The Columnist

Books

The Columnist

The Library of America gives Jimmy Breslin the treatment.

Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings, ed. Dan Barry, Library of America

Every publication—every good publication, anyway—is a bit like a baseball team. You’ve got your writers of various sorts, editorialists, book reviewers, and so on. These are your players. Foremost are the reporters, invariably badly dressed, usually gregarious, usually late on deadlines, rarely your great literary stylists but they shake out the interesting details of things. You’ve got your editors, usually better (or at least more formally) dressed, retiring or disagreeable, prone to drinking, the real type-A guys who don’t take crap. These are your managers, the guys who put together a line and guide the ship of state and answer for whatever boneheaded stuff the reporters do, of which there’s usually plenty. You’ve got your business guys, the ones who sit in the dark and sweat you about your reimbursements and know who is working for which senator and that sort of thing—the front office, which is the same kind of guy in baseball and I suppose every other kind of industry. 

There in the mix on the writing side you’ve got columnists. “Columnist,” when you pry off the decades of accumulated connotations, pretty much just means “space-filler.” The columnist is there to fill a column of text. He is to do this on some regular schedule. You hope (I speak as an editor here) that he’s going to be insightful or moving or funny; at any rate, you hope he’s going to be correct and non-libelous. But the bare, base-model minimum is this, that he be on time and to length. You’ve got to fill your inches, and you’ve got to fill them on time.  

Columnists tend to produce a mix of color and reporting—the tighter the deadline and the longer the column, the more color there tends to be. In this respect, they are more, irrespective of their publication’s format, akin to newsmagazine writers. What Otto Friedrich wrote about the newsmagazines among which he spent so many fruitful years tends to hold for the newspaper columnist as well: “The news, what happened that week, may be told in the beginning, the middle, or the end; for the purpose is not to throw information at the reader but to seduce him into reading the whole story, and into accepting the dramatic (and often political) point being made.”

Like many other party tricks—gurning, smoke rings, telling a decent joke—this sounds like an easy order to fill but proves harder in execution. Not everyone is cut out for columnizing, at least not indefinitely. Whittaker Chambers, unprompted, quit his column at National Review after two years; he gave William F. Buckley no explanation, but it seems he just felt he had nothing more to say on that schedule. A lot of columnists work for a couple years that way and move on to better things.

Yet there are those who thrive in the genre—can’t get enough of it. H.L. Mencken was a weekly columnist for most of his adult life, and a daily columnist for much of it; the now sadly neglected Ring Lardner likewise. On the other side of the pond, G.K. Chesterton wrote a daily column for the Illustrated London News for years. These examples underline a point: Your warhorse columnist of the first rank tends to become best known as a stylist. There are only so many worthwhile insights the human intelligence can produce in a month, let alone a week; you need something to carry you through the between times. Here is danger: It is a short slide from a characteristic style to self-parody, to being a hack. To return to baseball, you don’t want to repeat the same pitches too often, or they’ll stop working. You see this tendency in the late career of Baltimore’s own divine, who has a tendency to repeat the hyperboles a little too close together for the context of a book. In a column, where they might have been separated by a week or two, such repetitions would not have rankled.

Lardner illustrates a quirk of the American columnist tradition, namely that our leading column men tend to be sportswriters. Sports lend themselves to columns for the same reason that columns become exercises in style: You never have to worry about what bare facts you’re going to write about. Somebody beat somebody somewhere by some runs or points. The sportswriter, let alone the sports columnist, has sadly declined; nobody needs to read the paper for results anymore. Now, sportswriting means summarizing a tweet from Adam Schefter summarizing something some lickspittle agent’s assistant summarized for him from a private meeting summarizing contract negotiations between teams and athletes.

Of the latter-day practitioners of the column, the late Jimmy Breslin stands out. From 1960 until his death in 2017, Breslin wrote columns for multiple outlets, particularly the Long Island Newsday and the New York Daily News. He wrote sports, but he also wrote a lot of other stuff. The son of a working mother from Jamaica, Queens, he was the voice for the white ethnic millets of New York—canny, wry, tough, but also sentimental, even self-righteous. He looked the part: tubby, black Irish, a face that looked like it was laughing even when it wasn’t, the living mascot of a million beat cops, bus drivers, and sandhogs. He embodied the New York political sensibility—broadly liberal, distrustful of the Interests, a politics built around “the little man.” One of Breslin’s first big breaks was interviewing the gravedigger for JFK. But he was not what you would call woke. In the ’90s, when a Korean-American Newsday reporter accused him of sexism, he called her a “slant-eyed” “yellow cur” and took to The Howard Stern Show to expand on his thoughts and feelings about Koreans. Newsday suspended him until an apology was extracted.

Breslin was a fixture. My grandparents (Brooklynese) would have called him a character (“He’s a real charehctah”). He ran for city council in conjunction with Norman Mailer’s mayoral bid; their slogan was “Vote the Rascals In.” Yet Breslin was unlike Mailer personally. He remained married to his first wife until her death, and then his second, a New York councilwoman, until his own. This, also, is very Irish-from-Queens. Progressive politics has nothing to do with the right and wrong in your own life. Michael Moore, although a Michigander, has a little of this working-class moral austerity, which is becoming rarer and rarer, particularly in Democratic circles.

He wrote the whole time. A new Library of America collection, Essential Writings, gathers the highlights of a career, including two books—How the Good Guys Finally Won, about the Nixon impeachment, and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guttierez, about the death of an illegal immigrant construction worker—and many, many columns. 

There are two ways of writing American: chewing your cigar and holding your cigar. (Can you guess how the editorial We are oriented as we type these words?) Breslin is at his best when he’s chewing his cigar. From a column on the reporting about Mickey Mantle’s death: “The nurse resented every word of what she had read about the death of Mickey Mantle. These cheap sobbing uninformed Pekinese of the Press had hurt her patients.” On the 1962 Mets: “Basically, the trouble with the Mets is the way they play baseball.”

From a column on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (which perfectly summarizes every American Catholic’s feelings back in the early ’00s): “I don’t want to be a bishop anymore because the bishops of America have given the title such a bad name.” Later: “I cannot understand why, today, right now, Mansion Murphy of Rockville Centre dares to remain on church grounds after all he has done to place children in jeopardy. Nor can I fathom the reason why Bishop Thomas Daily was still in his residence in Brooklyn this morning. Both bishops belong in the city dump.”

It’s when he puts the cigar down that the self-righteous, almost puritanical tone tends to come through; here you can see the beginnings of the heavy-duty whining of the “personal essay” of the ’00s and ’10s. In a review of a Lardner story collection, Breslin decides to make it all about Watergate and the Nixon impeachment (Lardner’s son was one of the Hollywood Ten and went to jail for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee): “Ring Lardner went out into a place which proclaimed itself as America, but in 1901 it was a place for men on their way to making billions. The land was being stolen or scarred, the people manipulated and discarded and the Rockefellers, Goulds, Astors sawed and chewed their way through all the rules of life. Their dishonesty set a tone for the nation, spread a stain on its people, which maybe we haven’t been able to change yet.”

Yet at Breslin’s best there’s the liberal ability to see both sides, the complications of human persons—such as his profile of Big Mama Nunziata, the Gallo crime family’s matriarch, or his comments on a 1964 race riot:

The colored people, all of them, even the leaders, acted like small children yesterday. They have a deep, serious, legitimate, immediate case for themselves. A 15-year-old boy who weighed only 100 pounds was shot to death by an off-duty police lieutenant last Thursday. The case is being investigated. It has inflamed Harlem. The young kids, semi-illiterate most of them, who follow Malcolm X and other dangerous rabble rousers, used this to start a riot. They did not, these people milling from 125th to 133d Sts., last night, represent all of Harlem. They represented the part of Harlem that couldn’t wait for trouble with the white police. But they stood on street corners and hoped for trouble and when it came and the police hit them, the leaders promptly screamed “Police brutality.”

Police brutality? Sure, there was brutality last night. Terrible, sickening brutality. But this was a mess, an absolute, incredible mess, and if you were on the street with the bottles coming down and who the hell knows what was going to come from the rooftops, there was only one thing to do. Go after these crazy bums on the street corners and knock their heads open and send them home with blood pouring all over them. The crowd was uncontrollable. They laughed when Bayard Rustin took a microphone and pleaded with them to go. They jeered and spit at policemen. They wanted everything they got last night.

Breslin wrote and wrote and wrote. A lot of it was pretty good. He was dubbed a “deadline artist,” which is not a bad title. Perhaps he’s best regarded as an obituarist—for a type of liberal who is gone, and for a New York that is gone.

In a 1963 boxing profile, he writes about a bar in the Bronx:

Once, in the Irish neighborhoods, you had one of these places every couple of doorways. But now there are only faint traces of Irish neighborhoods left and this kind of a bar is rare. It is, Bimstein was saying over his beer, a shame.

It is, isn’t it?

The post The Columnist appeared first on The American Conservative.

How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World

Politics

How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World

Florida gets all the attention. The GOP power center of the future is closer to D.C.

The Ohio River tears westward through the Pittsburgh suburbs, whisks into West Virginia, cuts on through Ohio, capstones Kentucky, indexes Indiana, and terminates in Southern Illinois. In the end, it marries the mighty Mississippi. The Ohio River once marked the frontier—a land of second chances and poseur aristocrats. 

Now they just call it Trump country. 

By twofold, Louisville, Kentucky, is the most populous city on the river. Bourbon country’s finest is followed by Pittsburgh, and then ever so closely by Cincinnati. Hunter S. Thompson, a native, declared Louisville “a Southern city, with Northern problems.” A Cincinnatian in the know told me his hometown is the inverse. 

You see it when you’re there. Moving east and south across Ohio, Cincinnati is no Toledo. There is no quick-and-easy explanation of a glass industry gone away, no Detroit-style misery in miniature. Cincinnati is not comparable to Cleveland-Akron, Ohio’s Dallas-Fort Worth. Cincy has never suffered such a collapse in prestige. One hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the United States—more fearsome than American-ancient Boston or nouveau Los Angeles. 

Cincinnati is also not Columbus. First, Cincinnati is more likely to keep its name. (Roman generals are grandfathered in; explorers of the last six hundred years are not.) Second, unlike Columbus, Cincinnati is not anchored to a benign cult: the Ohio State University.  

John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote that Ohio “has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to.” But these places are not so satirical. After all, there are hipster bars that could have been ripped from Hollywood (or anywhere these days). And there are early 20th-century homes (though often on German-named streets) refurbished by under-40s that could double as S.F. Victorians in a pinch. 

More than anywhere else in the state, Ohio’s capital Columbus (and its more transient population) often seems intent on breaking its Midwest mold in such a fashion. Though such maneuvers all feel very self-aware—which is perhaps even more Midwestern. 

Columbus is the fastest-growing city of significance in the state, though such materialist markers of success haven’t stopped many Ohioans from spouting complaints that could be heard in Northern Virginia, the Atlanta suburbs, and scores of towns across Texas, Florida, and anywhere in 21^st century America that’s actually growing. 

Last, and not least, and barely in the state, is Cincinnati and the overlooked Ohio River.

It still bears emphasizing: Eight presidents of the United States have hailed from Ohio. And seven were born in the state—including the seven that occupied the Oval Office from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties. Seven in half a century. 

In contrast to the general understanding of American oligarchy, Ohio has been more important on the level of presidents than Harvard. Ohio politics in the Gilded Age was plausibly more important than the Democratic Party’s. And Ohio backrooms were nearly interchangeable with the GOP’s.  

The last representative of this Ohio old guard was Senator Robert Taft, who in the early 1950s substituted “sane analysis for expediency” (his words), argued China not Russia was enemy number one, and exhorted Europe to be vaguely self-reliant. 

Taft was defeated in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 by the most plausible heir to George Washington to date: Dwight Eisenhower. Taft’s ideas seemed, for a lifetime, to be settled business, as defeated as the druids.  

Robert Taft’s father had been president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Kids from even Southern Appalachia (a land of confusion and confused loyalty), like this writer’s grandfather, were named for the old man. For more than seventy years, to use a 21st century phrase, Robert Taft has been treated like the geopolitical version of a failson.  

Even his father William Howard Taft, that stout figure who served between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was seemingly abandoned by history. 

Yet along the Ohio River, up a road in Cincinnati named for the 27^th president, there is a man some now think will be the 48th, and possibly the youngest ever.

In 10 years, Ohio has swapped places with Virginia on the political map. Now it is Ohio that is a soft red state a stone’s throw from Washington. 

Sure, Akron is not Arlington-close, but there are portions of Virginia that are further west of Detroit. It’s not Arizona or Wyoming. And Ohio has the arsenal of would-be commanders-in-chief to match this new prestige that comes with being important, safe for the GOP, and an hour flight from power.

Before this shift, but after Taft, Ohio had a generation of usually Democratic grandees that seems strange and supine now. 

There was Democratic Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and not the last to run a weird and blighted campaign for president. There was Republican Governor and before that Congressman John Kasich, reportedly brilliant and temperamental, but brilliant and temperamental about balanced budgets (fair) and Ukraine aid (much less so). It was a different time; it was certainly a different GOP. 

There was Speaker John Boehner, beloved by the Washington press corps and the maître d’ at the Met Club. His tenure now is set to be lost in the noise of the Newt Gingrich revolution, the Dennis Hastert catastrophe, the Nancy Pelosi stints, the Paul Ryan story, and what could still be the GOP’s Year of Five Speakers.  

There were more. Ted Strickland, Democratic governor in the Noughties and an ordained minister, was on Barack Obama’s vice-presidential search list when the Democratic Party felt the need to strike a middle ground in the culture war. 

Notably absent from the Ohio national profile in these pre-Trump years was anything in the way of an effective punch on the issue of deindustrialization. It all went down, after all. 

At the commanding heights, it was a process. As Charles Bukowski wrote in 1986: “Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are [laid] off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: ‘I put in 35 years…’ ‘It ain’t right…’ ‘I don’t know what to do…’”

Especially after the collapse of communism, most statewide Republicans were tacitly for international laissez-faire. Both Democratic Senators at the time (including Glenn) and 11 of 19 congressmen voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement’s ignoble ratification. Among the Republicans voting in favor were Kasich and Rob Portman, the latter a Bushie U.S. Trade Representative and later U.S. senator.

In the meantime, many Democrats were content to rally support on these issues at the polls while often eliding immigration. They, too, seemingly achieved little. 

By the late 1990s, dissent on these subjects was marginalized to such voices as James Traficant (the “oracle from Youngstown” to some, a convicted racketeer to others) and Dennis Kucinich (more on him a little later). In Britain, these figures would have been written off as “the loony left.”

This line of thought is certain to resurface this year as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown seeks another term in office. He’s considered a state great, having been in elected office since the Seventies. 

To his most cynical Republican critics, who have possibly been feeding lines to his opponent Bernie Moreno, Sherrod Brown is great like Elizabeth II was great. Like the late monarch, Brown is impossibly long in tenure and has been an overseer of precipitous decline. 

For now, the old statewide consensus—what MAGA populists would now call “the uniparty”—is preserved in amber in the form of current Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Presently, he is probably best described as an anti-anti-Trump Republican. Like the current president, DeWine’s been running for office since the ’70s. This is his last gig. 

For the establishment, at least: après moi, le déluge.

West of Columbus and Northeast of Dayton, there is Jim Jordan, the congressman who in many ways was first on board with the new tendency. An unremitting presence on cable news, in office since 2001, Jordan’s tradecraft has left him open to the critique that he is agnostic on governing. 

In recent years, Jordan has sought—or been compelled by circumstance—to correct this impression. 

The current chair of the influential House Judiciary Committee, Jordan attempted a bid for speaker in the mad scrum last autumn. If Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure collapses before the November general election, Jordan may well be the odds-on favorite to succeed him. 

Southwest in the Eighth District is below-the-radar player Warren Davidson. A West Pointer and former Army Ranger, the congressman’s “your word is your bond” personal style may be better suited for whatever comes after the Trump restoration—or the attempt at it that may soon end.  

It is not unimaginable that Davidson could wind up a senior national security official under a President Trump next year. The former president has gone out of his way to show he means business this time, to the delight of both the right and the liberal press who have papers to sell. 

On foreign policy, especially, the ex-president is short on allies and frankly running out of neocons he hasn’t fired. If a Senate vacancy opens up next year, Davidson could run for the upper chamber (he looked but passed on a run this year). 

In the meantime, Davidson could take down a speaker of the House. Like a realist Georges Danton, no single member of Congress has communicated so proudly the imperative to end the old ways. That starts with bringing the war in the east to a close, or at least American sponsorship of it. 

Dashing back to Columbus now is Cincy native and overnight Republican rock star Vivek Ramaswamy. The entrepreneur-turned-politician relocated back to Ohio in recent years. His wife is a physician at OSU. Ramaswamy passed on the 2022 Senate race only to dive headfirst into the 2024 presidential contest. 

Ramaswamy has been compared derisively to Pete Buttigieg, another millennial Ivy League “gunner.” Past the mistiest similarities, it is an inaccurate comparison. 

Buttigieg’s support was often bolstered by voters older than him. Ramaswamy, by contrast, seemed to rattle many establishment Baby Boomer conservative sensibilities while he built a youth fanbase online. 

Buttigieg is taciturn. Ramaswamy is saber-rattling. Buttigieg is the bête noire of the Bernie Sanders wing. Ramaswamy is all in on Trump and Trumpism. 

The Senate nominee this year, Moreno, is perhaps the biggest unknown. 

A Hispanic-American and a career car dealer, Moreno’s background is plainly that of the kind of striver his party both seeks to attract and increasingly has come to represent. In his primary night victory speech, Moreno castigated the U.S. trade deficit with China. 

Moreno has the staunch backing of much of the most populist and nationalist infrastructure in Washington, DC. But he does not have much in the way of an independent brand—it is one he will swiftly have to develop. 

After all, a five-alarm fire, with way more than a whiff of the political dark arts, erupted at the eleventh hour in Moreno’s primary race. A 16-year-old alleged gay dating profile on an adult website. Was it Moreno’s? 

“I reviewed all the available information and it showed that the account had only a single visit, no activity, no profile photo, consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site. That’s it,” said AdultFriendFinder founder Andrew Cornu, denouncing the story. “It’s important to recognize that even temporary access to an email account is sufficient to create a fake dating profile in someone else’s name.”

For a party and a country seemingly debating abortion and gay rights this year with a fury not seen in decades, the impression of hypocrisy or even pathology could mean Senate control.

Even if one concedes the Republican talking point that Sherrod Brown is not all that he seems, the fact remains he has seemed just fine to voters. They have only once rejected him, in an Ohio secretary of state’s race over thirty years ago. 

Coincidentally, Moreno is also the new father-in-law of Republican Congressman Max Miller. Both are from the Cleveland area. Miller, a 35-year-old freshman representative, is a Trump White House alum, a stalwart ally of Mar-A-Lago, but not generally associated with the party’s reformist wing. 

Indeed, during the battle over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, Miller broke with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, the anti-McCarthy ringleader, in furious terms. His critics see him as a grandiose foreign policy hawk. He said shortly after the October 7 Hamas atrocity that Israel should be bound by “no rules of engagement.”

Miller is running for reelection this year—against Kucinich (!), last seen running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Kucinich left the RFK team in mid-October, as the candidate left the Democratic race to run as an independent. 

Some near the Kennedy orbit have commented privately that Kucinich’s exodus lines up with RFK’s foreign policy post–October 7. Remarkably, on the Gaza war, Kennedy is arguably now the most hawkish of the three leading presidential candidates. 

As Trump has urged Jerusalem to “finish up” and Biden has increasingly ceded ground to his progressive left, Kennedy has overtly rejected ceasefires and truces. This has won him plaudits from such arch-hawks as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. 

“I don’t even know what that means right now,” Kennedy said in March of a potential stoppage in fighting. Each such cessation “has been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?”

Surely these issues will soon come up on the campaign trail between Miller and Kucinich.

All these tensions, open disagreements and questions of authenticity and how they are settled—or not—will determine how much the Republican Party has really, truly changed. 

No discussion of Ohio, of the Republican Party, or American politics is complete any longer without addressing Senator J.D. Vance. 

For the subject at hand, he’s the 800-pound gorilla. Except what a poor analogy that is: the senator looks to be down about thirty pounds. The question of the hour is if he is, indeed, “central casting” to be Donald Trump’s second running mate. 

At first, Vance might not make all that intuitive sense for the role. Shouldn’t Trump select a woman or a minority? 

That is easier said than done, actually, as President Joe Biden found out in 2020. First Biden committed himself to the selection of a woman—it was a killing stroke to win the primary against Bernie Sanders in the waning normal days of 2020 (mid-March). By summer, the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd compelled Biden to select an African-American, ruling out white Minnesota politicians and former prosecutors such as Amy Klobuchar. 

Trump has shrewdly not hemmed himself in so tightly, but another Biden-style precedent looms. Major party presidential nominees usually don’t select non-politicians or even backbench congressmen for a reason. Statewide politicians—elected senators and governors—are more heavily vetted, and are demonstrated survivors. Yet even selecting a governor of a less populous frontier state is fraught with risk, as John McCain learned with Sarah Palin. 

Under this rubric, and ruling out clear apostates such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the list is winnowed considerably: Vance; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Florida Senator Marco Rubio; North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. 

With Rubio, the main problem is logistical. Both he and Trump are residents of the same state. Would Trump move his legal residence? Amidst a sprawling dragnet of criminal indictments related to his business and political practices? Would Rubio resign his Senate seat and move to another state for a race he might well lose?

Noem is bedeviled by a whisper campaign about marital infidelity. More significantly, Noem is in a double bind politically on social issues, cutting into her appeal as a feminine complement to Trump. 

On the one hand, social conservatives view Noem as not hardline on the transsexual issue. In 2021, Noem declined to sign a transgender sports ban in college athletics, purposefully avoiding a fight with the NCAA. She cited her small state’s tourism concerns and her duty to her constituents. Conservatives such as Tucker Carlson disagreed, and the matter culminated in a Fox News showdown. 

On the other hand, Noem signed into law an abortion ban that wiped away exceptions for rape and incest. 

Noem gave a striking, inspired answer to Carlson a year later on the subject of Ukraine:

The primary external threat to the United States in Communist China. Our opposition to Russia has heightened this threat… The American people didn’t get us into this war. Joe Biden did. Biden has this fantasy that he can do the same kind of thing to Russia that Ronald Reagan did to the Soviet Union. … We’ve already overextended ourselves in our largesse to Ukraine.

But it’s likely, though not certain, that she’s staked out ground that has bled too many would-be allies. 

Burgum is a dark horse in Vance’s way. It’s difficult to see what Burgum—Midwestern, tall, business experience, brains—brings that Vance doesn’t also while legitimately exciting people. Trump is said to fear anointing a successor. But picking the little-known if probably safe Burgum risks jumping the shark. Trump once also thought highly of Rex Tillerson. 

The other question for Vance: Should he want the number 2 slot?

It is not a secret The American Conservative is a longtime confederate of the junior senator from Ohio. The upside is clear: No politician in America is as staked out as clearly on the stalwart issues of foreign policy realism, trade realism, and immigration restriction. No one. If Vance becomes vice president, he will be the runaway favorite to succeed a reelected Trump.  

There is also the potential extraordinary circumstance that Trump wins but is forced from office by legal or financial issues or poor health (with a presumably corresponding set of pardons solving some of these issues). Vance, who turns forty in August, would become the youngest president in American history. 

Yet, if Trump loses, or if he loses badly, not only does Trump go down but the most credible populist in the country is badly tarnished by a rout. Only one losing vice presidential nominee in over a century has later become president: Franklin Roosevelt. And it took FDR 12 years and the crisis of the Great Depression to recover politically from his loss on the 1920 ticket. 

For Vance, then, this is a vabanque political moment less than two years into his Senate career. 

It is especially so attached to a personality like Trump’s. The former president is the consummate gambler. Untold numbers of individuals have flamed out of his orbit. 

Is this the move?

The personal fealty between Vance and the Trumps seems genuine. Vance is clearly tight with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. Few have been able to strike the delicate balance between Trump’s personal affairs and Trump’s political prerogatives. Has Vance found it? It would be a major asset in office. 

Much has been made of Vance’s highly bespoke political call in 2016: enthused and sympathetic about the issues Trump was raising, opposed to his becoming president. 

Five years later, in autumn 2021, Vance (before he was a senator) told me Donald Trump would be reelected and inaugurated in January 2025. Back then, I ferociously disagreed. A major horseshoe political miss that Vance has recovered from could soon be capstoned by powerful prescience very few had. 

It could make Vance the second most powerful person in the country. 

Back when I started in journalism, I worked with the longtime columnist Michael Barone. In vivid contrast with most others I met, those who warned what a tough business media was, Barone reported the industry’s upsides. Barone had predicted Mitt Romney would win 315 electoral votes in the previous election with nary a professional consequence. 

But Barone is hardly out to lunch, even if he joined organized conservatism’s strange sanguinity about the electoral appeal of Mitt Romney. He quickly followed up. 

In his 2013 work Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, Barone put forward the case (which would have huge relevance in 2016) that the Midwest is the most dovish region of the United States. The Midwest was notably settled by immigrants fleeing the wars of Europe. The Germans and even the Irish-Americans in the region were less likely to support any foreign policy perceived as too pro-British, which was increasingly a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy after the Civil War.

