorship? Associate Justice Samuel Alito pressed tech companies to define the term “content moderation.”
“If the government’s doing it, then content moderation might be a euphemism for censorship,” said a company representative. “If a private party is doing it, content moderation is a euphemism for editorial discretion.”
The Biden administration filed an amicus brief against Florida and Texas supporting the tech groups.
A decision by the Supreme Court is expected this summer. The Court is likely to prevent Florida and Texas from implementing laws restricting social media from removing conservative thought or controversial posts, even as they express concern about the power platforms wield over public discourse.
That does not end the debate, however. The interplay between the First Amendment and Facebook is the most significant challenge to free speech in our lifetimes. Pretending a corporation with the reach to influence elections is just another place that sells stuff is to pretend the role of debate in a free society is outdated.
The post Social Media Censorship Laws Face a Skeptical Court appeared first on The American Conservative.
Leading the Ukrainians down the garden path does nothing to foster peace in Eastern Europe.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron once preached about the dangers of humiliating Russia in its war in Ukraine. Now he’s trying to cement himself as Europe’s preeminent Russia hawk. During a recent 20-country meeting in Paris that aimed to consolidate the West’s support for Kiev, Macron generated headlines by suggesting that European troop deployments to Ukraine shouldn’t be ruled out. He doubled down about a week later, emphasizing that Ukraine’s allies in Ukraine couldn’t afford to be “cowardly” in the face of Russian aggression.
Macron’s initial comments caused a firestorm in Europe. For many, the French president’s proposition was a non-starter. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, rejected the idea. Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholtz stated bluntly that “there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil” from NATO or the European Union. The Biden administration reiterated that there are no plans to deploy the U.S. military to Ukraine.
The aspiring leader of Europe wanted to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a message of strength: A Ukrainian victory is of such strategic importance that the West will do whatever is necessary to achieve it. But in reality, Macron and the pushback he received inadvertently delivered the opposite: Ukraine’s success isn’t so important to the West after all, particularly if it could bring the U.S. and Europe into a direct conflict with Russia, the world’s largest nuclear weapons power. The entire kerfuffle demonstrates just how hollow NATO’s perpetual open-door policy to Ukraine is, and why it’s far past time to bolt the door shut.
Ukraine has long viewed NATO membership as a top foreign policy priority. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pressed the matter with the Biden administration. Once the war kicked off, NATO membership was more urgent for the Ukrainians; in September 2022, Zelensky formally submitted an application to NATO, and the alliance agreed to accelerate what is typically a years-long review process. Kiev’s campaign has persisted ever since, a journey which has no doubt been frustrating for Zelensky. During the 2023 NATO heads-of-state summit, Zelensky went so far as to lash out at the Alliance’s reluctance in giving Ukraine a firm entry date.
It’s easy to see why Zelensky was upset. True or not, he remains convinced that Putin wouldn’t have dared launch his invasion if Ukraine had already been under the NATO umbrella, which includes a military superpower and three nuclear states. Zelensky also believes that NATO is Kiev’s best deterrent to another Russian attack in the future. You can’t fault the Ukrainian president for any of this.
The United States and its NATO allies, however, can and should be faulted for keeping the possibility of membership on life support for so long. Washington and Brussels have treated Ukraine like a hamster on a wheel. The carrot of NATO membership has dangled in front of Kiev, seemingly in view but in reality out of reach. Instead of being honest with Ukraine—the West has no desire whatsoever to get into a war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf—it chooses to keep Ukraine’s hopes alive through a combination of rhetorical gymnastics, hand-holding, and virtue signaling.
While NATO members, both individually and through the alliance, are undoubtedly Ukraine’s biggest military backers, the last two years of war have shown that this support has strict limits. The Biden administration has reiterated on countless occasions that U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine must not be used against Russian targets on Russian soil; quickly dismissed calls for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine early on in the conflict, lest U.S. and Russian fighter pilots begin shooting at one another; stressed that a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces will be avoided to the maximum extent; and modified the pace of weapons deliveries to Kyiv to decrease the probability of Russian escalation. Washington isn’t alone. Germany’s government continues to withhold the long-range Taurus cruise missile from Kiev over escalation concerns—a position backed by the Bundestag.
Ukraine, of course, isn’t a NATO member, so the Alliance has no obligation to defend it. But given NATO’s refusal to enter the war directly today, where combat with Russia would be deadly and immediate, it’s difficult to see why Putin would believe NATO would do so if Ukraine was brought into the alliance after the war was over. NATO membership entails serious, consequential commitments to those countries in the club, up to and including a willingness to escalate to the nuclear level—and fight a nuclear war—in order to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its members. Can we say with enough certainty that the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, and France would risk their own national security to save Kiev? And knowing the lengths to which NATO has gone to avoid a clash with Russia, would Putin find such a threat credible in the first place?
Deterrence isn’t magic. It needs to be backed up by sufficient military capabilities, seriousness of purpose, and an assurance that NATO’s full weight will be brought to bear on an adversary if absolutely necessary. If any of these ingredients are missing, then deterrence will fail. Macron’s remarks, and the uproar it caused, only adds further doubt in Putin’s mind that any NATO defense guarantee to Ukraine would be credible.
If NATO is unwilling to fight for Ukraine today, it’s unlikely it will be willing to do so tomorrow. Putin knows that. Closing NATO’s open door will ensure that Ukraine does too.
The post NATO Should Be Honest With Kiev appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why is the U.S. still dictating policy to the Balkan states?
A quarter century ago, Kosovo, part of ever-shrinking Yugoslavia, was ready to explode. An ethnic Albanian insurgency burgeoned, fed by Belgrade’s brutal military crackdown. Not eager to jump back into the Balkans militarily, the Clinton administration temporized.
Ambassador Robert S. Gelbard, Washington’s special envoy, criticized Yugoslav government violence but dismissed talk of independence, condemning the Kosovo Liberation Army as “without any questions, a terrorist group.” Around that time, summer 1998, I visited Kosovo, traveling with a Serb military patrol and later wandering into a KLA checkpoint. Kosovo evidently was headed toward full-scale war.
By the following year, proposals for Western intervention were proliferating. Ultimately, Gelbard’s superiors abandoned any reservations about the KLA. In March 1999, the U.S. started bombing Belgrade and pushed Kosovo’s independence in the ensuing peace. The ethnic Albanian majority declared the new nation of Kosovo in 2008. Some 4,500 NATO troops remain on station, officially for peacekeeping but sometimes performing what amounts to international social work.
Washington is Pristina’s most important patron. Wrote POLITICO’s Matthew Karnitschnig, “The country is full of monuments, avenues and squares dedicated to American officials who helped win its independence, from former President Bill Clinton to his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to [Gen. Wesley K.] Clark, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander during the Kosovo War. At one point, the government seriously contemplated naming a lake after Donald Trump.”
Nevertheless, Pristina’s development has not been easy. Even today Kosovo is rated as only “partly free” by Freedom House, collecting 60 out of a possible 100 points. (Serbia is slightly behind at 57, but hasn’t been a Washington dependent for the last quarter century.) Kosovo’s leadership has been anything but Jeffersonian as former insurgents turned their talents to crime and corruption, and their country became known as a black hole in Europe. A couple hundred thousand ethnic Serbs were driven from their homes after the war. Extremists even launched a second round of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Serbs in 2004.
Western aid poured in, but much of the cash ended up back in America with U.S. companies. Former officials such as Clark, who was prepared recklessly to risk Armageddon to prevent any Russian post-conflict role, returned to Kosovo to turn their contacts into cash.
Karnitschmig observed, “By most objective measures, the American engagement in Kosovo hasn’t been much of a success. While the U.S. threw plenty of money at the country, a closer look suggests that Washington’s priorities were informed more by short-term American business interests than providing the country what it really needed to develop.” Kosovo remains relatively poor, with many of its young—the country’s future—heading elsewhere in Europe in search of better economic opportunities.
Moreover, Serbia, which resulted when Montenegro seceded from Yugoslavia in 2006, refuses to recognize Kosovo, which no one imagines will ever return to the former’s orbit. Alone, Belgrade could not stop the new country’s progress, but only about half of the world’s nations recognize Kosovo. Even five European states say no, fearing adverse border changes and secessionist movements. Most important, Russia and China block the new country’s entry into the United Nations.
Although Belgrade realizes that Kosovo is lost, the status of the Serbian ethnic minority, victimized by violent retaliation after the 1999 war, remains at issue. The Wilson Center’s Julie Mertus acknowledged: “To the extent that the NATO campaign sought to promote a multiethnic and human rights-abiding society, the campaign was a dismal failure. As long as revenge attacks continue against Serbs and the occupying international force fails to stop it, the result of NATO action in Kosovo cannot be called ‘humanitarian.’ The failure of international forces to protect against revenge killings negates a humanitarian result.”
Some 100,000 Serbs still live in Kosovo, half of whom are concentrated in the north in the city of Mitrovica. This remains a territory effectively apart and they want to join Serbia. Pristina refuses, backed by Washington and most of Europe. Having successively dismantled Yugoslavia and Serbia, the allies conveniently claimed to oppose changing borders in Europe. Such unashamed hypocrisy only fuels Serbian anger.
Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti is determined to establish his government’s authority over Kosovo’s north, in which ethnic Serbs make up roughly 90 percent of the population. Pristina and Belgrade have sparred over the local population’s use of Serbian license plates, smuggling of goods across the border, protests against the imposition of ethnic Albanian mayors, and resistance to Pristina’s mandate that ethnic-Serbian areas use European euros instead of Serbian dinars. Last October a gunfight erupted between ethnic Serbian gunmen and Kosovar policemen, leaving several casualties and as yet unfulfilled allied demands for accountability by Belgrade. As both sides postured, Serbia’s President Vucic President Aleksandar Vucic increased Serbian troop levels along the border, causing NATO to add 1,000 soldiers to its peacekeeping mission.
American and allied officials have responded with a flurry of pleas for everyone to be nice to one another and stop causing trouble, with little effect. Europe has promoted a regular “dialogue” for years, but the objective, Serbian recognition of Kosovo, requires Belgrade to concede Pristina’s primary demand while receiving nothing much in return. So the EU treats membership and economic aid/sanctions as inducements. The Crisis Group proposed some “good government” measures, such as improving policing in the majority-Serbian north. Such steps might reduce hostility but would do little to address the most obvious and important reasons ethnic Serbs want to remain in Serbia.
None of this should matter much to the U.S. Even Europe would be better off distancing itself from the Balkans’ eternal quarrels. As Imperial Germany’s famed Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, remarked more than a century ago, “The Balkans aren’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” The region certainly isn’t worth any American deaths, especially in a world so full of messy conflicts calling on Washington to stay out.
Nevertheless, having helped blow up Yugoslavia, the allies arguably have some obligation to encourage peace and stability in Kosovo. What to do? The best outcome would be allowing the ethnic Serb dominated north to join Belgrade, in return for which Serbia would recognize Pristina.
The authoritarian government of President Slobodan Milosevic bears the greatest blame for the Kosovo war and Serbia’s loss of Kosovo. The territory has special significance in Serbian history, and in 1987 Milosevic played on Serbian nationalism to seize power. He won, but his violent oppression of Kosovo’s majority—admittedly exaggerated by Belgrade’s enemies—drove the independence movement domestically and generated decisive support for it internationally. There is no going back.
However, if ethnic Albanians can legitimately escape majority rule in Serbia, why can ethnic Serbs not escape majority rule in Kosovo? They never supported secession from Yugoslavia and are concentrated in territory adjoining Serbia. If Brussels and Washington want local ethnic Serbs to accept the end of Belgrade’s rule over Kosovo, the latter should be allowed to choose Belgrade’s rule instead of Kosovo’s.
America’s social engineers and Europe’s ruling Eurocrats insist on federalism, but only when friendly forces are in control. In this case, the allies said yes to ethnic Albanians but no to ethnic Serbs. This position is as unprincipled as that of Milosevic’s government.
Is a federal system the best form of government? For some, certainly. But not for everyone. Especially not for groups that see nationalism as the best, and perhaps only, means to survive in a hostile world. As evident in Bosnia as well, attempting to force different communities to live together is often destabilizing. Even people of goodwill might prefer to be among perceived friends. And few rulers on either side have much goodwill. Better to allow people to choose their own countries.
The silliest objection to giving ethnic Serbs a choice is that changing boundaries invites more boundary-changing. The allies have ruthlessly destroyed old nations, created new ones, revised borders, rearranged communities, and changed names to fit their whims. More serious is the argument that yielding Kosovo’s north to Serbia is rewarding the aggressors. As noted earlier, Belgrade was responsible for the worst of the abuses. Yet Gelbard called the KLA a terrorist organization for a reason. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. Ethnic-Serbs today should not be punished for the sins of their elders. Especially since most everyone in Kosovo would benefit from separation.
Indeed, under the auspices of the Trump administration, Vucic had conversations with Kosovo’s then-President Hashim Thaci over “border correction,” which offered an opportunity to swap territory and population. Of course, this challenge to the conventional wisdom caused hysteria among the usual suspects. Alas, the Trump administration’s efforts collapsed after Thaci ended up indicted for war crimes and out of office.
This approach deserves international support since the status of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo inflames politics in Kosovo and Serbia alike. Kurti wins political points by cracking down on recalcitrant northern ethnic-Serbs. Remove them and his country’s politics would calm.
Vucic, during the war an extreme ethnic nationalist who was Milosevic’s minister of information, is an opportunist who manipulates ethnic tensions. “Border correction” would minimize his ability and incentive to stoke antagonism toward Kosovo. Moreover, allied support for shifting north Mitrovica to Serbia could be traded for Belgrade’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence.
Finally, dampening both Serbian and Albanian nationalism would reduce Russia’s opportunity to foment unrest. Some analysts with vivid imaginations warn that the Balkans could become the next front in a larger war with Moscow. David Shedd, a former Defense Intelligence Agency head, and Ivana Stradner, a Foundation for Defense of Democracies research fellow, claimed, “By pushing the Balkans to the brink, [Putin] also hopes to show that NATO is a paper tiger and will not act if truly tested. Even if NATO does fight back against Serbia, Putin could still win. By opening another front, the West would have less capacity to help Ukraine.”
This makes for a great conspiracy theory but doesn’t look very much like the Balkans today. There is nothing mysterious or nefarious about Putin’s interest in Serbia, which goes back to imperial times. Moscow’s role in the region today is modest and primarily defensive. Russia enjoys favor by employing its veto to prevent Kosovo’s membership in the United Nations. Normalize relations between Pristina and Belgrade, and that factor disappears. Beyond that Serbia wants to preserve west-leaning ties: At the UN, it voted to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Analysts who act like the Balkans matter to America have proposed frenetic activism to fend off Russia. Frankly, nothing about Kosovo should be considered “essential” for America and there is little that Washington “must” do. It would be best to emphasize ending the dispute between Kosovo and Serbia. Almost anything would be more effective than following Shedd’s and Stradner’s advice for NATO propaganda teams to “target far-right Serbian groups” with an anti-Russian message, as if the latter would be inclined to trust those who bombed and dismantled Serbia.
