Happy Thanksgiving! For America’s Sake, Don’t Berate Your Relatives

Today on NRO

JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama plays the role of disinterested pragmatist, but he's a frustrated ideologue in real life. Hail to the Panderer-in-Chief.

ELIANA JOHNSON: How did 60 Minutes go so wrong? Behind 60 Minutes's Bungled Benghazi Report.

ANDREW STILES: The hypocritical majority leader spreads rumors, sows discord, and moves ever farther left. Reid the Rat.

MICHAEL TANNER: It is the only effective brake on spending and the growth of government enacted in years. Save the Sequester.

SLIDESHOW: Combat Rescue Helicopters.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 27, 2013

Happy Thanksgiving. May your travels be safe today.

Happy Thanksgiving! For America's Sake, Don't Berate Your Relatives

Ace spotlights the most recent e-mail from Obama's grassroots army, Organizing for Action:

There's a whole website for it: "Health Care for the Holidays." (Somehow they managed to meet the deadline for getting that website to work.)

Apparently liberals have gotten the message. MSNBC host Chris Hayes cheerfully tweeted Monday, "Devoting our whole show on Wednesday to how to talk about politics, news with conservative family members. Should be fun!"

If you need the advice of an MSNBC host in order to respectfully and pleasantly talk with family members, you've got real problems.

Here's a crazy idea: Treat your family members as people you love and appreciate -- or at least tolerate -- instead of targets for political conversion. You only get one or two families in this life -- the one you're born into, and the one you marry into. Maybe if you're lucky, you become "like a son" or "like a sister" to another. There's a lot to talk about in this world beyond politics, and chances are you're not going to persuade disagreeing relatives, anyway.

A healthy society does not feature a leader who sends messages to his followers, asking them to make a pledge to have a conversation with their families about his agenda at Thanksgiving. This is cult-like.

Our friend Jonah gets a lot of grief over Liberal Fascism, usually from people who have never read the book, and who usually go on to insist they don't need to in order to criticize it. But there is a creepy quasi-fascist vibe in this effort to turn families' holiday gatherings into an opportunity to dissuade critics of the president's policies. This is not normal behavior for an American president. (Although FDR did try moving Thanksgiving a week earlier in an effort to help pre-Christmas sales. It didn't work out.)

When you say the word 'fascist,' people usually picture Mussolini speaking from a balcony and his high-booted goons marching around in public squares. Because we don't see those images in American society today, a lot of people recoil from labeling anyone in our modern politics with the term "fascist."

But Mussolini wrote, "for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state." Among the Organizing for Action crew, there seems to be some irresistible compulsion to take something outside the state -- Thanksgiving dinner -- and co-opt it for the purposes of the state -- or its leader, or its agenda.

Ace notes, "It truly is insidious, I think, this devotion to cause such that one would seriously -- earnestly! -- urge others to fight with family in order to advance a political goal. It's not just about the casual denigration of the family in favor of the Real Family, which is of course like-minded socialists in the Progressive Cult. It is that, but it's not just that. It's also this idea that a person's highest aspiration is to be... A telemarketer. Or, as there's nothing "tele-" about picking fights with your family in face-to-face meetings, an epimarketer, then. There is a terribly strange notion affecting the country, chiefly on the left but sometimes on the right, that man's highest calling is to be a Public Relations Account Manager."

Deep Thoughts for the Holiday Weekend

From Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing over at The Federalist:

A lot of conservatives claim that while the Left believes equality means equality of outcome, the Right is for equality of opportunity — but that's a load of hooey. Everyone agrees with equality of opportunity, and all non-communists agree equality of outcomes is not desirable. The question is whether too much inequality of outcome leads to a greater inequality of opportunity. It's a stubborn fact that, as a matter of dollars and cents, American society has gotten more unequal over the past 30 years. Does it mean that it has also become unequal in other ways? And if so, should we do anything about it? And what? Does Tocqueville show us a way?