“Southernization” has defined U.S. demography and its politics for nearly a century and especially much of the last fifty years. Americans continued (and continue) moving south and west. Between 1976 to 2004, it became conventional wisdom that any Democratic ticket that had a prayer would have to feature a Southerner, probably at the top (Carter, Clinton). 

From 1980 onwards, Republicans always featured a Southerner (and a Bush) except for 1996, an election in which the party was totally swarmed. The 1992 presidential race featured two Texas millionaires against the governor of neighboring Arkansas. The winning Democratic ticket of the 1990s was united by the Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis that links Tennessee and the Razorback State.   

And then, all at once, the South disappeared from the big game. 

In 2008, McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden skipped the region (unless you’re catching the current president on the occasional day he feels inclined to remind you that Delaware was a slave state). In 2012, Romney and Ryan were two Yankees. Parts of Indiana are arguably the South, but Mike Pence is not from that part. 

And no Southerner is in the top tier of Trump vice presidential aspirants (Miami is not the South). Three Midwesterners (Vance, Noem, Burgum) are. 

Given both the obscene housing crunch now hitting Florida and even Texas and the clear problems of the West Coast, the continued U.S. national move south and west may be no fait accompli. Much like Russia, the Midwest hopes to be a moonshot beneficiary of climate change. 

Demographics could match political reality in the coming decade. For now, political reality is already here. 

Midwest political influence—and Ohio Republican power, particularly—is back on the scene.

The post How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World appeared first on The American Conservative.

This November, Vote for a Balanced Budget

Politics

This November, Vote for a Balanced Budget

Our fiscal crisis should be among the top issues for voters in 2024.

If we balance the Federal budget today, and keep it balanced, it will take 100 years to pay off the National Debt.

Each child born in the United States gets an ID bracelet and a pro-rata share of the National Debt, currently over $100,000 and growing. This is a terrible injustice inflicted on future generations due to the relentless expansion of the Federal government under Progressive policies of the past 150 years. Our perennial deficits have vaulted the national debt over $34 trillion and are increasing at a rate of $1.5 trillion per year.

These deficits and the debt they accrue are imprudent, dispiriting, unsustainable, and a national security risk, yet Congress lacks the resolve to do anything.

For years, commentators have been warning of the dangers of the deficit and the national debt. The hucksters hankering for a total economic collapse hoping to sell gold or Bitcoin have lately been joined by more respectable voices: Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, and Jerome Powell.

It’s beyond time to take measures in line with the Constitution to balance the federal budget. Simple calculations conclude that balancing the budget without an increase in taxes will require a reduction in federal outlays (other than interest) of less than 20 percent. Only when the deficit is eliminated will it be possible to begin the burdensome chore of paying down the national debt.

My own preference is for a simple executive order requiring a 20 percent cut across every agency. Let the agency heads figure out how to accomplish that. Not spending every penny allocated and appropriated by Congress is entirely within the executive powers outlined in the Constitution. 

Assuming that will not happen, the only alternative is for Congress to act. Unfortunately, our elected representatives have repeatedly demonstrated that, though they have the power of the purse, they simply can’t muster the willpower to make such a courageous move. Even now, when the Republicans have the House, they are floundering in their effort to achieve a mere 2 percent reduction in outlays.

The deficit’s root cause is We the People. American voters are either too selfish reaping personal rewards to care about their grandchildren or fail to do due diligence on the character of candidates promising fiscal responsibility.

Every candidate running for the House of Representatives in 2024, Democrat or Republican, should present to his or her constituency a detailed plan to use the appropriations process to reduce federal outlays (other than interest) by 5 percent for each of the next four years. The proposed plans would smoke out who sincerely intends to protect the interests of the local people. Will the cuts be in Defense? The Department of Education? Bailouts of deadbeat states? Let the deliberations begin, and may they be spirited and boisterous!

The restructuring of the economy over these four years would unleash optimism, innovation, and heightened economic activity and, possibly, a corresponding increase in government revenues without raising taxes. In a recent report, the Competitive Enterprise Institute states that “U.S. households pay $14,514 annually on average in a hidden regulatory tax. This amount exceeds every item in the household budget except housing.” Almost $2 trillion of economic activity could be unleashed simply by eliminating disadvantageous regulations! 

A balanced budget would be a true benefit for families: more wealth would be created by making stuff than by financial speculation and that new wealth would go to families rather than elites. With more confidence in the future, more families will be formed, and couples will be more inclined to have children.

To the argument that this will put holes in the safety net, I turn to Dorothy Day, whom no one ever accused of being calloused. As the New Deal was being rolled out, she observed that if the government takes care of people, people will stop taking care of people. The wisdom of her prediction is manifest throughout America. It’s time for families to step up and be family once again, taking care of family and community members without expecting much help from the federal government. 

A balanced budget and its advantages for families depend on each American voter taking a more active role in the 2024 primaries and general elections, carefully selecting those they send to Washington to represent their interests, and holding them responsible.

The post This November, Vote for a Balanced Budget appeared first on The American Conservative.

The ‘Twin Deficits’ Risk the American Way of Life

Politics

The ‘Twin Deficits’ Risk the American Way of Life

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.

Trump Actually Can Renew the Economy

Politics

Trump Actually Can Renew the Economy

The second Trump term offers the opportunity to set America on the path to economic recrudescence—if culture wars don’t distract.

The impression that neoliberalism is finished is widespread. As Julius Krein has rightly pointed out, whether among populists or elites, on the left or the right, you won’t find anyone who believes that tax cuts would suddenly boost growth, or that a new free trade deal would turn China into a democracy. The whole world is rather keeping an eye on what will replace neoliberalism in the most dynamic part of the West: the U.S.

The election of Donald Trump and the resulting upheaval led to a reconsideration of political economy. Tariffs and protectionism are no longer considered outlandish ideas; in this regard, Biden is continuing the policies of his predecessor.

According to Robert D. Atkinson, who coined the term “national developmentalism,” a new consensus has already emerged around Biden’s “Neo-New Deal” project. It has garnered support across the political spectrum, and is enveloped in an aura of inevitability reminiscent of the neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative.” 

But has a shift of economic paradigm really occurred? On the contrary, one might contend that what we are witnessing is rather a directionless drift.

Example of this confusion is provided, for instance, by the Biden administration’s report on supply chains. It states that subsidized childcare enhances supply chain resilience. Similarly, the Department of Energy identifies “energy justice” as the most important principle for its vision to achieve clean energy. One gets the impression of a buzzword bingo, rather than of an intellectual renewal.

The crystallization of the new paradigm is hindered by barriers within economic thinking. So-called “sector agnosticism” would be one of them—the notion that all sectors are of equal importance. This means the persistent devaluation of manufacturing, despite its outsize influence on capital investment, productivity, trade, and R&D.

Another neoliberal tenet impeding reflection on a new political economy is the conviction that any state intervention is necessarily wrong. Here, neoliberals continue to use arguments that went unchallenged primarily due to the post-Cold War euphoria. Often forgotten is that monumental endeavors that led to important technological spillovers—from nuclear power to microchip to the Internet—were results of industrial policy.

Yet neoliberalism is not the only barrier to the renewal of the American political economy. On the left, there is a misconception that growth is fundamentally pernicious, a belief that underpins one of the principles of Biden’s green industrial policy. Advocates of “neo-New Dealism” belong to a school of thought that maintains productivity growth inevitably harms workers, and innovation poses a threat to both humanity and the environment, being at best a necessary evil. For many today, growth is an illusion to be abandoned in the name of more expansive social policies and climate change prevention.

Growth is vital not only because it is easier for a society to solve internal problems when it has more resources at its disposal. Geopolitics are an equally important factor. Beijing can afford to do extraordinary things when it comes to manufacturing. As Richard Baldwin reminds us, “China’s industrialization is unprecedented. The last time the ‘king of the manufacturing hill’ got knocked off the throne was when the U.S. surpassed the UK just before WW1. It took the U.S. the better part of a century to rise to the top; the China-U.S. switch took about 15 or 20 years. China’s industrialization, in short, defies comparison.” Moreover, as Baldwin observes, as recently as 2002, China was more dependent on American inputs. Now, the situation has reversed, with the U.S. being three times more exposed to Chinese manufacturing.

For Xi Jinping, achieving high growth constitutes the Party’s core task. China’s economy may experience turbulence, temporarily lose its confidence (such as in the face of a real estate crisis), but it will never deviate from the dogma of growth. To paraphrase Peter Thiel, when you hear degrowth, you should think CCP.

Ideas have consequences, and economics is no exception to this rule. They are not everything, however. As Michael Lind argues, it is not sufficient that a certain theory gains a majority in one party that wins elections. It takes an upheaval to trigger a paradigm shift. With the China shock, the Great Financial Crisis, the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, it seems the system has been disturbed enough to finally get rid of its ideological assumptions.

Unfortunately, the debate about the economic future has been reduced to the realm of culture wars, with Democrats pushing racialized welfarism and Republicans fighting against “woke capital.” Neither one nor the other has emerged with a positive project: The left proposes a purely negative program, anti-fascism, anti-racism, defunding the police, while the right is stuck in “neoliberalism of fear,” distrustful of the state, which it views solely as a dangerous tool wielded by the left.

Today, American developmentalism—still a loosely defined current of thought focused on developing the country through state activism—either leans heavily on abstract digressions or gets lost in historical case studies. As a result, it often fails to present concrete solutions or address the specific problems that need solving. Debates surrounding the American political economy risk repeating the mistake Christopher Caldwell criticized Reagan for: the belief that winning the argument automatically leads to political victory. Proving that social programs were ineffective did not bring the Reagan administration one step closer to dismantling them.

The fundamental question has shifted from the size of government—big or small—to the focus on building an effective state and designing an effective industrial policy. Let’s take a look at a few crucial domains that are largely neglected today by abstract debates and outdated economic ideologies.

Young companies are the primary drivers of innovation. However, in America, the number of new manufacturing companies has declined year after year for the past thirty years. One of the main reasons is the lack of funds to scale-up their operations. Capital-intensive, long-term industrial projects, while beneficial to investors and the economic and technological fabric in the long run, do not yield quick returns that venture capital is looking for. China has a myriad of financial vehicles in place to overcome this problem. One of these mechanisms is the so-called guidance funds.

These financial devices bring together market and state actors who pool their resources to meet industrial policy goals and generate returns on investments. Offering financing at the crucial stage of scaling up, they enable rapid expansion. Industrial guidance funds help companies navigate the “valley of death”—a period when production requires significant capital expenditure while future profits remain uncertain—allowing them to survive and develop.

Guidance funds don’t always yield the expected results promptly, as proven by the Chinese semiconductor sector. Yet the outcomes can be remarkable, as seen in the electric vehicle sector, where a combination of state subsidies and loans, coupled with the entrepreneurial drive of private firms, has led to the emergence of major players conquering the world markets. Similar success has come from the billions that have financed telecom companies like Huawei and ZTE. As one Gavekal analyst put it, “China’s well-rehearsed industrial policy can be staggeringly wasteful but still produce stunning results.”

Reform is also urgently needed within the American innovation system. The disappearance of corporate R&D labs has led to a situation in which the U.S. has lost crucial institutions responsible for not only achieving technological breakthroughs but also coordinating their commercialization. The technological advances emerging from the ecosystem have benefited not just the companies that produced them, but the entire economy. Reclaiming the American industrial standing will be difficult without addressing that gap.

Implementing an ambitious industrial strategy will require nothing less than a reform of state institutions. An interesting approach was proposed by Caleb Watney, who argues that “laying the seeds for effective institutional growth in small ways today can pay dividends down the road. And launching a new office or sub-agency is almost always an easier political lift than creating a new agency from scratch.” 

Inspired by the institutional experiment successfully conducted by Netflix, he proposes something similar for government. Originally a DVD distribution service by mail, the streaming company was inspired by YouTube and aimed to develop its own platform. To this end, a new division was established, exempt from traditional procedures and structures. Eventually, this division grew and created the company we know today.

Achieving success required a departure from established conventions and standards, adopting new practices, tapping into different talent pools, and utilizing criteria unlike those the organization was previously accustomed to. An effective national development strategy, as Watney highlights, demands a focus on the technical aspect, on issues such as financing mechanisms: “When is an innovation prize a better fit for a technical problem than a loan guarantee, advance market commitment, or a milestone payment? Mastering the nitty-gritty of government procurement best practices is not exactly a sexy policy topic, but it will be essential for building an entrepreneurial state.”

When it comes to procurement, one of the most successful mechanisms was introduced by NASA. When the Agency decided to replace the Space Shuttle, it held a competition which rules diverged from the standards prevailing in the federal government. Three factors, as Eli Dourado explains, “shared development costs, milestone-based fixed-price payments, and goal-driven evaluation—were all geared toward reducing the amount of oversight NASA had to exercise. It allowed the companies to move at their own natural speed, not waiting for NASA to approve specific elements.”

Two companies each qualified for subsequent phases of the project—each time, one of them was SpaceX. If not for the new milestones mechanism, taxpayer money would have been wasted on SpaceX’s competitors, whose projects experienced delays and failed to deliver. The total cost of the program was $800 million, and the result is a new rocket that will take America back to the Moon. NASA’s own project, the new space shuttle, is still behind schedule and has already cost more than $20 billion. Dourado suggests that every agency should have a similar option when it comes to procurement, combining market competition with government financial support.

No industrial strategy can be successful without an adequately educated workforce. America finds itself in the midst of a STEM crisis. The launch of Sputnik represented a moment of realization that without engineers and scientists the U.S. would not win against the Soviets. Today, Americans’ diminishing interest in engineering and science could significantly weaken the country’s position in the 21st-century geopolitical rivalries.

The data paints a damning picture. The Trump administration’s report, “Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education,” states that while America has produced 10 per cent of the global total of STEM bachelor degrees over the past 15 years, India and China combined have produced nearly half.

It’s not so much that the level of American universities has declined as that the interest of American students has. National security will pay the price for this significant misallocation of talent, as foreign students are filling the vacancies left by technology-indifferent Americans. The survival of many science faculties already depends on a steady stream of foreigners. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, 81 percent of graduates in electrical engineering are foreigners, 79 percent in computer science, and in industrial engineering that number is 75 percent. Addressing this talent crunch should be a top priority for industrial policy. Especially against the backdrop of Xi’s assertions that he intends to turn China into a scientific and technological superpower. Just as after Sputnik, today education should be wrested from the hands of bureaucrats and recognized as a matter of national security.

Pessimists who claim that American institutional sclerosis is irreversible and that vested interests will block any attempt at reform have many solid reasons on their side. Optimists point to Operation Warp Speed.

The speed and efficiency with which OWS was carried out was remarkable, especially when contrasted with the many shortcomings of U.S. state capacity in other areas. Some argue that it provides a working model for industrial policy that can be applied in other domains.

Alex Azar, former Secretary of the Department of Health involved in OWS, explains how, during the Bush administration, he attempted to secure funding for a pandemic preparedness plan. The sum demanded was not astronomical, but he could not obtain it. In contrast, during the pandemic he received the signal that money is not an issue. “I have to be quite pessimistic about the ability to, on the financial side, execute something like OWS in the absence of a catastrophic, systemic-type crisis,” Azar stated. If Congress had to be persuaded to support Warp Speed, it probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground at all.

Azar stresses that OWS was based on two key factors: unusually brave and efficient personnel, and exemption from bureaucratic interference. Add to that a great deal of luck coupled with a sense of urgency. Azar cautions against the belief that OWS can be repeated on demand. “We needed a miracle and we got one,” the former secretary reiterates. While OWS is an important case study, one must be careful so it does not build up a sedating conviction that all will end well.

The right must cultivate a passion for technical solutions, exploring specific financing mechanisms and reforming institutions. The culture war won’t serve as a substitute for the effort Americans have long neglected: thinking about their economic development. Tomorrow belongs to those who start reflecting on it seriously. 

The post Trump Actually Can Renew the Economy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Is Bitcoin ‘America First’?

Politics

Is Bitcoin ‘America First’?

Bitcoin speculation siphons dollars from actually productive economic activity.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently approved about a dozen Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), opening the floodgates for traditional investors to gain exposure through their brokerage accounts. Establishment conservatives, always enamored by financial speculation as a facsimile of prosperity, are predictably excited. “For the Americans most affected by inflation, those already struggling to make ends meet, it offers a crucial way to protect their savings and preserve their self-sufficiency,” explained FREOPP, the organization founded by the leading “Freedom Conservative” Avik Roy. Enthusiasm for Bitcoin among the “America First” crowd is harder to understand. How, exactly, is Bitcoin “America First”?

Bitcoin is a software that enables an alternative method for payment processing that circumvents traditional financial institutions. Some advocates suggest that individual payment units, called bitcoins, preserve value against inflation; more often, investors speculate on bitcoin values through online exchange marketplaces. Bitcoin supporters allege that its alternative attributes offer opportunities to innovate and grow the economy.      

The America First philosophy is defined by respect for the United States as an independent nation with its own unique interests, which policymakers must advance with particular emphasis on the concerns and priorities of ordinary American workers and families. Generally speaking, this orientation recommends opposition to globalization, deindustrialization, and financialization. Bitcoin fails on each point. It is a globalized system with its key operations and operators distributed around the world—often deliberately in foreign jurisdictions to avoid American accountability. Bitcoin doesn’t manufacture anything, provide any service, improve anyone’s productivity—to the contrary, it siphons energy and labor away from the more productive sectors of the economy that need revitalizing. And its alleged value? The same old Wall Street sleight of hand that tries to count financial transactions as useful in and of themselves, regardless of whether they foster investment in the real economy.

Claims about Bitcoin’s ability to stimulate economic growth and innovation are invariably empty platitudes. The typical economic activity Bitcoin promotes is day-trading: pushing digital paper around in a zero-sum game. With the new institutional support provided by ETFs, expect money to flow from businesses that employ people and produce goods and services into a sterile asset that promises a big payday for little work, with jobs created only for the bettors and bookmakers in the new casino. The stated premise is that investment in Bitcoin is for the sake of Bitcoin, nothing more. Therefore, its value can only be determined by arbitrary fluctuations in its price.

Real dollars are parted with to buy Bitcoin largely to line the pockets of those on the top of what can only be called a pyramid scheme. The top 1 percent of Bitcoin investors hold 90 percent of the supply of Bitcoin. For perspective, the top 1 percent of Americans own 30–40 percent of the nation’s household wealth. The Bitcoin elite siphon dollars away from unsuspecting Americans through strategic market manipulation.

The most recent case study of Bitcoin’s contribution to American society was Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scandal. He operated his company in the Bahamas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law, where he manipulated and stole from his American (and global) customers while becoming the second biggest individual donor to the Democratic Party. 

In that case, the economic growth Bitcoin stimulated was the growth of Bankman-Fried’s wallet and the war chest of the Democratic Party. The innovation it encouraged was in how best to fleece the American public.     

Leaders espousing an America First philosophy should be scrutinizing Bitcoin, not cheerleading for it. Yet presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy came out in support of Bitcoin, while Senator Ted Cruz has highlighted how he “champions” it. Former Congressman David McIntosh, who is also the President of the Club for Growth and co-founder of the Federalist Society, leads the Blockchain Innovation Project, which advocates pro-Bitcoin policy. He has said, “The technology itself has tremendous potential for economic growth and innovation.” The former GOP Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said, “I like bitcoin.”

In unique contrast, consider the perspective of President Donald Trump, whose record on America First considerably outpaces the typical Republican politician’s: “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam.” The American people shouldn’t let themselves be scammed into thinking that Bitcoin or its boosters are putting them and their interests first.

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It’s the Economy Again, Stupid

Politics

It’s the Economy Again, Stupid

Biden’s insistence that everything is fine cuts against voters’ actual daily experiences.

(Photo by Chris Kelponis-Pool/Getty Images)

One of the most succinct campaign slogans of the modern era came out of the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” which picked up on the feeling Americans were less concerned with the incumbent’s apparent foreign policy success (remember Desert Storm?) than the nation’s changing economy. Clinton spun his personal concern for voters’ well-being off this, with the catchphrase “I feel your pain.”

Things seem headed for some sort of through-the-looking-glass-style repeat in 2024, as the incumbent is hoping to sell voters on the strength of the economy when they are more than skeptical. Bidenomics’ thrust seems to be “The Economy Is OK, Stupid.”

“Bidenomics,” the word itself, melds two of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities: First, he is Joe Biden, 81 years old, “the Crypt Keeper”; second, the economy is fine, and just fine, if you don’t look at it too closely. Not much can be done with the first liability, but the second opens the door for Donald Trump to run on a populist version of the economy argument that could leave Biden looking uninformed and out of touch.

The New York Times paints the brightest picture of Biden’s economic world. Bidenomics propaganda points out that, in 2020, the average wage of workers who still had a job rose without talking about those who were laid off, disproportionately service workers. Growth in wages for everyone was then held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired at their old salaries.

Bidenomics fanboy Paul Krugman actually went as far as writing in the Times, “Until recently I thought everyone—well, everyone following economic issues—knew this.” Stupid voters, not keeping up with the Times. “There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy,” says Krugman. “One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.”

This dumb line of reasoning seems to attract progressives. One coined the term “vibe-cession” to describe the gap between the common perception and cherry-picked economic indicators. Others insist it’s poor perception and political polarization that are mostly to blame. Then, there is good old social media and its misinformation, reinforcing the “bad economy belief.” A former Federal Reserve economist quoted by, of course, the Times, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy lead to consumer pessimism. If only those rednecks who don’t subscribe to the New York Times could see the view from up there.

The problem down here is economic reality, off-limits in Bidenomics. Start with inflation. Things cost more, with some of the highest jumps in prices in decades. (With the exception of the pandemic, there hasn’t been a year with average annual inflation above four percent since 1991.) Even after years of the Fed raising interest rates (see mortgages, below), inflation coming down does not fix the everyday problems of Americans.

“Inflation,” as economists define the term, is nearly meaningless to most voters because it excludes food and energy prices: two significant parts of any household budget. To include those parts of most voters’ lives, you’re looking for the Consumer Price Index, which includes everything but which rarely appears in feel-good tales of the Biden economy. Even then, watch the magician’s hands closely; prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year, but still up considerably since Biden took office. Some 74 percent today say they’re “at least somewhat worried” that the cost of living will climb so high that they will be unable to remain in their community.

Now about those mortgages. As the Fed raised interest rates to push back inflation, loan costs rose in kind. Average monthly payments on a new home jumped to $3,322 in the third quarter of the year, data from real estate investment firm CBRE shows. It means they have risen 90 percent since the final quarter of 2020—just before Biden took office in January 2021—when it was $1,746. Home ownership is becoming an unattainable dream to many Americans. Interest rates above seven percent and soaring house prices mean buyers are facing one of the least affordable markets in recent memory.

The low unemployment Biden touts does mean more Americans are working, but says nothing about mediocre wages, underemployment, and those forced into two or more jobs to make ends meet. A Blueprint/YouGov poll on the economy found just seven percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices.

Bidenomics, of course, famously focuses on jobs created. Even then the numbers are slippery; the vast majority of this touted job growth comes from restoring job losses from the pandemic. Check instead the broader unemployment rate that includes underemployed and discouraged workers, which, at 7 percent, is nearly twice as high as Bidenomics claims. And watch claims of rising wages—most rises have been negated by inflation growing at an even faster pace.

Perhaps most significantly among economic perceptions is voters’ view of the future. According to the New York Times, a poll from March found that “just 21 percent of respondents felt confident that life for their children’s generation will be better, matching the record low since this question was first asked. In 1990, 50 percent of those asked felt life would be better for their kids.” The national debt, $5.7 trillion when Bill Clinton left office, has reached $34 trillion. This constitutes a form of intergenerational theft; rising interest costs will eventually require higher taxes or cuts in federal programs or both.

Food prices are up almost 6 percent under Bidenomics. Some 59 percent of parents will spend more than $18,000 per child on child care in 2023. The overall average manufacturer’s suggested retail price of new vehicles in 2023 was $34,876, 4.7 percent higher than the previous year. Average annual health insurance premiums increased 7 percent in 2023. The average family premium has increased 22 percent since 2018.

The Biden people have it just 180 degrees wrong; perception does matter and is not “wrong.” And it does not matter that some of the economic effects listed here are not Joe’s “fault.” Past experience shows the guy in the Oval Office takes credit or accepts fault for what happened on his watch, at least in most voters’ minds.

This is because while a few economists are voters, very few voters are economists. What the economy feels like at the checkout, at the end of the month, at the pump, matters most and will drive voting choices. So a recent poll found just two percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” with only 16 percent saying they were “good.”

A majority of voters already trust Trump more than Biden on the economy. You can’t just tell the voters they are wrong and that all is actually well when it is not. Bill Clinton called it in 1992, Donald Trump will surely emphasize it this year, but Joe Biden hasn’t heard it yet with the election just about ten months away: It’s the economy, stupid.

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Iowa Shows That ‘Optics’ Are for Losers

Politics

Iowa Shows That ‘Optics’ Are for Losers

State of the Union: Message trumps style.

