Connexion
The governor was great on substance but couldn’t match Trump’s symbolic appeal.
The one time I really met Ron DeSantis—the authentic, human Ron DeSantis rather than the stiff public persona that most Americans have come to know—was in March 2023, during my first week as a speechwriter on the Florida governor’s as-of-then unannounced presidential campaign. It was a brief, amicable meeting in the downstairs office of the Republican Party of Florida; DeSantis wanted to give me a copy of Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln by James C. Humes, a book on speechwriting he had used during his time in Congress. We made friendly small talk for a few minutes. I suggested he talk about trade policy in an upcoming New Hampshire speech. He laughed—a real laugh, revealing a brief, transitory glimpse of a man with an actual sense of humor—at a joke I made about fundraising emails. I thanked him for the opportunity, shook his hand, and walked out of the office and back to my desk.
Four months later, on July 25, my time on the DeSantis presidential campaign came to an abrupt end. The public explanation for my departure was that I had been fired for secretly creating and sharing a series of pro-DeSantis videos, the most inflammatory of which included a clip displaying a Sonnenrad—a black sun-shaped symbol associated with Nazism—posted to Twitter through an anonymous account. The story’s veracity quickly solidified as an unquestioned assumption in the press, despite the obvious problems with the idea that an ethnically Jewish kid with no prior video editing experience was cranking out neo-Nazi videos under the cover of night. While this piece will briefly correct that record, it won’t delve into the origins of the videos that were alleged to have caused my termination, or the accounts posting them, or their relationship to the campaign, or anything else that carries the risk of throwing friends under the bus or sparking a public conflict with the DeSantis operation. This is not a comprehensive fact-checking expedition, nor is it a navel-gazing reflection on the controversy that precipitated the end of my time on the campaign.
The broader issues surrounding my departure are the same issues that hobbled DeSantis’s presidential ambitions. But they are not unique to DeSantis, and they will persist long after this election cycle comes to a close. What follows is a story about things that are far more important than what happened to me. If I tell that story from my perspective, using the specific circumstances of my experience, it’s simply because it’s the only way I know how to tell it.
The best way to tell this story is to begin at the end. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination, almost certainly by overwhelming margins. If he manages to eke out a victory over Joe Biden in the general election, it may be the last victory Republicans see in a presidential election for a long time. In 2024, it will be 20 years since a Republican presidential candidate carried the popular vote; today, the party’s sole remaining path to an Electoral College majority requires mustering razor-thin margins in enough must-win states to crawl across the finish line. That path will continue to narrow due to demographic change, generational turnover tied to the unprecedented fact that young people are not becoming more conservative as they age, and the growing scope and sophistication of the Democratic Party’s ballot-harvesting and electioneering machine. Contrary to what some pundits say, these challenges are not unique to Trump. They are endemic, and every future Republican presidential candidate will have to contend with them.
Ron DeSantis was bound to lose this primary. It brings me no pleasure to say this: DeSantis was the best Republican governor of my lifetime, and his past two years in Florida are a top contender for the greatest string of conservative policy victories in modern U.S. history. But the underwhelming—at times, downright embarrassing—way DeSantis prosecuted his case teaches many lessons about what has become of the set of institutions that we used to call “movement conservatism” and the increasingly apparent chasm between those institutions and the broader political forces animating the Republican Party. The point of this essay is to offer some of what I learned about that dynamic during my time on the inside.
In April, a Trump-aligned political action committee released an ad about DeSantis’s alleged support for cutting Medicare and Social Security. The video’s narrated message was underlaid with clips of a man eating chocolate pudding with his fingers—an obvious reference to widely circulated reports of DeSantis’s alimentary faux pas. A pro-DeSantis Super PAC swiftly hit back with an ad of its own. Rather than engage with the “pudding fingers” allegation, the response focused on fact-checking the entitlement-cutting jab, airing a clip of DeSantis promising not to “mess with Social Security,” followed by another clip of Trump floating the possibility of welfare cuts himself.
Writing in the New York Times, the progressive columnist Michelle Goldberg noticed something perceptive about the interchange: “The ad from DeSantis’s allies misse[d the] point entirely.” The Trump attack ad wasn’t actually about Social Security. That was ideological window-dressing for the real message, which was that Ron DeSantis is a creep who eats pudding with his fingers. “The policy argument is just an excuse for the disgusting visuals,” Goldberg wrote. “The point is not to disagree with DeSantis, but to humiliate him.”
DeSantis, Goldberg wrote, was “making the mistake of believing that the primary race is about issues, while Trump instinctively understands that it’s about dominance… It will be about who is weak and who is strong.”
On an important level, Goldberg was right. Trump has a genius for the politics of the subconscious, instinctively intuiting and exploiting the weak points in the public’s perception of his opponent’s brand. That was evident during the successful months-long campaign not only to wear down DeSantis’s standing in the primary polls but to tank his approval rating among Republican voters. By summer 2023, DeSantis’s net favorability among GOP voters, once neck-and-neck with Trump’s, had dropped by double digits in many national polls. Every week came with a new installment in the slow-motion assassination of the governor’s public image. There was the odd laugh; the bright-white rain boots; the “leg-lengthening footwear”; the nose-wiping video clip; and an endless number of weird facial expressions and awkward interactions with the public. The left was only too happy to join in the evisceration of a figure who had, until then, proved frustratingly immune to their attacks.
