Dear Weekend Jolter,
Whatever these modern Lefties decry they are likely doing. That’s life in the Age of Progressive Projection. The Democrats have perfected the art of vote stealing and ballot hijinx (Old Joke: "My uncle from Chicago was a staunch Republican. Now that he's dead, he's been voting Democrat."), but the story persisting is that it will be the GOP that will somehow turn the union-dominated USPS into its co-conspirator to deny Joe Biden a mail-ballots victory. Either that or delay his monthly shipment of Geritol. Maybe both. Anyway, Rich Lowry is having none of this hoo-hah / blarney / baloney. From his new column:
Democrats and much of the media make it sound as though the post office was an efficient, smooth-running agency before DeJoy took charge and then, at Trump's behest, transformed it into a place struggling to keep up with broad-based changes in how we communicate.
In reality, the post office has lost nearly $80 billion since 2007, and it lost more than $2 billion last quarter. Unless the service finds a way to innovate, it is headed for bankruptcy.
This is the impetus for DeJoy's reforms, which should be welcomed by all the people now caterwauling about how essential the post office is to the American way of life.
DeJoy has been adamant that the Postal Service will do its job regarding mail-in ballots. The post office's recent warnings to states that they should be mindful of how quickly ballots can be delivered were played up as yet another assault on mail-in balloting. To the contrary, they were intended to avoid unrealistically late deadlines for mail-in voting that could create a train wreck in November.
But in their inflamed state, Democrats want a villain. If not a foreign potentate, then the guy in charge of delivering the mail.
There's more on this foolishness below, as well as the usual over-cup-runnething that should slake your thirst for conservative sanity, wisdom, and mirth. On with the Jolt!
Editorials
This post office conspiracy is a dead letter. From the editorial:
There were delays in mail-in balloting in the primaries before DeJoy showed up in June. (DeJoy is a Trump donor, but he had success with shipping and logistics in his business career and was unanimously approved by the postal service Board of Governors.) The changes that have drawn such fevered criticism are all commonsensical.
Collection boxes that don't get a lot of use are routinely decommissioned or moved. The postal service has stopped this practice for now, in reaction to the panic engendered whenever an image of a box getting removed appears on social media. The service has also been deactivating sorting machines for the types of mail that have been in decline, a plan that was in place prior to DeJoy's arrival. According to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, this will be paused until after the election, too. DeJoy has begun implementing another reform to try to cut down on routine overtime expenses by changing how mail goes out for delivery, a good-government measure that shouldn't be controversial.
We have met the enemy, and it is not the United States Postal Service.
The people of Belarus are demanding the ouster of dictator Alexander Lukashenko. We agree — he merits a spot in history's dustbin. From the editorial:
After he won election, he quickly turned Belarus — which had enjoyed democracy for a scant three years — into a personal fief. He took control of the courts, the banks, the universities, and so on. The Belarusian intelligence agency works for him, strictly. Charmingly, it is the only such agency in the post–Soviet Union to retain the old name: "KGB."
For years, people have referred to Lukashenko as "the last dictator in Europe." He held his sham elections from time to time, maiming or otherwise sidelining the opposition candidates. (They were incredibly brave to attempt to run in the first place.) One of the sham elections took place in 2010. Afterward, there were widespread democratic protests, which the dictator cracked down on, hard. We published a piece by our Jay Nordlinger called "The Assault on Belarus."
An exasperated dictator told his subjects, "That's it. I warned you that if some commotion started, we'd have enough forces. Folks, you tangled with the wrong guy. I'm not going to hide in the basement. So let's be done with it. There will be no more hare-brained democracy. We won't allow the country to be torn to pieces."
What he meant by that last sentence was, "I won't allow democracy to dislodge me."
As in the past, there were protests after the election this month, and, as in the past, Lukashenko has cracked down very, very hard. It is hard to read the testimonies of the tortured. It is hard to see videos of Belarusian security forces, making the blood flow in the streets. It is hard to listen to recordings made outside the detention center in Minsk: The screams of the tortured will send chills down your spine.
A Dozen Extra-Base Hits As NR Runs Up the Score on Liberal Knuckleheads
1. Hey, there was a convention this week. Rich Lowry mocks the Democrats' attempt to cast Joe Biden as a moderate. From the piece:
The Democratic Convention was, for the most part, bereft of policy, focusing instead on President Donald Trump's character failings — rehearsed at length — and Joe Biden's personal decency. Together with all of the speakers with a Republican pedigree, this reinforced Biden's image of being more moderate than he is, which is perhaps his greatest political strength.
There is obviously no percentage in him running as the most progressive presidential nominee in a couple of generations. It's much better for him to portray himself simply as a good guy whose tent is so broad it stretches from AOC to the former secretary of state for a Republican president many progressives think was guilty of war crimes.