Credit: picryl

Not much can be said about Iowa that my colleagues here have not already said: This is not your father’s conservative movement, but your great-grandfather’s. Trump is going to be the nominee and, barring extralegal methods and lawfare forcing him to suspend his campaign, he might even win the general election. His messages on foreign policy, law and order, and immigration really do resonate with the masses; all the polls and focus groups are bureaucratic redundancy, a sort of email-class job scheme best ignored. The economy is far, far more important to normal people than big talk about democracy; competent governance and order trump (so to speak) lofty values. No other candidate has the charisma to pull a comeback similar to Trump. The biggest rift in American politics isn’t between the left and right, but between nationalists and internationalists. Finally, and most importantly, a significant part of the American electorate still prefers a besieged man.

Florida’s Ron DeSantis, perhaps America’s most successful conservative governor, destroyed his campaign by listening to his obnoxious online surrogates and mindlessly relitigating Covid lockdowns against Trump. While important, this truth and reconciliation is nowhere close to where the electorate’s current demands are. His lane was consolidating second by targeting everyone below him; instead he chose to do an Icarus. 

Nimarata “Nikki” Haley, on the other hand, has turned into a bizarre mix of Hillary Clinton and the repulsive, perpetually online “debate me” bro. It’s a symptom of quintessential neoconservative brain to be walloped in a contest after near record spending and then to spin it as some sort of a major victory. 

But, as Dan McCarthy explained, at least Haley is a card-carrying neoconservative, a Netflix version of a female John McCain. No one knows where DeSantis even stands at this point, and the longer he ignores hitting Haley for a clear challenger role and instead blathers about Anthony Fauci, not only his current candidacy but his future runs will be questionable. Vivek Ramaswamy, on the other hand, isn’t going anywhere. His votes will be added to pad up the Trump tally, and he will be, in the words of Mark Hemingway, a campaign surrogate to end all surrogates. Naturally gifted with words, Vivek is seeking to consolidate his post-Trump role. A cabinet position that will give him some governing experience, or a role in the D.C. think-tank world, is a better fit for him than a traditional run for governor or senator.

The biggest analytical drawback for liberals and neoconservatives is that they care about optics more than anything else; as a result, their policy solutions hover around the idea that if only you “explain” more, optics would change and results would change. They talk about dangers to democracy while trying to bar the opposition candidate; ignore issues like foreign policy overstretch, which results in open borders, mass migration, and economic distortions including inflation. Unfortunately, when voters ignore that up-market drivel, both liberals and neoconservatives seek external explanations and solutions, from Russia to Resistance. Iowa, once more, however, shows that focusing on “optics” instead of message is for midwits and losers.

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Tuberville: Nikki Haley is a ‘Neocon’

Politics

Tuberville: Nikki Haley is a ‘Neocon’

State of the Union: Senator Tommy Tuberville’s message to the GOP colleagues holding out on Trump.

Credit: lev radin

Senator Tommy Tuberville’s pressure campaign against Pentagon promotions for the military’s abortion policies is over—at least for now. In the meantime, he’s started another pressure campaign, this time against 31 of his Senate GOP colleagues who have yet to get behind former President Donald Trump’s bid for the 2024 nomination. And the Alabama senator had harsh words for one of Trump’s challengers, Nimarata “Nikki” Haley. 

“I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with President Trump,” Tuberville said during a radio interview on “The Jeff Poor Show” on Thursday. “He’s all-in. I’m telling you, he’s looking good. He’s looking younger. He’s out working out harder. Of course, he’s on the road a lot. But, you know, we’ve got to get a lot of people to make their minds up pretty quick here. Yesterday, if you saw, Senator Tom Cotton finally endorsed President Trump. He is the 18th senator. I was the very first senator to endorse him. But we’ve got 31 more Republican Senators—they’ve got to start understanding what’s going on.”

Nevertheless, “President Trump is in good shape,” Tuberville added. “There is about 35-40% that is going to vote for a billy goat on the Democrat side, no matter who they’re running. Obviously, they know that Biden is not running the show—he’s not healthy. But they are still polling and saying they are going to vote for him. That is very concerning.”

As for Haley, Tuberville believes she is a “neocon”:

Nikki Haley is making a push but she’s getting all BlackRock and all the big corporations behind her. A lot of the Democrats are even pushing Nikki Haley because they see their guy can’t make it, Joe Biden. And so, they’re pushing Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley — she is a neocon. She has never seen a war she didn’t like. Joe Biden has got us on the verge of a world war but Nikki Haley, if she were to get in, she would just continue all of that. But she is not going to be our nominee. Donald Trump is going to be it.

What Tuberville says about Haley receiving money from left-wing donors is true. Previously, CEO of JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon urged left-wing donors to donate to Haley’s campaign to stop Trump. Some ultra-wealthy Democratic donors answered the call, such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, per the New York Times. Hoffman donated $250,000 to one of Haley’s super PACs, SFA Fund Inc. Haley also has taken meetings with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, though Fink has since denied that he is backing her. And, of course, there’s been no shortage of TAC coverage on Haley’s disastrous foreign policy ideas.

Tuberville is right: The GOP is Trump’s party. It won’t be long before the former president proves it yet again.

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‘Be All You Can Be’ and the TikTok Mutiny

Culture

‘Be All You Can Be’ and the TikTok Mutiny

The crisis of military readiness is a predictable result of the culture of liberalism.

(Bumble Dee/Shutterstock)

With a recruiting slogan like “Be All You Can Be,” it’s no wonder the Army is enduring a “Tik Tok Mutiny.” When the military—a force built for the ruthless and concentrated application of mass violence—promises self-actualization to Generation Z, why should the country be surprised when those recruits revolt over a military lifestyle of sacrifice and service? 

Multiple news outlets observe a trend of active duty servicemembers in uniform posting complaints about life in the military to popular social media accounts. These soldiers complain about such surprising facts of active-duty life as fitness tests, body composition regulations, and the occasional mediocre field dining. 

Maybe the problem started when potential recruits were encouraged to enlist so they could “Be All You Can Be.” Now they are complaining to their internet audiences because they discovered the military is not really designed for “you.” The military remains, as it always has been, a “we” project. But the Army is stuck in an endless, incoherent loop of presenting military service as a compelling means of self-expression for young Americans addicted to selfies.

Decades ago, Samuel P. Huntington described in The Soldier and the State the tension between the military’s adherence to the functional imperative of military lethality, and the social imperative to serve and defend a contrastingly liberal society. For Huntington—and for too few modern-day defense leaders, senators, or think tank officials—the military must adhere to the values that make the services effective, at the expense of the ideologies, politics, and passions of civil society. 

In 2023, the military missed recruiting goals by a staggering 40,000 recruits. The Pentagon’s capitulation to the social imperative of our increasingly progressive society manifests in declining service commitments. This recruiting crisis continues, even as the Army, in particular, tries to convince young Americans that a career of service is the best way to fulfill your personal potential.

Conservatives should reclaim Huntington’s conception of the institutional military and imbue the recruiting environment with honesty about the sacrifice that makes a life in the military so unique. While the servicemembers who expressed their misgivings with military life have received some justified scrutiny, it’s hard to blame them when they were recruited under the expectation of serving in an institution built for their own self-development. 

To attract more capable recruits who will not pursue influencer status via lifestyle gripes, the military should be direct and honest about the sacrifice and relative hardship that service entails. Army Rangers, for example, are required to spend at least 62 days on 45 to 90 minutes of sleep and two meals a day during training to prove their mettle under the stress of ground combat. 

While typical combat deployments are rarer these days, and very few recruits will ever undergo Ranger training, other units spend 4 to 6 weeks in the California desert to train for the unknown in an uncertain world. In these settings, the food is rarely good, the hours are long, and the physical stress immense. This is a life utterly foreign to a modern America, where almost by default one can live a life of comfort and ease. In fact, a strikingly small percentage of Americans are even eligible for recruitment. The Army should stop lying to them about finding personal achievement through enlistment. 

American boys are coming of age in a rudderless society largely indifferent to their formation as men. There is little need for a boy to learn to fend for himself, and he grows up in a world meant to cater, not challenge. The result of this cultural chaos is increased addiction and early mortality. 

These men are not joining the Army. Recent surveys from the American Principles Project indicate that almost 75% of veterans think the military is too politicized, and almost a third of these veterans would not want their own children to serve. 

The recent “Tik Tok Mutiny” is a sign that young Americans are not buying the military’s spin. In the spirit of Samuel Huntington, the military should appeal to prospective recruits in a spirit of ruthless candor. The message is simple: Join the only team on earth where you can give everything there is to give in exchange for a modest paycheck, preservative-laden food, and long nights at work. And where they can learn that there is more to life than can be expressed in an Instagram post.

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New Year’s Investment Resolution: Bet on Carbon

Economy

New Year’s Investment Resolution: Bet on Carbon

Words disappear into the air, but money talks.

Credit: Mark Geistweite

In investment, the adage has it, the trend is your friend. If the trend is with you—think internet stocks in the last three decades—chances are, if you stay with the herd of bulls, you’ll make money. So what’s the trend, in 2024 and beyond, for carbon fuels? (Okay, The American Conservative is not known as an investment sheet, and yet every conservative should be familiar with political economy, the self-evident point that investment, up or down—and anything else to do with money—occurs within a political context.)

To listen to the words coming out of the COP 28 climate change conference that wrapped up in Dubai on December 12, one might think that the trend for carbon fuels is bearish. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said of the final communique, “The decision embraces transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems so as to achieve net-zero by 2050.” Indeed, Kerry added, in a hat-tip to harder-core greens, “we will continue to press for a more rapid transition.” (Emphasis added.)

With money in mind, we might further consider the words of Jennifer Morgan, the American-born Greenpeace activist who is Germany’s chief diplomat on climate: “Every investor should understand now that the future investments that are profitable and long-term are renewable energy—and investing in fossil fuels is a stranded asset.” We can see that the greens have learned to talk the language of the other green. Who would want to invest in carbon fuels if political economics necessitates that the assets will be stranded, left in the ground?  

In fact, ExxonMobil stock fell more than five percent during the COP conference; it’s now about 15 percent lower than it was in September. The green agenda is clear: badmouth carbon energy to talk down business confidence, thereby depressing, and ultimately stifling, investment in carbon fuels. Given that environmentalists are well on their way to pastoralizing Germany—the Morgenthau Plan coming late, and self-imposed!—it’s possible that the greens will succeed in their global mission. Without a doubt, greens and their media allies will be touting, and spinning, COP28 for a long time to come. Sample headline: “COP28 Climate Deal Marks ‘Beginning of the End’ for Fossil Fuels.” 

But there’s just one thing. What if Kerry, Morgan, and the greens are wrong? What if the trend, outside of the echo-chamber West, is actually in favor of carbon fuels among the 150 or more countries—including China and India—that don’t take their cues from the New York Times and the Guardian?  

Late last year, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser took note of rising coal usage, quipping, “If you think about it, we are transitioning to coal.” In fact, we are burning a lot of coal: World coal production is rising. If we drill down we further see that China is far and away the biggest burner, with no end in sight. The communist regime is happy to sell us solar panels, which they produce with coal-fired electricity. 

To be sure, coal use in the U.S. is down—coal-happy India recently overtook America—and yet new coal mines are opening around the world, from China (of course) to Australia to Africa. Even the United Kingdom has opened one. So when Kerry said, post–COP 28, “The first and easiest thing that countries need to do to make this commitment a reality is to stop building new unabated coal,” it’s evident that countries are not stopping. And if they aren’t doing the “first and easiest thing” to get to net zero, where does that leave everything else? We can step back and observe: So long as a person is eating eclairs, there’s no need to take their protestations about a weight-loss diet seriously. 

In fact, world oil production is also movin’ on up. So is natural gas. Indeed, even the U.S. is part of this upward carbonward trend. In the words of Bloomberg News on December 21, “The US consolidated its position as the world’s largest oil producer, with daily output increasing 200,000 barrels last week to the highest in data going back to 1983.” The news service quoted energy analyst Tamas Varga: “It has become blatantly evident that predictions of stuttering growth in US shale production after the Covid-19 pandemic have been misplaced.”  

To be sure, the Biden Administration did come into office with grand plans to decarbonize, and yes, it fought what it deemed to be the good fight to kibosh drilling and burning, and with some successes. Yet the animal spirits of capitalism and energy hunger, helped along by Republicans in Congress, are winning out. American oil production is now at an all-time high. 

So we’re starting to see the difference between the words of Western officialdom and the deeds of the world’s energy producers and consumers. Carbon fuels are here to stay. Yes, nuclear power is making a comeback, and yes, solar is doing well (wind, not so much), but the world is voraciously hungry for energy. Notably, such post-industrial functions as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are energy hogs on a par with steel mills. Microsoft, for instance, wants to build nuclear power plants just to service its A.I. operations.    

So the whole notion that non-carbon renewables are “the wave of the future” is starting to look like mere backwash. Most likely, we’ll have “all of the above” energy systems coexisting for a long time. Maybe forever.  

But won’t we run out of some energy? What about “peak oil”, Which has been variously prophesied as happening in 1922, 1960, 1971, and so on? So now here’s a possibility that the world’s eco-energy establishment hasn’t yet come to grips with: Carbon fuels, too, are renewable. How so? It’s more than possible that the earth is actively making carbon fuels. The “abiogenic” hypothesis holds that production stems from the vulcanism of the earth, not dead dinosaurs. If we consider that the earth’s core—diameter, 1500 miles—is the same temperature as the surface of the sun, we can start to see how that much heat could crack carbon, the planet itself being Mother Nature’s own beneficent refinery. So, quite possibly, the “fossil fuel” label is a misnomer, to be regarded as one more bit of rhetorical sleight of hand aimed at convincing people that carbon fuels belong on the ash heap of history. 

The abiogenic theory goes all the way back to the 16th century metallurgist Georgius Agricola—with assists from such other legends as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table in chemistry. If it’s true, that explains why we keep finding more carbon fuels; since 1970 oil reserves around the world have tripled. Importantly, reserves is a technical term regarding the current-moment political economics of oil production; the better, broader, term is resources—the actual amount of stuff in the ground. 

Of course, not all the energy is in the ground; a lot of it is in the ocean. Frozen at the sea bottom are quadrillions of dollars’ worth of methane hydrates. And, speaking of energy resources with no connection to fossils that we know of, we can add the oodles of methane, aka natural gas, on Mars and on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. That’s just what we know about, extraterrestrially.  

To get a measure of resources closer to home, we can look to the Institute for Energy Research, which finds that the U.S. boasts oil resources totaling 2.9 trillion barrels. At the current price of around $75 bbl, that’s a tad more than $217 trillion. That dollar total is more than six times the U.S. national debt, and about eight times our GDP. Given that much wealth, with deficits and all, is it really to be expected that we’re going to leave it in the ground? Maybe Massachusetts will, but Texas won’t.  

Indeed, once Americans figure out that the whole country could be like Alaska—where last year each resident received a dividend of $3,284 from the oil-based Alaska Permanent Fund—the pressure to not strand it, to not leave it in the ground will be, shall we say, beyond the power of the greens to shut down. Interestingly, the U.S. is not uniquely blessed with such wealth; this country accounts for less than two percent of the earth’s surface; there’s plenty of everything everywhere else, too. Drilling or digging it out is just a matter of political economy—capital goes where it’s safe to go. 

Ah, but what about climate change? If there’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there’s a simple enough solution: take it out. That’s what trees and other green plants have been doing for a good long time, at no cost to us. And there are other mechanisms, as well, for carbon capture, as this author has detailed in the pages of TAC, here, here, and here. Just in October in Foreign Affairs, Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, offered a grand-strategic vision of carbon-fuel production and carbon capture (and a pro-American industry “foreign pollution fee” on China to boot).

Carbon capture and carbon utilization epitomize the circular economy thinking that the greens should love. Yet for now, they don’t. As Politico’s “Power Switch” newsletter explained on December 18, adding its own worried tone, “An idea scientists once envisioned would help remove small amounts of carbon from the atmosphere is steadily being built up as a global excuse to keep on burning fossil fuels.”

Well yes, that is kind of the point: The world is looking for excuses to keep on burning carbon fuels. And those excuses can be summed up in one word: money. So much money—zillions of dollars, under the ground, at the ocean bottom, and even in space—that the chances of the world not using it are close to nil. What a friend we have in carbon! That’s the way to bet, and for those interested in following the money, that’s the way to invest. 

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Enforce the Robinson-Patman Act for a Fairer Economy

Politics

Enforce the Robinson-Patman Act for a Fairer Economy

The RPA is merely in a dormant state, and thus ready and capable of being revived and vigorously enforced.

Credit: Boston Public Library

Nobody likes bullies. Bullies take from others what is not theirs and frequently make unreasonable demands that give them preferential privileges by depriving someone of something valuable—the taking of another student’s lunch money is the quintessential example. In a safe school environment, bullies must face disciplinary action. Such restrictions allow students to attend school without fear, ultimately fostering beneficial social interactions instead of destructive ones. Students, therefore, are not allowed to engage in any kind of social interaction they desire. Instead, some kinds of social interactions are proscribed so that others may flourish. No one questions that such restrictions are prudent. 

Antitrust laws operate similarly as a democratic codification of anti-bullying in the marketplace. For example, firms are not able to “compete” by using any method of competition they conceive. Property destruction, depriving dependent firms of an essential resource, or using privileged access to capital to price goods below cost to kill off rivals are all practices prohibited by our antitrust laws. These laws, in other words, channel corporate operations in a specific direction to compete fairly as based on commonly understood notions of morality.

The resurgence in antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration is a significant departure from every prior administration since the 1970s. Among other laudable actions, the Department of Justice has initiated a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google that could restructure the entire digital advertising industry. The Federal Trade Commission has also initiated a rule to ban all non-compete agreements in the United States, liberating workers to choose a new employer and facilitating potentially over $300 billion in increased wages. The Biden administration can continue advancing its indelible mark on the arc of antitrust history and promote fairness and anti-bullying in our economy by reviving pioneering 1930s legislation that is little used today: the Robinson-Patman Act. Fortunately, the administration is already making strides to do just that.

In 1936, Congress committed to anti-bullying and market fairness when it enacted the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA). At the time of its enactment, the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression, and the marketplace was dominated by powerful chain stores. Unlike local businesses, which are owned by members of the community, chain stores operate multiple outlets. In the 1930s, chain stores like JCPenney, Woolworths, Sears, and the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (more commonly known as A&P) operated thousands of outlets, designating them as some of the largest retailers in the world. By the middle of the 1930s, chain stores controlled approximately 25 percent of all retail sales and nearly 60 percent of grocery sales in the United States.

The success of the chain stores, however, was not solely the result of realizing economies of scale or pricing based on actual gains in efficiency of their operations. Instead, the chain stores decided to use their sheer size and purchasing power to coerce other dependent suppliers to give them highly preferential pricing. The discriminatory pricing the chain stores were able to obtain allowed them to unfairly crush their independent rivals. These chain stores were antithetical to the Jeffersonian conception of open markets, which centered around locally owned businesses that created economic opportunities, provided many options for consumers to purchase goods, and recycled wealth into their communities. To correct the distortion of America’s political economy created by the chain stores, Congress enacted the RPA.

The RPA’s proscriptions are straightforward: Firms must offer equal prices for purchased or sold goods, and variations in pricing are restricted to those based on actual cost differences, such as cost variations related to transportation or manufacturing, as opposed to some arbitrary decision. Critically, this means that dominant buyers like Amazon or Walmart must receive substantially similar pricing as a mom-and-pop store. In other words, powerful firms like Amazon cannot be bullies and use their sheer corporate size or privileged access to capital to demand or obtain discriminatory prices and terms from their suppliers. As one member of Congress cogently stated during the legislative debates preceding its enactment, the RPA was meant to establish “equal opportunity and fair play which…guarantees the integrity and wholesomeness of local community life against corruption and impoverishment.”

Despite the RPA’s sensible restrictions, it has attracted more criticism than any other antitrust law. The RPA is the most despised antitrust law enacted by Congress. A cursory glance at the literature describing the RPA allows one to witness the breadth of disparagements available in the English language. The RPA is described variously as the “Typhoid Mary of antitrust, a “hodge-podge of confusion,” and “one of the most tortuous legislative pronouncements ever.”

The near-reflexive criticisms of the RPA reveal a desire to promote a narrow conception of “competition” that heavily favors coercion by dominant corporations unfairly wielding their financial and market might. Critics of the RPA would like to see the law fully repealed based on the belief that the law prevents ostensibly beneficial competition and increases prices for consumers. Indeed, the law itself has been repeatedly described as “anticompetitive.” These assertions are either incorrect or distressingly deceptive. 

Instance after instance shows the need to restrict the conduct of powerful buyers through vigorous enforcement of the RPA and the deleterious effects of not doing so. None are more evident or notorious than the actions of Amazon and Walmart. Both leviathans are owned by some of the wealthiest individuals in human history and represent trillions in market capitalization and hundreds of billions in annual sales. 

Concerning Walmart, at a 2017 conference held in their Arkansas headquarters, the company flatly demanded that suppliers like Unilever and Kraft Heinz reduce their costs by 15 percent. During this period as well, Walmart leveraged its buyer power by repeatedly heightening its on-time delivery requirements from its suppliers. Starting in 2017, Walmart demanded a 75 percent on-time delivery rate. By 2020, in the middle of the tumultuous COVID-19 pandemic, the mandatory rate rose to 98 percent. 

In an effort to demonstrate its power, Walmart executives stated in a 2022 meeting that it would refuse to accept new price increases from suppliers. Indeed, historical accounts reveal that Walmart has routinely demanded that its suppliers reduce their costs by five percent annually. A 2005 book succinctly described Walmart as so enormous “it can (and does!) demand just about anything it wants from its vendors, from deeper-than-usual discounts to downright disadvantageous shipping policy to enforced returns on slow-moving merchandise.”

In regards to Amazon, journalist Brad Stone in 2004 detailed the company’s program to squeeze preferential prices from its most vulnerable dependents, which Amazon called the Gazelle Project—named to describe how a cheetah hunts and kills gazelles. In 2018, reports surfaced that Amazon was flagrantly demanding preferential pricing and terms from suppliers like Procter & Gamble to ensure its prices were the absolute lowest available on the internet. 

Suppliers incapable of capitulating to Amazon’s or Walmart’s bullying comes with severe punishment, such as being thrown out as a supplier, arbitrarily being imposed penalties, or, in the case of Amazon, products being demoted in online search rankings. For suppliers dependent on Walmart or Amazon, the choice is to capitulate to their demands or be shut out of the market. 

Rather than engage in socially beneficial competition, this kind of conduct by Walmart and Amazon is highly corrosive to our political economy. While the prices may be low on Amazon or Walmart, due to a phenomenon known as the “waterbed effect,” suppliers, seeking to make up for their lost margins by offering favorable terms to Amazon, are likely forced to raise their prices for other, less powerful firms. This circumstance creates a snowball effect where because Amazon has the lowest prices, consumers are dissuaded from shopping elsewhere and then shift even more of their buying to Amazon, which entrenches the company’s dominant market position further, giving it even more clout to demand privileged pricing and higher prices for everyone else. Amazon then can kill off its competitors by wielding its sheer size and access to preferential terms. 

As revealed in the landmark 1934 report by the Federal Trade Commission that led to the enactment of the RPA, it was precisely this kind of conduct that allowed the chain stores of the 1930s to crush their independent rivals and monopolize local markets. Other consequences of allowing firms to exercise their buyer power at will has also led to lower wages for workers. This behavior also has bad effects for the consumer: By killing off smaller, less privileged competitors, consumers have reduced access and choice for products.

By proscribing buyer coercion and discriminatory pricing, instead of stifling competition entirely, the RPA shifts market competition. As opposed to allowing firms like Amazon or Walmart to wield their colossal size against their suppliers to obtain preferential terms, the corporations can lower their profit margins or operate more efficiently to obtain lower prices. Both corporations can buy products from suppliers in bigger volumes to obtain a lower per unit price—a practice the RPA encourages so long as the discounts are constructed equitably. Walmart can invest more to expand its transportation and delivery network to allow suppliers to charge the company lower prices due to real differences in cost. Amazon can engage in additional internal expansion of its operations by hiring more workers and building its own manufacturing infrastructure to produce its own products in-house. Both companies can focus more of their resources on improving the quality of their products or becoming more attractive workplaces to obtain the best industry talent. 

By encouraging a firm to allocate more of its resources into expanding its productive capacity or providing more product choice for consumers or more jobs for workers, the restrictions imposed by the RPA, while inhibiting one method of competition, promote using others that benefit the public. It also facilitates investment by firms and leverages genuine economic efficiencies while curtailing a dominant firm’s predatory tactics. 

The RPA, while not a perfect law, is a sensible statute addressing a clear problem. In the words of the former FTC Commissioner Philip Elman, “Congress sought to assure that the prohibition of price discrimination would not prevent the development of efficient distribution methods or deprive buyers of the rewards of lower prices which are the incentives for seeking more efficient methods.” 