The basis of the MAGA case against DeSantis was pre-ideological. They were selling a feeling, a vague sense of revulsion. From there, they would go on to build a more formal political case against DeSantis: He voted to raise taxes and cut entitlements. He shut down Florida during COVID. He flip-flopped on Ukraine. He’s controlled by his donors. He’s corrupt, inauthentic, can’t be trusted—he’s not one of us. All of those more conventional critiques were enabled by the baseline “vibes” case against the governor.
This took place over several months. In February, the critiques from prominent MAGA influencers were relatively cautious. There was a tone of feigned bewilderment—“what is Ron DeSantis doing?”—paired with a projected suspicion about his ties to donors, links to hated establishment figures, and general lack of authenticity. It was an attempt to meet Republican voters where they were. If the attacks went nuclear too quickly, it would have invited indignance from a voter base that had spent the last two years viewing DeSantis as a folk hero.
By April, however, the same influencers were waging a much more aggressive and explicit narrative war, integrating a number of policy issues into their attacks. The tone shifted from “just asking questions” to outright ridicule and contempt, enabled by a handful of slip-ups on the part of DeSantis that provided his enemies with an opening. Now that MAGA had softened up DeSantis’s image, they could begin to wear down the credibility of the story he told about his actual record.
The DeSantis campaign was largely oblivious to this dynamic. To the extent they were making a case against Trump, it was a political one, based on policy issues or general electability. Trump would float the possibility of executing drug dealers, and DeSantis allies would retort that he had sponsored soft-on-crime legislation as president. Trump would promise to end birthright citizenship by executive fiat, and the DeSantis camp would argue that the proposal was constitutionally dubious or ask why he didn’t do it during his first term. More than once, I was reminded of the famous exchange from the 2016 GOP primary debates when Wolf Blitzer pressed Trump on the fact that the Mexican president had rejected Trump’s signature promise that Mexico would pay for the border wall. “If you don’t get an actual check from the Mexican government,” Blitzer wondered, “how are you going to make them pay for the wall?” Trump’s response was unhesitating: “I will. And the wall just got ten feet taller.”
The MAGA offensive against DeSantis was a one-sided war. There was little to no attempt to stage a counteroffensive because the DeSantis team failed to grasp the terms of the battle. The way DeSantis made the case for himself had all the same flaws. His pitch to Republican voters was often described as “Trumpism without Trump,” “Trump without the drama,” “Trump but competent,” and so on. It would be more accurate to call it a technocrat’s Trumpism. The issue set was substantively similar. The distinction was drawn along the lines of administrative ability. DeSantis would rattle off his impressive policy achievements like he was reading a grocery list—check, check, check—before concluding that we needed someone who could “get the job done.” A senior staffer, in a moment of private frustration, described him to me as “the Home Depot candidate.”
The campaign’s message was supposed to be built on low but solid ground. The vision, to the extent that there was one, took a backseat to the ability to execute. In the early months of the campaign, one of the governor’s favorite stump speech anecdotes was a story about swiftly rebuilding a bridge destroyed by Hurricane Ian—“they said repairs would take six months…we rebuilt the bridge in three days”—punctuated by a quippy proposal for President Biden: “I’m willing to send the guys that rebuilt the bridge down to the southern border to build the wall. Put me in, coach!”
DeSantis was eager to display his sophisticated grasp of public policy. In his glitchy Twitter Space campaign launch, he waxed poetic about the college-accreditation system, Chevron deference doctrine, and his advanced understanding of “the different leverage points that you would have under Article II of the Constitution.” But his wonkiness came with an increasingly apparent dearth of political vision. He talked of “reform,” not revolution; “restoring normalcy” rather than achieving greatness; “sanity” rather than excellence; “getting the country back on the right track” rather than winning the spiritual war for our way of life.
Trump’s pitch was more audacious. For MAGA, 2024 was the final saga of the eight-year-long war for America. The battle lines were clear. The stakes were all or nothing. Red America was besieged on all sides, facing insurmountable odds, outmanned and outgunned by the powerful forces arrayed against them. If they failed, all would be lost, and the America our ancestors fought and died to build would be plunged into darkness. But if they won, they were coming for everything—and those who had orchestrated the destruction of their country would pay dearly for their betrayal. Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.
“Make America Great Again” was a tight, succinct slogan that managed to communicate an enormous amount of substance in just eight syllables. It was an imperative, a call to action. At a fundamental level, it communicated what Donald Trump wanted to do. It was a demand, a promise, and a statement of intent, describing a tangible future to strive towards as a people.
The DeSantis campaign’s tagline was: Decline is a choice. Success is attainable. Freedom is worth fighting for. But these were empty words, drained of any concrete meaning or authentic feeling. They were abstracted out to the 10,000-foot view, removed from the experience of real, material Americans. The message was linguistically clunky and substantially uninspired. It was an attempt to retroactively backfill a political vision onto a pre-existing policy agenda, rather than a policy agenda built upon a pre-existing vision.
In the speeches I wrote for DeSantis, I tried to formulate a message with higher ceilings. Rather than saying decline was a choice, we needed to communicate what decline meant, why it was happening, who was responsible, and what the stakes were. The prospect of “success” does not stir the heart like the promise that one’s country can and will be made great again. And we needed to fight for America, our nation, our people, and our way of life, rather than a faceless, abstract “freedom.”
The governor rarely talked in these terms. But it may not have made a difference if he did—the way he talked mattered more than what he talked about. They used to call it the “beer test,” the proverbial question of which candidate voters would prefer to have a beer with. The meteoric rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political novice, is a testament to the relevance of that metric. On paper, Ramaswamy ran very close to the DeSantis “lane,” a hard-right, anti-woke policy wonk whose relative youth promises a generational shift in the boomer-dominated GOP. But Vivek had a decisive charisma advantage over DeSantis, which proved to be an ample substitute for his lack of policy record.