The answer is yes, when we realize a few things. First, that while what Tocqueville is really talking here is equality of conditions and not merely formal, legal equality. Tocqueville, after all, was no socialist. He was a classical liberal who admired Adam Smith and viewed redistributive taxation with deep skepticism. And Tocqueville notes that the US, even in the 18th century, had some pretty significant extremes of wealth (even in non-slave states). So while he's not pointing to socialism, he is pointing to something else, and that something might be this: any collective endeavor, including self-government but also functioning free-market capitalism, cannot be successful for long if some significant number of the people involved in the enterprise feel that they're getting screwed. Even if you see no value in equality as such and you are a total capitalist red-in-tooth-and-claw you must realize that if too many people feel that capitalism destroys them, at some point they will use the levers of political power to destroy capitalism.

At NR's event in Boston, Jay Nordlinger asked why the Northeastern states had become so blue -- so reliably Democratic, certainly in presidential races and in most but not all senatorial and gubernatorial races. Mark Steyn had just mentioned that his home state of New Hampshire was less reliably conservative than it used to be, and that until the 1970s, Vermont was one of the most reliably Republican states in the union.

My answer rambled a bit, but I think I hit the important points: There are fewer jobs, or at least fewer paths to a stable job without an expensive college education. There are fewer marriages and stable families. And there has been an erosion in the Burkean platoons that keep a community going -- the neighbors watching out for each other, the church and synagogue groups, the bowling leagues, volunteer groups, and so on. Why are fewer people in the Northeast conservative? Because fewer of them have something to conserve.

In way too many communities in this country, the foundations of those strong, thriving, safe communities have eroded over the past generation. In that other conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, Geoffrey Norman offered a fascinating story about the explosion of heroin addiction in small towns in Vermont.

The mills and manufacturing jobs are gone. If you only have a high-school education, you have little or no chance for a stable or thriving career. If you don't have a stable or thriving career, you are less likely to get married and raise a family. Since men and women will always be interested in each other, courtship and long-term commitment is replaced by the hookup culture. Kids start getting raised without a father around, young men with no role models to teach them how to be a man, young women with no fathers showing them how a man should treat them.

This horrid set of circumstances in poorer America is light-years away from equality of opportunity, nevermind remotely comparable outcomes. Unfortunately, those aren't the sorts of problems easily solved by passing a bill.

All societies have winners and losers, but modern America's winners are separating from the rest of us rather rapidly.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times:

When I grew up, school essentially came in two sizes: public or private. Now, private is a starting point, with many costly but broadly employed add-on's: the tutor for specific subjects; the tutor for SATs; the individual sports coach; the college-admissions consultant, whose fee can exceed $5,000. With taxis as with Boeings, there are degrees of pampering. Uber, a relatively new car service in dozens of American cities, allows you to specify, just minutes before your vehicle's arrival, precisely how regal and roomy it should be. If you see yourself in an S.U.V., then an S.U.V. is the chariot in which others will see you, too.

A big question that is likely to dominate our politics in the coming years is: How much are the "losers" of modern America responsible for their circumstances? Is it that they've been "getting screwed" by capitalism? It's not like we had a national referendum on free-trade policies that made American labor compete with (usually cheaper) labor around the world. That economic factor just advanced, decade by decade, no matter which party controlled Congress or the White House. Now we have a country in which too many public schools aren't up to snuff, and most of the good jobs require a skill level they're not capable of instructing to anyway.

Gobry notes:

One of the aspects where religion and freedom are most stunningly and intimately connected, Tocqueville writes, is education. Not without amazement, he cites the preamble of the section of the 1650 Connecticut Code of laws concerning education: "Whereas Satan, the enemy of humankind, finds in ignorance his most powerful weapons, and whereas it is important that the enlightenment brought by our father be not buried in their graves; whereas the education of children is one of the first interests of the State, with the help of the Lord…" and notes that the law mandated public education for all children. Countless sociologists and historians have pointed to this as one of the key origins of America's exceptional economic trajectory: the fact that, with religious motives, America educated its population much more and much sooner than the rest of the world, leading to a much more productive workforce.