Indeed, when it was once a keystone in America’s competition law regime between the 1940s and 1970s, the RPA assisted with channeling corporate conduct into precisely this kind of socially beneficial competition. During the height of its enforcement in the 1960s, when the FTC initiated over 500 actions, the RPA worked alongside other strict prohibitions from antitrust laws to structure the economy to ensure socially beneficial competition. For example, scholarly literature recounts how companies like DuPont, American Can, and IBM—some of the largest corporations of their era—all plowed significant financial resources into research and development after incurring repeated antitrust lawsuits.

Further, there is scant evidence that the RPA leads to higher consumer prices. However, in spite of the exceptionally limited number of empirical studies on the RPA, one study has actually shown that the RPA increases price competition. This result intuitively makes sense. If firms are receiving nearly identical prices for the goods they are purchasing, other channels of competition, such as lowering margins, increasing product quality, or offering additional marketing services become more viable and meaningful.

Moreover, regardless of the ephemeral potential of price increases, the drafters of the RPA explicitly stated that higher prices were worth it if they facilitated fairness in the economy and restrained undue corporate power. Representative Wright Patman stated that Congress designed his namesake bill to facilitate “low prices…consistent with good prices to the wage earner who converts that raw material into the finished product for retail distribution.” In other words, when Congress enacted the RPA, it consciously chose to ensure fair treatment, prices, and wages took primacy over low prices for their own sake. 

Despite the existence of such violative conduct from firms like Walmart and Amazon, along with the potency of the RPA and its enforcement benefits, why has the federal government not initiated blockbuster lawsuits? The answer is that since the 1970s, the defense bar and libertarian Chicago School economists engaged in a highly successful campaign to systematically dismantle the antitrust laws by marketing a demonstrably false narrative and asserting they were designed to almost solely focus on low prices to consumers under the moniker of “consumer welfare.” One of their prime targets was the RPA. Liberals like Ralph Nader also took particular umbrage against RPA enforcement on the grounds that the law was complicated, provided “questionable value” to consumers, and, because it was being enforced too vigorously, symbolized organizational incompetence at the FTC. These simultaneous efforts set the stage for significant retrenchment of RPA enforcement.

After obtaining prominent enforcement positions in the federal government in the 1970s and publishing a widely circulated report, Chicago School sympathizers directed the DOJ to completely abandon enforcement of the RPA. As with the DOJ, enforcement from the FTC precipitously dropped in the 1970s, with the last lawsuit from the agency during the Clinton administration. A scathing 1972 report published by Ralph Nader and his “raiders” also asserted that the RPA should be repealed unless enforcement was substantially curtailed.

Since the 1970s as well, the Chicago School has successfully convinced the Supreme Court to weaken the RPA and the antitrust laws more generally by restricting its application and imposing substantial legal burdens on private plaintiffs, making litigation significantly harder and more expensive. Moreover, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which effectively serve as mouthpieces for the defense bar, also continue to peddle highly distorted narratives about the RPA in all likelihood to maintain the status quo and thwart any potential action by the administration as they know that without the firepower of the federal government, RPA claims against companies like Amazon and Walmart are unlikely to prevail.

The wholesale abandonment of RPA enforcement from the federal government by such a miscarriage of prosecutorial discretion is fundamentally at odds with Congress’s intent and the rule of law. Nevertheless, Congress has not repealed the RPA, and historical attempts at such action have been repeatedly rejected. In other words, the RPA is merely in a dormant state, and thus ready and capable of being revived and vigorously enforced. 

The Biden administration has already taken several steps to restore the RPA, including initiating two FTC investigations, issuing a short guidance document, and giving speeches detailing the RPA’s goals. Based on these recent actions from Biden administration officials, there is clearly an overwhelming eagerness to initiate an enforcement action. Marketplace bullies like Amazon and Walmart should be on notice that their unfair practices could soon face heavy condemnation. Such a lawsuit cannot come soon enough and should be openly welcomed.

This article is part of the “American System” series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Nimarata the Piñata

Politics

Nimarata the Piñata

Nimarata “Nikki” Haley was attacked on Wednesday night—not because she’s a strong target, but because she’s an easy one.

There is supposedly a law of political debates that posits that a candidate being attacked is rising. That is nonsense for two reasons. First, candidates are much more concerned with making themselves look good and will attack any opponent to do so. Second, sometimes a candidate gets hit not because they’re winning, but because they deserve to get hit. 

Such was the case for Nimarata “Nikki” Haley in Wednesday night’s debate. Sure, she’s increased her share in the national polls by 3 percent over the last two months and change, but that’s mostly due to other right-liberals, establishment Republicans, and Cold Warriors getting out of the race. Wednesday’s hatchet job of Haley had very little to do with her so-called rise (in the same period, Trump’s numbers have increased by more than five points), and much more to do with the fact that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy saw they could score easy points by deservedly dunking on Haley for her views on transgenderism and foreign policy.

From the start, DeSantis’s and Ramaswamy’s guns were trained on Haley—it appears she left her ammunition heels at home. When DeSantis fielded the first question from moderator Megyn Kelly, the governor said, “I have delivered results. That’s what we need for this country. And you have other candidates up here like Nikki Haley. She caves anytime the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her. I did a bill in Florida to stop the gender mutilation of minors. It’s child abuse and it’s wrong. She opposes that bill. She thinks it’s fine and the law shouldn’t get involved with it.”

“If you’re not willing to stand up and say that it is wrong to mutilate these kids, then you’re not going to fight for the people back home,” DeSantis said in conclusion. “I will fight for you and I will win for you.”

Kelly’s next question was for Haley, and even she got in on the fun. Kelly noted that Haley had $100,000 in the bank when she left the Trump administration in 2018, and five years later, is reportedly worth $8 million “thanks to lucrative corporate speeches and board memberships, like you had with Boeing.” Kelly expanded the connections to Haley’s campaign: “Weeks ago you met with Wall Street heavyweights including leaders from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. Several other billionaire investors are reportedly ready to endorse you or recently have, all of which comes with expectations.”

Kelly got to the question: “Aren’t you too tight with the banks and the billionaires to win over the GOP working class base, which mostly wants to break the system, not elect someone beholden to it?”

Haley dodged the question and turned to DeSantis’s criticism, but she did not really address that either. Instead, she talked about the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, which she called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and which is not the bill that banned the mutilation of children in Florida.

DeSantis was quick to seize on Haley’s confusion. “You didn’t respond to the criticism. It wasn’t about the parents’ rights education bill. It was about prohibiting sex change operations on minors,” DeSantis explained. “That is what Nikki Haley opposed. She said the law shouldn’t get involved in that…. If you’re somebody that’s going to be the President of the United States and you can’t stand up against child abuse, how are you going to be able to stand up for anything?”

When it was Ramaswamy’s turn to speak, he returned to the question Haley thought she dodged from Kelly. “Nikki, you were bankrupt when you left the U.N. After you left the U.N., you became a military contractor.” Haley also joined the board of Boeing, and has toured the country giving speeches for tens of thousands of dollars. “Now you’re a multimillionaire,” Ramaswamy said. “That math does not add up. It adds up to the fact that you are corrupt.” Later, Ramaswamy would hold up a sketchpad with a handwritten note: “NIKKI = CORRUPT.”

Haley did eventually respond to the question Kelly originally posed. “I love Boeing. They build good commercial airplanes. They build airplanes for our Air Force. I’m proud of them,” Haley rejoined. “In terms of these donors that are supporting me, they’re just jealous. They wish that they were supporting them.”

Foreign policy quickly overwhelmed the debate. In truth, the bulk of Wednesday’s debate focused on other nations’ issues and not America’s—the rising cost of living, the economy, falling wages, the price of health care, education, and immigration (beyond the cartels and illegals).

One moderator posed another question to Haley: “You said in last month’s debate that, by contrast to the Biden administration’s approach to Iran, you would, ‘punch them once and punch them hard.’ Were you saying that it’s time to bomb Iran?”

“No, I was not saying it’s time to bomb Iran,” Haley replied. Then there was the ‘but.’ “But I will tell you, I dealt with Iran every day when I was at the United Nations and they only respond to strength.… What they don’t respond to, is when they do 140 strikes on our men and women in Syria and Iraq, and we do nothing but just some small shots back. You’ve got to punch them, you’ve got to punch them hard, and let them know that. That’s the only way they’re going to respond.” 

Haley claims she does not want to put boots on the ground in Israel or Ukraine. She’s also said sanctions don’t go far enough. How else should a reasonable person interpret this other than Haley is disingenuous when she says she doesn’t want to bomb Iran? Haley says not to worry because she would only strike “their infrastructure in Syria and Iraq.” But if Haley believes Hamas’s attack on Israel in October was an attack on America, can the Iranians employ that same logic?

Furthermore, Haley’s response demonstrates what she’s made abundantly clear on the trail: She has no conception of escalatory action. When Haley says Iran would “respond,” she assumes the Ayatollahs would just roll over. But, as Haley pointed out, actors in the region have the capabilities to strike over-extended U.S. forces in the region with ease. It is a target rich environment: the U.S. has 40,000 service members stationed in the Middle East. How many U.S. service members have to die for Haley to show the Ayatollahs that girls can do anything boys can do?

Haley then lays out quite the conspiracy: Russia, China, and Iran are essentially working in lockstep to destroy America. Hamas’s invasion of Israel, she implied, was a birthday present to Putin: “Hamas goes and invades Israel and butchers those people on Putin’s birthday.” She continued,

There is no one happier right now than Putin because all the attention America had on Ukraine suddenly went to Israel, and that’s what they were hoping is going to happen.… There is a reason again that Taiwanese want to help Ukrainians because they know if Ukraine wins, China won’t invade Taiwan. There’s a reason the Ukrainians want to help Israelis because they know that if Iran wins, Russia wins. These are all connected.

“Foreign policy experience is not the same as foreign policy wisdom,” Ramaswamy interjected. “I think those with foreign policy experience, one thing that Joe Biden and Nikki Haley have in common, is that neither of them could even state for you three provinces in eastern Ukraine that they want to send our troops to actually fight for.”

The camera panned to Haley. Her chin was tilted down, her eyes locked on a 1,000 yard stare.

“Look at that,” Ramaswamy said. “This is what I want people to understand.… She has no idea what the hell the names of those provinces are, but she wants to send our sons and daughters and our troops and our military equipment to go fight it. So reject this myth that they’ve been selling you that somebody had a cup of coffee stint at the U.N. and then makes 8 million bucks after has real foreign policy experience.”

Eventually, Chris Christie (yes, he was there too) white knighted Haley, which is about the only combat Christie is fit for. For four minutes and five seconds, Haley could not name three provinces in eastern Ukraine America’s sons and daughters would be forced to defend. Eventually, she said “Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.” That’s the wrong answer. The right answer would be Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. The only scenario in which Crimea is part of the answer is if you fantasize leading the U.S. into WWIII.

Apparently, Haley fantasizes about just that. After the debate, Kelly interviewed her one on one and continued the conversation about Ukraine. “The way you end Ukraine is if you went and said to Ukraine, we will invite you into NATO,” Haley proclaimed. “Putin would know he needs to come up with an exit strategy, Zelensky would know he can go back and say we got the invitation.”

Is Haley delusional? Kelly stated the obvious: “If Putin does continue fighting with Ukraine, and they come into NATO, then we have to fight.”

Haley’s response had much more to do with what is best for Ukraine and Israel than what is best for America. “The Ukrainians and Israelis, they don’t want American troops,” Haley replied. “They want to win this on their own. They want to win their countries on their own. I don’t think we should ever give cash to any country,” and, prompted by Kelly, added “no troops.” The trouble for Haley, of course, is that under Biden, the U.S. already has support personnel on the ground and continues spending billions just to keep the Ukrainian government afloat. 

As Ramaswamy said, “[Haley] is a woman who will send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house.” Sadly for Haley, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. won’t be on the market.

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Vivek the Warmonger?

Politics

Vivek the Warmonger?

Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy believes that the country is in a cold civil war that his opponents—minus one—can’t see, and that he’s the only candidate who can win it.

Vivek Ramaswamy has done well for himself. Ten months ago, most Americans didn’t know the successful entrepreneur’s name, let alone how to pronounce it. Since then, he has launched a bid to become the GOP’s presidential nominee come 2024. Now, he’s a household name. 

That’s certainly the case for my household—when my mother calls me up from California and wants to talk shop, the only candidate she asks about more than Vivek Ramaswamy is Donald Trump. He currently averages fourth in GOP primary polling, according to 538, climbing as high as third in August, when he was just about 2.5 points behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Without Ramaswamy’s involvement, most of the primary-related activities thus far would not have been worth watching. He’s had some phenomenal moments—from Chris Christie rebuffing his attempt at giving him a hug on stage, to taking aim at the ex-Boeing board member and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s girlboss warmongering, to offering RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel his time if she wanted to announce her resignation. In substance, the man most similar to Trump in the field might still be the governor of Florida, but in style, which matters just as much if not more to voters, it is Ramaswamy. Yet while the DeSantis campaign has decided to accentuate the differences between DeSantis and Trump, the Ramaswamy campaign, it seems, has attempted to minimize them.

Thomas Klingenstein, an author, playwright, and philanthropist, recently conducted a phone interview with Ramaswamy during which the 2024 hopeful showed the fighting spirit that made America First a movement, not a moment. Whether he can lead that movement is up to voters to decide.

Klingenstein started off by characterizing the difference he perceives between Vivek and the other candidates: “The crucial distinction between you and your competitors: You think we are in a war and your competitors do not. Most of your competitors would probably say that we’re in a period of unusual division, but not war.”

“We are absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake. And you had better know it,” Ramaswamy responded. “If you don’t recognize that you are in a war, then you will negotiate with the other side, but that will only lead ultimately to surrender.”

The stakes could not be higher, Ramaswamy claims. “If we lose this war, we will have full-fledged tyranny.” As for his update on the front, Ramaswamy said, “Those who hate America are in power practically everywhere. In effect, the woke regime is a hostile occupying power not so different than Germany when it occupied France during WWII. Now, we need someone to lead the resistance.” In other words, our nation has indeed been conquered, but its spirit has not.

The only other candidate that understands this war, much less knows it is happening, Ramaswamy told Klingenstein, is Trump: “He knows we are up against an enemy that doesn’t want to improve America but destroy it. I give Trump a lot of credit for this. In a war you must have clarity, you can’t be beating around the bush.”

The other candidates fail to see what Ramaswamy and Trump see “because they are stuck in the past, stuck in old ways of thinking,” Ramaswamy claimed. “What they think they see is that we’re going through one of the ups and downs that America has gone through time and again but has always found its way through. They can’t imagine that this time she may well not.”

In Ramaswamy’s mind, it’s no accident that the only candidates that did not hold political office before running for president are the only ones to understand the threat. The rest of the candidates “are all establishment politicians, so they tend to follow the crowd and they want to be liked by the establishment; they want to be interviewed by mainstream media and invited to establishment think tank events,” Ramaswamy said. “But there’s another more important reason why Republican leaders shrink from acknowledging that we are at war. Like most people, political leaders have a strong inclination to delude themselves rather than face harsh truths. I think if we don’t face these truths, we will lose our country.”

When Klingenstein asked Ramaswamy about other specific candidates, Ramaswamy did have nice things to say about DeSantis, whom he said is “very competent.”

“He has done a good job in Florida but he does not connect with voters all that well. A leader not only has to accomplish things, he or she must inspire people. This is not Governor DeSantis’s strong suit, and he is likely to buckle under pressure when the Republican establishment wants to go to war,” Ramaswamy continued. “He did that with Ukraine. He first expressed skepticism about the war in Ukraine but then he effectively changed his mind after coming under Republican pressure.” 

“All that said, I would consider DeSantis for a domestic position in my administration. As I said, he is competent,” Ramaswamy added. 

As for how Ramaswamy would wage his war, the GOP hopeful told Klingenstein that “get[ting] rid of the Department of Education, which is using $80 billion a year to effectively force schools to adopt the DEI, anti-American curriculum” is a start. 

“That’s what Republicans have been saying for decades,” Klingenstein replied. “It never happens.”

“There has just been an absence of will and an uncooperative Supreme Court. Both have changed,” Ramaswamy responded. “The crisis has never been as great as it is now. Parents across the country of all political persuasions see that the educational system—starting at the top—is weaponized against their kids.” If it doesn’t happen now, it likely never will.

“I say in all sincerity, ‘good luck,’” Klingenstein answered.

The Department of Education isn’t the only government entity Ramaswamy would scrap. Ramaswamy wants to be the Robespierre of the administrative state and, in Klingenstein’s words, “cut head count in the administrative state by 75 percent.” Ramaswamy confirmed that is the case and said that it “sounds like a lot, but with the necessary resolve, and a team of committed lawyers, trust me, it can be done.”

Firing government employees is easier said than done, however, as Klingenstein observed. “Under some conditions, mass layoffs are permissible,” Ramaswamy claimed. “The president already has the authority to shut down agencies, and that’s just what I’ll do.”

“These are war times. War requires bold action. Citizens must understand that it is the administrative state that carves the channels through which wokeness flows. It is the administrative state that executes the woke agenda,” Ramaswamy continued. “The war I wage as the next president will not be against non-threatening foreign states, it will be against the administrative state and that most definitely includes our security apparatus, which, as we saw in the Trump administration, has been weaponized by the woke Left.”

But the most pressing question currently facing the Ramaswamy campaign isn’t what are you going to do with the Department of Education? or how many bureaucrats are you going to fire and how are you going to do that? The biggest question Ramaswamy’s campaign faces is why should Republican voters choose him over the former president?

Klingenstein asked the question pointedly: “Why not vote for Trump? You say he also understands we are in a war.”

“Because I would be a better commander-in-chief,” Ramaswamy responded. “Trump understands that we are in a war, but he can’t explain how this war works. I can. I am young and full of energy. Being young, I have an appreciation of what much of the country is going through.”

Will voters be satisfied with that answer? Maybe. Is it enough to get them to change their vote from Trump to Ramaswamy? Probably not, likely because such an answer doesn’t exist.

Ramaswamy is fading a bit now in the polls. Haley has surpassed Ramaswamy, but not because she has trained her ‘ammunition’ heels (whatever that means) on his campaign and shot it down. Rather, Haley’s brief rise—and it will be brief—is due to the culling of neocon and cold-warrior candidates (remember Asa Hutchinson?). No, the source of Ramaswamy’s current woes is that Trump continues to surge. Since Vivek’s current peak in August, Trump’s polling numbers have increased ten points—nearly double Ramaswamy’s drop.

“Even you would have to admit that you are a long shot to win the Republican presidential nomination,” Klingenstein said in closing. When Ramaswamy replied, “America is the land of long shots,” Klingenstein admired his optimism. To which Ramaswamy rejoined, “America is also the land of optimism.”

Ramaswamy certainly has reason for optimism, just not for the race he currently finds himself in. And while other candidates ruin their names and credibility in a vain attempt to take Trump down, Republican voters will likely think the Ramaswamy name (which they now can pronounce) is a good one long into the future.

But nothing beats the real thing.

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Whiggism Is Still Wrong

Politics

Whiggism Is Still Wrong

Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to “make hard work cool again.” He isn’t the first.

Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to “make hard work cool again.” The long-shot Republican candidate has been visiting places GOP politicians typically avoid, like college campuses, preaching the supposedly countercultural virtue of toil. His messaging won’t win him the nomination, much less address the crises of the American labor market. Yet they are a striking reminder of the stability of Whig ideology in our political life across nearly 200 years.

Whig ideology—or “the Whig Counter-Reformation,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it—denies the existence of enduring social classes in the United States, or else suggests that there are no enduring conflicts between the classes. Social misery is the product of either rare misfortune or the failure of indolent individuals to seize opportunity. And reform isn’t a matter of redressing imbalances in power through politics. No, it’s the heart or “the culture” that has to be reformed. Hard work has to be made “cool again,” as Ramaswamy says.

In framing things this way, Ramaswamy stands in an old tradition. Whig ideology was the response mounted by America’s market elites to the Jacksonian uprising. For decades since the Founding, America’s market system had chugged along, industrializing the economy, proletarianizing its once-independent working men, and imposing enormous new stresses on the yeomanry. But it wasn’t until the crash of 1819 that the frustrations of the many, and their sense of vulnerability relative to the few, congealed into what then–Secretary of War John C. Calhoun described memorably as a “general mass of disaffection.”

Not unlike Donald Trump in 2015-16, Andrew Jackson was the unlikely outsider who gave voice to the disaffected. His 1824 presidential bid began as a ruse by local oligarchs against their enemies in his native Tennessee but soon resonated nationally. Old Hickory, who had been left in debt by his own failed stint as a land speculator, blamed paper money and banks for the people’s suffering. Blocked by the “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in 1824, Jackson clinched the presidency four years later. His anger soon found a more specific target in the imperious Second Bank of the United States. The BUS was a private, profiteering institution that was chartered and partially funded by Congress but that strenuously resisted democratic control. This, although it effectively acted as a central bank and disciplined the flow of credit by buying and holding—or selling and demanding specie for—the paper notes of much weaker state banks.

Jackson’s anti-Bank message resonated with broad ranks of American society (although the exact share of the population that supported Jackson’s Bank War has long been contested by historians). Western and Southern smallholders, urban workers in the North, and smaller capitalists everywhere who felt excluded by the establishment rallied to the Jacksonian cause, as did reformist intellectuals like Orestes Brownson, George Bancroft, William Leggett, Frances “Fanny” Wright, William Cullen Bryant, and so on.

Jackson’s “solution” to the tyranny of the BUS was small government: Another old pattern in American history is the libertarian conviction that often goes hand-in-hand with populist sentiment. Jackson, while in some respects an expansive nationalist, was in others a Jeffersonian strict constructionist. He had long believed that “the congress has no constitutional power to grant a charter…of paper issues,” as he told his Democratic senatorial ally (and one-time duel opponent) Thomas Hart Benton. So he vetoed the Bank’s charter when it came up for renewal, and then proceeded to remove federal taxpayer funds from its coffers, placing them instead in select state banks, the so-called pets.

For our purposes, the substance of Jackson’s reforms in the Bank War matters less than the reaction they elicited from market elites jittery about the rise of democracy, both political and economic. Save for a few pseudo-aristocratic strongholds like Rhode Island and South Carolina, the franchise had in this period expanded to include many formerly excluded ranks of white men. A people grown accustomed to having a more direct say in political matters also increasingly demanded popular control over market institutions: not just banking and the currency, but also the workplace became a site of political contestation through the rise of the labor movement.

It was against this backdrop that Whig ideology began to take hold among the wealthy and upper middle classes. An earlier generation of old-school Federalists—men like Chancellor James Kent, Noah Webster, and, yes, Alexander Hamilton—could simply insist that the rabble have no business shaping policy. As Noah Webster wrote, if distinctions between rich and poor were to endure, and they always would, then why not recognize them in the structure of the state? For “the man who has half a million of dollars in property…has a much higher interest in government, than the man who has little or no property.” The one deserves a much greater say than the other.

Yet by the 1830s, Jackson and the Jacksonians had made it impossible to speak this way. One sign of the change came in 1834, when Roger Brooke Taney, among the most militant Jacksonians in Old Hickory’s Parlor (as opposed to “Kitchen”) Cabinet, returned to his home in Baltimore, having helped the general slay the banking “monster” as his Treasury secretary. The local pro-Bank organ, the Chronicle, mocked the working classes who turned up to greet Taney. Their horses, the paper noted, bore collar marks on their necks—meaning, these were poor people with humble livestock.

Democratic papers naturally took advantage of the misstep and, as usual, counterpunched twice as hard. If the Chronicle’s reporter had examined the hands of the men riding the work-worn animals, bellowed the Jacksonian Republican, he would have noticed the same “striking indications of work as were witnessed on the necks of the horses.” It added: “We had reason to believe that our neighbor had but little regard for ‘working men,’ but did not suppose the antipathy went so far as to ridicule a procession on account of the employment in it of working horses.” The Chronicle’s class arrogance was downright ridiculous in this new age.

Yet the elites would soon master a different political vernacular, and this was the Whig ideology. Partly, it had to do with how Whig politicians presented themselves. Going forward, even politicians representing market elites would have to pitch themselves as men of humble origins, solicitous, above all, for the happiness and prosperity of other Americans from such backgrounds. The Whigs would master this transfiguration by 1840, embracing their nominee William Henry Harrison’s dubious image as a downhome man of the people. What Jackson dismissed privately as the Whigs’ “Logg cabin hard cider and Coon humbuggery” would prove thoroughly winsome at the ballot box, to Old Hickory’s chagrin and that of his Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren, who was swept out of office that year.

But beyond campaign imagery, there was a deeper ideological effort afoot. Gone was the old-school Federalist idea that those with property should have greater say in the affairs of state. Instead, the Whigs promoted the idea that we shouldn’t think of class differences at all, since “the interests of the classes [were] identical,” as Schlesinger noted. A prominent Philadelphia Whig, for example, wrote that “however selfish may be the disposition of the wealthy, they cannot benefit themselves without serving the labourer.” Thus, “if the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored”—this was in the aftermath of the Bank War—“they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”

A step further was the idea that America simply has no social classes at all. Wrote one Whig critic of the labor movement: “These phrases, higher orders, and lower orders, are of European origin, and have no place in our Yankee dialect”—seeming to forget his own ideological forebears’ insistence that there are, in fact, rich and poor, and that the former must be allowed to rule unchallenged.