But there was also something deeper at play than “beer test” likeability. In another time, with another Republican voter base, DeSantis’s pitch—electability, experience, and a proven record—may have resonated. John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t exactly fonts of charisma. They sold themselves to Republican voters on the grounds that they had a depth of governing experience and the (false) promise that they could win in the general. Today’s landscape is different. In the minds of many contemporary Republican voters, elections are no longer an orderly contest between competing governing philosophies but an existential battle between good and evil. Numerous polls over the past year have found that about half of the GOP electorate believes that the U.S. is on the brink of civil war. These are not normal times, and Republican voters don’t think of 2024 as a normal election. They want a candidate who talks and acts in a way that suggests he understands the stakes.
The Republican base does care about policy. Primary voters have been willing to unseat Republican incumbents, including those in leadership roles, due to their betrayals on key issues. Just ask Eric Cantor: After voting for amnesty in 2014, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, widely seen as the next in line for the speakership, promptly found himself among the ranks of the unemployed. But the average voter is not as ideological as those of us in the political class. This is the limitation of public opinion polling. When pollsters present respondents with distinct, isolated questions about a given policy, they produce results that don’t always mirror how voters act.
A humbling realization dawned on me over the course of the first few months of the campaign: The reasons I was initially interested in working for DeSantis were the very reasons his presidential run was ultimately doomed. DeSantis was, as Geoff Shullenberger put it in a July essay for Compact, “The GOP’s Liz Warren.” Shullenberger wrote, “DeSantis’s campaign language and emphases, like Warren’s four years ago, betray a disproportionate fixation on the pet concerns of his party’s media and activist class.” Both candidates “were heavily favored by their respective parties’ aligned media professionals and broader constituency in the educated professional class, but never managed to broaden their appeal much beyond that narrow precinct.”
While the campaign’s issue set, record, and candidate all looked pristine on paper, the effort to convert them into a winning presidential run overlooked how normal people think. DeSantis was selling a plan; Trump was selling a feeling. That doesn’t make Trump’s pitch less legitimate. Loyalty, solidarity, mutual obligation, and a willingness to sacrifice are the lifeblood of mass political movements. But they are built upon a politics of common purpose and shared identity that DeSantis wasn’t capable of offering—not a politics of the book, but a politics of the heart.
Many voices have criticized the DeSantis campaign for being “too online” in its aesthetic, its rhetoric, and its substantive issue set, e.g., “Rich donors to Ron DeSantis: Be more normal,” Yahoo News, August 2023. What most of these critics mean by normal is a more moderate, conventional form of politics, a tack to the center on key culture-war issues, and a reduced focus on online platforms like Twitter.
There’s an obvious problem with that diagnosis. Whatever else you might say about him, Donald Trump is not “normal.” His 2024 policy platform is the most aggressively right-wing agenda of any leading presidential candidate in recent memory and has all the hallmark issues of the “very online right” that is ostensibly responsible for torpedoing DeSantis’s campaign. His rhetoric is more aggressive, not less. And online platforms like Twitter have always played a pivotal role in Trump’s political operation.
It was the MAGA campaign against DeSantis’s image, organized and driven by platforms like Twitter, that produced the overwhelming body of ridicule that eventually undermined his standing with Republican voters. While the average GOP voter may not be closely following every video and tweet produced by Trump influencers, they may have seen at least a few of the unflattering images and memes that migrate over from Twitter to Facebook, a platform used by a high proportion of Republican voters. And it’s more than likely that they saw the souring coverage of DeSantis on platforms like Fox News, a development driven in part by the Twitter cycle’s influence on the people who run Fox.
The core problem, then, wasn’t that the DeSantis campaign was too online. The problem was that it wasn’t real. The operation learned the hard way that you can’t fabricate authenticity, even if you perfectly mirror, or even surpass, the on-paper traits of the authentic subject. The Twitter videos that were publicly linked to my exit from the campaign were part and parcel of the increasingly extreme, and haphazard, attempts to substitute ideology for authenticity. If DeSantis could get as far to Trump’s right as possible, the thinking went, then the mystical hold Trump possessed over his voter base could be broken. This betrayed a subtle but fundamental misunderstanding of human nature—a conception of the average voter as homo ideologicus, driven by formal philosophical commitments.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I don’t intend to give a comprehensive accounting of everything that was wrong with the public reporting on the video controversy, other than to stipulate that a large body of the reporting was, in fact, wrong. What is true is that I retweeted a video containing what I would later come to learn was a Sonnenrad and immediately un-retweeted said video and alerted my superiors on the campaign staff when I learned what the symbol meant. From there, the reporting graduated to the claim that I made the video and then to the speculation that I had also made an anti-LGBT video that had landed the campaign in hot water weeks prior. That reporting was categorically false.
But at this point, that’s almost irrelevant. Regardless of what the press might have said about me or my involvement in various campaign gaffes, my departure was not going to save the DeSantis operation—nor would spending less time on Twitter, moderating their tone, shifting their issue set, nor attempting to appear to be more “normal.” All of these problems were symptoms, rather than causes, of the forces that were responsible for the campaign’s inability to make its case to Republican voters.