A quarter century after Kosovo’s bitter civil war, its residents enjoy a better future. Nevertheless, their opportunities remain constrained by contending nationalisms in both Kosovo and Serbia. Washington and Brussels should stop pushing their vision for the Balkans and allow the people living there to negotiate their own futures.
The post A Quarter Century After Liberation, Kosovo Suffers from America’s Tight Embrace appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The decision also ensures that Donald Trump will be on the primary ballot in Illinois and Maine.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the former President Donald Trump should remain on the primary ballot in Colorado.
The Supreme Courts per curiam opinion reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that would have barred Trump from running for a second term under Section 3 of the 14 Amendment due to the events of January 6, 2021.
The Supreme Court argued that the power to restrict ballot access due to such violations lies with Congress. “This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency,” the decision claimed. “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.”
Two concurring opinions accompanied the per curiam ruling.
The first, from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is only a single page. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home,” Barrett wrote.
The second concurring opinion, from the liberal cohort of justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, expressed some displeasure over their colleagues’ reasoning. “The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement,” the three justices wrote. “We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment,” the trio concluded.
As for Trump, the former president said it was a “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!” in a Truth Social post.
Meanwhile, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold tweeted, “I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.”
The Supreme Court’s intervention also ensures Trump will be on the primary ballot in Illinois and Maine, two states where Trump was previously barred from running.
It’s not the last time Americans will hear from the court before the presidential election. The Supreme Court will also render a decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case.
The post Supreme Court Vaporizes Colorado Ballot Gambit appeared first on The American Conservative.
Old age is driving a period of generational transformation in American politics.
Mitch McConnell is not willingly giving up power after 17 years. His decision to step down as the Republican leader in the Senate has been forced on him by two opponents he can’t beat. One is Donald Trump. The other is senescence.
Joe Biden, born the same year as McConnell, faces the same foes. Both men are at the end of their era.
They ascended together out of the ruins of the George W. Bush presidency.
When Republicans lost the Senate after the 2006 midterms, McConnell became their new leader in the minority. And when Republicans lost the White House after 2008, Biden became vice president.
Biden and McConnell defined a twilight period in American politics, bridging the fall of neoconservatism and the rise of right-wing populism. Both finally staked their political lives on holding back the future that Trump represents.
Ironically, McConnell owes the zenith of his career to the failure of the only alternative to Trump that the post-Bush epoch has produced. If Barack Obama had succeeded in personifying hope and bringing lasting popular change to a war-weary and economically divided America, Republicans might not have taken back the Senate after 2014. But his failure cleared the way for McConnell to become the chamber’s majority leader in 2015.
Of course, Obama’s inadequacy also led to Donald Trump succeeding him as president. Trump was a break with Bush and Obama alike, but the ghosts of the immediate past continued to haunt his administration. He had to contend with McConnell as Senate leader (and Paul Ryan as speaker of the House), and in 2020 he had to fight Biden for the White House.
McConnell was no friend to Trump or his agenda, and while they had a shared interest in holding onto the Senate in 2018, the divisions between them made success all the more elusive. The GOP’s old guard, and the president’s sometimes surprising deference to them, limited what Trump could achieve in office. Once Ryan and McConnell lost their majorities, Trump’s opponents in the other party had the means to impeach him.
Even so, the future could not be stopped. Trump would have won the 2020 election if not for Covid and the economic reversal it brought about—no president wins re-election in a recession. (Not since Calvin Coolidge, anyway; and if he’s an exception, the fate of his successor, Herbert Hoover, more than proves the rule.)
Many a defeated Senate majority leader still enjoys power within his party as a minority leader. An ex-president, on the other hand, has no institutional leverage. Yet Trump, not McConnell, has continued to set the GOP’s direction. McConnell isn’t simply old, he’s outmoded—and if he were 20 years younger, he would still be yesterday’s Republican.
How long could he possibly hold onto his Senate leadership role as the legislative party catches up with the spirit of Trump? Congress, with its hundreds of members, changes more slowly than the executive branch. There may be only 100 senators, but their six-year terms combined with the extraordinary advantages of incumbency can make the chamber a mausoleum of obsolete politicians. Joe Biden himself was just such a mummy until Obama picked the long-serving Delaware senator to balance his own youth with experience—and more to reassure older voters that the new Obama-led party was not too radical a departure from the Irish-American Democrats of Camelot nostalgia.
A good politician wins elections. A great movement wins by changing the terms of politics, which can make the ballot box an afterthought. Mitt Romney might or might not have risked defeat if he were running for re-election—but there was no point in his running when the party belongs to Trump. McConnell recognized the same thing. His term in office runs until 2027, but he doesn’t lead the party even while he holds the title of leader. He’s been defeated: not in a Senate race or leadership contest, but in the battle for a future.
Yet if Trump had not overcome him, time itself would have. At 82, McConnell is no longer fully fit for duty. Here too, McConnell is twinned with Biden, who is only months behind him. If an 82-year-old is unfit to continue as Senate leader, how fit can anyone imagine Biden will be to serve as president, when he will also be 82 the day he’s sworn in for a second term? McConnell at 83 or 84 would not be a better leader; will President Biden get better? He will leave office at 86 if he wins re-election.
But Biden, unlike McConnell, is not stepping aside. He can hardly do so—if McConnell has no heir in the GOP of today and tomorrow, Biden has in Vice President Harris an heir apparent with no viable future of her own. The Obama-Biden ticket conceded defeat from the day the alliance was struck—not defeat at the ballot box, but defeat afterward, looking ahead. Biden was never going to be the successor to a truly hopeful and change-bringing new leader. He could only be a retrenchment; a step back. The Biden-Harris ticket is a parody, with a backward-facing top and a hopeless undercard. Biden was what the Democrats needed to make Obama viable and to take on Trump in the radically unstable conditions of 2020. But he’s not more future-oriented than Mitch McConnell.
The only thing the McConnell-led GOP had going for it was its opposition to Obama. And the only raison d’etre Biden has is to stop Trump. These are photographic negatives as leaders. They occupy the space that real leaders occupy, yet their purpose is not to lead but to arrest. In some circumstances, that can be a modestly conservative function, but following the exposure of the present American elite’s comprehensive strategic and moral bankruptcy—amid the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and the cultural revolution that has swept over the nation since then—it’s more obvious than ever that great change is necessary to conservation. That change begins at the top with the removal of leaders like McConnell and Biden.
The post Sunset for Mitch McConnell—and Joe Biden? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Even Biden’s fellow Democrats understand that Congress remains the final authority on authorizing the use of military force.
From time to time, you still get surprised. In a Tuesday hearing, the Democrats of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—prominent among them Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the committee’s chairman, and Tim Kaine of Virginia, the future vice president of yesteryear—noticed that the U.S. is raining down various sorts of expensive hellfire on the Houthis in Yemen in a half-cocked, not entirely kosher way.
“The Constitution requires Congress to authorize acts of war. Period. Stop. We swore an oath to follow the Constitution. If we believe this is a just military action—and I do—then we should authorize it,” Murphy said in his prepared introductory statement. “But we also need to acknowledge that there is a real risk of escalation in the Red Sea, especially since Iran is unquestionably aiding the actions of the Houthis. Thus, an authorization is important to legalize the existing operations but also to guard against an unauthorized mission creep.”
“I believe that a tailored, time-bound congressional authorization is not just nice to have—it is required—to both authorize and limit the current military operation,” he added. “I will be in discussions with my colleagues in the coming days to introduce such an authorization.”
Amid discussion of American “strategy” in the Red Sea—we insist on quotes because “strategy” seems like a strong word for what we’re up to over there—Murphy returned to his bete noir. “This looks to me like war in every bit of the constitutional sense: We have engaged in multiple rounds of strikes, we have a limited number of boots on the ground, we have taken casualties, we have prisoners,” he said. “I’m having a hard time understanding why this does not require a traditional congressional war authorization.”
Kaine went further, attacking the argument that American actions in the Red Sea are “self-defense” that does not require explicit military authorization. “This is hostilities, there’s no congressional authorization for them. To claim that this is covered by Article 2 self-defense, Article 2 self-defense means you can defend U.S. personnel, you can defend U.S. military assets, you probably can defend U.S. commercial ships, but the defense of other nations’ commercial ships in no way and it’s not even close,” he said. “That’s not self-defense under Article 2 of the Constitution, and a president can’t make it self-defense by calling another nation a partner. If you’re defending the commercial ships of other nations, it is in my view laughable to call that self-defense.”
This is of a piece with bigger problems. You can argue that we should go to war or we should not. For that matter, you can argue that we should have green regulations, or subsidies for microchip manufacturers, or a draft, or whatever. You can also argue that we should not. Yet so long as these things are handled by the executive’s administrative machine, you can’t argue about them. It annihilates every Anglo-American development in government and law pretty much from Runnymede on down. “No taxation without representation” doesn’t mean you’re always going to love what’s happening with your tax dollars; it just means that you’re going to get to gripe about it and try to change the law. You should get a say.
I, personally, think going to war in Yemen is a dumb idea for the United States. (At the same time, I understand the calculus is different for Saudi, or Oman, or Ethiopia, or even China or Russia.) Our chums, the Saudis, have been lobbing missiles and artillery shells at the Houthis since 2015; we’ve been lobbing the missiles ourselves for about two months, give or take a week. You can’t say it’s been very effective. The Houthis are still there; by the most reckonings, they’re still controlling something in the ballpark of 50,000 square miles of Yemeni territory, including the country’s putative capital, Sanaa. Efforts to dislodge them have generated mass human suffering, including a pretty impressive on-again-off-again famine.
The Houthis are wildly unpleasant people but, in truth, most of the wielders of power in that part of the world are. The unified Yemeni republic is a fairly recent invention. As in every Middle Eastern civil war, each “side” is a headache-inducing coalition of more or less frightening people who all hate each other nearly as much as they hate the other “side.” The effects on American shipping, as the good senator from Virginia points out, have not made a persuasive casus belli, and other nations’ shipping interests have had to be yoked in to make good the lack. This, to me, has the makings of a classic dumb American adventure in the sand.
Sometimes democracies have dumb wars; it has been that way since an Athenian armada sailed westward on a clear spring day 25 centuries ago to wage a cheeky war against the despot of Syracuse. I can grin and bear it and carry on the fight against it—so long as I get a say. Since the retaliations began, the U.S. has struck 230 targets in Yemen. That isn’t just 230 strikes against the Houthis or the Iranians or whomever we’re trying to cut down to size over there. It’s 230 strikes against your rights as a citizen, against the idea that your duly elected public servant gets a say in matters of peace and war.
The question, of course, is what Congress can do to reel in the executive—without real action, one suspects that Kaine and Murphy are using fair words to cover foul buck-passing. One thought: I hear it’s budget season (again). Perhaps Pentagon funds could be tied to obeying the Constitution our military allegedly swears its oath to uphold?
The post Shouldn’t You Get a Say on the Yemen War? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, long under pressure to step aside, finally hit the escape button on Tuesday. But not before one last furor with Hill conservatives.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he will be stepping down as Senate GOP leader come November on Wednesday as Congress hurtles towards a government shutdown with rolling deadlines of March 1 and March 8.
The establishment would have one believe that Washington’s current time and cash crunch is the fault of raucous Republicans in the House, where House Speaker Mike Johnson has razor-thin margins. A closer look, however, suggests that, if Republicans are on the receiving end of another raw deal come March 1, the fault lies not with the man just stepping into his role in the House, but the lame duck departing the Senate.
For the fourth time since October, Congress is faced with another deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown. When this Congress has faced shutdowns in the past, some conservative members have made their peace with a government shutdown if conservative priorities weren’t addressed.
Some conservative members are now supporting a full-year continuing resolution (CR), however. McConnell has made advancing GOP priorities, particularly forcing the Biden administration to execute the law on the southern border, nearly impossible by siding once again with his Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. If the government does shut down, it will be because McConnell has, at almost every turn, sown discord and disunity throughout the GOP by undermining Republican priorities. In the past six months, the Senate GOP leader’s own conference has rebuffed his commands, particularly when it comes to government spending and Ukraine aid. From this position of weakness, McConnell repeatedly doubled down and dangled campaign funding from Senate leadership over the heads of GOP senators like the sword of Damocles.
Disquiet turned to unrest. “There have been behind closed doors discussions on another attempt to replace him as leader,” one Senate Republican staffer familiar with the matter told The American Conservative. “[McConnell] might not have been aware of this, but his people were probably smart enough to know that there were people having these sorts of conversations.”
“He’s announcing this now because he knew he had a rebellion on his hands,” the staffer added. “He was no longer leading the conference in any real way.”
Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana put it this way in an email to TAC: “If Republicans aren’t on the same page regarding the border, Ukraine, or spending toplines, it undoubtedly negatively affects our ability to govern.”
Eli Crane, a representative from Arizona, won’t be shedding any tears when McConnell goes to his vine and fig tree. “Our leadership, especially in the Senate, is perfectly content managing the decline of this country. I wish McConnell the best, but it’s time for him to go,” Crane told TAC via email shortly before McConnell announced his pending departure. “His priorities are out-of-touch with everyday Americans, and he’s obsessed with burning the hard-earned tax dollars of our people in Ukraine instead of fighting tooth and nail to secure our borders. How are we supposed to mount a meaningful opposition when our own weak-kneed leadership undermines us at every turn?”
On Tuesday, President Biden met with Johnson, McConnell, Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to continue working on avoiding a government shutdown.
Of the 12 appropriations bills that need to pass, only four—Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Transportation-HUD, and Energy and Water—have a deadline of March 1. After the White House meeting, Johnson said, “We have been working in good faith around the clock every single day for months and weeks, and over the last several days, quite literally around the clock to get that job done. We’re very optimistic.”
“We believe that we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown, and that’s our first responsibility,” he added.
Schumer was also feeling optimistic. “There was a little back-and-forth on different issues that different people want, but I don’t think those are insurmountable,” Schumer told members of the media Tuesday. “The fact that we made it so clear that we can’t have the shutdown because it hurts so many people in so many different ways, even for a short period of time, was very apparent in the room.”
“The Speaker did not reject that,” Schumer continued. “He said he wants to avoid a government shutdown. So that was very heartening.”
Nevertheless, Schumer believes a CR, not appropriations bills, are the way to go. “To not shut the government down means we need CRs. And we told that to Johnson,” Schumer told PunchBowl News.
There’s another likely reason Schumer left Tuesday’s meeting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. feeling heartened. McConnell reportedly spent much of his time pushing for the sans-border-security supplemental. As Jake Sherman of PunchBowl News put it, “MCCONNELL told JOHNSON that the Senate’s foreign aid bill is the only game in town.”