It's not as though Biden pulled from the Republican A-Team, though. At this point, it'd be shocking if Colin Powell didn't endorse the Democratic candidate for president. Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, found former President George W. Bush too divisive for her taste. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 and the two-term governor of Ohio, was more of a get, but still, if all of these figures were collectively asked to go build an audience of Republican voters, they probably couldn't fill out a moderately sized Zoom call.
2. Andrew McCarthy explores and explains the Bannon indictment. From the beginning of the analysis:
NR's Zachary Evans has reported on the Justice Department's indictment of former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon, along with three codefendants — Brian Kolfage, an Air Force vet who became a triple-amputee serving in the Iraq War; Andrew Badolato, a longtime Bannon associate; and Timothy Shea, who helped Kolfage establish "We Build the Wall," the campaign said to be at the center of the alleged fraud scheme.
The indictment unsealed today elucidates that a great deal of investigative scutwork went into this case, chiefly by the U.S. postal inspectors and prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. Indeed, the investigation was plainly in gear last autumn: The indictment says that in October 2019, the defendants were tipped off by a financial institution that they were under investigation. The wire-fraud and money-laundering charges were a long time coming, and the postal inspectors appear to have meticulously traced the proceeds through numerous bank accounts, real-estate parcels, and at least one vehicle. These are itemized in the indictment's forfeiture allegations, which are in addition to the significant imprisonment and staggering fines that could result in the event of convictions.
The scheme is big but not complicated. According to the indictment, in late 2018, Kolfage, with the help of Shea and others, established a campaign originally called "We the People Build the Wall" through GoFundMe (described in the indictment as the "Crowdfunding Website"). The concept was that private citizens would contribute money to be donated to the government for the construction of a wall on the southern border. The campaign was instantly successful as a fundraising vehicle, quickly racking up $17 million in commitments, and ultimately $25 million.
3. Doug Bandow finds the effects on Hong Kong of Red China's national-security law. From the piece:
The law was, in short, intended to trigger the democracy movement's broad retreat from the public square, and it has. But there are already signs that its effects will be much more far-reaching.
On Monday, Hong Kong authorities arrested Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, along with two of his sons and four company executives, for alleged collusion with foreign groups. Around 200 police officers raided the paper. China's nationalistic Global Times tagged Lai as a "modern traitor." On passage of the NSL, Lai had warned: "Whatever we write, or whatever we say, they can label secession or subversion or whatever they decide according to their expedience."
Detained separately were members of the now-disbanded group Scholarism and an election-monitoring organization, as well as 23-year-old pro-democracy politician and protest leader Agnes Chow. Over the weekend, Chow cited surveillance of her home on social media. After the plethora of arrests, another democracy activist, Sunny Cheung, observed: "Everyone, let's mentally prepare. The road ahead will be darker and more terrifying than what we've imagined."
Such arrests might have been expected within Hong Kong when the law was passed. But last week, the authorities also issued warrants for six activists based overseas. The police refused to discuss the case, but the Chinese state-owned CCTV network helpfully explained that the activists were wanted for promoting secession and colluding with foreigners.
4. Jack Crowe finds Montana Governor Steve Bullock — also a Dem U.S. Senate hopeful — serenading the ChiComs. From the beginning of the report:
'When you invest in Montana, you have the full support of the state," Governor Steve Bullock says at the conclusion of a video soliciting Chinese investment in the Treasure State.
The circumstances surrounding the video, which was recently provided to National Review, remain unclear. Though Bullock's gubernatorial office claims it was made to be presented to a 2015 trade delegation of Chinese companies considering purchasing Montana's exports, his spokeswoman was unable to provide any documentation proving that was the case.
National Review was, however, able to locate a copy of the video on Ixigua, a Chinese platform that resembles YouTube. The video on Ixigua carries a caption that suggests the video is part of an effort to solicit investment in Montana through the EB-5 visa program, which promises wealthy foreign nationals permanent residency in the U.S. in exchange for a minimum $500,000 investment in an American development project that's been sponsored by a "regional center" — a legal entity approved by the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS). "The Governor of Montana kindly invites you to participate in this 'free schedule' EB-5 project," the caption says.
5. Kyle Smith tries to find media coverage of the Clinesmith guilty plea. He'll find Godot first. From the article:
You need not be a ranting Alex Jones-Pizzagate-Q-Anon freak to recognize why the term "Deep State" has caught on. If the label sounds silly to you, think of it as merely a spy-movie label for that most boring of institutions, the entrenched bureaucracy. The permanent Washington class has its own interests, interests that tend to align with those of the party of government, which is another way of saying that "nonpartisan" federal employees have a tendency to be ardent Democrats. Clinesmith is a Trump hater to such a degree that he once wrote "Viva [sic] le [sic] resistance" in an email. Why would a lawyer working for the FBI on the biggest case in politics be so indiscreet as to create a record of altering a document in the course of making a false statement of huge importance? Either Clinesmith was so confident in being surrounded by allies in the anti-Trump resistance that he believed he would never be caught, or he was so blinded by Trump loathing that he was willing to do something breathtakingly out of character for a trained, experienced Washington lawyer.