Donald Trump has a practical mastery of conservatism—if not the intellectual, ideologized conservatism that one encounters inside the Beltway, then certainly the felt conservatism of the heart that is native to the GOP base. It is a conservatism that is intimated rather than reasoned. DeSantis, on the other hand, justified his political project in terms of a formal ideology. This endeared him to the conservative political and intellectual elite who reside in the world of ideology, but it stunted his ability to speak to the millions of Americans who instinctively “got” Trump and neither needed nor desired a more complex ideological framework for their political attachments.
Those of us in the political class often recognize no distinction between these two forms of politics or, when we do, we discount the latter as just the irrational, anti-intellectual impulses of the common voter. The idea of Trumpism as a “cult of personality” rather than a substantive policy agenda has become a popular cliché for this reason. But this is a feature, not a bug, of self-government. In a time such as ours, when our ruling class has so ensconced itself in ideological fads and theories as to have completely severed itself from the laws of reality, the instincts, feelings, and intuitions of the people—the politics of the heart—offer a welcome corrective to an elite that is enchanted with the search for utopia.
“God must love the common people,” said Abraham Lincoln. “He did make so many of them.” If this country finds the will to pull itself back from the brink, it will come from the nation’s heart; not a formula, or a technique, or even a particular ideological program but a felt need, an inextricable determination, a sense of necessity—not just that things can change, but that they must. Trump embodied that imperative in a way that DeSantis—or anyone else for that matter—could not. In a number of important ways, my time on his rival’s campaign deepened my appreciation for what the former and perhaps future president represents. I don’t resent Republican voters for being a step ahead of me on the curve.
The post What I Saw Inside the DeSantis Campaign appeared first on The American Conservative.
Big Business and Big Education have a hand in our boys’ failure to thrive.
You are familiar with the litany of ills blighting our society: declining rates of work and marriage; rising rates of obesity and loneliness; soaring deaths of despair. All of these trends reflect the falling fortunes of the American male, a malaise magnified when we look at boys and men in poor and working-class communities.
When the male malaise is raised among conservatives, too often the blame is assigned to “culture,” that most nebulous of forces. The assumption here is that vague changes in the culture—shifts in norms, preferences, and aspirations—are robbing men of their sense of industry and ambition, not to mention their ability to forge meaningful ties to others—including a wife.
What goes unacknowledged here is that real institutions—Big Business and Big Education—also have had a hand in the worsening lot of American males.
Fewer men are working in America than ever before, according to the chart aboveGeneral Social Survey. The share of young men (aged 25–35) who are working full-time fell from about 80 percent in the 1990s to less than 70 percent today. For men without college degrees, the fall in full-time employment was even greater, from around 80 percent to less than 65 percent today. This means that about one-third of young men in their prime are not working full-time.
Part of the story here is related to Big Business’s offshoring of American manufacturing jobs. President Clinton’s China trade bill in 2000 obviated inestimable quantities of American labor. According to MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues, America lost well over 2 million jobs as a direct result of this trade agreement. This is but one example of how the search for cheap labor fed the falling fortunes of the American working man.
In more recent years, another business development has affected the work ethic of the American male. Big Business has moved heavily into what David Cartwright called “limbic capitalism” in his 2019 book, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business. He defines limbic capitalism as “a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments…encourage excessive consumption and addiction…They do so by targeting the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling and for quick reaction, as distinct from dispassionate thinking.”
Many of the nation’s biggest businesses—from Alphabet (YouTube) to TikTok to Microsoft (Xbox) to Philip Morris (vapes)—are selling products that serve teenage boys and young men one dopamine hit after another. The problem with these products is they make school and work relatively less appealing, inhibiting the ability of many young men to develop the skills, ambition, and work ethic that would enable them to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.
The dangers of these limbic products are well known in Silicon Valley. That’s why Big Tech titans like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sundar Pichai limited their kids’ exposure to their own products. The problem is that many young males, especially working-class and poor kids with less parental oversight, are not similarly protected from the allure of these products.
Consequently, one reason a growing number of men don’t view work as normal or desirable—or don’t have the capacity to focus and flourish in a job—seems to be that they are too addicted to the electronic opiates of our day. The research of the Princeton economist Mark Aguiar and his team suggests that screentime can account for nearly half of the drop in working hours for men in their twenties from 2004 to 2017. Over that time, recreational computer time rose by 60 percent among men. Many parents of teenage boys, of course, know that this problem begins well before males reach their twenties.
The bigger point is that many of America’s biggest businesses now profit off vices that rob males of their capacity to aim for and hold down a good job.
But it’s not just Big Business. It’s also Big Education.
In an interview with the George Lucas Educational Foundation covering his 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, social scientist Richard V. Reeves explained that boys are falling well behind their female peers. “There are very big gaps in terms of things like school [expulsions] and suspension,” he said, also noting a staggering difference in academic performance today by gender. Two thirds of the students with the top 10 percent in GPA scores today are girls; in the bottom 10 percent, two thirds are boys.
Why are boys doing so much worse than girls in our schools? The pedagogy and ethos are not boy-friendly. There’s not enough recess and too few male teachers, too many group projects and make-work assignments that hold little appeal for boys. All this and more helps to explain why too many of our schools do boys a disservice.
Boys pay greatly for this educational failure as they age. Today, for instance, males are significantly less likely to attend and graduate from college than females. The current male-female ratio in college classrooms mirrors the ratio of the 1970s, and we seem to be headed for a world where about 60 percent of college attendees are female and only 40 percent are male. This matters not only because many men will have more trouble getting launched in the working world relative to their female peers, but also because women prefer to marry men who have roughly the same educational credentials as they do.