With Republican control over the House and Democrat control in the Senate, passing the needed appropriations bills seems increasingly unlikely. Nevertheless, there are other options on the table for Congress to consider.
The first, and most dissatisfying result for GOP legislators, is another short-term CR that continues current funding levels from the previous fiscal year—a budget set by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Schumer (who received aid from McConnell) and Biden—that will not trigger any cuts. This is the kind of CR Schumer wants and McConnell seems to be helping him get.
Johnson has signaled he’s willing to go forward with a short-term supplemental that extends funding deadlines to March 8 and March 22. Johnson’s Press Secretary Athina Lawson said, “Any CR would be part of a larger agreement to finish a number of appropriations bills, ensuring adequate time for drafting text and for members to review prior to casting votes.” But without a bipartisan agreement in hand Friday that at least addresses some GOP concerns, Johnson is willing to let the government shut down.
The second option is a medium-term CR that extends funding past April 30. If April 30 passes by and the government is being funded via CR, a one-percent cut for discretionary spending kicks in. This provision was part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), the debt deal struck by Biden and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year.
Another provision of the FRA, however, could kick in if Congress decides to fund the government via CR for the rest of the fiscal year and begin work on the FY2025 appropriations process, which by statute should begin in April. A full year CR would run into discretionary spending caps, set at $1.590 trillion in total, put into place by the FRA. The cut to government spending in a full-year CR scenario is an estimated $73 billion or 10 percent.
That is where things get murky, however.
FRA negotiations included several “side deals” that used some creative accounting to effectively increase non-defense discretionary spending by $69 billion, which would bring total discretionary spending to $1.659 trillion. Nevertheless, those “side deals” were not made law. Even Connecticut’s Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, House Appropriations Committee ranking member, admitted she voted against the FRA precisely because the “side deals” were “non-binding.” In January, Johnson and Schumer revised the deal previously struck between McCarthy and the Senate majority leader, which shifted some of the side-deal money away from budget gimmicks to internal budgetary offsets. Nevertheless, the caps of $1.590 trillion are still in statute, but Democrats and establishment Republicans in the Senate might suddenly conclude they’re unwilling to fund the government at the reduced levels they agreed to in statute.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah doesn’t see the caps that way, however. “Because of side deals that have been negotiated behind closed doors by McConnell and others, the FRA caps have all but become moot,“ he explained in an email to TAC. “These deals would allow for $54 billion in additional spending, above the FRA caps, to be approved, raising the total expense of these bills to $1.644 billion.”
Nevertheless, Lee thinks a full-year CR is the way to go: “If Congress were to instead pursue a one-year CR we would expend only $1.562 billion, which is well below the FRA cap and even current spending levels. If Republicans are to be taken seriously as fiscally prudent representatives of the American people, a one-year CR is the best option before us for good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
The final option is a government shutdown. Previously, Republicans in Congress have called on GOP leadership to stop passing CRs and embrace a government shutdown if conservative demands cannot be met. Back in July 2023, Rep. Bob Good, now the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said “we should not fear a government shutdown.” Other conservative members expressed the sentiment, too.
Some members of the House Freedom Caucus, however, now support a full-year CR. In a letter to Johnson last week, House Freedom Caucus members wrote:
If we are not going to secure significant policy changes or even keep spending below the caps adopted by bipartisan majorities less than one year ago, why would we proceed when we could instead pass a year-long funding resolution that would save Americans $100 billion in year one?
“A full year CR is different than just a kick down the can down the road temporary CR,” Good told TAC in a phone interview. “A full year CR through September 30 would kick in or activate or kick in the FRA caps that would result in about $100 billion dollars in savings from what is being negotiated currently. It would also cancel thousands of earmarks for both parties worth tens of billions of dollars.”
Good later described a full-year CR as “the best realistic possibility right now that loses the least for the American people.”
Nevertheless, Good told Fox Business on Monday, “The government shutdown is not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing.”
“It would be worse to exacerbate the problem, to further increase our debt and our spending, to make our fiscal situation, which is unprecedented as it is, as you know, to continue to fund a government that’s facilitating the border invasion,” Good added.
Rosendale sounded more enthusiastic about the righteousness of a government shutdown. “The GOP needs to rally behind the idea of no government funding unless our southern border is secured!” Rosendale told TAC. “Passing approps into law is by far and away the most appealing victory that can come out of this current spending battle, it will ensure the deepest cuts and will discontinue Covid-era spending levels. The American people deserve better than the short-term CR to short-term CR style governing that has become standard in Washington.”
If it comes to a government shutdown, Crane is pointing the finger at Democrats and their new lackey McConnell. ”McConnell has been more concerned with escalating a war in Eastern Europe than protecting Americans by securing our border. It’s clear that the American people want to see our border secured. This should be the main priority for every Republican in the House and Senate,” Crane explained. “If conservatives commit to fighting for this objective and McConnell refuses to get on board, and instead, uses his power to pursue a victory for the Uniparty, then he owns a sizable share of the responsibility for a government shutdown.”
It’s difficult enough for Republicans to win the politics of a government shutdown. The Democrats’ structural advantage is nearly total. Keeping the government open requires spending dollars the government doesn’t even have yet. With national debt of more than $34 trillion, it’s not today’s Americans paying for Biden’s spending spree, but their grandchildren. Democrats are completely uninterested in sound money or fiscal responsibility, which means Democrats can always go home and tell their constituents they want to spend the money to fund the government. That places Republicans on the back foot.
While Republican constituents want Washington to stop leveraging their grandchildren’s financial future, few are necessarily thrilled about a government shutdown—the cuts should have already happened. That means Republicans need to make the case that not only current spending levels but underlying politics justify shutting down the government.
Which is why, when government shutdowns do occur, Republicans are often left shouldering the blame. When the government shut down for 16 days in October of 2013 over Obamacare funding, 81 percent of Americans polled by the Washington Post and ABC disapproved of the shutdown. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed blamed the GOP for the shutdown. GOP legislators’ favorables fell to 32 percent; 63 percent disapproved of their work. The government shutdown in 2018 tells a similar story. Another Washington Post–ABC poll found 48 percent of respondents blamed former President Donald Trump and Republicans, while 28 percent blamed Democrats. Eighteen percent said both parties were equally at fault. When the government shutdown again in December 2018, the Washington Post and ABC found 53 percent of respondents blamed Trump and the GOP. Just 29 percent blamed congressional Democrats.
Nevertheless, it’s not all bad news. In the midterms that followed the 2013 shutdown, Republicans expanded their majority in the House and flipped the upper chamber by picking up nine Senate seats. Trump would go on to win the 2016 presidential election. Democrats wound up taking back the House by gaining 41 seats in 2018. In 2020, the presidency and senate went to the blue team.
Righteous government shutdowns are, indeed, possible. Good still might be willing to have one if it comes. “I’d be willing to have a shutdown fight for the American people who understand the spending is unsustainable, and the border invasion is unsustainable,” Good told TAC. “I think we could win a shutdown fight if we’re willing to have it.”
Good might not be wrong. New polling from Gallup this week found immigration is the top concern for Americans by a margin of 8 points. A shutdown over the current situation at the southern border is a relatively straightforward pitch: Until the government can do its foremost priority, protecting the territorial integrity of the United States, it ought not spend time or money doing anything else. In December 2023 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had more than 300,000 migrant encounters—a record high. Nearly 7.3 million migrants have illegally entered the United States since Biden took office in January 2021. If the Biden migrants became their own state, it would be one of the 15 most populous states in the union.
McConnell, however, has made justifying a government shutdown nearly impossible. As The American Conservative previously reported, McConnell ensured the negotiated border deal attached to the $118 billion supplemental funding package for Ukraine and Israel would fail. McConnell, upon deputizing Sen. James Lankford and other Republican negotiators, ordered the Oklahoma senator to not attach foreign aid in the supplemental to any concrete metric to bring down the number of migrants entering the United States. As Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told TAC, “McConnell, on his own, told Lankford that’s not even on the table.” With the border deal dead, McConnell was free to do what he and Schumer wanted all along: force a Ukraine funding bill without border security through the upper chamber. So far, the House has refused to consider the bill.
Johnson is still worked up about the border deal. “[McConnell] botched this, he produced such an awful bill. Now he wants to blame Trump and house conservatives.” Johnson became breathless. “I mean, it’s, again, just stunning. Unbelievable!”
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio wrote about the supplemental funding bill for TAC earlier this month and outlined how McConnell’s betrayal undercut Johnson and embarrassed the GOP. When Johnson fights, “he will be attacked by Senate Republican leaders, at least privately, and will face another negative news cycle. If he doesn’t, his own conference will turn against him.”
Vance gave a prescient warning. “The cycle will replay over the government funding deadline in March,” he wrote. “It will replay over the omnibus debate that follows. It will replay any time the U.S. Congress must actually do something.”
“We have gone from a strong negotiating position in January to one where all our leverage for policy concessions is given away before negotiations begin, Both the Majority and Minority Leaders have the same stated priorities regarding foreign aid, but who is fighting for Republican priorities and a secure border?” Utah’s Lee commented.
“The Republican House majority for 14 months now has battled Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell,” Good claimed.
Rosendale agreed: “Without the support of McConnell in the Senate leveraging items like the House’s HR 2, Speaker Johnson is left without a leg to stand on in the appropriations fight.”
Johnson (the senator) told TAC that McConnell’s actions have placed Johnson (the speaker) “between a rock and a hard place.”
“Ideologically, [Speaker Johnson is] a true conservative, but he’s in an almost impossible position,” Johnson added. “I’ve just seen McConnell undermine the speaker time and time again. Democrats are in a lot better position on the border now than they were three weeks ago. I mean, talk about jaw-dropping political malfeasance.”
McConnell dug his own grave, and is attempting to pull the rest of the GOP in with him. Even though the negotiated border deal ensured that “the border never closes,” in the words of Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and would actually codify the Biden administration’s dubiously legal parallel asylum system set up via regulation, Democrats can claim that not only are they willing to spend the money but that Republicans just rejected ‘border security.’ McConnell gave them the script.
“Our own Minority Leader has used Democrat talking points against his own conference, undermining our House colleagues in the process, and helped Democrats pass Ukraine funding without border security using a minority of Senate Republican votes,” Lee told TAC. “We should absolutely continue to fight for better policies if a shutdown occurs, but to quote Michael Scott, someone decided to ‘make this way harder than it needs to be.’”
Just as McConnell chose Biden and Schumer over the GOP conference and GOP voters in previous spending fights, he’s once again siding with Democrats. “Shutting down the government is harmful to the country. And it never produces positive outcomes—on policy or politics,” McConnell said in a Monday speech on the Senate floor. “The task at hand will require that everyone rows in the same direction: toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills,” the minority leader added, calling on the House to pick up the Senate’s appropriations bills.
To add insult to injury, while Johnson has a tiny majority in the House, McConnell has what should be a cloture-proof cohort in the Senate. Instead of using the GOP conference as added leverage for Johnson and the GOP, McConnell is leaving Johnson high and dry.
“Why lead Republicans if you’re not going to lead Republicans?” Lee told TAC. “Why ignore border security, at a time when Americans are reeling from stories of illegal immigrant felons killing innocent people across the country?”
For Good, 60 is the magic number. “The House Republican majority ought to be able to get more than the Senate,” Good said. “We only need 217 votes right now, and we’ve got 219. Now that’s a narrow majority, but we do have 219. And the Senate needs 60 votes. Democrats only got 51. Senate Republicans can block just about anything Democrats do. The Democrats in the House cannot do that. If Republicans would unite and do conservative Republican things, we could be really strong.”
From Crane’s perspective, “[McConnell is] not utilizing any leverage the GOP has because he doesn’t want to. It’s disgraceful, but it’s not surprising. I don’t think any leverage the GOP has will be used effectively until McConnell signs off.”
“You’re the supposed Republican leader of the United States Senate, not the chief fundraising coordinator for Ukraine,” Crane said of McConnell. “Americans are being killed because the Biden Administration has cruelly opened our borders and Republican leadership has consistently and corruptly diverted their attention away. We need real leadership, not cowardly controlled opposition.”
“There is still time for Senate Republicans to reflect the will of the American people and demand real border security rather than rubber stamping funds for an administration that is facilitating an invasion of our country,” Lee claimed. “With the right leadership, our conference can refuse cloture, demand consideration of amendments, and keep up personal pressure on Chuck Schumer to blink. But leadership views all this as an impediment to helping Democrats get what they want, which seems to be the real agenda here.”
Johnson would like to see the House Speaker put the pressure on McConnell and the Senate. “The House should pass something and then leave. That’s what I want to see them do. It puts more pressure on the Senate,” Johnson said.
“A full year CR is reasonable,” he continued, “it proves we don’t want to shut down the government, so we passed this. I guess the Senate would have to pass that, or, if they don’t, people voting against you are obviously for the shutdown.”
“[Passing a full-year CR in the House] would be difficult for the Democratic Senate to ignore when it keeps the government open,” Good claimed. “And it’s passing spending at the levels that they agreed to a year ago and were signed into law by the President.”
“Speaker Johnson should stand his ground and not be trampled by the uniparty forces that are conspiring against his fight for a better country,” said Rosendale. “The American people are in his corner and are relying on him to be their voice. He must maintain he has control over the House of Representatives, he does not have to go along with what Schumer and Biden are advocating for.”
“McConnell has been more concerned with escalating a war in Eastern Europe than protecting Americans by securing our border. It’s clear that the American people want to see our border secured. This should be the main priority for every Republican in the House and Senate,” Crane told TAC. “If conservatives commit to fighting for this objective and McConnell refuses to get on board, and instead, uses his power to pursue a victory for the Uniparty, then he owns a sizable share of the responsibility for a government shutdown.”
“Speaker Johnson should stand firm, demand McConnell join conservatives in supporting either HR 2 or a clean year long CR, and tell Democrats they won’t get one more red cent—for Ukraine, or for the salaries of the Biden admin destroying our border—until we listen to the American people and secure their homeland,” Lee told TAC.
Senator Johnson left TAC with some food for thought: “When he became leader in 2007, we were under $10 trillion in debt. Now we’re approaching $35 trillion. And you know who the one constant is in all that time, the one person in every room for every negotiation? Mitch McConnell. This is Mr. Long Game?”
After nearly two decades as the Senate GOP leader, the longest leadership tenure in Senate history, the long game is over for Mitch McConnell.
The post Inside Mitch McConnell’s Last Fight Before Abdicating appeared first on The American Conservative.
Disingenuous accounting does not change the fact that the U.S. is the main underwriter of this war.
In the course of the debate over President Biden’s most recent request for an additional $60 billion in “emergency” taxpayer support for Ukraine, a new argument has emerged: This aid package, while the largest requested so far, is actually not a disproportionate burden on America given how much Europeans have donated in both military and civil society support. Rather than trying to guilt the U.S. Congress into rubber-stamping this assistance, some of our European NATO allies would do better to come clean about their own contributions and accounting.