Still another variation was to suggest that social classes in America are so fluid and mobile as to be politically meaningless. Today’s worker is tomorrow’s capitalist, who hires a hand, and this third will tomorrow own his own shop and hire still other workers. And so on. “The wheel of fortune is in constant operation,” wrote the Whig Sen. Edward Everett, “and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” The Whig minister Calvin Colton agreed: “Every American laborer can stand up proudly, and say, I AM THE AMERICAN CAPITALIST, which is not a metaphor but literal truth.” Abraham Lincoln, too, promoted this idea — which I have elsewhere called the cycle-of-classes theory of political economy — in his famous Speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society.

Yet the most powerful element of Whig ideology was the primacy of internal, spiritual, or cultural uplift over governmental policy or material reforms. The worker will rise, wrote the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, not by “struggling for another rank,” nor through “political power,” but by “Elevation of Soul.” Instead of seeking worldly reforms, Channing advised, workers should grow in “intelligence” and “self-respect.” Another Whig reformer declared: “Legislation can do nothing; combinations among working classes”—that is, labor unions—“could probably effect no permanent remedy.” But if workers bettered themselves interiorly, they would find the peace that no external policy solution could bring.

“Making hard work cool again” harks back to these old Whig themes. For it suggests that a significant share of American workers simply decided to stop participating in the labor market or grew tired of making productivity gains. The problem, in this telling, aren’t things like the loss of U.S. manufacturing thanks to neoliberal trade policies and the rise of a low-wage and precarious services-based economy. Nor is the financial industry’s erosion of the real economy to blame. No, American workers just decided, en masse, that work is un-cool, and it’s up to the Whiggish politician to tell them that work is pretty cool, actually.

Nearly 200 years ago, Orestes Brownson, the Massachusetts preacher, journalist, and Jacksonian reformer, who certainly wasn’t one to pooh-pooh spiritual uplift, answered Whig ideology once and for all. “This position,” he countered, 

is not tenable. If it were, it would be fatal to all progress, and be most heartily pleasing to all tyrants. The plain English of it is, perfect the individual before you undertake to perfect society make your men perfect, before you seek to make your institutions perfect. This is plausible, but we dislike it, because it makes perfection of institutions the end, and that of  individuals merely the means. Perfect all your men, and no doubt, you could then perfect easily and safely your institutions. But when all your men are perfect, what need of perfecting your institutions? And wherein are those institutions, under which all individuals may attain to the full perfection admitted by human nature, imperfect?

The post Whiggism Is Still Wrong appeared first on The American Conservative.

Checking in on the Moral and Religious People

Politics

Checking in on the Moral and Religious People

Republicans lost Tuesday because of poor fundamentals in the game of American electoral politics.

(DigitalVision/Getty Images)

What John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts militia in October 1789 has become one of the most common refrains among conservatives of all stripes young and old: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

On Tuesday, Ohioans voted in favor of Issue 1, which purports that the right to an abortion is protected by the state’s constitution. “Yes” on abortion won by more than 13 points, yet another blow to conservatives that have suffered a series of defeats in referenda on abortion even in deep-red states since Dobbs.

Issue 1 was one of several votes that didn’t go the right’s way last night. Ohioans also voted in favor of Issue 2 to legalize recreational marijuana; Virginia’s Senate stayed blue, and the House of Delegates flipped the same way just as conservatives thought both chambers were within reach; and incumbent Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear fended off Republican candidate Daniel Cameron in a five point victory.

The GOP’s failures have not gone unnoticed. In Wednesday’s Republican primary debate, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy rightfully took aim at the Republican party’s failures. “I am upset about what happened last night. We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” he said. He went on to designate the Republican establishment a “cancer.”

Ramaswamy continued by calling for Ronna McDaniel’s resignation as RNC chair: “Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022,” and “we got trounced last night in 2023.”

Conservative personalities, more invested in 2024 than any of Tuesday’s races, used the results as a whip for their chosen horse. Some Trump supporters blamed some conservative’s fixation on abortion for the party’s woes as a jab at DeSantis, and claimed that lagging GOP turnout proved that placing Trump atop the ballot come 2024 is the only way to energize the base. Trump critics, or supporters of other candidates, said a Trump endorsement has become toxic, pointing to Cameron’s loss in Kentucky, and that the GOP’s strategy to protect life, not the pro-life cause, is to blame for other defeats. This writer believes each camp’s first point is a stretch; the second point for both sides, however, have some truth to them.

Yet Tuesday’s losses should not and cannot be credited to a single overarching narrative, whether that narrative hinges on Trump or abortion. Rather, Republicans lost Tuesday because of poor fundamentals in the game that is American electoral politics.

First, there’s the money problem. In a country that elects the better-financed candidate more than 90 percent of the time, it is probably not a good sign for your side if you’re getting outspent in almost every major category. In the Kentucky gubernatorial race, Democrats outspent Republicans by almost $20 million: Beshear’s apparatus spent $47.8 million, Cameron $29.2 million. For the totality of the Virginia legislature races, team blue spent $35.2 million, team red $27.6 million.

The GOP was outspent in Ohio’s Issue 1 campaign by over $8 million: “yes” spent $24.4 million, while “no” spent $16.3 million. As for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Republicans spent $6.5 million to Democrats’ $10 million. Republicans were also outspent by a magnitude of four times in the New Jersey legislature races. Republicans did outspend Democrats in the Mississippi gubernatorial race; Republican Gov. Tate Reeves was reelected by a margin of 4.5 points.

For all its bluster of being the party of federalism and localism, the Republican Party is terrible at actually understanding the political terrain. 

Take Virginia for example. In the Virginia Senate, Republicans needed to pick up three seats to take the majority. After Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s shocking victory in the 2021 gubernatorial election, the GOP thought it might hold the House and flip the Senate. Republicans overpromised and underdelivered: They only picked up one Senate seat and lost three seats (and control) in the House.

In Senate District 16, Republicans believed Republican Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant could hold off the Democratic candidate Schuyler VanValkenburg. The Republican incumbent lost by 8 points—which is close, given that District 16 makes up the northern part of Henrico County, which Joe Biden carried by a 29 point margin in 2020. Expenditures for the candidates were about even, with Dunnavant having about a $20,000 edge—though Republicans were outspent in advertising. 

Another seat Republicans hoped to gain in the Senate was the open seat in District 31, which straddles the much more populous Loudoun County and more rural Fauquier County. While Trump beat Biden by about 6,500 votes in Fauquier, Biden won Loudoun by more than 56,000 votes in 2020. Democratic candidate Russet Perry only beat Juan Pablo Segura by just over 5 points, or 4,500 votes. Perry also outspent Segura by just under a million dollars: She raised $5.68 million to Segura’s $4.71 million.

Republicans did manage to remove one incumbent Democrat, thanks mostly to redistricting, in Senate District 24. Republican Danny Diggs unseated incumbent Democrat Monty Mason, who was elected initially as the senator from District 1. Diggs won by 2.5 points despite being outspent by $1.3 million.

If the GOP wants to win these kinds of races, it needs to do more to break its structural disadvantages and less wish casting, and it actually needs to raise and spend the money required to win. These are just fundamentals, like establishing a pivot point in basketball. Things could have been worse for Republicans, too. In Senate District 27, which encompasses Fredericksburg and parts of Stafford and Spotsylvania counties (Biden won two of the three), Republican Tara Durant bested Democrat Joel Griffin by about 2 points, thanks to third-party spoiler Monica Gary.

In the Virginia House of Delegates, Republicans were outspent in races Republicans needed to win in Biden-won areas if they wanted to preserve their majority after redistricting, such as the races in District 97 and District 58. Incumbent Republican Kim Taylor barely held off Democrat Kimberly Adams, though two of the three counties that partly make up her district voted for Trump by considerable margins in 2020. Funding was about even, though Adams had about a $50,000 advantage.

In District 57, Republicans barely beat Democrat Susanna Gibson, a woman who posted videos of herself and her husband on a pornographic website. Her campaign spent about $300,000 more than Republican David Owen.

Maybe Americans love their porn, their abortions, and their weed. Pairing two of the three in Ohio was always going to spell disaster, and Republicans did not do enough to stop them from voting for it. This is the task of a mixed regime—to lead the people to virtue by fending off the will of a faction’s desire to gorge on its own appetites. What if Ohio’s Republican attorney general just said no to drugs and abortion on the ballot?

Some other interesting data on Ohioans’ views on abortion before Issue 1 was on the ballot from Pew Research Center: While a majority of Catholics and Evangelicals opposed abortion in all or most cases, a majority of mainline Protestants thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases—as did religious “nones.”

What happens when even many of the religious stop being moral?

“Have you ever found in history one single example of a Nation thoroughly Corrupted—that was afterwards restored to Virtue,” he asked Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated December 21, 1819. He continued: “Without Virtue, there can be no political Liberty.”

The post Checking in on the Moral and Religious People appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Church of Bill Watterson

Culture

The Church of Bill Watterson

The Mysteries finds humanity exactly where the Calvin and Hobbes impresario wants it: Cowering before certain annihilation.

Credit: spatuletail

The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 72 pages

Several months ago, I wrote in these pages a long biographical piece about Bill Watterson and why he quit Calvin and Hobbes. I had originally intended the essay to be a review, more or less, of The Mysteries, Watterson’s first original book since 1996. But owing to the withholding nature of his publisher and the grinding schedule of The American Conservative, days before my deadline I was left with a nonexistent book by a man famous for a singular disappearing act. 

In panic, I ransacked my notes for something usable. I found that I had both too little and too much background research to handle the piece properly. So I followed the advice which Lytton Strachey gave to biographers in that unenviable position: I rowed out over my great ocean of material, and lowered down into it, here and there, a little bucket, hoping to bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths to be examined with a careful curiosity. I found the catch satisfying, if incomplete.

In any case, the book did eventually arrive—last week. I’m glad I didn’t see it before I wrote the essay. Without the book, I, like most everyone else who has written about Watterson, was forced to reckon with his silence, to treat him as if he were a dead man who has passed into blank nothingness. And if The Mysteries is any guide, that’s exactly how Bill Watterson wants to be treated.

The book is short, less than 400 words long. It’s a social parable of the sort James Thurber often wrote after he went completely blind. The text is by Watterson, but most of the illustration work is by the caricaturist John Kascht. (Watterson contributed the backgrounds: forests, cityscapes, art galleries, and the like.) Kascht’s people, as anyone who has seen his work at the National Portrait Gallery already knows, are grotesque: clay-like medieval figures who appear to have been derived from the artist’s reading of A World Lit Only by Fire. When paired with Watterson’s painterly landscapes, the effect is that of a stop motion film.

The story—if it can be called that—is this: Sometime in the Middle Ages, a frightened and suspicious people built a walled city to protect themselves from the Mysteries, which lived in a dark forest. These were reputed to have “bizarre and terrifying powers” and they regularly visited unexplained calamities on the people. But, one day, the king sent his knights out to capture a Mystery, and, when at last a knight returned with one in tow, everyone was surprised by its ordinariness. “Once understood, its powers were not all that remarkable,” Watterson writes. “And over time, each new Mystery they discovered was even less impressive.”

This is a rather sardonic gloss on the Scientific Revolution, and as the story moves on, Watterson only intensifies his criticism of progress. It is a great subject of his. Ever since he was a child, Watterson has held a reverence for the natural world and a hatred for anything that threatens it. When he was growing up in suburban Cleveland, he lived in a house which backed up to an undeveloped forest, which he loved because it was “a bit wild and mysterious and beautiful.” These days, the forest has been paved over. “Looking at a cul-de-sac of McMansions doesn’t have the same impact on the imagination,” he admits, with more than a little bitterness.

Now he gets his revenge. As more Mysteries are discovered, soon the people’s fear and wonder give way to laughing and mockery. Sprawling cities are built in place of the old fortresses and everywhere there is a general feeling that human beings are at last masters of the natural world. But all the while, in a clever artistic choice, Kascht still dresses his people in their ragged peasant clothes, suggesting, perhaps, that even though many people today live in gleaming cities and surround themselves with luxury goods, we are no more dignified than our ancestors.  

The story ends when at last the natural world reasserts its power over the people. The sky turns strange colors; the ground quakes; and the animals flee to the far corners of the earth. Only when it is too late do the people begin to worry. And then, they too disappear. “Time moved on,” Watterson writes. “Centuries passed. Eons passed. The universe continued as usual. And the Mysteries lived happily ever after.” 

These last five sentences take up the last four pages of the book. On each page there is a stark illustration of the moon and desert planets or the stars of a distant galaxy, bright lights shining for no one at all. This is the purest expression of Watterson’s work and beliefs. After Calvin and Hobbes, he abandoned comics for painting, mostly of the American Southwest. Here, finally, he found a landscape whose massive scale annihilated his own fears, desires, and longings by the simple fact of its overawing vastness.

“You’re reminded that we’re on a planet, that we’re just little specks, and Nature will kill you if you’re stupid,” Watterson once said of these desert scenes. “Somehow I find all that deeply comforting. That’s my church.” 

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A Murder Story: Whatever Happened to Interoperability?

Technology

A Murder Story: Whatever Happened to Interoperability?

Tech companies once dealt with competitors by attempting to develop superior products. Then they discovered they could simply buy them.

Credit: Kevin McGovern

Tech exceptionalism is a sin. Tech leaders aren’t especially smart; they’re not even especially evil. They’re just ordinary mediocrities, no smarter or more cunning than you or I. Yet today’s generation of tech bosses have shrunk the internet down to “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”

What happened? How did a clutch of utterly undistinguished businesspeople convert the dynamic, fast-changing world of tech into a sector so inbred that it’s practically got a Habsburg jaw?

Like tech itself, tech concentration is unexceptional. Tech companies once dealt with competitors by attempting to develop superior products. As antitrust enforcement was progressively neutered—tentatively by Carter, aggressively by Reagan, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm by each successor administration, Republican and Democrat—tech companies were able to simply buy their competitors. 

Take Google, a company with a single blockbuster product: its quarter-century old search engine. Virtually every other in-house product Google has developed since—its video platform, its numerous social media networks, its RSS reader, and its “moonshot” smart cities division—has failed. Google’s successful products are—with few exceptions—other people’s products, which it bought and operationalized. From mobile to ad-tech, server management to maps, document editing and collaboration to satellite imagery, Google is a company that bills itself as an idea factory, but is best understood as a deep-pocketed, self-sabotaging investor that buys the products it is incapable of designing and fielding on its own.

Google isn’t exceptional here. Facebook identified WhatsApp and Instagram as threats when its users started jumping ship for the new rivals. The company wrote a couple of checks and acquired these two nascent rivals before they could grow to challenge the company’s dominance. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Apple, too, is a buying-things company: In 2019, CEO Tim Cook cheerfully boasted to Kara Swisher about the 90 companies Apple had acquired that year. Cook brings home a new company for his board more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family.

Not every startup wants to be agglomerated into a Big Tech borg. When a tech giant finds a firm that isn’t willing to sell out, they use their investors’ cash to force them out. Take Diapers.com: When they refused to sell to Amazon, Amazon responded by selling diapers below cost, lighting $100 million on fire before buying the suffocated husk of Diapers.com for pennies on the dollar. 

Again, this isn’t exceptional. Most industries have indulged themselves in a 40-year-long orgy of mergers and acquisitions, transforming virtually every sector into an oligopoly ruled over by a cartel of five or fewer companies: athletic shoes, beer, cheerleading, defense contracting, book publishing, eyeglasses, semiconductors, bottlecaps, professional wrestling…the list goes on and on. Whole supply chains have consolidated into fistulated masses: The drugs produced by the pharma cartel are overseen by the pharmacy benefits management cartel and retailed through the pharmacy cartel.

But actually, tech is a little exceptional.

Digital technology is exceptional in a deep, technical sense. The only kind of digital computer we know how to make is the “Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine”—a device that can run every valid program. All computers are, at their deepest level, equivalent, able to run any app we can write. That universality has been a boon to tech competition. 

The flexibility of digital systems means that a new market entrant can always make a compatible (“interoperable”) add-on, mod, or accessory. When IBM gouged its customers on mainframe hard-drives, innovators like Memorex jumped into the market with “plug compatible” drives that sold at a fraction of the price.

Microsoft’s wildly unreliable Office for Mac product turned reading and writing Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files into a crapshoot for Mac users, whose files were frequently unreadable by their Windows-using colleagues. Apple responded by reverse-engineering the Office file-formats and releasing the iWork Suite, whose applications—Pages, Numbers and Keynote—could perfectly read and write those Microsoft files. Thereafter, Mac users could collaborate seamlessly with Windows users, and—crucially—Windows users could switch to the Mac without giving up their files or their compatibility with the Windows users who comprised the majority of the market.

For Facebook, the infinite malleability of the digital world was key to its triumph over the incumbent MySpace. Facebook promised dissatisfied MySpace users a superior, surveillance-free alternative, but Facebook understood that no matter how much users disliked MySpace, they loved the friends they had on MySpace more. “Come to Facebook and sit alone in an empty virtual room, admiring the clean user-interface” was a poor pitch.

So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox. Replies that users typed in on Facebook were then autopiloted back to MySpace. Thus, MySpace users could become Facebook users without having to convince their friends to make the leap with them—and without having to give up on friends who weren’t ready to leave.

This digital flexibility and the interoperability it enabled was a perennial check on incumbent dominance. Any time an incumbent tightened the screws on its customers—raising prices, lowering quality, converting included features into pricey add-ons—an interoperator could sell that customer a screwdriver to loosen the screw again.

What’s more, these interoperators enjoyed the “attacker’s advantage.” In security, the defender—say, an incumbent hoping to prevent its products from being reverse-engineered by an upstart—needs to make no mistakes. The attacker—say, a would-be interoperator painstakingly decompiling a popular product with an eye to offering an after-market improvement—has only to find and exploit a single defect in the defense.

Tech products have always enjoyed explosive growth thanks to the network effects that are endemic to the sector. Every Facebook user signs up to be with the users who are already there, and then becomes a lure for other users who want to hang out with them. Every iOS user is a reason to be an Apple app developer; every new app is a reason to become an iOS user.

But tech’s network-effects-driven growth have always been held in check by that inescapable universality. The second a company used its network-effects-drive scale to start shifting surpluses from customers to its shareholders, an interoperator popped up to offer those customers a better deal. 

That was true when IBM gouged on hard-drives; it was true when Microsoft used its scale to visit pain upon Mac users; it was true when MySpace tried to hold its users hostage. Wherever an incumbent used lock-in to extract super-normal rents, a new market entrant popped up to offer those customers an alternative. The more invasive your ads are, the more the ad-blocker company can raise in the capital markets.

The universality of digital platforms meant that every platform that became greedy thanks to its explosive growth was pruned back to size through the good graces of low switching costs delivered by interoperability, which either lowered the friction associated with going from one product to another, or simply modified the product the manufacturer delivered to remove extractive antifeatures.

Tech was forever a dynamic industry, where mainframes were bested by minicomputers, which were, in turn, devoured by PCs. Proprietary information services were subsumed into Gopher, Gopher was devoured by the web. If you didn’t like the management of the current technosphere, just wait a minute and there will be something new along presently. When it came to moving your relationships, data, and media over to the new service, the skids were so greased as to be nearly frictionless.

What happened? Did a new generation of tech founders figure out how to build an interoperability-proof computer that defied the laws of computer science? Hardly. No one has invented a digital Roach Motel, where users and their data check in but they can’t check out. Digital tools remain stubbornly universal, and the attacker’s advantage is still in effect. Any walled garden is liable to having holes blasted in its perimeter by upstarts who want to help an incumbent’s corralled customers evacuate to greener pastures.

What changed was the posture of the state towards corporations. First, governments changed how they dealt with monopolies. Then, monopolies changed how governments treated reverse-engineering.

The Apple II Plus hit the shelves the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. While it was Jimmy Carter who pulled the first tentative Jenga blocks out of the antitrust enforcement system, Reagan went at it with gusto, tearing them out by the fistful. 

The theories of Robert Bork and his Chicago colleagues gained currency. Their new orthodoxy held that Congress had never intended to police the emergence of monopolies per se, but only to rein in those rare monopolists who abused their market power to raise prices or lower quality. This “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust enforcement gradually won out over historic notions of the inherent risks of large corporations and concentrated sectors.

With the drawdown of antitrust enforcement, industries across the board dwindled to oligopolies, but tech got there first and faster. The capital markets proved exceedingly bullish on subsidizing formerly illegal tactics, such as predatory pricing, acquiring and extinguishing nascent rivals, and mergers to monopoly between major competitors.

Shareholders lined up to subsidize below-cost offerings. Amazon spent a mere $100 million destroying Diapers.com. But Uber’s investors financed a bonfire of $31 billion, losing $0.41 on every dollar it took in for the first 13 years of operations. Investors snapped up shares of companies like Google, whose ineptitude at creating successful new products was counterbalanced by its ability to buy other peoples’ companies.

As tech diversity declined, the industry’s ability to capture its regulators increased. 

The early, chaotic years of the consumer internet were full of policy setbacks for tech companies. Recall the Napster Wars, when the entertainment sector—dominated by fewer than a dozen companies then, a number that’s halved in the ensuing quarter-century—comprehensively trounced the tech sector. Bedrock case law crumbled, like the “Betamax” decision (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.) that immunized the manufacturer of any technology that was “capable of sustaining a substantial noninfringing use” from copyright liability. 

Congress and state houses introduced strings of bills intended to limit the tech sector’s ability to make new tools without permission from the entertainment company. Michael Powell’s FCC passed the “Broadcast Flag” rule, which required every single digital device to be fitted with technology that would disable file-transfers if a file was marked with a copyright restriction flag (the Broadcast Flag rule was struck down by the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2005).

Then, as now, the entertainment sector was a pipsqueak when compared to tech. By every measure—number of users, number of sales, total profits, profit margins—tech was bigger and (theoretically) more powerful than entertainment. But the difference was that all the power in the entertainment industry had been boiled down to a cozy cartel of frenemies who were capable of forming a united front in policy fights. By contrast, tech was a squabbling rabble. In every policy fight, some tech companies would defect, taking the entertainment industry’s side, muddling the message that regulators, courts and lawmakers heard. 

That disunity provided an opening in tech’s defense that entertainment drove straight through, again and again.

But there’s more than one way to solve a collective action problem. The tech sector’s solution was brutally simple: As tech companies merged and re-merged and re-re-merged, its policy goals grew less fractured. Tech companies that had once rudely shouldered their way into the market by reverse-engineering their rivals’ products—Apple, Google, Facebook—suddenly got DMCA-happy and began suing and threatening rivals who tried to do unto them as they did unto their own forebears. When Apple reverse-engineered Microsoft Office to make iWork, that was progress: If you were to try to do the same—say, to make a platform that could run iOS apps and play back media from the iTunes Store—Apple’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble glowed. 

Everywhere questions of tech policy arise—U.N. specialized agencies like WIPO, standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium, expert agencies like the FCC, intergovernmental bodies like the E.U. Commission—tech arrives in lockstep to sing from the same hymnal. Their self-serving rhetoric is no longer checked by other commercial actors who speak with the authority of firms that serve millions of customers. 

To the extent that a counternarrative appears in the record, it comes from minuscule firms, hobbyists, activists, and academics. For regulators—especially regulators drawn from the ranks of large tech firms—giving them what they want is a no-brainer.

This policy unity has produced a regime where everything that is not prohibited is mandatory. Tech companies get to violate privacy laws where they exist (Europe) or prevent their passage altogether (Washington). They bypass labor law with the fiction that when an app is your boss, you are transformed into a “small business.” They circumvent consumer protection law, arguing that a pay-to-play system that fills our search results with deceptive lookalike products that are inferior to the goods we’re seeking is a form of “advertising.”

Meanwhile, we are prohibited from taking countermeasures. A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation.

Interoperability wasn’t killed by the reverse-engineer-proof computer nor by the lack of market demand for aftermarket modifications. It was killed by regulatory capture, arising from market concentration, arising from the bad idea that monopolies are efficient sources of consumer welfare, rather than deep-pocketed rent-seekers who leverage their scale to extinguish rivals, corrupt our politics, harm workers, and gouge customers.

This article is part of the “American System” series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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One a Penny, Two a Penny

Politics

One a Penny, Two a Penny

The joke of a recession is on the middle class, whose money means less than ever. 

Credit: RomanR

Recession or no recession, many Americans have taken the economic stress of the last few years on the jaw. While inflation slows, the Wall Street Journal reports this week that the Fed’s interest rate hikes are beginning to touch Americans in a meaningful way: In mortgages, car payments, credit card debt and even securities-backed loans, Americans are now paying as much as double the interest they paid just a year ago. 

Of course, the whole point of the interest rate hikes was to slow the economy to curb inflation caused by sky-high pandemic spending and a few months’ attempt at shutting down the majority of the economy. But, since economies are still composed of human beings with free will and fickle behaviors, outcomes are never guaranteed. Although Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made happy noises about a “soft landing” just last week, other economists don’t see it as a sure thing. 

But even if there is no recession by the generally accepted definition of two consecutive periods of GDP losses, there has already been an extended period of receding economic prosperity and opportunity for a wide sector of the American economy since 2020. With just enough wealth to be borrowing, but not enough to be immune to economic shocks, the middle class is paying the most in real terms for the government excesses of the last few years.