How, then, can we push back against Big Business and Big Education to reduce the enervating and dispiriting effects they are having on boys and young men?
When it comes to Big Business, we need to keep studying the effects of the dopamine economy on male ambition and agency, much as we have studied the effects of social media on young women’s mental welfare. If rigorous studies confirm the red flags thrown up by research to date, public and civic efforts should be launched to educate teens and their parents about the harms of excessive time spent on screen for young men. And we should target gaming much as we do alcohol and cigarettes, with taxes and public messaging to reduce the amount of time and attention that our teens, especially teen boys, devote to the dopamine economy.
Regarding Big Education, we need to give parents more options for their sons’ (and daughters’) best educational fit—and that means passing school choice legislation in as many states across the country as possible. We need schools that hire more male teachers, that make their curricula and pedagogy more boy friendly, and that give boys more time out of doors. More single-sex schools, of course, would be especially valuable in this regard. Well-funded vocational programs in high schools, accorded greater status by local schools and closely tied to local business opportunities, would also help motivate and prepare young men who are not on the college track.
These are the kind of concrete steps we must take if we wish to tackle male malaise head on. It’s not enough to chalk it up to “the culture.” We must move clearly and confidently to limit the hold that Big Business has on our boys’ hearts, minds, and time—and make sure that Big Education stops crushing their curiosity, creativity, and potential.
Absent clear measures like these, we can expect to see all too many of our boys and young men continue to drift, underperforming in school, work, love, and life. For their sake and ours, let us not leave them to the enervating embrace of Big Business and Big Education.
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.
The post Male Malaise Is Not Just About ‘the Culture’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
As antisemitic incidents spike in the rest of Europe, Hungary’s restrictive immigration policies are vindicated.
As Israel continues to count and identify the bodies of the October 7 Simchat Torah massacre by Hamas, and as the number of civilian victims used as human shields by Hamas in Gaza continues to rise, revolutionary Islamists are now filling European streets and squares, attacking police and synagogues, and, above all, proclaiming loudly: “Here we are, and we stand by what happened.”
This problem stems from both failed demographic and immigration policies. While Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has accepted some level of immigration and has started to let in tens of thousands of third world migrant workers to deal with the ongoing global recession, he has done so under strict regulations. Notably, the immigrants are primarily from non-Muslim countries.
The rest of Europe, however, takes a different approach. A quick glance at British statistics shows that the foreign-born population has been growing steadily since 1921 with a radical jump after 2001. In 2001, there were 1,600,000 Muslims in the U.K.. By 2021, their number had increased to 3,868,000. The Muslim population of the U.K. is expected to grow to 13 million by 2050. West Germany began admitting its first Turkish migrant workers in the 1960s; their number have since ballooned to four million. In addition, Germany has taken in almost a million Syrian migrants, which has resulted in further problems. In 2021, 65 percent of Syrians in Germany were unable to find work, placing additional strain on Germany’s famed social welfare system. These radical changes did not occur in centuries, but in decades.
Hungary and the rest of post-socialist Europe, however, have taken a more cautious pace and some politicians, such as Orbán, or the recently elected Slovakian left-wing P.M. Robert Fico have sounded the alarm on immigration. In response they were criticized by the mainstream press as “extremist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” These adjectives are debatable; Orbán regularly connects his strong stance on immigration with protecting other minority groups. In 2016 he declared, “We shall not import to Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.”
Their warnings were not cultural “fear-mongering,” as the left-wing press claimed. The European immigration problem has direct ties to real security issues. In 2017, there were over 50,000 Salafists (radical Sunnis) in France; in 2022, 11,000 in Germany. Not all Salafists are jihadists, but many of them are or have such sympathies, and most European countries admit extreme Salafists are a security concern. But they are not the only dangerous group in Europe. Although Germany banned Hezbollah in 2020, there remain about 1,250 members of the Shiite terror group. The constant surveillance of this many people regularly drains resources and manpower from the internal security services. In 2018, the German police were keeping only 774 radical Islamists under constant surveillance. A recent report from the Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security stated that “last year, the terrorist threat from ISIS to Europe increased. Especially since the second half of 2022 there have been ever more clues that ISIS is planning attacks in Europe.” Israel has also warned that there are over 450 Hamas operatives in Germany alone.
Attacks have already taken place throughout Europe in connection to the current war in the Middle East. In France, a mass stabbing occurred at a secondary school in Arras, after Hamas called for a “Global Day of Jihad” on October 13. A French language teacher was killed, while several others were injured. The perpetrator, a Muslim from Russia, was known to the French security services for being a radical and was affiliated with ISIS. Three days later, two Swedes were shot dead in Brussels by a Tunisian migrant who had previously been flagged by Belgian authorities for potential jihadist activity. Again, ISIS claimed responsibility.
Meanwhile, illegal migration continues. Last month, around 7,000 migrants arrived to the island of Lampedusa, Italy, in a span of only 48 hours. The island normally has a population of 6,000. Lampedusa is a well-known transport hub for would-be-terrorists. The Tunisian who shot two Swedes in Brussels arrived there on a boat in 2011. The island is “overwhelmed” and “in a crisis,” according to its mayor who spoke with Reuters. A staggering 2.3 million immigrants entered the E.U. from non-E.U. countries in 2021, an increase of almost 18 percent compared with 2020. This does not mean that a real far-right threat does not exist in Europe; it is not, however, coming from populists but from mushrooming neo-Nazi groups. The world is destabilizing at an alarming rate and there are increasingly strong signs in Europe which point towards a looming civil war or bloody social unrest; there are fewer and fewer signs that this scenario can be avoided.