This line of reasoning ignores the simple fact that the United States remains the biggest contributor of military aid to Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, the United States has given $46.33 billion worth of bilateral military donations to the Ukrainian government.
Germany is the second-biggest military donor to Ukraine. It has given $19.42 billion—almost half the total for all EU members, but still less than half what the U.S. has contributed. France, Italy, and Spain (respectively, the second, third, and fourth largest economies in the EU after Germany) have contributed very little. France’s military aid to Ukraine stands at about $700 million, Italy is at $730 million, and Spain is at $360 million. In comparison, Poland alone has given more than $3 billion in military aid despite being only the sixth-largest economy in the EU. Some European politicians are demanding America spend more on a war in Europe when France, Italy, and Spain have contributed about the same as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Some who support the United States sending more aid to Ukraine prefer to measure contributions as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). America’s total bilateral commitments to Ukraine’s defense come in at 0.32 percent, behind 15 other NATO members. By contrast, Estonia’s total bilateral contributions (military and non-military) are roughly 3.55 percent of its GDP, Latvia’s are 1.15 percent, and Lithuania’s are 1.54 percent. Critics praise these three for their substantial contributions, while claiming that the U.S. and Germany have done very little to help the Ukrainians.
But this argument only makes sense from the point of view of a politician, not that of a military analyst or an economist. Smaller countries like the three Baltic states may have had larger contributions to the defense of Ukraine when considered as a percentage of GDP, but their economies are only fractions of the economies of the wealthy Western European nations or the United States. Their assistance, while admirable, is not going to be on the scale required to defeat the Russians. (Incidentally, using this metric, France, Italy, and Spain all stand at 0.07 percent.)
As stated before, the United States has contributed $46.33 billion of military bilateral commitments and Germany has contributed roughly $19.42 billion of military aid to the Ukrainian military. No other NATO member’s contributions even came close. Estonia comes in at $980 million. Given Estonia’s size, this is substantial and reflects the degree of support for Ukraine within Estonia. Nevertheless, this support has had comparatively little military effect when considered against the massive amounts donated by the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Germany). In the sense that matters most—the contribution of military aid in absolute terms—the United States is doing the most in Ukraine. Ukraine’s military would probably not have been able to hold against the Russians over the last two years without the massive amounts of military aid sent by the United States, and anyone making a military or economic argument about the biggest contributors must recognize this fact.
These numbers represent bilateral commitments to the government of Ukraine—that is, money or equipment given directly to the government of Ukraine. The total for the U.S., both military and non-military, is $75.4 billion. This fails to include tens of billions of dollars the U.S. has spent in support of Ukraine, including operational and training expenses. Other countries such as Poland have also spent significantly more than the total bilateral commitments suggest, for similar purposes.
Those who believe that Europe has in fact been doing considerably more than America in terms of supporting civil society and humanitarian causes in Ukraine are missing a critical fact of accounting. Every dollar the United States has given to Ukraine has been in the form of a grant with no expectation of repayment. $65 billion of what European Union institutions have pledged to Ukraine in financial bilateral commitments, however, are in fact loans. In terms of grants, the United States has given more to Ukraine in financial support, having contributed just under $26 billion in financial bilateral grants, whereas European Union institutions have only given Ukraine about $18 billion in grants.
The United States cannot care more about a European war than Europeans do, and has in fact contributed more than its “fair share” already. Meanwhile, the primary threat to American interests lies in the Pacific, a theater routinely downplayed by the foreign policy elites in Washington. While Russia is an opportunistic power that may seek power and advantage episodically, it is far less of a threat to U.S. national security interests than China.
China is the only power with the desire and capability to overturn the current global system and establish itself as a regional hegemon in Asia, with an eye towards becoming the global hegemon. As such, it poses a clear and immediate challenge to the United States in a way that Russia does not. Our defense spending should be focused on deterring China, and while we can continue to play a supporting role we should not be emptying our magazines against what is, if we’re being honest, a secondary threat against which the Europeans should be able to take the lead.
The post Yes, America Is the Biggest Military Donor to Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.
Fellini’s Satyricon comes to the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine.
There is a very easy way to eliminate death on the roads: prohibit all traffic. Unfortunately, such a policy would have effects other than the elimination of death on the roads, but road safety experts might have difficulty in appreciating this. As we saw during the Covid epidemic, enthusiasts—who may be perfectly honest and sincere—are sometimes blinded to other considerations by their enthusiasm. The elaboration of public policy requires more than attention to narrow scientific findings, important as the latter are. Policy rarely hits only its target.
Trials of the old and cheap antibiotic, doxycycline, taken “post-exposure,” have been shown in trials to be effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases, at least among “cisgender men who have unprotected sex with men,” as the scientific literature now delicately puts it, and among “transgender women.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention therefore now proposes to recommend the prophylactic use of doxycycline by such persons in such circumstances.
To enter the literature of what is now known as DoxyPEP is to enter a world in which acronymic medical bureaucratese confronts Sodom and Gomorrah. The paper published in April last year in the New England Journal of Medicine is a good example. It describes a trial in which 501 people in California were assigned either to take prophylactic doxycycline after “unprotected sex” or to receive “normal care.”
The 501 people were of defined types: they were MSMs (men who have sex with men) and transgender women (men who have attempted to become, and live as, women) who were taking PreP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) or PLWHs (persons living with HIV infection), all of whom had had gonorrhoea, chlamydia, or syphilis infections within the last year and still practiced unprotected sexual relations. (Surely it would have been less judgmental and stigmatizing of the NEJM to have written that they had experienced gonorrhoea, etc., than to write that they had actually had it?)
One might hope that, even in California, the 501 who entered the trial were not representative of the population as a whole. But the results of the trial were clearer and more decisive than the results of clinical trials often are: Those subjects who took the doxycycline immediately after having had (perhaps I should say experienced) unprotected sex contracted considerably fewer sexually transmitted infections (STIs) than those who did not. Among the PrePs, the percentage of those who took doxycycline who developed STIs during follow-up was 10.7 percent compared with 31.9 percent of those who did not. For the PLWHs, the figures were 11.8 percent and 30.5 percent.
Certain other figures caught my attention, carefully unremarked upon in the text by the authors. The number of sexual partners experienced in the past three months by the 501 varied between 4 and 17, the lifetime figures being between 143 and 491. (This was self-report, admittedly, with its possible under- and overestimation.) The median age was 36 for the PrePs and 43 for the PLWHs, so the first flush of youth cannot account for the continued large number of sexual partners—or what at any rate to me seemed in my bourgeois conventionality a large number. Neither past infection nor the prospect of future infection seems to have moderated behavior very much in this cohort of people, not even to the extent of using condoms.
As for the consumption of drugs, 30 percent had taken cocaine, methamphetamine, or crack in the past three months, 32 percent had taken ecstasy, gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or ketamine, 45 percent amyl nitrite, and 48 percent marijuana.
While carefully avoiding all mention of the above, the authors in their acknowledgements thanked the subjects for their “altruism” in taking part in the trial. This was the one value judgment in the whole paper, a judgment that personally I found unctuous, and probably inaccurate to boot. The participants risked nothing, for doxycycline is a safe drug. Self-interest was as strong a motive as altruism, insofar as they hoped to discover a means by which they might continue their way of life without, or at any rate with reduced, medical risk. Altruism, one might have thought, could or would have suggested other things to them than participating in such a trial.
The paper did address, however, the possible development of resistance to tetracycline of infectious agents if the drug were prescribed frequently for prophylactic use. This is a serious matter, because once bacterial resistance develops, it has a tendency to spread rapidly in a population, and then the usefulness of the antibiotic declines accordingly. Because the numbers were small, the paper could not answer the question fully, but to my mind pointed at least to the likelihood of such resistance developing. For example, the proportion of Staphylococci resistant to tetracycline was double that in those taking it prophylactically than in those not doing so, and serious staphylococcal infections remain a threat to everyone.
Policy recommendations based on controlled trials like the one cited above seem to be “following the science,” and in a narrow sense they are. But there are caveats to be entered: for example, that results obtained in experimental conditions often cannot be immediately extrapolated to real life conditions, where things are much messier and where there are fewer staff, less follow-up, lower morale, carelessness, and so forth.
Nor is it valid to conclude from the efficacy of prophylaxis in a particular (and one might hope rather unusual) group of people that it would be efficacious in prophylaxis for society as a whole: It might even have the contrary effect if, for example, the idea became general that risky behaviour could be counteracted by simply taking a pill. Lowering the prevalence of infection in one group does not necessarily lower the prevalence in society as a whole.
One of the causes of the current epidemic of overdose deaths from opioids was an invalid (and corrupt) extrapolation from one group of patients to another. It was found, correctly, that hospital patients given strong painkillers after heart attacks or post-operatively did not become addicted to the painkillers; it was concluded, wrongly, that it was therefore safe to prescribe such drugs to all patients whatever who complained of pain. As an unfortunate partial corollary of this unjustified extrapolation, half a million people have died.
Such an unjustified extrapolation of the results that I have signalled above is not inevitable in the case of doxycycline, of course, but it is at least possible. Publicity having been given to the results of the trial, patients, who believe that in all circumstances prevention is better than cure, might demand doxycycline of their doctors who, for one reason or another, will oblige.
There is also an intangible cultural effect of research like this. Certainly it gave me the feeling reading it that Fellini’s Satyricon had come to the pages of the NEJM. Doctors must take their patients as they find them, of course, and they perform no moral triage among them such that they give lesser attention to those whom they think are morally reprehensible. In my career, I treated many an abominable criminal, and did so always to the best of my medical ability.
But insofar as the CDC’s proposed endorsement of DoxyPEP normalizes what to most people is distasteful conduct, and, by passing no explicit moral judgment on it, in effect asserts that it is morally neutral, the CDC may—I put it no higher than that, for the question is an empirical one—be helping it to spread.
As for general medical journals such as the NEJM, they have not of late refrained from moral judgment, almost always of the woke variety, on all manner of subjects. But they would go to the stake rather than admit that the conduct of the subjects of this trial was wrong or even distasteful in any sense other than that it was medically imprudent, a situation which they hope to improve by means of DoxyPEP.
Our fear of appearing censorious is now so great that we remain silent in the face of any degradation and praise the grossly licentious for their altruism in seeking their own safety.
The post DoxyPEP Is a Disaster in Waiting appeared first on The American Conservative.
Handing out pink slips to partisan bureaucrats may not be the most viable route available for increasing government accountability and efficiency.
If Donald Trump’s supporters could be said to share a single ambition, it would undoubtedly be the candidate’s repeated promise to “drain the swamp.” Some of his backers claim that their primary goal is to get back to pre-Covid economic prosperity, others want to reverse the influence of woke ideology, and of course many want to take back control of the border. Yet nearly all have what New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has termed a “visceral desire” to radically downsize what they see as a corrupt, unresponsive, and intrusive government bureaucracy.
Trump’s own plan to accomplish this goal appears to rely heavily on issuing an executive order reviving an option known as Schedule F, which allows the president to reclassify members of the federal workforce in such a way as to remove their employment protections. In a video posted to X (formerly Twitter) last year, Trump said he would “wield that power very aggressively,” identifying and rendering disposable those who have politically weaponized the nation’s security and legal apparatus, perpetrated hoaxes, leaked sensitive documents, or inappropriately spied on American citizens. Then he would fire the guilty parties or move as many as 100,000 government positions away from the D.C. area to “places filled with patriots who love America.”
Given the extent to which so many of the attempts to impede and discredit Trump over the years appear to have been facilitated by partisan bureaucrats, his yearning to purge the federal workforce, should he win in November, is perhaps understandable. Even if the Supreme Court were to uphold the inevitable legal challenges stemming from such a sweeping shakeup, however, Trump would soon find himself viewed by the public in one of two untenable ways: as either inflicting collateral damage on too many innocent public employees or, in his effort to weed out only those who “deserve it,” undertaking a secular version of the Spanish Inquisition. In recent speeches, the candidate himself seems to have realized the danger of appearing too vindictive, reminding supporters that the best revenge is passing successful policy.
It is important to make America’s public sector more efficient, more effective, and more sensitive to the rights of all citizens. There is an agenda for accomplishing this which, even if only partially enacted, would prove far more viable and perhaps more consequential over the long run than just issuing thousands of pink slips.
Restore the president’s authority to prevent the wasteful spending of unnecessary funds. America’s founders believed that the executive branch of the U.S. government had the right to refuse to spend any monies appropriated by Congress which turned out to be unnecessary for achieving its legislated goals—a power technically known as impoundment. As a result, presidents from Jefferson to Nixon were able to restrain the growth of the federal bureaucracy, sometimes by refusing to pay out as much as 7 percent of the country’s annual budget, but also by letting Congress know in advance that some proposed projects would be cut.
In 1974, the first post-Watergate Congress was finally able to divest the executive branch of this impoundment power, although periodic recognition of the need to control spending has inspired various attempts to find a substitute. In April of 1996, for example, President Bill Clinton worked with the Republican Senator Robert Dole to pass the Line-Item Veto Act, which empowered the president to eliminate entire programs. Unfortunately, this solution was seen as giving the executive branch too much power, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional just two years later.
Either restoring the president’s impoundment authority or passing a more limited line-item veto is such an important part of any real swamp-draining agenda that Trump himself has begun talking about it.
Take advantage of developments in e-government. According to a June 2021 study published by George Mason University’s School of Policy and Management, artificial intelligence (AI) will soon make it possible to greatly reduce the number of public workers at all levels of government. Resolving fines and other low-level legal disputes, giving tax preparation advice, performing and interpreting medical tests, making welfare payment decisions, generating instructional publications, conducting background checks, negotiating contracts and processing claims, delivering mail, building and maintaining roads, detecting grant fraud—these are just a few of the many bureaucratic functions which could be performed just as well by computers as by humans.
Cutting an estimated third of all federal, state, and local employees may do little to change the ideological bias of those who remain, but recent research by McKinsey suggests the switch could save taxpayers at least $750 billion every year while simultaneously improving the overall quality of public services. Once more, it will dramatically shrink the dues paying membership of public worker unions, diminishing their capacity to fund left-wing politicians, supply liberal candidates with campaign volunteers at election time, and subsidize progressive ballot measures in states like California and Oregon.
Return to regular order in Congressional lawmaking. Much of the desire to drain the swamp clearly stems from the rising power of what is often called the “administration state,” although as Thomas Firey, managing editor of Regulation, points out, this power is not nearly as conspiratorially exercised as many imagine. For while it is true that Congressional lawmakers, wanting plausible deniability for making unpopular rules, will often turn that task over to agency administrators, “the bureaucracy (itself) often doesn’t like making those decisions and will try to duck them until courts hold their feet to the fire.” The result is unpopular regulation “which Congress then rips (as) being either too strict or too lax, but Congress seldom then rewrites the law.”