Many Americans can no longer afford to buy a median-priced home. Not only can they not afford it, but they’re approximately $175,000 short of affording it: The median home price is some $425,000, but most Americans are shopping at the $250,000 level. For those neither bold nor foolish enough to buy well above their means, the pathway to home ownership, a key element of the American dream, has become increasingly ephemeral as high home prices combine with the high interest rates to calcify, intentionally or otherwise, a broad class of semi-permanent renters. For this cohort, the can of financial benefit from building equity through property ownership must be kicked still further down the road. Meanwhile, those who do own a home are far from willing to trade their lower mortgage interest rate for a higher one, which is almost certain to be the case when buying a new house today. Thus, the supply of affordable older homes is thin, pinching the market even more. 

Home buying is the big one, but there are others too. Monthly median household savings, adjusted for income, remain far below pre-pandemic norms: In 2019, Americans were saving an average of 8.8 percent of their after-tax income. This skyrocketed in April 2020 to 33.8 percent, but by 2022 it had hit the opposite extreme at a sparse 3.5 percent. This year, the average household’s after tax savings have only improved marginally to 4.3 percent. In the meantime, we’ve racked up a collective $1 trillion in household credit card debt, because, as TAC’s Executive Director Emile Doak pointed out last week, it’s now completely acceptable to buy in plastic what you can’t afford in paper. Perhaps our poor savings have as much to do with bad home economic choices as with bad federal ones.  

Let’s not forget about inflation, either. We are supposed to be celebrating victories in this department, but I’m not sure increasing at a decreasing rate is the home-run we’ve been told it is. Whatever is going on, one thing is for sure: Maybe you can work hard and save your dollars and become a millionaire, but to be a millionaire in 2023 simply means that you have made it to the modest upper end of the middle class. One million dollars is barely a comfortable retirement fund in today’s terms, assuming the standard 4 percent rule and a paid-off house; it will soon be even less if the inflation trajectory continues. 

All of this combines to create an unpleasant picture of the future of the American middle class; it threatens to give the lie to the American dream as we know it. Indeed, 65 percent of Generation Z and 74 percent of millennials believe they are starting further behind financially than previous generations, and that the possibility of getting ahead by sheer work and willpower may no longer be true. 

In some sense, however, it does not matter: Economic decisions are shaped more by beliefs about reality than reality itself, and if younger generations believe they cannot get ahead without a step up, many will not. For those who have seen their parents’ savings gutted by inflation or heard stories of grandparents saving a year’s worth of college tuition in one summer—while even a $15 minimum wage couldn’t enable this today—it is hard to find the lie. 

A sizable body of Americans with marginal savings, no home, and massive credit card debt is a recipe for economic hardship—recession or otherwise—not to mention the political turmoil born of class resentment. But it would not be completely true to say that the American dream has died, if that is indeed the case. Rather, it must have been sold: to Pfizer, to Moderna, to global corporations, for proxy wars in Ukraine and democracy in the Middle East, by those who claimed to know better.

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Will We Never Be Free?

Politics

Will We Never Be Free?

Another round of tedious GOP ritual combat shouldn’t distract from where the real action is happening.

Credit: Wangkun Jia

Sequels are always worse, even when the original is pretty dire. Vivek Ramaswamy defined the last Republican presidential debate by declaring a “dark moment” in America. In some way, he also captured the spirit of last night’s performance when he was reduced to agitated and jabbering cross-talk by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Scott had a good night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at Simi Valley, California, but not so good that it redeemed the futility of the whole exercise. Same for Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota. (Burgum is the only politician I’ve ever heard speak coherently on a debate stage about the underlying systemic madness of the American health insurance system.) Ramaswamy, the last debate’s winner and so last night’s whipping boy, did not have a good night. Nikki Haley, shouty and humorless, had a bad night, but not so bad that it was worth staying up late. 

Also, Ron DeSantis was on the stage. Remember him? He’s still running for president. I know! Crazy!

At the beginning of this cycle, I argued that these people aren’t actually running for president—well, Chris Christie and Mike Pence might be—but are rather jockeying for the Number Two spot on the GOP ticket. People have come around to seeing things my way. There has never been any doubt that the former President Donald J. Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee. The rumble at the Reagan Library did nothing to change that.

And, in truth, it’s dubious that any of these people will be on Trump’s ticket, although Ramaswamy would clearly maim himself to get the nod. (And, you know, there would be something to it—can you imagine the fantastic transformations Ramaswamy’s name would undergo in the Trumpian idiom?) Vice-presidential candidates are rarely drawn from the ranks of challengers, even when the main attraction weighs personal loyalty less than Trump does. If I were making book, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota would be my favorite, tabloid scandal or no. (If anything, I’d guess getting your picture in the Daily Mail increases your odds.)

In a word, this was all a bit stupid. These people, collectively, are going to burn a nine-figure sum and not even make it to the big show. If I had wanted to see that, I could have stuck to watching the Mets. It wasn’t even good T.V. Even the usually avuncular Scott bullying Ramaswamy couldn’t pierce the anhedonic gloom. Even Mike Pence using his best late-night D.J. voice to intone the words “expedited federal death penalty” couldn’t do it. 

Little help was forthcoming from the moderators; Fox News’ Dana Perino appeared actively hostile to the candidates, while Stuart Varney, the gray eminence of Fox Business, was affably confused. Inexplicably, a Colombian newsreader for Univision, Ilia Calderon, was the third moderator. Perhaps this is the rare case of a job that an American really will not do; perhaps the grandees at Fox Business, the debate’s sponsor, were just revealing their own globalist alignment.

So, what did we learn, Palmer? Well, I can fill out this column by divining a few points. First, ending birthright citizenship has become an acceptable mainstream GOP proposal. Hearing Ramaswamy lay out the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment does not cover the children of illegal immigrants was not a surprise. Hearing Scott agree with him was. (What exactly the president can do about this is, of course, an open question, since this is prima facie an issue for the courts or the legislature.) Second, the use of armed force to secure the border is the GOP consensus position, even if that means some form of boots on the ground in Mexican territory. (Haley’s baloney-shaving about “special operations” as distinct from military operations was unconvincing.)

Meanwhile, far away, Trump gave a thunderous address to United Auto Workers picketers in Detroit. He spoke on the theme that made him president: the consistent betrayal of American interests and especially American industry by the political class. Nobody has the knack for the hard-truth tone that Trump does. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get, because in two years you’re all going to be out of business,” he said, pointing to the potential auto worker displacement from Biden’s government-pushed electric vehicle transition. Nor does anyone beat the anti-globalist drum so well: “If we can afford to send billions of dollars to Ukraine, then we can afford to have an auto industry that pays our workers a good living wage to keep the workers working.” 

This is the real arena; this is where the next president will be chosen. The chattering in Simi Valley about school choice and just how much of the federal government should be abolished is beside the point. Can Trump or Biden better protect the American national interest? That is the only question.

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TikTok: A Way to Gen-Z’s Ballot?

Politics

TikTok: A Way to Gen-Z’s Ballot?

State of the Union: Will Vivek Ramaswamy’s inauguration to TikTok play a part in his 2024 campaign?

Credit: Aaron of L.A. Photography

Social media has become a sort of necessary evil in today’s society. Many companies and individuals have become hyper-dependent on it for pushing and selling their products, but the dangers of screen addiction, the exposure to harmful content, and the risk of data harvesting often outweigh the benefits of various social media platforms. This is particularly evident with TikTok, the video-sharing platform that has taken the online world by storm over the past few years.

It isn’t rare to see politicians pop up on TikTok, trying to reach a younger demographic. After all, nearly 50 percent of TikTok users are under the age of 30. The latest example: GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy’s decision to make a TikTok account has caused a stir among both his supporters and enemies. Initially, on the campaign trail, his opinion of TikTok was harsh–he went so far as to call it “digital fentanyl.” He was also wary of the threat the Chinese app posed to the data of those using it. However, after meeting and dining with the infamous media personality and boxer Jake Paul, Ramaswamy was convinced to become one of the hundreds of millions of worldwide TikTok users:

Had dinner with @JakePaul on Sunday. He changed my mind and convinced me to join TikTok. Yes, kids under age 16 shouldn’t be using it, but the fact is that many young voters are & we’re not going to change this country without winning. We can’t just talk about the importance of…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) September 13, 2023

According to Axios, a GOP strategist suggested that Ramaswamy’s decision to join TikTok may serve as a catalyst in shifting the Republican attitude towards TikTok more generally: “If influential conservatives start coming out more forcefully against a ban and even start using the platform, the political will among Republicans to ban it will disappear.”

This would not be good. Banning TikTok in America would not only alleviate national security concerns, but would also likely help the mental health epidemic fostered by the addictive app.

You can still see Ramaswamy’s point. After officially announcing his decision to join TikTok, he told his supporters at an event in Iowa that, “Sixty—six-zero—percent of Gen-Z says that they would sooner give up their right to vote than to give up their access to TikTok.”

Overall, this issue will not be detrimental to his campaign or to his image in the court of public opinion, but it does raise questions regarding the authenticity of Ramaswamy’s political platform. TikTok’s threat to American mental health and security is a key issue for many voters; Ramaswamy must remain steadfast on other important topics if he wants to keep his supporters behind him.

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America is Not The New Rome

Politics

America is Not The New Rome

State of the Union: Vivek Ramaswamy’s remarks at the America First Works speaker series promoted a message of hope for the nation.

Anastasia Kaliabakos

“We don’t have to be ancient Rome,” Vivek Ramaswamy declared in the final moments of his Wednesday morning speech in Washington, D.C. “We can still be a nation in the early stages of our ascent.”

This departure from the regularly scheduled doom and gloom of America’s political discourse is a welcome one for many, given its rarity. Ramaswamy’s positive attitude towards America’s future—and the role he plans to play in it—was infectious for the diverse crowd that came to listen to America’s truly first millennial candidate at the headquarters of America First Works (AFW), a political advocacy group. A woman behind me exclaimed, “He and I are really around the same age. Seeing him makes me think I could really do so much with my life.”

Ramaswamy’s remarks were introduced by Ashley Hayek, AFW’s executive director, and Brooke Rollins, the CEO and founder of the America First Policy Institute, AFW’s partner think tank. As Rollins praised Ramaswamy as “Liberty’s longtime friend,” Rep. Matt Gaetz could be seen nodding along from his seat at the front of the audience. The highest-profile conservative to attend the event, the Florida Republican was to receive Ramaswamy’s personal thanks for support during the course of the speech.

Ramaswamy has an undeniable and unfettered charisma. He channeled his inner Amy Coney Barrett, speaking with no notes; his perfect cadence and an interactive demonstration were enough to keep his audience engaged for a nearly hour-long speech.

The main focus of his presentation was his ardent commitment to the uncompromising maintenance of our founding principles. Instead of veering away from the often-difficult side effects of pursuing a pure American vision, he declared it would be of paramount importance to maintain the energy of our founding fathers in his presidency.

He mentioned the fact that the founding fathers were innovators and inventors to tout his experience as a CEO and entrepreneur as something not to be wary of, but to have faith in: “Being willing to take risks and fail is how you get to success…Innovation doesn’t only belong to the technocrats,” he said.

The bulk of his speech focused on “the waterfall of political responsibilities” that have fallen to the pervasive “three letter agencies,” which he believes have, in many cases, completely (and even illegally) overstepped their authority in America. He specifically highlighted the FBI, the DOE, and the ATF to illustrate his agenda of undoing the harm that these agencies have caused: “Part of the problem when you have a bureaucracy that runs the state is that they find things to do that they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.”

Whether the layoffs he suggested would be feasible (or as effective as he claimed) is debatable, but his relentless can-do attitude seems to have the potent ability to blur the line between wishful thinking and reality.

Despite this, he is right about America’s difference from Rome. Casual historians and staunch traditionalists often seek to draw comparisons between 21st century America and fifth-century Rome. The collapse of the Roman Empire was brought about in no small part by a widespread identity crisis—at a certain point, the question of what it meant to be a Roman could no longer be answered. But, in today’s America, many people still have a clear idea of what being an American means, even if there is variety in those ideas. If Ramaswamy can bridge the gaps between the factions undergoing America’s own identity crisis with an America First agenda, perhaps he can emerge as an American combination of Cato and Augustus, and be a true friend of liberty.

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On Drugs, Vivek, War is Love

Politics

On Drugs, Vivek, War is Love

As a war on drugs voter, I want to hear how a presidential candidate would use executive power to curb the flow of drugs into this country, because tackling demand alone will never be sufficient.

Credit: Tinnakorn jorruang

Vivek Ramaswamy is, without a doubt, charismatic and persuasive, and often hits all the right points. Yet coming out in favor of maintenance treatment and decriminalization of illegal substances is a deal-breaker for me.

Fox News reported that in June, Ramaswamy described his position on drug policy as “You don’t hear me talk about the war on drugs. I’m not a war on drugs person,” adding, “I think in the long run, and I’m talking about over a long run period of time, decriminalization, serially, is an important part of the long run solution here…That’s gotta be part of the solution[…]”

I happen to be raising my family in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the regions hardest hit by the fentanyl epidemic, and I am very much a war on drugs kind of voter.

That the United States fought the war on drugs and lost is an oft repeated falsehood. Setting aside the fact that the phrase “war of drugs” is just a figure of speech signifying robust law enforcement, the pattern with our nation is that we didn’t lose wars, but sabotaged them from within. In this case, we surrendered our mission to the hedonistic New Left.

The 1960s, anarchists adopted a program of cultural revolution in which mind-bending drugs were a key component. Domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground broke LSD guru Timothy Leary out of prison. Weather Underground alumni eventually settled in academic and nonprofit positions, training future activists and politicians. For a short while, the son of once-incarcerated domestic terrorists, Chesa Boudin, became the district attorney in San Francisco. He fit right in within the political culture that views addiction as a lifestyle choice which must be respected regardless of the consequences to society.

Since the 1960s, San Francisco—and California in general—has spiraled deep into the harm reduction model, limiting punishments for possession and public consumption of illicit substances, supplying users with paraphernalia, tents, and monthly cash stipends. For a few months in 2022, the city operated an unsanctioned “safe consumption” site where addicts were dealing and using drugs under the supervision of city employees, and in the plain view of everyone. According to harm reduction doctrine, these actions are necessary to keep the user alive until he chooses sobriety. It’s a daring idea. And if it seems counterintuitive, that’s because it is.  

We locals often say that San Francisco is the place where junkies come to die—maintaining a habit here is convenient; quitting is hard work. So, they stick around for their short lifetimes. 2023 is on track to set a new record for deadly drug poisonings, with 121 suspected “overdose” emergency calls placed on Pride weekend alone. Eighteen users are reported to have died of suspected overdoses this past Wednesday, August 30.

Since drug addiction is not a victimless crime, the lenient approach has created entire neighborhoods littered in syringes and human excrement, made public transit unusable, and contributed to the “doom loop” of population and business outflow. The Union Square cable car terminal used to be a busy and noisy place where families lined up to take the scenic ride. It is now a void of boarded up storefronts. A few months ago, a frightened security guard shot a homeless shoplifter a block away from the former tourist spot.

San Francisco is not the only American city facing social and economic collapse: Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, and many others have their own no-go zombielands. With over one hundred thousand yearly drug poisonings taking American lives in their prime, the proliferation of hard drugs is one of the top problems facing the nation, and I expect a Republican presidential candidate to address it with a sense of urgency.

Ramaswamy doesn’t seem to have a vision for it. In an attempt to limit the fallout from the Fox expose, he explained himself: “More planted trash. I support decriminalizing ayahuasca & ketamine for veterans suffering from PTSD, to prevent the epidemic of fentanyl & suicide. It’s pathetic that Establishment candidates are using lies as a substitute for a message. When you strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.”

Ketamine is a Schedule III drug and already legal for medical use. Is Ramaswamy running for president to expand the prescription of ketamine to one additional diagnosis? I think not. The big picture he painted is different. He gave his audiences a blueprint for gradual legalization of all drugs, starting with a controversial treatment for veterans and moving on to addicts.

He appears to be endorsing maintenance treatments, or government-dispensed and/or administered drugs for those who already developed the habit. So-called “safe consumption sites” are a variation on this idea. Unlike abstinence, this approach creates lifetime pharma patients and, as libertarians should acknowledge, expands the role of government in private lives.

It’s worth mentioning that  California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is very much running for the Democratic nomination, recently vetoed a bill that would legalize such joints. That puts Ramaswamy to the left of Newsom on the issue of addiction.

Lost amidst Ramaswamy’s self-congratulation for being the only Republican candidate in favor of decriminalization is the fact that decriminalization of hard drugs has failed everywhere it was tried. Portugal was the latest overhyped “success” story. Michael Shellenberger explained in his seminal work San Fransicko that the pro-opiate lobby misrepresents Portugal, as the Iberian country compels addicts to enter treatments under threat of a prison term—a far cry from decriminalization.

Even so, Portugal is now forced to rethink its decades-long policy. The traditionalist, homogenous Portugal has the same illegal drug issues as the U.S., albeit on a smaller scale: Rising use, rising crime, demoralized law enforcement, sprawling encampments—thankfully away from the tourist destinations.

Our own marijuana legalization, now enacted in many states as a step towards eventual legalization of all drugs, is no shining example of success. Americans were promised that pot is harmless and even medicinal, and that crime would decline. It turned out that highly concentrated cannabis sold at dispensaries is addictive and linked to psychosis, and that panic attacks are common, along with a myriad of other psychological and physiological side-effects. Out of hundreds of chemical ingredients found in a marijuana plant, only CBD has shown to be useful in medical practice. There is no need to legalize cannabis to manufacture CBD extract.

Decline in criminal activity stemming from the drug’s sale and distribution was another empty promise. Cartels continue dealing the drug—and grow it stateside. And while the proponents of legal cannabis argue that such pathologies proliferate because cannabis remains illegal on the federal level and that the state industry is overregulated, deregulating a weed that can be grown in any home next to a basil plant would drastically reduce the price and make the dangerous substance even more readily available. The consequences to our society would be tremendous, and, with deregulation and falling prices, states would miss out on hundreds of millions in tax revenue.

In his op-ed on foreign policy for The American Conservative, Ramaswamy explained that his goal is peace. Well, the streets of so many of our cities look like war zones full of defeated men. China, our number one geopolitical foe, is supplying components of the drug that is killing them, but it’s our domestic policies that make it easy for China to do so. Under decriminalization and harm reduction protocols, drugs became cheap and easy to procure, and social restraints are next to non-existent. It’s no wonder that use has skyrocketed.

Addressing the demand side is important. We need new and better treatments for the increasingly more addictive and deadly substances that now reach American markets. We also need to signal to potential users that their transgressions will not be tolerated, that there will be severe criminal penalties for the sociopathic behavior that is now destroying our great cities.

Above all, as a war on drugs voter, I want to hear how a presidential candidate would use executive power to curb the flow of drugs into this country, because tackling demand alone will never be sufficient. We will never curb drug addiction without going after the supply lines.

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On Vivek & the Right’s State of Play

Vivek Ramaswamy’s foreign policy op-ed, “A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine,” has generated quite the buzz since we published it on the TAC site Monday. Ramaswamy is willing to explicitly break from “the bloody follies of neoconservatism and liberal internationalism,” as he wrote, in ways few other candidates are.

So it’s no surprise that Ramaswamy’s op-ed has also drawn a fair share of criticism. Jacob Heilbrunn, in an essay in the Atlantic, writes, “Like more than a few Republicans these days, Ramaswamy is obsessed with China, which he depicts as the locus of evil in the world, and cavalier about Russia, which stands accused of perpetrating war crimes in the heart of Europe.”

As Sohrab Ahmari pointed out on this week’s TAC Right Now, Ramaswamy’s position on Taiwan—a move from ‘strategic ambiguity’ to ‘strategic clarity’ and then back once economic independence has been achieved—is in many ways a noteworthy outlier in a Republican primary that has seen near-uniformity on the issue.

But for Heilbrunn, Ramaswamy’s desire to end the war in Ukraine, including by negotiating with Putin if necessary, is particularly troubling. Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, has been concerned about Ukrainian interests since Russia’s invasion, and his criticism of Ramaswamy runs along similar lines:

[Ramaswamy] proposes to bow to Russian suzerainty over the territories it controls in eastern Ukraine and oppose Ukrainian membership in NATO “in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” But as others have noted, those two countries do not have a military alliance. In any case, Putin has repeatedly displayed no interest in serious peace negotiations over Ukraine, a country that he remains wholly intent on reducing to the status of an imperial Russian colony.

Heilbrunn is right, though, that foreign policy is exposing real rifts in the GOP. As I’ve written previously, it’s the one issue candidates seeking to claim the non-Trump lane resort to first when asked to differentiate themselves from the 45^th president. Heilbrunn frames the rift this way:

The Wall Street Journal denounced [Ramaswamy] for seeking to sell out Ukraine, and National Review asked whether “he’s auditioning for a geopolitical game show instead of the presidency of the United States.” To some extent, his comments can be dismissed as bluster. But he and his fellow self-proclaimed realists—a cluster of activists and thinkers at places such as The American Conservative, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—are responding to a genuine, if dismaying, phenomenon in the American electorate.

“Wall Street Journal & National Review” vs. “TAC, Claremont, & Heritage” seems to be a fairly accurate way of describing the state of play. Fortunately for us, the voters are overwhelmingly on our side.

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A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine

Foreign Affairs

A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine

Washington, Monroe, and Nixon equals America First.

(By Gage Skidmore/WikiMedia Commons)

In his inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson famously summarized the thought of George Washington in what is now known as the Washington Doctrine: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” The last of the Founders to serve as president, James Monroe, formulated the Monroe Doctrine, in which he declared to the European powers that the Western Hemisphere would henceforth be the unique sphere of influence of the United States. Over a century later, with the United States having ascended to superpower status, Richard Nixon expanded the corpus of American foreign policy strategy with his own doctrine, which called for our allies to bear their own security burdens and provide the primary manpower for their own defense, with America serving as defender of last resort.

In the years since Nixon formulated his doctrine, our country has moved from being one of two superpowers to ascendancy as the world’s sole superpower after the fall of the USSR. We squandered our post-Cold War opportunity to preserve that position through a bipartisan embrace of “democratic capitalism” with Communist China, on the false premise that we could spread democracy through capitalism by creating mutual economic codependence with China. Our mistaken posture towards Communist China led us over the last three decades to a new uncomfortable equilibrium, where the United States tenuously remains the world’s great superpower but our two great power rivals—China and Russia—are now working together in a way that threatens us. We must admit our mistakes, recognize our time, and adopt a revised strategic vision for our day aligned with reality rather than wistfully wishing the immediate post-Cold War order back into existence.

The Washington Doctrine provides apt inspiration of where to begin. I will lead our nation from the bloody follies of neoconservatism and liberal internationalism abroad towards a strategy that affirmatively defends our homeland. We will be Uncle Sucker no more. Rather than spending billions projecting power into global vacuums where our allies will not spend to maintain it themselves, we will put America First again—as George Washington urged—as we recalibrate and consider our true interests.

Nixon and Realism

Though I often pay tribute to George Washington, when it comes to foreign policy, the president I most admire is Richard Nixon. Against the chaotic backdrop of the 1960s, where battles over ideas spilled into the streets, Nixon asserted a cold and sober realism. He formulated peace in the Middle East, while maintaining only the lightest-possible military footprint there. He declined to intervene in the subcontinental war between India and Pakistan, while still demonstrating naval deterrence. He got us out of Vietnam. Most importantly, he recognized the unique threat posed by the Soviet Union. In China, he saw the greatest butcher of the 20th century, Mao Zedong. Yet rather than counting Mao’s crimes or launching a moralistic push for his downfall, he understood that Mao was the driver of the Sino-Soviet split. Nixon could never trust Mao to be a great leader or a saint, but he could trust him to act in his nation’s own interests. Thus it was that Nixon went to China and changed the Cold War forever.

If only Nixon could have seen the giveaways future administrations would offer to China. He was wary of the Chinese and believed they would become a great power and a great threat by the 21st century, but he could not have imagined that a whole generation of American leaders would help them do it—“useful idiots,” in communist parlance. In his day, many useful idiots populated the foreign-policy establishment, and he rejected their influence. Under Nixon’s leadership, the engines of state were turned from universalist language to, as he put it, driving local actors to take the “primary responsibility of providing the manpower for [their] defense.”

As U.S. president, I will respect and revive Nixon’s legacy by rejecting the bloodthirsty blather of the useful idiots who preach a no-win war in Ukraine that forces our two great power foes ever closer. The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, it becomes ever clearer that there is only one winner: China. I will lead America from moralism to realism by executing the inverse of what Nixon did in 1972: I will go to Moscow in 2025. I will deliver peace in Ukraine under the only terms that should matter to us—terms that put American interests first. The Biden administration has foolishly tried to get Xi to dump Putin. In reality, we should get Putin to dump Xi.

A good deal requires all parties to get something out of it. To that end, I will accept Russian control of the occupied territories and pledge to block Ukraine’s candidacy for NATO in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China. I will end sanctions and bring Russia back into the world market. In this way, I will elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.