The problems described above affect the European Jewish community in a particularly dangerous manner. The mere fact that a very large proportion of immigrants come from countries where anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in society should be reason enough for strict border controls. According to ADL data for the Middle East and North Africa and Asia, 80 percent of the population is anti-Semitic in Morocco, 87 percent in Algeria and Libya, 71 percent in Turkey, 60 percent in Iran, and 92 percent in Iraq. But Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza beat them all: Ninety-three percent of their population is anti-Semitic. In the summer of 2015, the ADL conducted a survey focusing specifically on Muslim communities in Western Europe, which found that 68 percent of Belgian Muslims, 62 percent of Spanish Muslims, 56 percent of German and Italian Muslims, 54 percent of British Muslims, and 49 percent of French Muslims held anti-Semitic views. In general, 55 percent of Muslims in Western Europe were found to be anti-Semitic. In terms of attacks, Germany saw 2,480 anti-Semitic atrocities last year; the UK, 1,652; France, 436. Attacks have sharply risen since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas.
But this may not be all that surprising. A report by the Community Security Trust, a Jewish NGO in the U.K. explained that “the single biggest contributing factor to the record number of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2014 was antisemitic reactions in the U.K. to the conflict in Israel and Gaza.” How could the current protests and atrocities catch European authorities unprepared? This is not to say that some countries have not acted. French president Emmanuel Macron recently banned pro-Hamas protests. On October 13, France raised its security alert to the highest level and deployed 7,000 soldiers following the aforementioned school stabbing. Viktor Orbán also banned all pro-Hamas demonstrations in Hungary. But in the rest of Europe, hatred took the streets.
Ten thousand pro-Palestinian demonstrators sided with Palestine in the Netherlands, as Jewish schools closed around the country. Thousands protested against Israel in London. Jewish schools in the U.K. also stepped up their security or shut down altogether. Parents kept their children away. Pro-Palestine protests were held in Germany as well; some local Arabs openly support Hamas. But this is nothing compared to what German media reported: some Jewish homes had been marked with the Star of David, reminiscent of the Nazi era. One German synagogue was firebombed.
How could Europe’s liberal leaders have turned a blind eye to the dangers of Muslim immigration for decades? How could they commemorate the Holocaust every year, while allowing the mass arrival in Europe of people who see the Holocaust not as a story of a horrific genocide, but as the story of a brave man—Hitler—who tried to defeat the evil Jews, and failed? The West’s fear of being branded ‘illiberal’ has given free rein to anti-Jewish hatred on the streets of Europe.
The post From ‘Never Again’ to ‘Now and Again’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
Allies, friends, and partners fear the end of Uncle Sucker.
There is a fearsome specter haunting not just Europe, but the entire globe: a Donald Trump victory in next year’s presidential election.
The Europeans are the most alarmed, though. The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman detailed their conundrum: “Many European decision-makers admit that they were caught unprepared by Trump’s election as U.S. president in 2016. They are determined not to make the same mistake again. But knowing that Trump might win the presidency back in 2024, and knowing what to do about it, are different things. That is all the more the case since a second Trump presidency would probably be even more radical and unpredictable than the first.”
Bronwen Maddox of Chatham House was refreshingly honest in admitting that Europeans take American coddling for granted. She explained:
British foreign policy, like that in much of Europe and many democracies beyond, is based on the presumption that the US in some sense always remains the same. Its presidents, its policies, its wars of choice come and go. But America upholds the principle of international institutions even if it rails against some of them or funds them sporadically. It continues to pick up the giant’s share of the tab for NATO, above all.
For a good time, call Uncle Sam!
No wonder the thought of losing the privilege of being a U.S. security dependent is so daunting to so many. For decades, countries enjoyed an essentially free or at least cheap ride, recovering economically behind an American defense shield. In recent years, Europeans have continued to prosper while leaving the heavy lifting of war and peace to Washington. That allowed the continent to concentrate on fun stuff, like creating a bountiful welfare state and carping about American policy priorities.
The first military outlay on the chopping block if Trump regains the presidency probably would be aid to Ukraine. Noted Rachman, “Led by the U.S., NATO nations say repeatedly they will do ‘whatever it takes’ to help Kyiv win. But if Trump subjected Ukraine to an Afghanistan-style aid cut-off, the Europeans would not have enough military materiel to keep Ukraine going.”
Yet the continent has been backing away from the many fevered promises to devote significantly more money to Europe’s defense. And European states might not even be willing to fight for each other. The Pew Research Center found that more Europeans opposed going to war on behalf of their NATO neighbors than fighting for them. After all, the Biden administration remains ready to underwrite intervention on the continent’s behalf, no matter how miserly its efforts.
If Washington is on its way out, Rachman warns, withdrawing Ukraine support “would leave the countries closest to Russia, including Poland, high, dry and on the front line.” However, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Europeans continue to advertise their helplessness when it comes to defense. After all, Americans are soft touches, having been ever willing to subsidize their wastrel, derelict Atlantic cousins.
Alas, the problem goes beyond guns to butter. Apparently, European governments can’t even meet soft targets. After all, European taxpayers insist on bulking up their welfare states first. And the U.S. can be counted on to step in financially. Indeed, Washington has provided some $25 billion in economic assistance to Ukraine “to help farmers, subsidize small businesses and pay the country’s first responders.” All this for a country with a well-earned reputation for corruption.