In times past, Congressional legislation went through a process called “regular order,” which meant that bills were first sent to the most relevant House or Senate committee, where members had a chance to make amendments, then presented to the full chamber for additional deliberation in full public view. But in recent years, leaders of both parties have attempted to shield their colleagues from having to take uncomfortable stands by bundling multiple bills into one large appropriation and bringing it to a vote so quickly that neither the voters nor even many legislators quite know what is in it.
A return to regular order would undoubtedly force lawmakers to take more heat from constituents, but it would also give clearer direction to those federal agencies charged with implementing the nation’s laws. This, in turn, would go a long way toward making the federal bureaucracy more responsive to public opinion.
Support federal legislation which would allow heavily indebted states to declare bankruptcy, just as financially troubled companies, cities, and counties have always been allowed to do. Much of the reason for wasteful and inefficient bureaucracy at the state level stems from the lack of any legal mechanism to enforce budget discipline. As Yale Law School’s Professor David Schleicher notes in his book, In a Bad State, public unions would be a lot more responsible about their wage, benefit, and work rule demands if they knew that a bankruptcy judge could someday slash both—just as those investors who fund state deficits would demand far more accountability from local government if they knew that the value of their municipal bonds could be similarly reduced.
As it is, profligate states are typically bailed out by Democratic presidents with legislation that not only camouflages the rescue but, because state debt has effectively been turned into federal debt, only aggravates the entire country’s fiscal problems. It is not a coincidence that President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021—billed as a Covid-19 stimulus package but primarily designed to reduce blue state liabilities—sparked a bout of inflation which has still not retreated to an acceptable level.
Phase out the over $1 trillion dollars that Congress spends annually on education, housing, transportation, and other local programs. Not only is it needlessly complicated to send the tax revenue to pay for such activities all the way to Washington, only to send it back to the states, but this practice allows federal authorities to tack on expensive and unrelated programs as a condition for localities to use their own taxpayers’ money. As the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards has put it, federally funding local programs requires “more layers of wasteful bureaucracy” and “spends more on the subsidized activities than residents would favor if they were directly footing the bill.”
Again, what is important to recognize about all five of the above swamp-draining proposals is that they promise to accomplish the job far more effectively than either wholesale firings or selective prosecutions. The arrogant and inappropriately partisan bureaucrats whom Trump would like to purge from the federal bureaucracy do exist, perhaps even in significant numbers, but they are far less the cause of the country’s dysfunctional governance than the most visible—and therefore aggravating—symptom.
The post How to Actually Drain the Swamp? appeared first on The American Conservative.
A recent U.S.–Saudi spat shows that we need tougher tools to deal with globalism’s degradation of national sovereignty.
Nobody really knows what consultants do. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), asked a group of four consulting executives about their work last Tuesday. Their response did little to dispel the mystery: emails with redacted copy, calendar invites with redacted participant names, and the rest.
They did not fall silent because of some pact of trade secrecy; a Saudi court had asked them to. With a threat of up to 20 years in prison, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, called the Public Investment Fund (PIF), sued four of its advisors—Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey & Company, M. Klein & Company, and Teneo—in an effort to block the PSI’s access to advisory documents.
The consultants earned the interest of the committee after the June announcement that the PIF-backed LIV Golf would merge with the PGA Tour. The PIF’s attorney, Rachel Prober of the American firm Akin, said in a letter to the PSI that the “target, scope, and extraterritorial nature of the subpoenas are unprecedented.” Now, the four companies’ refusal to comply with the committee’s subpoenas has instigated a concrete power struggle between the PSI and the defiant consultants and a more abstract one between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
“BCG is caught between two sovereigns,” the firm’s Global Chair Rich Lesser said during last week’s hearing. Michael Klein had the same to say about his firm: “The reality of being caught between two legal orders from two sovereign nations is a challenging position and not one that I have previously faced as an investment banker.”
The apparent challenge for Lesser, Klein, and their peers is sustained, of course, by their retention of the PIF as a client. The only committee member willing to bring up this rather obvious fact was Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, a Democrat whose appointment we addressed last year. After each executive affirmed that the PIF remains a client of their respective organizations, Butler asked a simple question: “Do you normally retain clients who sue you?”
BCG’s head called it “unprecedented;” McKinsey’s said it’s “not common practice;” Klein’s called it “aberrant;” Teneo’s called it “unusual.”
These admissions, coupled with the cooperation that the firms promised the committee in theory and their remarkable lack of cooperation in practice, did not relieve Blumenthal’s concerns; after the consultants’ opening statements, he said, “You say that you’re between a rock and a hard place, but you’ve chosen sides. You’ve chosen the Saudi side, not the American side.”
It’s easy to get behind Blumenthal’s frustration: The companies he’s targeting are actively prioritizing the laws of a foreign country over those of their own. But these consulting firms, like the U.S.-based law firm representing the Saudis’ sovereign wealth fund against peer U.S.-based consultancies, are “American companies” as much as any other multinational corporation is. These entities do business overseas, form relationships of mutual benefit with foreign corporations, or, in this case, with a subsidiary organization of a foreign government; they even retain hostile clients in the face of potential criminal indictments. In choosing the Saudi side, the consultants are just responding to the current state of play and the limited loyalty engendered by agreeable American participation with the global market. This situation is a consequence of circumstances the U.S. actively cultivates.
It remains to be seen how far Blumenthal wants to dig his heels in. His complaints with the four witnesses may make their competitors think twice about signing long-term contracts with the PIF, but the hearings and attention devoted to this dispute will be really worthwhile if the senator is hoping to leverage a strengthening of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The current form of the 1938 law requires the DOJ to keep a fresh pen next to a registration sheet for those disseminating foreign propaganda on American soil. The law does not prohibit activities, but merely requires self-reporting of foreign activity at home.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced a bipartisan bill last April that would give the attorney general “greater authority to promote enforcement of disclosure requirements for agents of foreign principals” with increased criminal penalties and the addition of civil penalties for failing to comply with FARA. While this initiative moves things in the right direction, it does not address the disconnect between the nation, her laws, and the companies that function according to them. Under the current paradigm, the four consultants had every reason to sign contracts with the Saudi government, and right now the increased risk of noncompliance in the Kingdom outweighs the risk of noncompliance in the States.
In this case, the PIF claims it is binding the consultants from sharing advisory documents with the PSI because of national security concerns. Grassley’s proposal and another from Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina address blind spots for enforcement; yet they do not consider whether foreign lobbying that neuters congressional regulatory oversight by otherwise domestic companies is in our national interest.
Sterner measures are needed. If Sen. Blumenthal wishes to save his committee from future embarrassment and arm it with sharper teeth than that of a foreign sovereign wealth fund, he should push for something tougher: prohibiting these companies’ objectionable behavior by delegating judicial review of such foreign-entanglement cases to a federal agency like the International Trade Commission.
Michael Klein claimed in his testimony that his firm is “proud to work with our clients to create economic opportunity here in the United States.” But at what cost?
The post FARA Reform Doesn’t Go Far Enough appeared first on The American Conservative.
A credible investigative journalist brings to light accusations that AMLO’s presidential campaign took narco bribes.
ProPublica, a left-wing investigative-journalism organization best known for going after conservatives like Justice Clarence Thomas, has turned its media attention on Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).
ProPublica’s Tim Golden, an experienced American reporter with years on the ground in Mexico and Latin America, has published an article that analyzes accusations that, in 2006, the Lopez Obrador presidential campaign accepted financial contributions from a Mexican drug cartel.
AMLO is predictably furious. His rise to the presidency was based on the carefully crafted political persona of a humble man crusading against corruption, a different kind of Mexican politician heroically dedicated to toppling the country’s rotten ruling class. For the Mexican president, ProPublica is committing political blasphemy of the highest order.
ProPublica released its report under the title “Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?” Before publishing, Golden asked AMLO’s press office to respond to questions, but received no reply. The main thrust of Golden’s article is to recount the facts around a DEA investigation that suspected narco money was going to the 2006 Lopez Obrador presidential campaign. U.S. law enforcement investigations of the corruption of senior Mexican politicians are delicate and precarious affairs, and the DEA eventually closed the case.
But the circumstantial evidence and interviews were damning. The essence of the suspicions was that operatives of the Sinaloa Cartel, working through Nicolas Mollinedo, AMLO’s close political aide and personal driver, reportedly provided the Lopez Obrador presidential campaign some $2 million in exchange for a promise from the candidate that his administration would turn a blind eye to their illicit business activities.
The Mexican president and his former aide categorically reject all charges of collusion with cartels, although AMLO’s defenders might concede their man has always opposed aggressive law enforcement against the cartels (his famous dictum of “hugs not bullets”). In denouncing the government’s drug wars, Lopez Obrador always advocated addressing the “root causes” that compel marginalized Mexicans to turn to crime to survive.
It takes little imagination to see AMLO or his operatives rationalizing that accepting drug money for a “just cause” could be morally defensible. Such dirty money, once laundered, could serve the greater good, propelling an under-funded populist campaign to power against Mexico’s crooked and corrupt political establishment. For AMLO, theoretically, such a Faustian bargain could be justified as a way to curtail drug violence and transform the narcos, themselves victims of an unjust society.
Of course, no one will ever know because such matters are typically never clarified, particularly south of the border, but for veteran Mexico watchers, the allegations that AMLO’s political aide in fact took the narco bribes appear credible. To their credit, the ProPublica journalists, according to the managing editor, resurrected this story because they fear that growing Mexican corruption is a fundamental danger to both sides of the border.
Golden’s report points to yet another example, if the charges are true, of classic narco-corruption poisoning the highest levels of Mexico’s political class. For Washington policymakers, this report is yet another wake-up call about Mexico’s widespread corruption sickness. It is a long-term threat that gnaws away at everything in the bilateral relationship.
American leftists typically blame corruption on Mexico’s old ruling class. Their first instinct when considering accusations against Lopez Obrador is probably to ignore them because they fundamentally share so much of the Mexican president’s Weltanschauung. The Biden administration has made clear that its highest priorities towards Mexico, and Latin America in general, are based in finding common ground with regional leftist leaders and doing “justice” for perceived past gringo wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, many on the American right, particularly libertarians and the business class, are so blinded by dollar signs, corporate growth, and expanded trade that they rarely consider how stoking up commerce in Mexico, a quasi-failed state, is making that country’s corruption-criminality axis even stronger. They are unwittingly feeding a cancer.
The latest Transparency International report on corruption perceptions, recently released, ranks Mexico 126 out of 180 countries globally, giving our southern neighbor the worst record of all states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But the TI report fails to capture the full picture. Mexico’s miserable ranking downplays how the country’s corruption is also interwoven with a widespread system of criminal violence, or the credible threat of violence, that has blocked the modernization of the country’s law enforcement and judicial institutions. After decades of countermeasures, Mexico has no formula to get out of this corruption-criminality quicksand.
In response to ProPublica’s report, el Presidente predictably unleashed his usual opprobrium, denouncing Golden as a DEA “mercenary” and demanding the U.S. government apologize. AMLO is vigorously defending his image as a unique populist crusader at war with his country’s endemic corruption.
To be sure, AMLO’s reputation is certainly already tarnished among educated Mexicans, including many elites on the political left, but it robustly survives with much of his populist political base, the grassroots of his party Morena. The image of incorruptibility, so rare in Mexican politics, continues to undergird AMLO’s popularity. Thus, he must not only deny Golden’s charges, but destroy the journalist’s credibility.
And AMLO will likely succeed, at least in Mexico with his allies. By all accounts, Lopez Obrador remains so politically popular that his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a shoo-in to follow him into the presidency after Mexico’s 2024 elections. Regrettably, Sheinbaum has no more idea on how to manage Mexico’s corruption-criminality axis than does AMLO.
Official Washington, of course, has little to say about the ProPublica report. Since coming to office, the Biden administration, uniquely obsessed by its own unprecedented open-borderism, is incapable of calling the Mexican president to task over, well, anything at all. There are few foreign-policy examples of an American president so misplacing the national interest in managing an important bilateral relationship.
Covering the White House’s flank, most leftwing journalists refuse even to question Biden’s unusual passivity vis-à-vis his outspoken Mexican counterpart. Biden’s exaggerated submissiveness is partially intended, of course, as a contrast to the Trump administration’s hard-nosed Mexican diplomacy.
It also reflects the American left’s deeply ingrained orthodoxy that Washington must continue to repent, even in the modern bilateral relationship, for historical U.S. misdeeds in dealing with our southern neighbor. Lopez Obrador plays these American guilt feelings like a master violinist.
Perhaps, after three years of disastrous U.S.–Mexican security relations, just maybe, the leftward winds are changing. ProPublica has made a significant contribution on reconsidering Mexico policy through this exposé on Lopez Obrador. Golden’s report puts front and center the 109,000 American fentanyl deaths in 2022 and calls out the extraordinary ineptness of U.S.–Mexican security cooperation. He writes:
The administration of President Joe Biden has been steadfast in its refusal to criticize López Obrador’s security policies, avoiding confrontation even when the Mexican president has publicly attacked U.S. law-enforcement agencies as mendacious and corrupt.
Golden points to Biden’s extraordinary diplomatic lameness:
After asserting repeatedly that Mexico had nothing to do with fentanyl, López Obrador has recently taken a few modest steps to renew anti-drug cooperation. His government, though, continues to ignore U.S. requests for the capture and extradition of major traffickers, while Washington officials portray the relationship in rosy terms. At the end of a meeting with López Obrador in November, Biden turned to him and said, “I couldn’t have a better partner than you.”
Biden treats no other foreign leader with such kid gloves. Even while offering his Mexican “partner” unprecedented open-border migration, President Biden is incapable of diplomatic horse-trading with AMLO that gains any significant security benefit in favor of the United States. For Biden and co., open-borderism compensates for the unconscionable excesses of past gringo presidents, from Polk to Wilson to Trump.
That is why the ProPublica piece on AMLO’s shady past is so groundbreaking. Perhaps it is the beginning of a new awakening on the left to the dangerousness of the status quo, and how Lopez Obrador is part of the problem.
The post Did Mexican President Lopez Obrador Take Drug Cartel Money? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Years of professional irresponsibility has consequences.
“Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” asks an Atlantic headline. The numbers are deadly. The grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper outside the East Coast. The paper announced it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom. In June of last year, the Times dropped 74 people. Some 2,900 newspapers have closed or merged since 2005.
Sports Illustrated is in trouble. The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, NPR, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year. (The author of the Atlantic article himself was a layoff from the Post.) Job losses among print, digital, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023.
The reason for all this professional carnage, according to the article? Something something the Internet something something digital advertising revenues blah blah social media.
One proposed solution calls for “direct and muscular government intervention” and legislation forcing Facebook and others to pay for “news” they feature from sources like the New York Times. Yet, as journalist Glenn Greenwald asked, “Will there ever come a moment when liberal journalists who work for corporate outlets, and who are being completely consumed by layoffs and financial failures and audience indifference, ask whether there’s anything they’ve done to contribute to the profession’s failure?”