With the same realist candor, I will admit that it is unacceptably dangerous that so much of our way of life is dependent upon Chinese manufacturing and Taiwanese semiconductors. I will declare economic independence from China. I will demand fairness in our trading relations with them. There will be no more industrial espionage and theft through forced “technology transfers” or other political favors as a condition for U.S. companies expanding into China, or else I will take swift action to punish China and to bar U.S. businesses from engaging in such behaviors. I will incentivize American companies to move supply chains away from China and rebase them in allied markets, especially in our own hemisphere, and I will use trade deals as the main way to do it. The key to so many supply chains is the semiconductor, and here, I will work with American industry to make certain our country achieves semiconductor independence.

Monroe and Security

If Nixon teaches us how to approach more distant foreign policy, it is Monroe who teaches us how to handle security and relations with our near-abroad in the Western Hemisphere. His doctrine has driven American grand strategy since the 1800s. I do not want to change Monroe’s centrality; rather, I want to reinvigorate Monroe. 

As we look at the Western Hemisphere today, we see encroachments that James Monroe would never have tolerated: Chinese spy balloons drifting over our heartland, Chinese spy bases in Cuba, Chinese ports near the Panama Canal. We must re-embrace the Monroe Doctrine and say that America comes First and that our hemisphere is not to be encroached by our adversaries.

Our foes abroad have sowed discord in our home hemisphere. Waves of leftism have roiled Latin America and created economic instability. Unstable states are unable to protect their own people, often leading to parallel states like the drug cartels that plague Mexico. These cartels are then used as foot soldiers by Chinese criminal enterprises that use them to push poisonous fentanyl into our country. In the form of both migrants and drugs, our border is under attack.

A safe Western Hemisphere makes for a safe America. To our foes who wish ill upon us and our hemispheric partners, I say keep your distance or you will be made to regret it. When I make that promise, I look especially at our U.S. Navy, which has fallen into sad decline but will be a key target of strategic investment for my administration. Meanwhile, to our hemispheric partners, I say, now is the time to invest in your own security and prosperity so that your people will have no desire to migrate.

Especially with regard to regional prosperity, I pledge that America will be a willing partner in the commerce Jefferson mentioned so long ago. We already have free trade agreements signed with twelve neighbors in our hemisphere, most especially the USMCA deal that covers our two most important trading partners in Mexico and Canada. Under my leadership, we will grow hemispheric trade to historic levels. We will pursue fair trade deals that will help create good-paying jobs both in the United States and in our neighbor nations, with an eye towards helping us to near-shore our supply chain and move it away from China.

My Foreign Policy Vision

With Nixon and Monroe firmly in hand, we can now move into application. Let us start with our great power rival, China, and the jewel of their near-abroad, Taiwan. We have operated in strategic ambiguity with regard to Taiwan for far too long. I will move to strategic clarity, by which I mean that China must understand that I will defend American interests in Taiwan. If Taiwan wants any partnership in their defense, then they will need to raise their defense spending and military readiness to acceptable levels. Meanwhile, I will commit to making sure Taiwan has the weapons they need for that defense, both from a sea-borne invasion, and in future, for a long-term insurgency against any occupying foreign force, if needed. 

Aside from China, India is the key to our Indo-Pacific policy. I respect India’s realist tradition of non-alignment and equidistance, but I will nevertheless find ways to draw them closer to us and into regional leadership. Right now, India is the world’s largest arms importer, as well as a strong center for technology and engineering. The American defense industry needs time to grow and recover from decades of post-Cold War mismanagement. India can serve as a helpful partner in the meantime. We can use trade and tech transfer to unleash India’s tech and manufacturing might to not just arm India but other regional allies – to transform them from importer to exporter. In a similar way, I will pursue an AUKUS-style deal to share nuclear submarine technology and empower the Indian Navy. The result should be that if there is war in Taiwan, we can reliably depend on India to stand with us in a naval blockade of the Andaman Sea and Malacca Strait—the way of passage for China-bound oil supplies from the Middle East. This possibility alone will further deter China from invading Taiwan.

Elsewhere in Asia and Oceania, we must encourage other allies like Japan, the Philippines, and Australia to expand their defense budgets. These countries and others, including European countries like France and the U.K., should be encouraged to invest in poorer regional countries to offset Chinese economic influence, including the Polynesian islands. France and the U.K. both retain possessions in the regions, and I will encourage them to reposition their naval forces and permanently garrison their Pacific protectorates with manpower and assets. If we are to stand with the Europeans on their continent, then we should feel no compunction in asking them to stand with us in Asia.

On the European continent, we must seek a finite NATO border and pledge no further territorial expansion. European manpower should be the primary defense of Europe’s frontiers, with America as a balancer of last resort. Since about 1960, the United States has averaged about 36 percent of allied GDP but more than 60 percent of allied defense spending. Uncle Sam should not serve as Uncle Sucker to Europe. While European and American interests remain aligned, our spending priorities are not. No longer will America subsidize European weakness. Standing in the way of this recounting is the NATO bureaucracy, which is prone to push liberal internationalist missions that are beyond the alliance’s core role. Just like with the American administrative state, the NATO bureaucracy is beyond repair and must be pared to the bone. I will refashion NATO as a strictly defensive military alliance, not an internationalist club that opines on the domestic politics of its members.

One of my great hopes is that the United States will need to concern itself with the Middle East far less than we have in the last century. Oil drew us into the internecine rivalries of this region. Time and again, we tried to pick winners and losers in lands torn by ancient hatreds that were impenetrable to us. In the past few years, the Middle East has settled into an uneasy equilibrium. The Abraham Accords stand as a shining achievement that delivered a peace previously unimaginable. Yet we must recognize what more than anything drove these accords: Israelis and Arabs working together out of necessity to counterbalance the power of Iranians. There’s no one single power that poses a hegemonic challenge in the region, and if and when there is, America will be there to resist. We have settled at an uneasy equilibrium, but it is an equilibrium nonetheless—any further intervention by the United States risks throwing this situation out of balance again. We should therefore return to the Nixonian wisdom of keeping a minimal footprint in a region beset by historic grievances that Americans neither can change nor should even try to change with social engineering, unless a major great power threat emerges. 

My campaign, at its core, is about reestablishing American national identity. When my two terms have elapsed, Americans will have taken back their country from unelected elites. We will rightly experience national pride again. The better we Americans understand our national identity, the better the world will understand us too. I will be honest with our partners abroad as I will be with our own citizens: the U.S. government’s job is exclusively to represent the interests of Americans. I further contend that the better we Americans understand our national identity, the better the world will understand our international identity. We still seek peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations. We remain committed to our own sovereignty above any internationalist delusions that promise paradise on earth, even as we still seek peace, commerce, and friendship with other nations. We are one nation under God, cognizant of the fallenness of our world, resigned to approaching it with realism, and yet enlivened with the certainty that our own liberty and prosperity may animate hope in the hearts of peoples abroad of what is possible when the greatest nation founded on freedom is indeed the strongest version of itself at home.

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Made in Farmville

Culture

Made in Farmville

Farmville, Virginia’s Oliver Anthony sits atop the charts. His music about the struggles of the common man has become a rallying cry for his community and communities like it across the country.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Revelation 22:1-2

FARMVILLE—Flashing blue lights in my rear view mirror welcome me into Farmville, Virginia, and it’s not a police escort. 

From my side mirror, I see a classic looking sheriff confidently striding closer, his lampshade mustache curled up at the corners with a smile. “You’re not from around here are you, son?” The California plates on my Jeep made it obvious to the sheriff, but that wasn’t the only time I would be asked that question during my time in Farmville.

“What’s your destination?” The sheriff asks. “Farmville,” I reply. “Shucks, you’re not but ten minutes away, and you were going under the speed limit not 90 seconds ago; but when you got to me, I had to pull you over because it had dropped,” the sheriff explains, as if he felt bad writing me a ticket. No one is ever happy getting a speed ticket, but it made it easier to take. 

“And your reason for traveling down here?” I tell him the purpose of my trip: Since “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral and shot the previously obscure Farmville native to the top of the charts, a lot has been said about Oliver Anthony’s music and the message it sends. But no one has bothered to ask Farmville what they think about his music, and why someone growing up there might be inclined to think about the nation the way Anthony does.

“Yeah, I’ve seen the videos,” the sheriff replies. “While I have you, sir,” I say, “what’s it like working down here?” 

“This is the best place in the world, with the best people in the world. We [law enforcement] look out for folks, and folks look out for us and treat us well. Most get on and get along just fine, and we look after one another, at least in this county”—we were in Cumberland County, which bisects Farmville with the neighboring Prince Edward County. “Other counties, well, I have my own opinions about them, and I’ll leave it at that.”

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Revelation 22:3-6

I pull into the gravel parking lot outside of Appomattox River Co., the family business of Brian Vincent, the current mayor of Farmville. His hair is gray and thinning a bit, but he’s a fit outdoorsman—no doubt he could run circles around me.

Vincent moved to Farmville in 2012, after he and his wife, a Farmville native, tied the knot. While she sought a degree as a nurse practitioner in nearby Charlottesville, Vincent could keep himself busy working for his father-in-law.

“For a long time after we got here, I was known as Harriet’s husband,” Vincent says. “I ran for office just so people would know my name,” the mayor jokes.

The property includes a small showroom for top-end kayaks, and two large warehouses, originally built in 1926, that hold the company’s inventory, which can be upwards of 1,000 self-propelled watercraft. Inside the showroom, a framed black and white picture of a storefront that reads, “E.S. Taylor & Co. Prospect Depot, VA. Circa 1895.”

The place has changed a lot since the late 19th century when the family first opened a business in Farmville, which wouldn’t become a fully incorporated town until 1912. Even before the place got the name, it has been backdrop to peculiar and prominent moments in American history. 

Prior to gaining the name Farmville, it was simply called “the Farmlands,” as part of the tobacco plantation owned by the Randolph family called “Bizarre.” Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Robert E. Lee were all related to the Randolphs on their mother’s side. Patrick Henry, who represented Prince Edward county in the Virginia General Assembly, returned to live in the area after finishing his second stint serving as the state’s governor. Founded in 1775, the local Hampden-Sydney College is one of the ten oldest colleges in the United States.

Through the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries, local industry revolved around tobacco production, processing, and shipping from the large plantations in the area like Bizarre. Freed and enslaved black laborers built and operated canals that shipped tobacco products throughout the region. By the mid-19th century, the industrial revolution had brought railroads to Farmville, and the demands of fossil-fuel consuming technologies led to the opening of several coal mines. The era also brought Farmville its second college. Located in the heart of Farmville, Longwood University was founded as a female seminary in 1839. In 2016, Longwood hosted the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Tim Kaine.

While many of the mines remained operational through reconstruction, the Civil War caused coal production in Farmville to decline. In the final days of the Civil War, Lee’s army retreated through Farmville, where the Confederates hoped to pick up rations as they marched from the besieged Richmond to other confederate forces in North Carolina. The Union Army stayed hot on their heels, however. Lee’s army made a last ditch effort to secure the high bridge that runs more than a third of a mile over 100 feet above the Appomattox river. When they failed to secure the bridge, they made a failed attempt to destroy it. Two days later on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant in the nearby Appomattox Court House.

Into the early 20th century, rail, coal, and tobacco continued to shape the local economy—though the war fundamentally transformed the structure of these industries on a macro and micro level. Other businesses started popping up, too. From 1884 to 1901, Lithia Springs Water bottled and sold water that was believed to have healing properties from the nearby lithia springs. Tourism also began to play a factor, but tobacco and coal remained Farmville’s bread and butter.

“Right now, we’re on the north end of Main Street before you enter downtown. When you do, you’ll see the big brick buildings,” Mayor Vincent tells me. They used to be tobacco warehouses, operated by companies such as W.G. Dunnington and R.S. Paulette. The dozen or so brick warehouses, which date back to the Civil War and reconstruction era, “are now a successful furniture retailer Green Front Furniture. They anchor downtown.”

The days of manufacturing are mostly over for Farmville. “We’ve got a good tourism industry today in Farmville, thanks to the High Bridge Trail, the Appomattox River and the five state parks located close to town,” the mayor says. “Beyond that, of course, you still have local agriculture, a robust retail sector and small to mid scale manufacturing that give the people here a chance to make a good living.” He names antique stores, bars and restaurants, and a local fishing gear manufacturer as town pillars.

A blend of geography and historical circumstance has helped Farmville stave off some of the worst aspects of decline experienced in small-town America. “There’s been quite a lot of change over the years, but we succeed by working together,” Vincent tells me. “And being a community with open lines of communication.” Vincent started serving on the city council in 2018, and when he ran for mayor in 2022, he walked nearly 100 miles criss-crossing town to try and speak to every Farmville resident. He already knew many of them. In Farmville, everybody knows everybody.

“You always have some people on what I call the crispy edges of the political spectrum. Knocking on doors this election cycle those folks would ask me what I thought of this or that national issue. They asked about issues I have no control over, but I’m always willing to engage,” Vincent tells me. “And when you knock on their door and approach a conversation with good faith, we’re able to talk about what we think is best for our town and how to best serve the interest of the people of Farmville.” 

I asked Vincent what motivated him to get into politics, other than so that people would know him as something other than “Harriet’s husband.” “I’m not really interested in partisan politics,” the mayor says, “I’m interested in Farmville. I’m interested in Southside Virginia. I’m interested in doing the most good for the most people. I’m interested in doing good work.” Most local politicians run as independents, Vincent tells me because at the end of the day, they all belong to one party—the party of Farmville. 

“I ran for mayor because I’ve been disappointed by the tenor and style of leadership in today’s politics. My wife and I have two daughters, and most of all I want to give them an example of leadership that they can look up to, and hopefully the rest of the town can be proud of,” Vincent explains. “Of course, we’re all fallible human beings, we all stumble. But can you get back on track, with steadfast clarity of purpose, grounded in core, high moral principles—that’s fortitude. That’s the example I want to provide for my daughters and for the town.”

“We must all hold each other accountable to decency and virtue,” Vincent says. Even though he’s the mayor, the ballot box is the last place where Vincent is held accountable. “I see our citizens, my neighbors, at restaurants and the grocery store, and they let me know if there’s a problem, and we work it out.”

He says Farmville resident’s political beliefs vary widely. Prince Edward county, in large part because of the colleges, is a purple county that Biden won by just over 500 votes in the 2020 presidential elections. The families that have been there for a few generations, however, tend to be conservative like the deep red you’ll find in the neighboring counties. But everyone agrees that Democrats aren’t coming to save Farmville, and neither are the Republicans.

“The only people that can save us and keep us together are ourselves, our community,” Vincent explains. “When someone gets hurt, falls ill, falls on hard times, or tragedy strikes, we have to be there for each other. That’s how Farmville operates. That’s why I love this community.”

I ask the mayor for a local bar or restaurant where I could watch the debate and ask some folks what they think. “Many folks won’t be watching the debate tonight. They’ll all be at the concert.”

“Wait, Oliver Anthony is playing tonight?” I ask. 

“Yeah, at North Street Press Club just about a mile up the road for about three hundred or so people at six o’clock. The place sold out in minutes when the tickets went on sale,” the mayor responds. “You didn’t know?”

“I had no idea,” I said as he introduced me to Spencer, one of his employees who would go straight from Appomattox River Co. to North Street Press Club to work the door. I tell Spencer what I do and why I’m in Farmville, and that some corporate media organizations said Anthony’s songs should be more patriotic and are trying to connect him to the right, making him a deplorable by association. “They said we have to be more patriotic?” Spencer says. The mayor scoffs and we all have a laugh.

The angel said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God who inspires the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place.”

“Look, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy written in this scroll.”

I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me.

Revelation 22:6-8

I left Appomattox River Co. and made the short drive to North Street Press Club. The old brick building that used to print newspapers has been converted into a bar. It is just past three, but the bar is already closed to prepare for the show. I knock on the glass doors, and a confused employee cracks the door open. I tell him why I’m in Farmville and ask if there are any tickets left over for members of the press or otherwise.

“A press ticket?” North Street Press Club has never heard of press tickets. I love this town. I tell him I plan on coming to ask some people questions while they wait in line, which he says is fine.

In the meantime, I head to a barbeque restaurant called the Fishing Pig. There, I strike up a conversation with my server, a young black man who is planning on entering the Air Force upon finishing school. “Do you get a lot of people entering the armed services from around here?” I ask. “Not a ton, but there’s still a strong community of people who are in the service or have served around here,” he replies. “A lot of them come back here to raise families.” I inquire if he plans on doing the same. “Absolutely,” he replies. “I’ve loved living and growing up here. It’s small town America—you just can’t beat it,” he says with a big smile across his face.

After I finish eating, I head back to North Street Press Club where folks have begun lining up for the night’s concert. I see Spencer at the front of the line, distributing wristbands and checking IDs.

I strike up a conversation with a group of three, a man and two women, who look to be in their early twenties. They’ve come from Richmond and Fredericksburg to see Anthony live rather than on Twitter or YouTube. “He’s so relatable,” one of the young women, Meredith, says. “It’s what everyone’s been thinking. He just put it into a song, and everyone loves it because everyone can agree with it,” Will, the young man, adds. They’ve frequented Farmville before, and I ask if they think Anthony’s music represents the character of the town. “Yeah, everyone loves Farmville because in a small town, it’s not worth fighting with the people you work with everyday about stuff that doesn’t really matter,” the other woman, Zoey, says.

I talk to two men, Ralph and Cody, next. They’ve lived in this part of Virginia all their life, and look the part. When “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral, “everybody around here just came together. In person, and on social media. That was what I loved about it—the unity that the song brought between both liberals and conservatives,” Cody says.

I ask another two men, who have driven more than two hours to see Anthony, why they’re here and not watching the GOP debate. “Is that happening tonight?” one says. “Is it even a contest?” asks the other with a chuckle. “I’m far away from all that kind of stuff. I believe what I believe, and that’s all there is to it,” the first man adds. “This is more about the common man who doesn’t have a dog in that fight, but cares about their own lives and what goes on in their community.” I get a sense that it’s not disinterest in politics that leads him to say the common man doesn’t “have a dog in that fight,” but that none of the dogs fight for them.

One middle-aged woman, whose daughter works behind the bar at North Street, tells me the community has rallied around Anthony because “he’s being honest. All of us feel this way, and I just hope that they let him be true to himself.” 

“And if he wants to be left alone, leave him alone,” she adds.

As I meander up and down the line chatting with concertgoers, I get a strong sense that some want to be left alone, so I do. Others look suspicious when they start talking to me. I’m wearing a red and blue striped polo, blue pants, and a red hat with the Betsy Ross flag embroidered on the front.

“You’re not from around here,” the voice of a towering man, who looks like he’s eaten sandwiches bigger than me, booms. “Who do you work for?” I tell him and hand him my card. Reading it pleases him, and he slides it into the pocket on his left breast. He and the group of about six others are now more willing to talk. One of the women in the group says her daughter also works at North Street. “We all love Oliver Anthony around here, no matter what people think about politics, because he’s speaking for all of us from small towns who see what’s going on in this country.”

“This is who we are,” one heavyset man wearing a cowboy hat tells me. “If people have a problem with it, then imagine living it. We work the land, we work in the factories, we do anything to make ends meet and put food on the table for our family on our own. We’re the working class that built this country, and we’re tired of feeling disrespected.”

Another man I spoke to built the sign that now hangs above North Street Press Club. “We’ve all been able to get behind Oliver Anthony because his message isn’t right or left, it’s the people versus the elites who seek to divide us over anything they can.” A buddy of his says, “It’s great to see the revival of Appalachian music, given most music, pop and country, are just junk these days. These themes have always been in our music, because they’re true. You can disagree or not like the sound, but this is the reality that small town America faces today.” When it comes to the GOP debate, “its all just bullsh*t. Most of them don’t understand what’s going on in places like Farmville, Virginia. They don’t want to, because they’d be implicated in what’s going on here and all over the country.”

But he said to me, “Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your fellow prophets and with all who keep the words of this scroll. Worship God!” 

Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”

Revelation 22:9-11

A few stragglers make their way into North Street Press Club as Oliver Anthony takes the stage to raucous cheering. I’m standing outside the entrance, watching through a window—nobody was scalping the hottest tickets in town. Anthony is wearing blue jeans, a black shirt, and black sunglasses, and carries up a few loose pieces of paper and a brown leather Bible. He nods and smiles, waiting for the crowd to die down, and when it does, he cracks open the leather book at its very end.

Anthony begins his set reading Revelation 22 in full, followed by a chorus of “amens” from the crowd and more cheering, this time, a more thoughtful applause. Later, after the show, when we chat very briefly, Anthony tells me he “just felt compelled” to share Revelation 22. “I just try to open the book, and what I feel compelled to read, I read. It just felt appropriate for the climate we’re in, the international climate we’re in.”

I hear the first chords of “I Want to Go Home.” The crowd sings with Anthony: “Well, if it won’t for my old dogs and the good Lord they’d have me strung up in the psych ward ’cause every day livin’ in this new world is one too many days to me. Son, we’re on the brink of the next world war, and I don’t think nobody’s prayin’ no more. And I ain’t sayin’ I know it for sure. I’m just down on my knees.” Christians know how this world ends, but it doesn’t alleviate all the anxieties and suffering modernity has wrought.

As I watch through the window, Spencer walks up with a “Rich Men North of Richmond” hat and gives it to me. I beg to pay him back but he says no. “This is hospitality. We treat you well, but our only request is that in your story, you treat us fairly.”

Anthony’s other hits, “Aint Gotta Dollar” and “Ive Got to Get Sober” follow. As does “Doggonit,” which begins, “My head’s been hurting, my back’s been aching,. The water’s drying up and there’s a war in the making. People eating bugs ’cause they won’t eat bacon.” Every “Doggonit” is screamed by the crowd at the top of their lungs, so loud it echoes down the street.

Anthony raises his voice at one part of the song, too. “And Republicans and Democrats, I swear they’re all just full of crap. I’ve never seen a good city slicking, bureaucrat.” Through the window, I see old and young alike singing along, some have hands raised in the air, some smile and nod their approval, and others struggle to sing the lyrics without keeling over in laughter. I check the clock. It’s 8:05. An hour from now, on the debate stage in Milwaukee, the first question of the first GOP primary debate for 2024 would start with a question about Oliver Anthony’s hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

Revelation 22:12-15

“As we sit here tonight,” Fox News’ Martha MacCallum says, leading into the first question of the debate, “the number one song on the Billboard chart is called ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’” The debate crowd breaks out into a cheer. “It is by a singer from Farmville, Virginia, named Oliver Anthony. His lyrics speak of alienation, of deep frustration with the state of government and of this country,” MacCallum says, before Fox News plays a clip of Anthony’s viral performance. The screen splits in two as one camera pans the candidates. Chris Christie looks constipated watching it. Pence has a condescending smirk on his face. DeSantis sways with his eyes closed and mouths the words. Vivek is grooving, too, with a big smile plastered across his face. Nikki Haley smiles blankly, but that is par for the course. Tim Scott trifles with loose papers.

In Farmville, Oliver Anthony’s set ended with “Rich Men North of Richmond” about an hour ago. The staff has since let me into the bar, and Anthony is supposedly coming back on stage to perform a second set later in the night. Instead, most of the bar is still grouped around Anthony, waiting for their turn in line to get a picture, an autograph, and exchange a few words. 

North Street Press Club has several televisions. Not one is playing the GOP debate. One is showing the Little League World Series, another a rerun of the Steelers/Bills preseason game. A TV located stage right is playing a nature documentary about the Louisiana Bayou; a small gator trudges across a silty bank. The TV on stage left is on a channel with some kind of paid programming for a new vacuum cleaner.

Oliver Anthony has no idea what was happening in Milwaukee. Nor did North Street Press Club. If they knew, they either wouldn’t care, or possibly would have flipped the TV the bird. A merchandise stand sells hats, t-shirts, and posters. Two signs, out of place and clearly made by fans strategically posted by them behind the merchandise stand, read “Oliver Anthony 2024.”

At the bar, whiskey is flowing and tall cans of PBR crack one after another. I strike up a conversation with a couple a few years older than me. I ask them how they liked the set and when they first heard Oliver Anthony’s music. “We’ve heard his music for years,” they reply. “Years?” I ask. “I went to elementary school with Oliver, and we’ve been friends ever since,” the man says. They show me their wristbands that read “artist’s guests.” They live in Richmond now and came down to hang out with Anthony and see him perform for the first time since he shot up the charts.

“At first we didn’t believe it, because we thought the algorithm was just feeding us his stuff because we already followed him. We just thought, ‘wow, Oliver’s song is catching on around here.’” When he first watched the video of “Rich Men North of Richmond,” it had around a hundred thousand views. “That was really cool. Then I came back a while later and it had millions, which was crazy.” The most shocking thing for them about their friend’s overnight stardom is that “‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ isn’t even his best song,” the man says. They both think “Doggonit” is the best.

Anthony’s childhood friend tells me that Anthony, born Christopher Anthony Lunsford, has been playing music for some time. He did open mic and karaoke nights at North Street Press Club and became a part of Farmville’s community of musicians who mostly do it for fun outside of their full-time jobs. Anthony worked at a nearby mill, and then worked as a salesman selling oxygen tanks for medical use. Anthony was struggling with health issues of his own. His mental health was in poor condition, and he struggled with alcohol abuse. It was a cycle that compounded until he recommitted himself to Christ in July of this year, praying to God that he’d get sober if the Lord directed him in the pursuit of his dream. Just a month or so later, Anthony was atop the charts.