Even more distraught about the impending advance of the new Dark Age if Americans go home was Ed Luce, also of the Financial Times, who bewailed the potential return of “isolationism” under Trump. It was a bizarre charge then, and it remains a bizarre charge today. Trump spent more on the U.S. military than his predecessors, added more troops to and devoted more money to Europe, left Washington even more entangled in the Middle East, launched economic war on China, and revived the Ugly American in Latin America. He was no isolationist.
However, to Luce increasing popular pressure in the U.S. to reduce the amount of money going to the allies’ increasingly dangerous proxy war against Russia is evidence enough of impending doom. He insists that “today’s rising isolationism”—meaning reduced funding for Ukraine, nothing more—“is not about even-handedness between Russia and Ukraine; its driving force comes from Republicans in sympathy with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” With CNN finding a majority of Americans opposed to more aid, there must be a very large number of Russian sycophants and stooges in the U.S. Who knew that more than half of the population had gone over to the dark side?
There is much disquiet at the prospect of “isolationism” in Asia as well. Reported the Wall Street Journal: “For many foreign capitals, the possibility of a second Trump administration is a source of anxiety. Allies from Paris to Tokyo regard Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, as an erratic leader with little interest in cultivating long-term ties to counter Russian and Chinese expansionism.”
True, Trump talked about withdrawing troops from South Korea, but he never acted on those threats. He formed a tight bond with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and never pushed for the withdrawal of much of anything from Japan. Trump also deployed the U.S. Navy to counter Chinese maritime activities. His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, led the anti-Beijing campaign and now advocates for an independent Taiwan. These positions do not bring “isolationist” to mind.
Where the term might be more accurately tossed at Trump is on trade. Nevertheless, his policies look little different from those of his successor. Trump has promised to impose tougher restrictions in a second term, but the Biden administration’s investment and technology controls on China go much further than anything promoted by Trump.
Indeed, Maddox reluctantly conceded the policy convergence, adding: “these are just awkward policies—and the U.K. has not found the current administration easy on that front either. Biden ordered the precipitate exit from Afghanistan which upended 20 years of British efforts in that country. The Inflation Reduction Act, a subsidy of hundreds of billions of dollars for green technology, has been drawn up with blithe disregard for the way it will suck investment and manufacturing from U.S. allies.”
Still, even if the Yanks continued to defend her country, there’s something about Trump and his Yanks she obviously doesn’t like. He “would have an utterly different conception of America’s role in the world and the nature of its democracy at home, of the rule of law at home and abroad. And so would the U.S. voters who elected him.” At which point “the implications for global institutions, for international law and order, for predictability of a world superpower are stark.”
America’s nervous dependents are pursuing two different strategies. The first is to cozy up to the very people they despise. Reported the Journal: “Leading members of the three parties of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition have been jetting across the Atlantic ever since they took power in late 2021, meeting with GOP officials and Trump confidants. A key Scholz aide, Wolfgang Schmidt, has made regular visits to Washington, forging links with key Republicans. In September, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will embark on a 10-day visit to the U.S., including an extended visit to Texas, a GOP bastion, to familiarize herself with the party.” Visiting Texas! Such is the sacrifice made by German grandees!
Still, even an artful “suck-up” can only go so far in delaying the inevitable. The other strategy is to embrace reality. Unfortunately, some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have been pulling back from their promises to do more. Germany, with Europe’s largest economy, also has been a disappointment. Admitted one analyst, there was hope that “Germany would leave the comfort zone and start to take security more seriously. But I don’t see any game changer.”
Other governments, however, may be ready to take a more responsible position. For instance, Poland is contemplating a major military buildup: “Poland’s military expansion plans would make the country Europe’s leading military power by raising its long-term defense spending target from the current 2.4% to 5% of gross domestic product. Warsaw wants to increase spending to 3% of GDP as early as next year to kickstart an armament overhaul as well as a huge expansion in troop numbers to 400,000 from 150,000.”
Despite Berlin’s poor performance, the senior German parliamentarian Norbert Röttgen urged the creation of an independent foreign policy. Paris, too, is pressing for more: “French officials have been warning European allies that the possibility of Trump’s return requires the continent to significantly expand arms production, from artillery to missile defense systems, so it can supply Ukraine on its own.” After decades of enjoying a cheap ride on America, it is time for Europe to start doing something “on its own.”
Will doing so be easy? No, of course not. Nevertheless, as revolutionary hero Thomas Paine reminded us: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s “High Representative” for foreign policy, declared that “Europe is facing an existential threat.” If so, the EU’s twenty-seven member states should act accordingly, investing in their militaries, improving continental coordination, and establishing a multilateral framework for operations.
No doubt, Donald Trump was and again would be a difficult partner even for a friendly government. He would be a particularly unwelcome ally for those used to playing the helpless dependent to take advantage of Washington’s foolish tendency to turn the Pentagon into an international welfare agency. Say what you will about Trump, he doesn’t suffer this sort of fools gladly.
Rather than strategizing how to best “play” Trump if he again ends up in the Oval Office, foreign officials should begin to act as leaders of important and capable states. The U.S. remains the world’s richest and strongest nation, but no longer can afford to play military nursemaid to Europe and the others. Governments which took over their own security would no longer need cower in fear of what the next American election might bring.
The post Hedging Against a Trump Victory appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why is the uniparty risking a war we’re so ill-prepared to fight?
When Richard Nixon lost the election to John F. Kennedy, Nixon told supporters, “I know Jack Kennedy. He’s a patriot.” Nixon knew that the nation would be safe in President Kennedy’s hands.