The answer, of course, is no. No one important is going to ask. Somewhere along the way (we’ll tag it as the beginning of the first Trump campaign of the modern era) journalism lost all pretext of objectivity and decided to devote itself fully toward advocacy. It is clear now the public wants accurate reporting, not advocacy, but never you mind, the media elites on the coasts know better what you need. As long as the mainstream media traffic falsehoods, people will disappear from their audiences.
Let’s look at one almost silly example: Did Donald Trump say people should drink bleach to kill off Covid?
No, Donald Trump did not suggest that people should drink bleach to kill off Covid. During a White House briefing in April 2020, Trump did make comments about the potential use of disinfectants and ultraviolet light to treat the virus. His remarks were widely criticized because they seemed to suggest the possibility of injecting or ingesting disinfectants, which would be extremely harmful. The media, however, would not be stopped, making the bleach thing into a meme, handing it off to Late Night, then picking it up again throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.
Twelve months after the supposed statement, to keep things alive, POLITICO wrote, “One year ago today, President Donald Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.”
“For me, it was the craziest and most surreal moment I had ever witnessed in a presidential press conference,” said ABC’s chief Washington correspondent.
A year after the “fact,” it is bad enough that the media could not accurately report what was said. But how about some four years later, twice in recent New York Times articles, on January 24 and on January 29, 2024 (“oblivious or worse, peddling bleach as a quack cure”)?
The thing is, Trump never said people should drink or inject bleach. Here is his comment in its entirety: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light—and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see, it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
It was obvious Trump was talking about a hypothetical example in that hyperbolic style of his. It takes a selfish media mind to roll all that into an admonition for the suffering American people to drink a poisonous substance. But that’s what happened, and is still happening even four years later.
There are so many other examples that persist in the media as untruths, exaggerations, or something evil done by other presidents but uniquely ascribed to Trump—everything from wrenching children from their parents at the border into concentration camps, to denouncing fallen soldiers as suckers, to inciting a bloody insurrection to overturn an election, to peddling “the Big Lie” to the point that he is supposedly constitutionally ineligible to run for president.
Journalism is at a crossroads at best (it may have already crossed into the abyss). The old models of reader-supported or advertising-supported media are no longer sturdy and seem still to apply only to a few giants like the New York Times. Americans’ trust in the mass media’s reporting matches its lowest point in Gallup’s trend line, largely because of Democrats’ decreased trust. (Republicans were lost an election or two ago—see Russiagate—though independents still lead the two parties in lost trust.) Just 7 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media.
Meanwhile, 28 percent of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 39 percent have none at all in newspapers, TV, and radio. Social media is still the least trustworthy sector, while simultaneously being one of the most read or watched. The declines for the mainstream media have been steady since their 1977 peak at about 70 percent trust levels. It has gotten worse since Trump, but you can’t blame it all on him. It’s the media’s own fault.
The loss of trust is because of a perception that the MSM is biased. Some 78 percent of conservatives think the mass media is biased, as do 44 percent of liberals and 50 percent of moderates. Only about 36 percent view mass media reporting as “just about right.” A September 2014 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Americans believe the media is “too liberal.”
Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting. The survey goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive. When asked whether or not they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50 percent said they disagreed. Only 25 percent agreed.
The pattern is pretty clear: As long as the mainstream outlets are significant sources of misinformation, not to mention out-and-out lies, the people’s trust in it will continue to fall. We’ve reached a breaking point where many people believe the media intends to deceive. People literally are not buying what the media are selling, and that is entirely the media’s own fault.
The post The Mainstream Media Are Dying of Self-Inflicted Wounds appeared first on The American Conservative.
Maryland is a machine state, Democratic, and has been since before the Civil War. Edgar Allan Poe died as a consequence of Baltimore’s baroque election-day malfeasance, which regularly produced rioting and homicides until the turn of the 20th century. Of Maryland’s 29 governors since 1867, a whole seven have been Republican.
You get more or less the media environment you’d expect from these political circumstances. There are no papers of the right in Maryland; indeed, there are few papers left at all. The rag of record remains the Baltimore Sun, which once boasted the talents of H.L. Mencken, Frank Kent, and two foreign bureaus; it is now reduced, having undergone the conglomerate cannibalization that most mid-size local papers have seen over the past 30 years. An upstart web paper, the Baltimore Banner, also broadly left in its outlook, now competes on the local reporting circuit.
So it is with some interest that we saw the magnate of the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, David Smith, in January bought out the Sun and several other papers previously in the Tribune Group. Immediate reports detailed writers shivering in their shoes. (The job market for journalists is pretty dire right now.)
I picked up a copy of the Sun Friday—in fact, it was delivered to me, mistakenly I think. It looks much the same as it has recently; all the national stories are taken from the Associated Press, and the opinion section is virtually nonexistent. Things are early. Nevertheless, the promise of an adversarial paper bringing real accountability to the Maryland machine and balancing the lefty Banner and the yet leftier broadly local titan, the Washington Post, will keep us checking. Best of luck, Mr. Smith.
The post The Baltimore <i>Sun</i> Rises? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The coming Mayorkas impeachment trial is a long-overdue rebuke of the Biden administration’s criminal abuse of federal immigration law, and a reassertion of Congress’s supremacy.
Conservatives are rightfully celebrating the House’s Tuesday vote in favor of articles of impeachment against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The coming trial of the scofflaw DHS secretary is far from a waste of time, even if the Democrat-controlled Senate is already looking to block it. It sends a message to frustrated Americans: This administration is breaking the law.
This constitutional and legal fight is an attempt to salvage what is left of the rule of law in immigration and border-security matters, instead of watching the country continue to descend into banana republic status. If some kind of trial or forced public examination of the border mess takes place in the Senate, the effort can provide a valuable national platform to document exactly how the Biden-appointed Mayorkas is uniquely responsible for the country’s unprecedented illegal immigration catastrophe.
The charges against Mayorkas are not simply a “policy dispute”; they directly address his abuse of federal immigration laws. When Colorado’s Congressman Ken Buck, one of three House Republicans to vote against impeachment, asserted that “poor job performance is not an impeachable offense,” he is confusing Mayorkas’s malfeasance with misfeasance.
The House charges document Mayorkas’s mens rea of wrongdoing and arrogance in ignoring federal law. They make a persuasive case that, from the very start of his tenure, Mayorkas has been engaged in calculated malfeasance (unlawful acts or intended omissions) to overturn the controlling federal law, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The DHS secretary actions are much more than simple misfeasance (poor administration).
An experienced lawyer, Buck should know the difference. As Black’s Law Dictionary explains: “Malfeasance is a wrongful act which the actor has no legal right to do or any wrongful conduct which affects, interrupts or interferes with performance of official duty.” Malfeasance is more serious than misfeasance and in fact can constitute the crime or misdemeanor set down in the Constitution as the basis for an impeachment action.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states Secretary Mayorkas’s duty is “to control and guard the boundaries and borders of the United States against the illegal entry of aliens” (8 USC § 1103).
As a point of comparison, Mayorkas also has the duty to prohibit discrimination in DHS hiring based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If Mayorkas were flouting the anti-discrimination statutory duty, would Buck or the New York Times call it just a policy dispute?
The House prosecutors should concentrate on two of the main charges: the secretary’s plot to overturn the law’s requirement that all illegal aliens be detained and his abuse of parole authority to create unlawful mass immigration programs.
Start with Mayorkas’s detention malfeasance. From first taking his oath of office, the secretary willfully rejected and undermined the INA’s security mandates to detain persons who enter the country without legal authority. Mayorkas unlawfully ordered DHS personnel, most notably front-line law-enforcement officers in U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Border Patrol, not to detain and hold encountered illegal aliens.
Such an unlawful order does not constitute a “policy dispute,” but is a fundamental rejection of a basic statutory duty about which the statute authorizes the DHS secretary no discretion. Congress gave the secretary nothing remotely equivalent to a prosecutor’s judgment to bring or not bring charges in a criminal case. The DHS secretary has a constant and unqualified affirmative duty to ensure his officers are interdicting, detaining, and holding foreigners attempting illegal entry.
This detention requirement, most notably, also applies to those foreigners who claim asylum; such persons are to be held, not released, until their case is resolved. Under the INA, neither illegal migrants nor putative asylees are to be set loose into the United States.
The reasons why are self-evident, but Mayorkas has thrown this fundamental duty aside because of his own ideological beliefs about how to treat migrants. Mayorkas further calculated he could overwhelm his own agency’s capacity to manage these migrants by publicly encouraging millions to travel to U.S. frontiers.
The articles of impeachment recount the secretary’s intentional decision to sabotage President Trump’s highly successful “Remain in Mexico” policy (officially called “Migrant Protection Protocols”). What Buck and the “policy dispute” apologists overlook is that MPP was U.S. diplomacy based on an INA statutory requirement; it was not just a hard-nosed, common-sense Trump administration policy initiative.
Thus, the House’s first article of impeachment states:
Mayorkas willfully refused to comply with the detention mandate set forth in section 235(b)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, requiring that all applicants for admission who are not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted shall be detained for a [removal] proceeding. Instead of complying with this requirement, Alejandro N. Mayorkas implemented a catch and release scheme, whereby such aliens are unlawfully released….
The articles continue:
Mayorkas proceeded to abandon effective border security initiatives without engaging in adequate alternative efforts that would enable DHS to maintain control of the border and guard against illegal entry, and despite clear evidence of the devastating consequences of his actions, he failed to take action to fulfill his statutory duty to control the border.
The fact that previous administrations may also have engaged in releasing some illegal migrants does not minimize Mayorkas’s malfeasance on this crucial point, nor does it matter that there may have been inadequate detention space. From the very start, Mayorkas gave his order to overturn MPP and end detention so that he could substitute his own personal standard in place of the law.
A good prosecutor can bring these points out in a trial. Mayorkas’s substitution of his own concept of “migrant justice” was his overarching motivation to act, not the department’s lack of resources or any other kind of operational limitations.
The second major issue that a Senate trial will help bring to light is the secretary’s continuing abuse of “humanitarian” or “public interest” parole authority. The abuse of this parole authority, along with Mayorkas’s refusal to detain illegal migrants, are the two battering rams this administration is using to turn the United States into an open-border country.
For context, the concept of parole provides limited presidential authority, in exceptional cases, to simply admit (“parole in”) individual foreigners into the country without a visa.
Through Congressional clarifications, the INA has been adjusted to make clear parole is not authorization for presidents to create their own immigration programs. Congress has always retained constitutional authority to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” (Article I, Section 8), which gives it, not the executive, sole power to set the law for short-term visitors and permanent migrants.
But as with so many other matters concerning the separation of powers, the modern Congress is institutionally lazy and incapable of keeping up with an imperial executive. That is why the House’s impeachment against Mayorkas on this issue is a blast of fresh air, striking directly at the administration’s outrageous ultra vires abuse of parole. The articles of impeachment state:
Mayorkas created, reopened, or expanded a series of categorical parole programs never authorized by Congress for foreign nationals outside of the United States, including for certain Central American minors, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, which enabled hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens to enter the United States in violation of the laws enacted by Congress.
The House could have also added Ecuadorians to that long list, and probably other nationalities we do not even know about. Mayorkas simply invented new mass immigration programs, under the pretext of parole, directly assaulting the long-recognized, exclusive authority of Congress to control the numbers and standards under which foreigners are admitted into the country.
Historically, it is true, presidents have used, and abused, parole authority as a diplomatic tool to admit large numbers of foreigners. This was done to tamp down a potential migrant stampede (e.g., President Clinton paroling in Cubans) and to serve the White House’s idea of justice (e.g., Obama paroling in Central American children).
Nevertheless, the abuse under Biden is unprecedented. Mayorkas paroles refugees, asylees, displaced Afghans, economic migrants, and about any population group for whatever reason the secretary deems as “humanitarian” or in the “public interest.”
Congress could have tried to defund DHS’s improper parole activities, but impeachment is another appropriate tool to fight back against federal officers who flout the law. Given the long history of parole abuse, even after Congress changed the law, impeachment is in fact overdue.
The impeachment articles also contain a range of other charges against Mayorkas that include violating the public trust, lying to Congress, flagrantly ignoring terrorism-related migrants, allowing fentanyl to enter the country, and perpetrating other misdeeds. Some may be impeachable and some may be, as Congressman Buck would say, just policy disputes. They all deserve to go before the Senate.
The House’s impeachment is warranted and long overdue against this renegade DHS secretary. The battle to stop the illegal opening up of our country’s borders demands impeachment. It is not just a matter of Mayorkas’s gross abuses; it is a matter of Congress restoring itself to constitutional primacy.
The post Yes, Mayorkas Is in Fact Breaking the Law appeared first on The American Conservative.
Many of the American public still deeply distrust the official medical narrative.
Like most kids in the 1990s, I was born in a hospital. In the first years of my life, I received every single recommended vaccine on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s schedule—a shorter schedule than today’s requirements, but still an extensive one. When I briefly considered a career in the U.S. Marine Corps as a college freshman, I willingly took another slew of required vaccinations. Prior to 2020, I would not have described myself as distrustful of the medical establishment; on the contrary, I was happy to take any prescription that promised to fix minor ailments when incurred.
When my first child came into the world in 2021, however, I decided to forgo a hospital birth. This was despite the initial hesitation of my own mother, a former nurse, who cautioned me with a statement about the statistically high risk of death in out-of-hospital births. (This statement, we both later learned, was not true of midwife-assisted home births, a subset of all out-of-hospital births.) The initial incentive against giving birth in a hospital was not a desire to test my odds, nor was it prescient knowledge of how midwifery was going to protect myself and my daughter from a cascade of needless medical interventions found in too many hospitals. The incentive was that, under the care of physicians in Northern Virginia in 2021, my husband was uninvited from ultrasounds, and I would have been required to endure labor and delivery in a mask. The aggressive, unyielding adherence to policies that the same experts had called useless only a few months prior was enough to make me distrustful.
In the estimation of POLITICO’s Joanne Kenen, this public relations problem is exactly the culprit behind a new RSV vaccine’s poor performance. Lingering Covid medical misinformation has made the target audiences for the seasonal respiratory virus vaccine hesitant to take it. Only 16 percent of eligible pregnant women and 22 percent of eligible retirees actually did. This statistic, especially when coupled with a declining kindergarten vaccination rate—93 percent of kindergarteners were considered “fully vaccinated” for their age in 2022, versus 95 percent in 2020—suggests many of the American public still distrust the official medical narrative. For Kenen, this mistrust is caused by the bogeyman of “malicious misinformation.”
She writes,
Still, health organizations have begun to mobilize since the tidal wave of Covid vaccine misinformation undermined demand for the shots and drove broader suspicion toward all vaccines, including routine childhood immunization for diseases like measles. But while clinicians and health groups are more alert to the threats, much of the population is so distrustful of public health and medicine—inside or outside of government—that any assertions of safety immediately get sucked into the conspiracy vortex.