Yeah, we've lost that advantage.

But if most of our countrymen getting the short end of the stick are folks who "worked hard and played by the rules," some significant chunk of them exacerbated their problems with bad decisions: They dropped out of school, had children before they were ready, abused alcohol or drugs, pursued unrealistic career paths, ran up student debt, ran up credit-card debt, bought houses they couldn't afford.

Obama has talked in the past about a "culture of irresponsibility," but he's mostly used that phrase in the context of Wall Street, and in fact pledged to "protect consumers from bad mortgages and greedy credit-card companies." In his world, it's always the big powerful corporations making trouble for the person in debt, not the person who actually ran up that debt.

Quite a few Americans want to hear that we ourselves are most responsible for the quality of our own lives. If we could overcome that, the rest of the problems would fall like dominoes.

Lighter Thoughts for the Holiday Weekend

ABC's Agents of SHIELD isn't a bad show; it's just a very underperforming one so far. I concur with most of the criticisms in this article, and add a few of my own:

How is the rest of the world reacting? We rarely if ever step outside the world of the main characters to see how the world at large is reacting to the revelations of the Marvel movies -- i.e. billionaires can build flying suits of armor; the U.S. government created a super-soldier in World War II and revived him from frozen ice decades later; the Norse Gods are real and are actually aliens; hostile aliens invaded New York City. All of these revelations would have big effects on society, the culture, the government . . . and all we've seen is a storefront window showing 'Heroes of New York' action figures.

Heck, in the most recent Iron Man movie, Air Force One was blown up, the president was kidnapped, and the vice president was implicated and arrested. Not only is this not a big deal in the world of Agents of SHIELD, I don't think it's ever been mentioned.

Last week's episode, where the characters are sent to clean up the mess left behind from the events of the Thor movie (literally) was a step in the right direction. We learned that the revelations about the Norse Gods had spurred the creation and growth of a Norway-based cult/hate group.

What, did SHIELD have budget cuts? The main characters are often wildly outmanned and outgunned, considering how they work for an organization that has at least one flying aircraft carrier that can turn invisible, and perhaps more, judging from the Captain America: The Winter Soldier trailer. What are these planning meetings like?

"We need two of our men to sneak across the border. They'll drive in and then try to convince them to sneak them past the guards."

"Or, you know, we could fly them over the border on our giant invisible aircraft carrier."

Hey, have you guys read any comic books? The other prime-time series based upon super hero comic books, WB's Arrow, is chock full of characters from DC Comics: Green Arrow, Black Canary, Deathstroke, Ras al Ghul, Speedy/Red Arrow, Brother Blood, Dollmaker, Bronze Tiger, Deadshot, Count Vertigo, the Huntress, the Royal Flush Gang . . . Sometimes the characters are altered from their larger-than-life, super-powered forms in the comics, but it's a nice little Easter Egg for fans every time they do that.

In Agents of SHIELD, we've seen . . . Samuel L. Jackson step on set for a two-minute cameo as Nick Fury. Then some sort of super-strength guy in the pilot. A group called 'Centipede' that is trying to turn people into super-heroes. Some scientist who got sucked into a gravity-altering machine. Some Chinese guy whose power is controlling fire.

Marvel comics has been churning out stories, -- great, awful, and in between -- for decades, with hundreds or thousands of characters. I realize some of those characters are set aside for the movies, but the generic unnamed super-powered mortal-of-the-week makes it feel like they're afraid to make the series too 'comic-book-y,' when in fact is it is based upon comic-book characters and supposedly all about living in a world with superheroes.

ADDENDUM: So, what's Thanksgiving going to be like at Alec Baldwin's house this year?

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