Most Americans do not have the same confidence in President Biden. In April 2023, fewer than four in ten U.S. adults (37 percent) said they approved of Joe Biden’s job performance as president, with six in ten saying they disapproved. By a 2-to-1 margin, American voters now believe controlling the U.S. border is more important than helping Ukraine fight Russia. For the first time in 30 years, the U.S. Government’s interest payments on the sovereign debt equal defense spending.
These revelations would shake the confidence of any White House, but there is much more for Washington and its NATO Allies to consider. Alleged efforts by the Department of State to freeze the conflict in Ukraine are dismissed out of hand in Moscow by every knowledgeable observer of the Russian government. In the absence of a freeze, Washington has no idea how to end the 600-day conflict.
Meanwhile, the Biden Administration’s sanctions continue to seriously weaken the collective West. European economies are sliding toward recession. Germany’s economy, the largest in the Eurozone, is stagnating for the third quarter in a row. In 2022, German automakers produced nearly 40 percent fewer vehicles than they did 10 years ago. In the words of one of Germany’s leading industrialists, Germany’s deindustrialization has begun.
However, it is Washington’s proxy war with Moscow and the war’s battlefield impact, combined with the economic consequences, that are shifting the balance of power in Moscow’s favor. According to open-source intelligence, Ukrainian losses suggest that Ukrainian soldiers are being killed at a rate comparable to or greater than the World War I experience, when an estimated 1.7 million soldiers in the Russian Army died from all causes in three years of fighting.
The art of war is always subject to the impact of technology and Ukraine’s war with Russia is no exception. Ukrainian soldiers are courageous, but Ukrainian forces, like U.S. and Allied NATO forces, are still organized to refight a version of World War II. This condition is a recipe for defeat against a Russian military establishment organized for 21st century warfare.
Today, Russian strike weapons—artillery, rockets, missiles, drones—linked to persistent, overhead surveillance within dense, integrated air and missile defenses create battlefield conditions like those the German army experienced in the last year of World War II. From the moment the U.S. and British-Canadian armies landed in Normandy, 5,000 U.S. and British fighter aircraft in the air over Western Europe made it impossible for German ground forces to maneuver. The entire German air force was defending German cities against U.S. and British bombers. Without tactical air cover or support, German formations could move only at night, and never in daylight.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky puts on a fine show of confidence, but he makes no secret of the lagging popular support in Europe and the United States for Washington’s proxy war. He knows NATO is in trouble. Frankly, the alliance was never designed to wage offensive warfare against anyone. Events in the Balkans during the 1990s began the awkward evolution that tried to transform NATO into an offensive instrument of U.S. national security strategy. Yet NATO’s forces are not prepared for high-end conventional warfare.
Predictably, voters in NATO’s thirty-two member states are questioning the wisdom of outsourcing their national security and economic health to their own and Washington’s globalist elites. Still, Europeans must soon decide whether to sacrifice what little remains of their respective national sovereignty and economic health in the name of NATO or suspend aid to the Zelensky regime and negotiate directly with Moscow. Total European contributions to the proxy war of about $167 billion are greater than Washington’s contribution.
Confronted with a weak economy, higher yields and lower prices for Treasury bonds, the Biden administration and its partner on Capitol Hill, the Washington “uniparty,” really have two choices: First, cut U.S. and Allied losses in Ukraine, reduce discretionary spending, and focus on domestic emergencies at the Southern Border and in America’s largest cities. Or second, the Administration and the uniparty can escalate the conflict with Moscow.
The White House’s announced intention to ship Army Tactical Missile Systems with a 300-kilometer range along with German Taurus cruise missiles and other strike weapons to Ukraine would seem to indicate Washington’s preference for escalation. But no one weapon system can fundamentally alter the truth that Ukrainian forces grow weaker with each passing day.
Nowhere is the potential for confrontation with Russian military power greater than in the Black Sea. Yet between September 11 and 15, Romanian, British, French, and Turkish forces together with U.S. maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft Poseidon, diver-engineers with boats and specialized equipment, will conduct Operation Sea Breeze 23.3 near the Danube Delta. Since commercial vessels are sailing from the Black Sea into the Danube River without Russian interference it is unclear why the exercise in the Danube Delta is necessary.
Sadly, pushing dangerous conditions to the brink of conflict is nothing new in the conduct of U.S. foreign and defense policy. After Desert Storm in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, American power and influence grew exponentially. Washington’s appetite for filling allegedly “ungoverned spaces” with American military power was insatiable. Washington was free for 30 years to intervene with American military power when and where it liked establishing new “frontiers of insecurity” in the Balkans, Southwest Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa.
The Washington uniparty (corporate oligarchs, public health officials, mainstream media, social media, deep state agencies, academia, Hollywood, and an assortment of dubious international agencies like the UN/WHO/WEF) swiftly invested trillions to advance globalization with U.S. military power. Whenever the armed forces were committed to action, a series of administrations were always ready to defer to ineffective, even failed, military commanders.
Wasteful defense spending, excessive redundancy in capability, and resistance to badly needed change in force design and modernization are now revealing that the U.S. Armed Forces are ill-suited to modern high-end conventional warfare. The fighting in Ukraine demonstrates that Washington can no longer ignore the influence of geography, culture, and economics, all of which operate as constraints on the use of American military power.
The age of abundant wealth and unconstrained defense spending is nearing its end. How Washington reacts to these realities will determine America’s future.
The post War, Money, and America’s Future appeared first on The American Conservative.
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