If we had not endured nearly two years of petty tyrants telling us to double mask, Lysol our grandmothers, and show our papers before entering a restaurant, we might be able to laugh. But memes and chain emails don’t hold a gaze for four years and beyond.
Such loss of trust can only be the result of something much firmer: For many Americans, this was watching public health officials run roughshod over science and debate for political gain. The primary reason many parents are not vaccinating their 5-year-olds is not rootless suspicion but much concrete evidence that the CDC, FDA, and major medical organizations manipulated public opinion in the months following March 2020. Americans’ mistrust is not caused by misinformation any more than a house is knocked over by a door-to-door salesman. It is caused by untrustworthy actors in the federal bureaucracy and the medical establishment.
As if we needed one more example of this, Kenen herself is an employee of Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health. Like her, many of the reporters who purported to keep the public health machine accountable during the Covid-19 pandemic behaved more like advocates for the same public health machine, making it hard to tell the needles from the hay. (Unfortunately, this intimate relationship does not seem to make the reporters better at data science.)
There’s another consideration here too, which is the moving target of “fully vaccinated.” Children today are required to take a minimum of 76 doses of 18 vaccines by the age of 18 years. That is a lot of shots for any parent, even those who are still friendly to the public health regime. Is the decline in childhood vaccination rates caused exclusively by vaccine hesitancy, or is it that the bar has gotten too high for the average parent to find it worth reaching? This certainly makes optional shots like the RSV vaccine less appealing than ever.
If “bad information” is the problem, the solution, for those with a monopoly on Good Information, is more aggressive control of language. This has been tried since 2020, and has proven unhelpful in converting vaccine skeptics into vaccine lovers, but nevertheless the medical community persists. The next step for public health officials, according to POLITICO and the health experts it cites, should be “a way of monitoring social media to rapidly identify newly emerging misinformation.” In other words, the experts’ latest narrative simply needs to be propagated faster, smarter, better, and maybe this time Americans will fall in line. Heaven forbid health, or science, get in the way.
The post Americans’ Vaccine Hesitancy Continues appeared first on The American Conservative.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to notice recurring cliques of prominent media personalities.
One night in 2019, around the time she wrote an article in New York Magazine accusing President Donald Trump of rape, the writer E. Jean Carroll attended a party at an apartment in Uptown Manhattan. Fellow guests included the Princeton professor emeritus and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, comedian Kathy Griffin, the Republican legal operative George Conway, the TV journalist Soledad O’Brien, and the sexual assault activist Amanda Nguyen. Their host was the writer and society fixture Molly Jong-Fast. A photo of the gathering entered circulation four months later, when President Trump was impeached and Kathy Griffin posted it under the headline Never Trump, the cause uniting the people at the party.
Four and a half years later, some of the same players aligned under the same banner gathered again—this time at The Flower Shop, a “hip” bar on the Lower East Side. Carroll, fresh from an $83 million defamation suit victory against Trump that flowed from her 2019 magazine article, celebrated with Molly Jong-Fast, New York Magazine’s ex-editor Kurt Andersen, the New York Times op-ed columnist Lydia Polgreen, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
These two gatherings of Carroll and her media friends bookend her odd late career arc, in which she’s become a certified “icon” off cases that turned on two-decade-old allegations which, on the metrics of hard, verifiable news stories, don’t seem to merit the repeated, repetitive, marquee media attention they’ve received in the New York Times, MSNBC, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and elsewhere. In this, they’re like many other recent storylines championed by establishment media in the age of Trump—from decades-old allegations against Brett Kavanaugh unsupported by key witnesses, to a yearslong investigation into Russia “collusion” exposed as faulty to its core, to “investigations” into Supreme Court corruption that have failed to uncover a single tangible link between the justices’ rulings and their lives.
Since 2017, these eccentric quests have been explained by critics as “Trump derangement syndrome”: the hyperbolic coverage that seems to infect major outlets and their upper-income Democrat readership over the former president and his appointees. But digging into the players and institutions who run the coverage suggests that it comes from something deeper, something built into how these institutions have operated for 30 years: an accelerating turn from reliable informing to the narrative sensationalizing of which Carroll and her friends are practitioners and symbols. Tracing how that turn happened, and how it created Carroll’s and the other “scandals” of our scandalized political age, means going back to when the trends began.
The roots were in the 1980s, and the mostly silent driver was the government, which was gutting regulations in the name of free markets, free trade, and free movement of people. In practice, this allowed for mergers-and-acquisitions booms that pushed companies to be more responsive to shareholders while concentrating ownership: narrowing decision-making into fewer hands and making quick profits more important than steady growth. The marquee effects of this turn happened in the financial sector with Wall Street’s two-decade boom, but an equally influential shift occurred in media. “In 1983,” according to the legendary media analyst Ben Bagdikian, “the men and women who headed the 50 mass media corporations” could gather and discuss newspaper prices and postal rates. By 2003, “five men controlled all these media,” and their subjects when they gathered were the internecine backstabbing and takeover efforts of their subsidiaries.
This shift dramatically changed the nature of information in America. In the 40 years between the end of the Second World War and the ’80s, practitioners of a centralizing, sometimes insiderist media developed it into a watchful hedge against arbitrary power: judiciously informing American citizens of what their government was doing in their name. Perhaps the preeminent example of this development was the New Yorker which, as its longtime staff writer Renata Adler put it, “used, from time to time, to publish the definitive piece on a subject,” whether Seymour Hersh’s breaking of the My Lai massacrre coverup or the works of Rachel Carson. In these pieces, “the facts had been checked; the prose was adequate” and “there was a firm sequence” that balanced information and commerce: “first, the creation of the work itself; then, the publication of the magazine, followed by the reaction of readers; finally, the enlistment of advertisers.”
Outlets like the New Yorker, the Times, and even Vogue practiced this approach under editors like William Shawn, A.M. Rosenthal, and Grace Mirabella, who saw their roles as practical, public trusts: informing people about society or politics or the art of civility while increasing circulation and ad revenue. But in the 1980s, Conde Nast, under S.I. Newhouse, rebooted Vogue, re-launched Vanity Fair, and bought the New Yorker, replacing editors like Mirabella and Shawn with Anna Wintour and Tina Brown: editorial “personas” geared towards the insider- and advertiser-heavy games of youth, “glamor,” “celebrity,” “trends,” and “buzz.” Eventually, across media, the Conde Nast trend prevailed: “buzz” and aggrandizement intensified in venerable outlets still benefiting from reputations they’d accrued over time.
One was the Paris-based Elle, which began an American edition where Carroll was hired to write a confessional advice column. In 1997, the Times contrasted Carroll’s work there with the practical, civility-oriented problem-solving of earlier advice practitioners like “Dear Abby,” calling her new approach “a hybrid of the epistolary novel, the personal essay and improvisational theater” where, “with no particular claims to expertise, [writers] field questions and offer solutions to personal problems, but [where] problem solving isn’t really the point.” The point, rather, was “offer[ing] some of the pleasures of popular fiction but delivered in a sharper, post-modern flavor”—in Carroll’s words, “true tragedies, or dramas, with a narrative and a solution…the chewed slipper in the dog kennel of literature.”
Publishing houses like Random House also jumped on this trend of fiction blending with reality in pursuit of buzz, against a commercial backdrop of buyouts, mergers, and what seemed like a general decline in quality. In 2000, Penguin published the first book by Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of the famous feminist Erica Jong, which made a splash off what had become the decade’s literary trend: “serious” confessional memoirs or memoiristic fiction by the young and privileged that generated buzz off the titillations of high spending, heroin addiction, and self-harm. Up-and-coming scholar-critics gave this trend their blessing: e.g. Louis Menand of the New Yorker and Harvard arguing that literature and entertainment were, in practice, inseparable, and should be treated that way.
Entertainment infiltrated further afield. On television, longtime players like Barbara Walters made themselves ubiquitous with shows like ABC’s The View, where the talk was politics and the vibe entertainment. (This show, incidentally, gave Kathy Griffin one of her breaks.) Other players moved between worlds. Kurt Andersen, who had made his name satirizing the celebrities from whom Vanity Fair took cues, also edited New York magazine and covered politics in its pages, wrote for The New Yorker, and wrote satire for NBC. Lawrence O’Donnell advised New York’s senior senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan before writing for NBC’s The West Wing and appearing on NBC’s political spinoff MSNBC, hosting low-cost productions where journalists could achieve recognition by “speak[ing] to anything with a lot of authority.”
These trends also moved into newspapers and public affairs, with more immediate consequences. The Times, where Rosenthal’s one goal had been to “keep the paper straight,” changed under later editors and with the application of corporate management techniques which gave administrators and executives more power. By the time Paul Krugman began his columns there in 1999, several years of insinuation-heavy “scoops” over land deals in Arkansas had led to special prosecutions that paralyzed the Clinton presidency. Meanwhile, an anonymously-sourced “national security” series based on flawed leaks was in the process of sending an innocent man, the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, into solitary confinement. Independent journalists like Adler who pointed to diminishing quality were hounded by the Times, in true corporate bureaucratic style, in witch-hunts across its pages.
All the while, the political soap opera that eventually ensued off the Times’ Clinton investigations, with Monica Lewinsky in the starring role, owed its life to media players and redounded to their benefit. It was pushed by George Conway, a Republican operative and partner at the mergers-and-acquisition behemoth Wachtell Lipton, who collaborated with the journalist Bill Kristol as well as New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, her son Jonah, and the ex-White House staffer and would-be-author Linda Tripp to leak Lewinsky’s existence to an eager special prosecutor and press. It ended with Barbara Walters interviewing Lewinsky to sky-high ratings. Throughout its “run,” book deals were inked, gossip excerpted, bestseller lists bristled, Fox News made its name, and talk-show viewership soared off buzzy promos. Why wouldn’t they? Like E. Jean Carroll’s columns, the story was from the genre of “true tragedies, or dramas, with a narrative and a solution”: in this case, the familiar narrative arc of philandering, disclosure, comeuppance, punishment, penance, and redemption.
Then, only four years later, came another drama (or tragedy) with a clear narrative powered off anonymous leaks culled by “star” Times reporters: Iraq. In the course of this story, White House “sources’” fed journalists quotes about stopping a “mushroom cloud” that sold papers and boosted the Sunday shows’ viewership, eventually driving America into a “Shock and Awe” invasion and the president into an aircraft-carrier-landing-theatrical-tableaux, which gave CNN and Fox major market boosts. All the while, the institutions and their operators kept failing upwards, not through any particular accomplishment but by being, as one informed observer put it, “one of the at most twenty people who run any story…setting the terms, setting the pace, deciding the agenda, determining when and where the story exists, and shaping what the story will be.” As one of these shapers, the Times heir and owner A.G. Sulzberger, Jr., said about the paper as early reports flowed in that no WMD existed in Iraq, “There’s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be.” His words were undercut by events.
Still, the institutional going wasn’t good for long. Shareholder pressures were minimizing the room for innovation, and the shock of the 9/11 attacks on markets exposed the frailty of ventures like Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, backed by Hearst and kicked off with millennial fanfare. Establishment Democratic and Republican investments hastened the reckoning: Al Gore’s mainstreaming of that obscure defense-funded project, “the internet,” and Lawrence Summers and Dick Cheney’s encouragement of obviously risky mortgage-based-investments-and-mergers. Thanks to these policies, an online meteor and a financial implosion hit America’s institutions—and revenue drops, layoffs, stagnation, and then white-collar unionizing became orders of the day. Tech-backed expansions sputtered, while writing and fact-checking were curtailed. Today, Conde Nast and most other media companies are “staring into the abyss,” while viewership at MSNBC and elsewhere has slumped.
This had real effects on careers. Kurt Andersen moved to public radio and Lawrence O’Donnell struggled to get renewed at MSNBC. Kathy Griffin’s talk show was canceled, and, after 2011, Molly Jong-Fast didn’t write another book. E. Jean Carroll was laid off by Elle, now owned by Hearst. George Conway lost currency when his party made its populist turn after the 2008 financial bailouts. And Donald Trump, whom players in this circle had long both mocked and used, became the unexpected voice of the populists—paradoxically creating opportunities for institutions and institutionalists under the heading of once-muted identity politics, with benefits for buzz and the bottom line.
The path was paved by the institutions. Outlets like the New Yorker, which as late as 2004 had been exposing the Iraq War boondoggle using the skills of Seymour Hersh, became power’s tools, sponsoring Lewinsky-like witch hunts against Trump nominees in the name of social justice. The Times, CNN, and MSNBC began trafficking in another information flow from the Lewinsky and Iraq eras: suspect leaks that secured eyeballs while costing them most of the non-partisan readership they’d retained.
In this context, Carroll’s and her friends’ moves seem almost predictable.
Conway left Wachtell Lipton in 2020, became a Never Trumper, a regular fixture on MSNBC, and an inveterate tweeter whose background photo is a snapshot of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation verdict against Trump.
Andersen wrote a book of American history, explaining America’s political turn as one in a series of crackpot conspiracy movements that have paralyzed the country throughout its lifespan, and then followed this book with another blaming Republican cronyism for the country’s current path.
Krugman peddled his own political narrative in columns criticizing states like Florida for trending Republican, including a column about Miami in which he labeled possibly the most ethnically and culturally diverse city in America a place of “stucco” and retirees.
Griffin got headlines with a photo holding the populist president’s bloodied “head,” which earned her a dismissal from New Year’s Eve hosting duties on CNN while pushing on a new tour and a documentary and the claim that “my little story is historic…whether you like it or not.”
Jong-Fast became a memoiristic channeler of “Trump-era angst.” She got a profile in the Times, bylines in the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, and a deal for a new memoir. She also showed up on MSNBC thanks to her friend Lawrence O’Donnell; one of her recent appearances on the network was with George Conway to discuss E. Jean Carroll’s second legal victory over Trump. O’Donnell, for his part, revitalized his career using his old Senate relationships with Biden politicos to smooth MSNBC’s post-Trump viewer downturn.
They were joined by a new breed of institutionalist like Soledad O’Brien, a regular on CNN and then at Hearst, who increasingly focused on diversity issues; Amanda Nguyen, a non-profit leader and regular object of coverage in Elle as a crusader for sexual assault survivors; and the Times’ Lydia Polgreen, whose work focuses on “human rights” and “queer lives.” Their arrival gives validity to the institutions’ social justice claims, engineering the replacement of men who reportedly inflicted sexual predations with true believers who seemingly enforce ideological conformism—without altering the ways the institutions do business.