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

Revelation 22:16-17

“Who are you?” a woman, dressed in a spunky dress with geometric figures, dangling earrings, and a neon headband, asks as I stand in front of the stage listening to a few men pluck “Wagon Wheel” on stage. I didn’t think I’d stick out so much, but I guess I really do. I tell her who I am, where I work, and why I’m in Farmville. “Ohhh,” she says. “I thought you were a lost Hampden-Sydney boy.” She asks more about my trip and how I’ve liked Farmville. “Tell me, honestly!” She demands. I tell her that I think the people here are right to love their town, and are right to stick together, because the rich men north of Richmond do, in fact, want total control. 

“Did you know this is the biggest event this place has ever had?” She asks excitedly. “I D.J. here and host the hamster races from time to time. Oliver Anthony used to come here and watch me and the rest of us,” she motions to the group she’s with and beckons them over (apparently, I’d passed the test), “and now we’re here watching him!”

They are all musicians that play North Street and other local venues, either as solo acts or in bands. She levels with me, “I’m a Democrat. Most of this area, aside from the schools, are pretty conservative. But I love the people here and when we talk and play together, we always end up getting along.” She and the other musicians that have now gathered around are particularly big fans of one member of their group, Russell Lynch. “The kid is like a young Elvis,” one musician says. “I love him, and he’s about as conservative as you can get,” the woman jokes.

Lynch had just finished on stage, and he was in fact phenomenal. Others outside of Farmville have recognized as much, too. He’s won multiple Josie awards—presented at the Grand Ole Opry for independent musicians—such as Outlaw Country Vocalist of the Year. He’s slighter in stature, but has a rough, outlaw look. Get him talking, and it’s obvious why the people around here love him. “Music means so much to this community. Songs tell our stories, tell our history. It’s who we are as individuals and as a community. It gives us hope and brings us together, and it’s exciting to see Oliver recognized for doing that and speaking the truth.”

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.

He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.

Revelation 22:18-21

For the land of Jefferson, Farmville, Virginia, is awfully Jacksonian. 

Almost everyone I spoke to identifies as some kind of libertarian, but are nothing similar to libertarians in Washington, D.C. People with similar politics to the kinds one finds in Farmville have been described as folk libertarians, which is certainly true given their suspicion of federal and even state power, their distaste for anything that smells bureaucratic, and anything that might get in the way of how they want to live their lives. 

But it’s best to check the term libertarian at the door. They aren’t for creative destruction—that uproots people and places dear to the community and prevents life from carrying on as it has for years. Nor are they for reforming Social Security or Medicare.

The people of Farmville are Jacksonians: they are seriously concerned with state power, but they’re just as skeptical of corporate power. They believe the elites seek to depress, if not destroy, the people and parts of their community that are doing well. The elites’ response to people and places that are struggling and begging for assistance is to stick up their nose and tease them, “We thought you wanted to be left alone.” If they are going to pay taxes, they better be getting their money’s worth: programs and services that benefit and strengthen the middle and working class. Those who take advantage of those programs are at best not being neighborly, and at worst are stealing from other members of the community. 

While Republican politicians demonstrate to millions of Americans that they don’t understand the common man on the debate stage, the folks of Farmville don’t bother tuning in, because they already knew, and they already have their champion.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Longwood University hosted the 2020 vice-presidential debate. We regret the error.

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The Do in Brew City

Politics

The Do in Brew City

Last night’s display in Milwaukee showed off the institutional GOP’s sorry shape.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire outsider candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, had the line of the night at the first Republican presidential debate: “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment.”

It is difficult to argue with that. Last night’s ritual combat at Milwaukee did little to dispel the gloom. Contrast the clown-car pageantry of the overstuffed debate stages in the 2016 cycle. You wouldn’t say it was all exactly sweetness and light, but there was a certain zest to it. 

Ramaswamy seemed to be the only person on the stage enjoying himself, perhaps because he has the most uncomplicated relationship with the continuing focal point of the Republican Party, former President Donald Trump. Everyone else on the stage had to explain why they are turning on the man with whom they worked on policy, whose coattails they rode at the polls, and who remains prohibitively popular in their respective home states. 

A tall order; you wonder why anyone signed on for it at all, let alone the truly marginal candidates who could have just as easily stayed home. Would sitting this out have brought any loss of honor to off-putting nonentities like Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and apparent parody of a Kevin Costner character, or Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas whose big idea is apparently making public schools offer computer science courses? 

The evening brought few surprises, even in the particulars. The only real diversion was Ramaswamy’s apparent glee as he impishly quoted Obama and sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence about the virtues of Pence’s former boss. Ramaswamy’s straightforward support for Trump, the policies, and Trump, the man, makes you wonder whether there is already a compact about the bottom of the ticket. Or perhaps he just expects to be the dauphin if 45 does end up donning the orange jumpsuit or disqualified on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, or if any of the other perfervid but not impossible dreams nurtured at the Department of Justice and the DNC come to pass.

That’s the crushing inevitability of this race: Donald Trump will be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, irrespective of the goings-on in Brew City. It is a fitting recapitulation of the Trump phenomenon that the old forms of political contest have been turned into a game show about who will get to be 45’s new business partner. This cursus honorum is starting to look pretty imperial.

There are two points worth making about this otherwise basically pointless exercise. First, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis had a bad night, putting more drag on what has seemed like an ill-considered campaign from the get-go. He seemed shifty and weak, temporizing in his answers about the six-week abortion ban he signed into law, about sending aid to Ukraine, about whether Pence fulfilled his constitutional duty on January 6. (During one rambling evasion, Ramaswamy licked his finger and put it up in the air, which, with Fox’s split screen, made for pretty good TV.) 

Perhaps worse, DeSantis did not seem like a main character: Ramaswamy, Pence, and the erstwhile Trump chew toy Chris Christie drove the conversation. He did not seem like the man who was supposedly closing in on Trump six months ago, let alone the man who can distill that elusive alchemical elixir, “Trumpism without Trump.” Anything can happen, of course—optimists point to the McCain and Biden campaigns, which came back from moribundity to win the crown. But it still seems that the remaining campaign staff should start thinking about their future careers. (How do you phrase “blew through $35 million, tanked the candidate’s poll numbers, and was out of the race by Super Tuesday” for a resume?)

The second point is how incoherent the GOP line on abortion is, and how visibly cretinous some of the party’s putative grandees are. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s diatribe about “not demonizing” but “humanizing” the abortion question allowed Pence and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina to use the rhetoric of hardliners in endorsing a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks. The vast majority—90 percent or more—of abortions occur at or before that cutoff. If the unborn child is in fact a human being, maybe our most outspoken champions for life can scare up a policy a little better than a 10-percent cut to the slaughter. This is tap-dancing outside Dachau. 

So we return to Ramaswamy’s “dark moment.” We have a state security apparatus that appears to be completely outside the control of the duly elected representatives of the American people. We have an ongoing failure to exert national sovereignty on our southern border. The industrialized mass murder of children continues, a little slower but just as sure. Our industrial base remains in shambles from a massive multi-decade trade deficit. Americans, when they are not being killed by drugs, are simply dropping out of civil society and our shared national life. It is a dark moment. Where can we find a light?

Not Milwaukee, anyhow.

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Vivek’s Cassandra Problem

Presidential candidate and potential First Rapper Vivek Ramaswamy’s greatest mistake is, apparently, being “unserious” about foreign policy—an increasingly interesting phrase that’s thrown out by our “serious” foreign policy experts such as Adam Kinzinger, David Frum, and Will Hurd, to demonstrate whom they consider declasse. After all, Kinzinger, Frum, Hurd and company have led to unquantifiable prosperity and success in the last quarter century. You have to believe them, because it surely isn’t measurable by normal sensory perceptions or metrics.

Ramaswamy doesn’t want to continue a proxy war in Ukraine. Ramaswamy doesn’t want to treat any country besides America as special, including Israel. Ramaswamy wants to target cartels on America’s border with American military, instead of safeguarding Ukraine’s borders and subsiding European welfare states. Ramaswamy is attempting a functional and applicable “America First”, trying to translate a catchy worldview into tangible action. The sophisticates hate that.

The reality of Ukraine is, however, grim.

The hyped “counteroffensive” failed, by all measures. The Ukraine First Caucus has accepted that. The Intel community warns that it is not salvageable. The people have soured on another forever war. As Alex Ward writes in Politico, “The three top-polling Republicans for the presidential nomination all have one thing in common: they don’t want to commit the United States to defend other governments, namely in Ukraine and Taiwan.” An unnamed officer (it’s always an unnamed officer) finally figured out the reality of Ukraine as well. “One U.S. official, who didn’t want to run afoul of the administration by offering real views on the record, said the realities of the counteroffensive are sinking in around Washington.”

Everyone sensible knew that 45 thousand troops (nine brigades) aren’t enough for a counteroffensive against an entrenched great power enemy with nuclear weapons, who has the capability and intention to escalate. Ramaswamy’s fault has been to channel what most American people instinctively know. But according to our neoconservative elites, that truth is Russian disinformation.

The story of Cassandra is a classic, purely because it is a natural human instinct for most people to hate those few who display even a modicum of dispassionate foresight. It demonstrates their own ideological myopia. Ramaswamy, given his credentials, is supposed to be an elite, and go with the “consensus opinion” of the elites. He refuses to do so, for whatever reasons, and is therefore a class traitor in their eyes. It is a tale as old as time.

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Nixon Now

Politics

Nixon Now

Reflecting on the legacy of the 37th president.

(Bettmann / Contributor/Getty Images)

On the final morning of his presidency, America’s 37th president spoke to a gathering of young White House staffers. It was the lowest point in his career—and arguably, his life—yet still Richard Nixon sought to impart one final piece of wisdom to those assembled:

It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

Today, the American people rightfully feel disappointed. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, the economy seems stacked against the working man, and much of Washington refuses to listen. This has driven some policymakers to look for new paradigms in which to craft domestic and foreign policy. But as they do, it would behoove them to take a second look at the man who told Americans to always keep going.

Forty-nine years ago this month, Richard Nixon resigned. With him went one of the most successful presidencies in American history. But so too did his unique philosophy of government. Contrary to the progressive presidencies that came before him, like the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Nixon did not believe that government was the solution to every problem. But contrary to the Republican presidents—and their philosophies—which would come after him with the advent of Ronald Reagan, Nixon likewise did not believe that government was inherently a problem.

This is because Nixon saw governmental action, be it action taken domestically or abroad, as a tool. Like a hammer or a scalpel, it was not to be feared or loved; it simply existed for a purpose and could be used for that purpose when necessary. This made him a political realist, and as such he was never bound by a pure ideology. He had principles, to be sure: Over the course of his long career he identified himself as a conservative, sometimes as a progressive conservative. But beyond that, he had little time for clearly delineated ideology that necessitated certain responses. Preceding Reagan’s famous 11th commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican”), Nixon had one of his own: “When saying ‘always’ and ‘never,’ always keep a mental reservation; never foreclose the unique exception; always leave room for maneuver.” It was clearly his guiding star, and it served him well.

It was also well received by Americans. Before Watergate, Nixon was extremely popular, winning forty-nine of fifty states in his 1972 win, while also setting the record for largest popular vote margin in American electoral history, a record that remains unbroken today. When his campaign would play “Nixon Now,” one got the feeling it was a demand reverberating across the country.

While Nixon is known today as more of a “foreign policy president” because of his opening of China, domestically he took bold action. It was under the Nixon administration where the first serious environmental protection legislation was passed, which included the National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a serious expansion of the Clean Air Act. Nixon’s administration also began America’s war on cancer.

Nixon’s administration was also famously serious about law and order. He was a supporter of “dissent,” believing that the allowance of it was what separated the West from the communist world. But he differentiated between peaceful protest and law-breaking and made clear his and his administration’s opposition to illegal activities. And there were plenty, as a result of fervent opposition movements: In 1971 and 1972 alone, there were some 2,500 domestic bombings by the likes of the Weather Underground and other groups. These now-forgotten bombings were taken seriously by the Nixon administration, which took actions against them to restore national peace.

When it came to healthcare, Nixon stood out from practically all preceding and succeeding administrations by putting forward a concrete plan—based around employer-mandated coverage—that would have essentially created a form of universal healthcare in the United States. Though Democrats opposed it, believing they could get more under a Democrat (Jimmy Carter turned out to be less than spectacular on that front), Nixon’s plan was a bold one that broke from the conservative movement’s growing fusionist orthodoxy of smaller government. But Nixon pushed his plan because he correctly understood that people would not be proud to be Americans if, through no fault of their own, they or their family members went into debt due to illness, saying, “the general good health of our people is the foundation of our national strength.”

And national strength was something Nixon took seriously, especially when it came to foreign policy. Guided by realism, Nixon opened the door to China and allowed for detente with the Soviets at a time when America, weakened from internal strife and economic issues, was in no position for a harder or hotter Cold War. Both of these immense victories were serious breaks from past Cold War policy.

Nixon’s approach to foreign policy also stood in stark contrast to the ideologically based foreign policy that would come to dominate both the left and right: the neoconservative desire to spread democracy by force and the Biden administration’s war on autocracy both are utterly opposite of Nixon’s pragmatism. Fusionists at the time loathed Nixon for his opening to China; William F. Buckley, Jr. had such distaste for the opening to China that he un-endorsed Nixon in 1972. But it was his policy of triangulation against the Soviets, while also cooling relations with the opposing superpower at a key moment, that put the United States on the correct path to ultimately win the Cold War 20 years later.

Nixon also ended the War in Vietnam, something that historians far too often fail to credit him for. He did not do so out of an isolationist impulse, nor did he do so out of a reflexive anti-war stance. He did so because, in his realist view of the world, the war was unnecessary and was causing unnecessary death; the Vietnamese themselves would ultimately have to decide their own fates in a policy Nixon called Vietnamization. This was itself part of a larger view of the world that came to be known as the Nixon Doctrine. While the doctrine made clear that America would honor its treaty commitments, it also made clear that the U.S. would expect countries that received American aid to do most of the actual fighting.

Such policies would greatly serve America today. This is not to say that policymakers should copy and paste Nixon’s policies. Indeed, nothing would be less Nixonian than carrying on a policy simply because that is how the policy has always been done. But we can be inspired by his ideas. Domestically, conservatives should perhaps break new ground on ideas like wider healthcare coverage in recognition that, in order to have proud and strong Americans, they probably should not be afraid to go to the hospital or be punished if they develop cancer (half of all cancer patients go into debt).

In foreign affairs, substituting realism in place of ideologically motivated policymaking would likewise set us up much better for the coming 21st century challenges. Instead of threatening India, now the most populous country in the world, with sanctions over their internal politics, we should be actively attempting to strengthen relations. When it comes to China, a clear threat to the United States, we likewise should not allow them to overtake us—but should also not lose our heads and provoke an unnecessary war.

In using government as a tool, Nixon aspired to, as he put it in his resignation address, “put the interest of America first.” He did not bind himself with ideology, nor did he act without principle. He laid out clear principles, and then went about protecting his country as an optimist, always striving for the highest mountain. As Americans everywhere look for a path forward, and policymakers in Washington look for new inspiration, perhaps it is time for Nixon, now.

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In 2024, Keep an Eye on Foreign Policy

Politics

In 2024, Keep an Eye on Foreign Policy

The issue may not be top of mind for voters, but it is for Permanent Washington.

Vivek Ramaswamy (Wikimedia Commons)

ATLANTA—In the Spring of 2022, then-candidate J.D. Vance spoke at TAC’s snap conference in Washington to urge restraint in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Foreign policy is uniquely dangerous,” Vance said, “It is kind of ok to be on the wrong side of the consensus on trade, on immigration. But if you are on the wrong side of the foreign policy consensus in this town, it is remarkable how much the media organs of both the establishment right and the left will go after you.”

Vance continued: “The first time that I’ve actually ever had donors push back against all the crazy things that I say over the course of my senate campaign is on this Russia/Ukraine thing. The craziest idea that I’ve had is that we should not get involved in a nuclear war with Russia.”

Polling consistently shows that foreign policy isn’t a top concern for voters. But as Vance noted, it certainly matters to the political class in Washington. Members of that class are committed to ensuring that the GOP remains the party of endless wars. And it seems many in the Republican presidential field for 2024 agree.

Here in Atlanta at Erick Erickson’s “The Gathering,” we’ve had most of the GOP presidential candidates on stage, besides the one that voters actually want to be the nominee. But Trump still looms over this gathering, as he does all things 2024. So it has been a good opportunity to see how these also-ran candidates plan to differentiate themselves from the 45th president: Many are quick to double down on increasing our overseas meddling.

Mike Pence was asked directly how he’d distinguish himself from the man who was his boss just three years ago. He pointed to his hawkishness from the start, with platitudes about America as the leader of the free world, and swiped at “other candidates [who] want to pull back from American leadership.” He cited Eastern Europe, but threw in Iran, too, for good measure.

Similarly, Chris Christie emphasized his commitment to defending the borders of Eastern Europe. “Two weeks ago, I was in Ukraine,” Christie said, “I will tell you for certain this is not a territorial dispute.” The line was a clear swipe at Ron DeSantis’s response to Tucker Carlson on Ukraine earlier this year—which the Florida governor had to awkwardly walk back shortly thereafter. (DeSantis seems to have learned how thorny the issue is for the coalition he’s attempting to build. He didn’t mention Ukraine during his time on stage here in Atlanta.)

Nikki Haley brought back the worst of mid-aughts fear-mongering to make her case for increased intervention. For the former U.N. ambassador, it seems the specter of another devastating attack on the homeland is somehow connected to the question of who governs the Donbas. “Right now you see a lot of people, and you’ll see a lot of candidates on that [debate] stage, who want to take the lazy way out and say ‘Oh, we don’t need to worry about our friends.’ Yes we do need to worry about our friends! Because guess what? Don’t be so arrogant to think that a 9/11 can’t happen.”

Only Vivek Ramaswamy, the youngest candidate in the race, was willing to offer an alternative view. It’s no wonder he’s surging in the polls.

“The first thing I would do is end the Ukraine war.” Ramaswamy said, “I will end the Ukraine war on terms that advance American interests. Specifically: Freeze the current lines of control like the Korean War armistice agreement. Make a hard commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine…And I want to be clear about why: This will require, as a condition of that deal, Vladimir Putin to exit his military alliance with China. And the Russia-China military alliance is the top threat that we face today.”

Ramaswamy knows that his foreign policy, which he described as “moving from the model of fake liberal hegemony to a model of actual realism,” is an outlier in the race. “I’m frankly shocked that I am the only person in either political party right now actually that has embraced that vision.”

The millennial entrepreneur is conveniently discounting the primary’s overwhelming frontrunner with that declaration. Yes, the Trump administration’s record was more mixed bag than wholesale pivot from the party’s liberal hawkishness of previous years. But this was still a president who didn’t start any new wars, and a candidate who continues to draw the ire of the party establishment for suggesting that maybe our goal in Ukraine should be for people to stop dying.

Issues like inflation and entitlements may dominate the presidential debate on Wednesday. But keep an eye on foreign policy. It still is the driving issue for Permanent Washington.

And it seems it is deepening the chasm between the GOP and its voters as well.

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Against the Hunky-Dory Cons

Politics

Against the Hunky-Dory Cons

Presentism: The view that everything we have now is more or less optimal and correct and without need of reform.

(By Matt Ragen/Shutterstock)

One of the most acute pieces of media criticism came courtesy of The Simpsons several years ago: On vacation, Homer is delighted to find that his hotel offers complimentary copies of USA Today—“the newspaper that tells me everything is going to be Ooooo-K.” That’s a pretty fair assessment of USA Today. But it could apply equally to conservative publications and pundits singularly devoted to insisting that our economy and society are just fine the way they are.

Call them the hunky-dory cons.

National Review is, of course, the emblematic example. Witness the magazine’s response to the viral success of Oliver Anthony’s log-cabin cri de coer against “Rich Men North of Richmond.” In the song, the country singer tells of how he has “been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay / So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away.”

Cheer up, NR executive editor Mark Antonio Wright scolded Anthony in a column Monday: “My brother in Christ, you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job.” Wright added:

There’s plenty of them out there — jobs that don’t require a college degree, that offer good pay (especially in this tight labor market) and great benefits, especially if you’re willing to get your hands dirty by doing things like joining the Navy, turning wrenches, fixing pumps, laying pipe, or a hundred other jobs through which American men can still make a great living.

I’m not, in full disclosure, a fan of Anthony’s ballad. I’m not a country guy to begin with, and I found myself raising a skeptical eyebrow over the verse about fat people on welfare, which struck me as a little too on-the-nose and a little too Newt Gingrich circa 1995-96. But if we’re arguing about the political-economic insights of country songs, there is no denying that Anthony is right on balance, while Wright is in the wrong.

Wright might sincerely believe, based on anecdotal impressions, that there are plenty of well-paying jobs just out there for the taking, provided downscale Americans weren’t so lazy. But real wages for the bottom half of American workers have been stagnant for the better part of two generations. And Anthony is right to complain of “workin’ all day” for little reward: Since 1979, the dawn of the neoliberal era, American workers’ productivity has jumped by 65 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while their hourly pay has crawled up 17 percent.

Moreover, as I note in my new book, Tyranny, Inc. (published today!), American workers on the bottom of rungs of the labor market suffer from pervasive wage and scheduling precarity. Its symptoms include the fact that nearly half of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in cash to pay for exigencies, while one in ten would struggle to come up with the funds at all, according to the Federal Reserve. Plus, nearly half of fast-food workers—and a quarter of adjunct teachers—have to rely on welfare to make ends meet.

But the hunky-dory cons aren’t interested in statistics of this kind, only shiny abstractions and feel-good certainties from a bygone age. Hence, the Washington Free Beacon’s review of Tyranny, Inc., by the arch-hunky-dory con Samuel Gregg. In my book, I tell the story, among others, of Alicia Fleming, a Massachusetts restaurant worker who found herself unable to care for her newborn or pay her bills, owing to just-in-time scheduling by her employer.

Her employer would inform Fleming of her schedule days before she was supposed to show up for shifts that sometimes ran well into the early-morning hours. The unpredictability and short notices made finding childcare impossible. As Vox reported, “as a single parent without close family nearby,” she “was often scrambling to find childcare. When she wasn’t able to do so on short notice, she’d have to miss a shift.” That, in turn, caused her income to fluctuate: “It felt like all the time, I would think about the money I could make [if I could make the shifts], and what that could do for us, and then be really intent on trying to find somebody for child care.”

Gregg reduces this fact pattern to a single sentence: “Suddenly she found herself having to work several shifts to cater for her family’s life-necessities.” And then adds, in classic hunky-dory con style: “Only those with hearts of stone would not sympathize with these circumstances. But particular cases of distress do not constitute proof of systematic injustices pervading the American economy.”

There are two problems. The first is that Gregg, in his haste to insist that all is hunky-dory, misread the facts of the Fleming case. Her crisis wasn’t that she had to work several shifts to pay for necessities—it was that she couldn’t pick up enough hours given the unpredictability of her schedule and her childcare needs. This misreading of the facts is especially unfortunate in a review that faults yours truly for favoring “vehemence” over facts.

The second problem is that all is emphatically not hunky-dory. Fleming’s wasn’t an isolated case of distress, but, indeed, a symptom of a wider problem. Service-sector employers’ attempt to shift all the costs associated with periods of low demand onto labor means that a third of workers in the industry get less than a week’s notice of their schedules, making a chaos of their lives. Workers subjected to such scheduling practices, a 2019 University of California study by scholars Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett found, “sleep poorly, suffer psychologically, and are generally unhappy”—sociology-speak for “wast[ing] my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away.”

Gregg, in what he no doubt considered a devastating coup de grace, closed his review by noting in passing that “the woman [Fleming] eventually found a better, less-stressful administrative position 18 months after her baby’s birth.” Indeed, she did. Yet that long time span belies the myth of worker mobility that underpins Gregg’s critique.

As I note in the book, Fleming had to stay put for 18 months, because there was no other choice that wouldn’t have jeopardized her family’s income and basic well-being. Those 18 months are considered the most crucial phase in the development of babies. And the children of workers subjected to precarious scheduling are “much more likely to exhibit anxiety, guilt or sadness than children of parents with stable schedules, according to survey results from 4,300 workers with children 15 and younger,” according to a New York Times summary of other research by Schneider and Harknett.

The causal dots aren’t hard to connect: “Parents with irregular schedules had less money and time for family meals, playing with children or helping them with their homework. The biggest way parents’ work schedules affected their children? Those with unpredictable schedules were more likely to feel stressed, irritable or depressed.”

Determined not to admit any systemic faults with our current economic arrangements, hunky-dory cons end up committing that most grave of conservative sins: presentism, the view that everything we have now is more or less optimal and correct and without need of reform. But, my dear brothers in Christ, you don’t, in fact, have to defend everything about the economy in 2023, with its spiking suicides and deaths of despair. Hunky-dory conservatism might please the right’s donor class, but it alienates the millions who can’t detect reality in its rosy picture of the world.

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