But it’s E. Jean Carroll who took on the existential threat to the institutions that is Donald Trump, becoming an “icon” and inadvertently showing that, inside those institutions that support her, compelling narrative has trumped inconvenient realities. Like most decades-old sexual assault allegations, Carroll’s claims were difficult to parse: The first jury verdict in her favor rejected her central claim of rape even on the less stringent preponderance-of-evidence standard. What’s more, some of the trial’s players had suggestive ties, namely Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Democratic appointee whose wife is a former vice president at Random House and former reporter at the New York Times, where Carroll has been featured and her supporters have had bylines and publications. Carroll’s specific claim, of rape in Bergdorf Goodman’s 23 years before, was a premise for a Law and Order: SVU episode. But these facts weren’t examined, turned over, highlighted, made to fill out or add nuance to a picture. Instead the move was toward at-face-value storytelling: In Carroll’s words from years before, “true tragedies, or dramas, with a narrative and a solution.”
Still, the stories the institutions create they also replace. Just as Carroll and her friends started celebrating at The Flower Bar, a new story arrived, pushed by the same players, generating hits and views: Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s “victimization” at the hands of “conspiracist” populists who were calling Swift and Kelce tools for the Biden re-election campaign. After the end of January, this essentially marginal subject generated an astonishing amount of commentary: from the Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, multiple Times columnists, O’Donnell, Jong-Fast, and a prominent administrator at Krugman’s Princeton who synthesized the receding and cresting storylines by tweeting that “E. Jean Carroll deserves a Taylor Swift song.”
It’s perhaps beside the point to note that the Swift-as-victim-and-MAGA-as-conspiracy-narrative, like those that preceded it, is not only super-charged but incomplete. What, for example, to make of the yearlong raft of elaborate establishment praise for Swift—a mainstream, temperamentally conservative celebrity who supports the establishment—at the hands of sometimes-connected operators whose institutional interests align behind a Biden win? (These include the White House, the Times, Time magazine, several moderate conservative columnists, one of whom called her “the best thing happening in America,” and a New York Times opinion writer who claimed her for “queerness,” as well as Paul Krugman, twice.) Still, this evidence won’t be emphasized by the institutions because it runs counter to the simpler, starker terms of “the narrative”—and because, as the sagas of E. Jean Carroll and her friends who survive inside it show, our establishment has been captured by the stories it tells and sells.
The post E. Jean Carroll and the Establishment’s Art of Fiction appeared first on The American Conservative.
After last week’s failed impeachment vote, the House of Representatives Tuesday night indicted Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a 214–213 vote.
The impeachment resolution stated that Mayorkas “has failed to faithfully uphold his oath and has instead presided over a reckless abandonment of border security and immigration enforcement, at the expense of the Constitution and the security of the United States. Secretary Mayorkas has violated, and continues to violate, this requirement by failing to maintain operational control of the border and releasing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens into the interior of the United States.” Since Mayorkas’s confirmation, roughly 6 million illegal immigrants have entered the country, encouraged in large part by the gutting of Title 42 and the abuse of asylum law.
The White House released a statement later Tuesday accusing the House Republicans of “unconstitutional partisanship,” asserting that Mayorkas “has upheld the rule of law faithfully and has demonstrated a deep commitment to the values that make our nation great.”
While three Republicans—Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, Tom McClintock of California, and Ken Buck of Colorado—departed from the party line, the vote is a welcome show of strength for Speaker Mike Johnson following the failed vote of February 6.
Mayorkas, the first cabinet member to be impeached since 1876, is likely to be acquitted in his Senate trial.
The post House At Last Impeaches DHS Secretary Mayorkas appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Sorry, Senators Tillis and McConnell, you are no Cicerones.
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said in a reported scooplet during what is now an open fight about not just foreign policy, but the direction of the republic itself. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined in, against those with “the dimmest and most shortsighted views of our obligations.”
“I know it’s become quite fashionable in some circles to disregard the global interests we have as a global power,” he added. “To bemoan the responsibilities of global leadership. To lament the commitment that has underpinned the longest drought of great power conflict in human history. This is idle work for idle minds. And it has no place in the United States Senate.”
I remain, er, speechless at the accusation of having an “idle mind” and remain in awe of McConnell’s more “active” one, but a curious patrician instinct is visible here. I actually agree that the Senate should be authoritative, and not the people: That’s how the system was originally designed. In Federalist 62, James Madison outlined the need for the Senate: “The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.”
It’s an instinct as old as the Roman Republic. A true-blue republic is fundamentally an elitist project; it presupposes a public house of debate and deliberation opposed to the public passions of the majority, and in turn is therefore guarded by the checks and balances of a senatorial class. “To consort with the crowd is harmful,” Seneca warned. “The greater the mob with which we mingle, the greater the danger.” Madison himself was influenced by none other than Cicero—cum potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu sit.
Unfortunately, the firebrand Cicero-LARPing section of our current senators suffers from a mild but somewhat notable disadvantage. They are not Cicerones; the act works only with, first, a true-blue patrician class within the republic who considers very narrow national interest and refuse to waste native-born blood and treasure for abstract values on wars faraway; and, second, who refuses to delegate the authority bestowed upon them to nameless lobbyists and bureaucrats.
The post The Senate GOP Establishment Insults the Base Over Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.
American posture in the region is inherently at odds with the goal of keeping Americans safe.
President Biden has launched a military campaign in retaliation for the death of three Army reservists killed in a drone attack on their remote outpost in Jordan. When asked to expand on the president’s strategic aims, John Kirby was evasive. The National Security Council spokesman explained that it was “very possible” the U.S. would pursue “a tiered approach” which could entail “not just a single action, but potentially multiple actions” that would occur “over a period of time.”
This approach obscures the aims of U.S policy with a wink and a smile. Setting aside euphemisms for “going to war,” the proposed activities and timeline are deliberately unclear. Considered in context of Kirby’s remarks, one can safely imagine a campaign that will last longer than discrete strikes but shorter than the war in Afghanistan. Even then, this riposte may only further escalate regional chaos without hastening talk of victory or ticker-tape parades.
Still, one must wonder: What is the objective, and how will we achieve it?
Biden has since reportedly ordered attacks on dozens of targets with ties to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Based upon the administration’s own language, the goal is to restore deterrence, which—outside of arcane, academic language—is code for convincing armed militants to stop shooting at Americans and our allies. Thus far, this approach has yielded scant results other than additional casualties.
The whole mess is a perfect encapsulation of Biden’s way of war in the Middle East. It is an exercise in anti-strategy: murky, reactive, and doomed from the start.
The deaths of those three reservists—two women in their 20s who managed heavy machinery and a middle-aged electrician—was a result of this ambiguity. These soldiers did their jobs, providing unheralded backbone in support of wars most Americans now ignore. Their tragedy is compounded by the fact that it was predictable and, in the circumstances, inevitable; yet in a wider sense, it was totally avoidable.
Predictable, because repeated strikes against militants in the region have thoroughly failed to prevent attacks on U.S. forces. The Biden administration’s lukewarm approach to the elimination of militia leaders and neutralization of their assets has only increased the volume of attacks against American servicemembers. Ironically, the decision to withdraw defense systems, as highlighted by recent reports, not only acknowledged, but seemingly embraced this risk, leaving our servicemembers more vulnerable. This strategic oversight—pulling critical defenses amidst escalating threats—underlines a troubling paradox where the safety of those on the ground appears secondary to broader, yet murkier, operational objectives.
Inevitable, because political miscalculation keeps our uniformed men and women stationed on remote and vulnerable bases in pursuit of a mission that ended years ago. There have been nearly 150 U.S. casualties in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan since October. The relatively low number of deaths is, thus far, a matter of good fortune rather than sound strategy.
Avoidable, because the number of U.S. personnel deployed to these isolated bases is small and easily redeployed. Some of these remote outposts are staffed with no more than 100 people. They could have been moved to sturdier hubs like Al Assad or Muwaffaq Salti Air Bases with little logistical planning other than the assignment of helicopters and the selection of the appropriate afternoon.
These tragic deaths in Jordan also spotlight the flawed rationale underlying U.S. forces’ “by, with, and through” missions on remote outposts at the very edge of our security perimeter. Despite the intention of advising and assisting local forces, these missions often end in failure or yield little lasting success. One may recall the fatal 2017 incident in Niger involving American Green Berets as a further example of high-risk, low-reward operations.
As the saying goes, the buck stops here. And President Biden is on the hook for these profound failures of strategic imagination. Nevertheless, this malign neglect is not confined to the White House.
For years, the Congress has neglected its most solemn duty to authorize, oversee, and (ultimately) end our country’s wars. In this domain, the past 20 years have tested the boundaries of Congressional complacency. The legislature stood pat while successive administrations conducted dozens of wars against unnamed adversaries all over the globe, citing standing authorizations for use of military force (“AUMFs”); namely, the 2001 authorization against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Iraq War authorization.
In his recent letter to Congress notifying the legislature of retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria, President Biden applied a “belt and suspenders” approach, invoking both authorizations in addition to a generous interpretation of the Article II prerogative granted the Commander-in-Chief.
Biden referred to these statutory authorities because the 60-day window to make war without Congressional approval established by the War Powers Resolution has wound down. The problem with citing these turn-of-the-century authorizations is they simply do not apply to the security challenges posed more than 20 years after their ratification. Can a war authorization sanctioned by the 107th Congress against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime really justify retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed Shi’a paramilitaries operating in Syria and Jordan more than two decades later?
Perhaps, but only as an exhibition of executive hubris, and certainly not with a straight face. Nevertheless, absent repeal or substantial revision of extant authorities, Congress holds the bill for any blank checks bounced by the executive.
Of course, none of this absolves the bad guys shooting at Americans. Nevertheless, the president and Congress might consider restoring American forces to a position of strength by redeploying those left in harm’s way. Only time will tell if they can imagine an alternative to leaving them hostage to adversaries in search of something to shoot at.
The post Biden’s Middle East Anti-Strategy appeared first on The American Conservative.
The shielding of Americans from a broader perspective has implications for both the survival of the species and the values we hold most dear.
“I beg your pardon. Could you tell us what period? I’m losing track of where in history we are,” interrupted Tucker Carlson as Vladimir Putin rolled into minute 8 of an extended disquisition covering the last 1,100 years of Russian history.
For a handful of Americans across the country, what followed was a brief moment of redemption. For those pitiable souls who had plodded through years of Russian history and its mendacious Soviet retellings on their way to an otherwise marginally useful degree, this seemed to be a sudden call to action. Here was a man among America’s most hated drawing the world into a debate on the historical origins of the Russian Federation. He even added a classic Soviet KGB flourish by dropping a papka of archival documents upon his bewildered guest.
More than anything, Tucker’s brave interview should highlight one glaring reality to Americans: We, as a nation, are dangerously unfamiliar with Russia, and this ignorance is putting our own country at risk.
With the Senate now proposing to ship a further $61 billion of additional taxpayer money eastward to continue the war, and with the certain loss of further hundreds of thousands of more lives on both sides, we need to stop and take account. It is high time to ask: What is the U.S. really doing in Ukraine? How does our involvement serve our vital national interests? And what, exactly, is the desired end state for U.S. strategy?
Making America great again here at home also involves unmaking past mistakes abroad. It means avoiding them in the future by maintaining an abiding focus on our own national interests. The time for defending borders on the other side of the world while ignoring our own is over. There is too much on the line and real work to be done.
Americans deserve the answers to these questions and Congress must start demanding them.
How can it be that America’s vital national interest is so unquestionably intertwined with a non-ally nation 6,000 miles away? Why, if Ukraine is such a valuable strategic partner, did net U.S. direct investment there prior to Russia’s first 2014 invasion total well under $1 billion, and today a negative $131 million?
What interests are we spending hundreds of times this amount to protect? Why is it worth taking on additional debt that we have no realistic possibility of ever repaying, but will become a permanent legacy liability for every future American generation? Is this really so no bureaucrat in Kiev will ever lose their job and all pensions will be paid in full and on time?
Unfortunately, we now have a real mess. Repairing it will require further effort and resources. Both the need to restore the strength of U.S. leadership, as well as to address the moral obligation created by helping lead Europe’s largest country on a path to destruction, demand that the U.S. cannot simply cut and walk away. Yet, this is the case, and pressing questions remain: With Ukraine’s top military commander now out, is there any coherent plan for victory? And regarding additional military aid, which may be necessary to position for negotiations and should be the limit of America’s involvement, why are European contributions so paltry in comparison to ours?
Don’t count on receiving any explanation for this from Joe Biden, let alone a crisp 10 minutes on why financing and managing a proxy war in Ukraine helps the people of East Palestine. The State of Union Address is not scheduled until March 7, its latest date in nearly a century. If Biden won’t speak, Congressional committees must summon his staffers for answers.
Yet Biden is not the only one keeping Americans in the dark. While many of Putin’s statements coming out of the two-hour Tucker interview will be considered revelatory, they shouldn’t be. His stated willingness to find a negotiated solution for Ukraine? Absolutely nothing new. Historical claims on Ukraine? Ditto. Putin has repeated these same themes and statements many times over the course of the last two years, not to mention in the time since the 2014 invasion. They are available for any journalist or analyst as video segments on the Kremlin’s website. Why did we never hear any of this?
Whatever we may think of him, and however we may evaluate his sincerity, Putin is not reluctant in expressing his thoughts and setting forth the positions of the Russian Federation for its actions. He does this in Russian, of course. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to go deep on Putin’s plans for Anadyr, Russia’s closest city to the United States, can get there with a click. It will be a challenge to find it in our news though. When Putin headed to Chukotka last month, 50 miles from the U.S. border, it was the closest he has come to the United States since a 2015 meeting with Barack Obama. While there, he cruised around in special Arctic off-roader called a “Khishchnik”—Russian for “predator.” Did Alaska’s largest newspaper even mention the visit? No.
The key problem for U.S. policymakers is that developing an understanding of Russians requires time, effort, and dedication. Attempting to understand the other side without embracing its positions is work few want to do. First, you really have to speak Russian to understand Russians. Very few Americans do. Certainly, if anyone in Congress does, it’s a well-kept secret. Fewer than 0.2 percent of American high school students receive any amount of Russian language instruction. Save immigrants, heritage speakers, academics and those trained by our government for state purposes, the result is an ingrained ignorance of Russia among Americans. In turn, this begets an over-reliance on a small cadre of experts whose points of view seldom coincide with the interests of most of us, let alone America First voters.
In fact, as is clear in the event, most of these voices are deeply vested in continuing adversarial relations between Russia and the United States. Peace is difficult and does not pay. Deterrence went out with the last plane from Bagram. When our government openly declares that its goal from the outset has been to inflict maximum pain on Russia and the president demands that his counterpart, who commands the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, be removed from power, it seriously crimps opportunities for diplomacy and dialogue while ushering in death and destruction. It’s no wonder Putin tells Tucker he cannot recall when he last spoke with Biden.
This has to change. After 1,100 years, Russia is not going anywhere. And neither are we. America needs new leadership who can talk with Russia. So does Ukraine—and the rest of the world, for that matter. Let’s hope this November provides that opportunity.
The post Why Was Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview the First Time Americans Heard the Russian Viewpoint? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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