The press that spent two years on the shaggy-dog story of the nonexistent Trump–Russia conspiracy has been extravagantly bored by the new development. CNN's coverage of the matter on its website has been limited to two pieces, one a news item meant to downplay the guilty plea and one a column by Chris Cillizza meant to downplay the guilty plea. Cillizza focuses on Trump's typically hyperbolic and imprecise comments on the matter and concludes, of the case, "What it doesn't prove is that Trump's wild claims that there is a 'deep state' conspiracy that tried to keep him from being elected and has worked against him since he got into office actually exists. The facts just aren't there."
No, a Trump-hating FBI member who said he was part of "le [sic] resistance" simply falsified a document as part of a months-long play to obtain and renew FISA court approval, under false pretenses, to unleash all of the levers of state surveillance to spy on a Trump aide. It strains credulity to believe such a nobody as Carter Page was the actual target; he was just the tool the FBI used to wedge its way into Trump's inner circle. Nothing deep-statey about that at all.
6. J.K. Rowling may be on their Naughty List, but Luther Ray Abel finds that “Harry Potter” is still a thing that infatuates lefties. From the piece:
Arguably the most despicable character in the series is Dolores Umbridge, not Voldemort — Harry's primary nemesis. A life-long bureaucrat, Umbridge lives to write oppressive, vindictive legislation and delights in the suffering of those upon whom her decrees fall most heavily. Odd that the Left would dislike a fuchsia, paper-pushing, middle-aged, big-government-loving toadie seeing how often they elect similar individuals to office.
Given the series' questionable progressive bona fides, why does the Left insist upon using the series to explain events in the real world? The charitable explanation would sound something like: The Harry Potter series is a cultural touchstone for many people between the ages of ten and 40, having read it as youths and young adults, and the analogies drawn from the series are easy to follow with minimal explanation. In effect, Harry Potter supplants the Bible and Shakespeare as the analogous font from which writers draw to better explain current happenings. HP is in many ways a simplified, secular re-telling of the Christ story; specifically of the crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost. During an interview in 2007, Rowling confirmed the Christian imagery was intentional. Rowling's repackaging job has made a religious account — with all the attendant baggage — wholly more palatable for a religiously diverse international audience.
7. Madeleine Kearns finds that Donald Trump is a few letters short of satisfying the gender fanatics. From the piece:
In fact, so golden is Trump's liberal record on gay rights that in the 2016 Republican primaries, the New York Times even noted how "[Trump] has nurtured long friendships with gay people, employed gay workers in prominent positions, and moved with ease in industries where gays have long exerted influence, like entertainment." The Washington Post, meanwhile, ran an op-ed with the title, "Donald Trump is teaching the GOP a different way to embrace gay rights."
Since taking office, he hasn't so much as touched the precepts of Obergefell. At the United Nations, he pledged to fight for global decriminalization of homosexuality. He doesn't share Joe Biden's embarrassing voting record — the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 or withholding federal funds from pro-gay schools. He hasn't said, as Joe Biden did in 1972, that his "gut reaction is that they [homosexuals in the military] are security risks."
So how is it that Trump — the only pro-same-sex-marriage president to enter the White House — is now being painted by progressives as an enemy of sexual minorities, while Joe "marriage is between a man and a woman" Biden is their greatest champion? In a letter, T.
Because the gay-rights movement succeeded far more quickly than anyone had imagined, lobbyists had to reinvent themselves in order to preserve relevance. The gay-rights movement is now the "LGBT" movement and is almost wholly focused on redefining biological sex under the pretext of transgender rights. In truth, the only reason that transgenderism, a niche issue that affects a tiny proportion of Americans, is now a culture-war issue is because progressives have insisted on making it one.
8. Robert VerBruggen makes a case for deregulating the suburbs. From the analysis:
To put it bluntly, zoning regulations that aggressively restrict density, both in big cities and in the suburbs, are horrible. They make housing far more expensive than it needs to be. They limit what owners can build on their property. They make it hard for the working class (and in some cases even the middle class) to live in thriving places with lots of jobs, which misallocates the labor supply and hinders upward mobility. They prevent economically strong cities from growing. And they stunt economic growth in general: By one estimate, housing constraints "lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009."
Without government intervention, the free market matches the supply of housing to the demand for it. When a city grows, it becomes profitable to build new neighborhoods and further develop existing lots — with a blend of single-family homes, apartments, etc., that fits local preferences and works within the constraints of the area's geography. Onerous zoning rules prevent the market from adjusting this way, making existing property owners wealthy as their property values skyrocket but harming everyone else. Such regulations take a variety of forms, from height restrictions to growth boundaries to single-family zoning (which dictates that only single-family houses may be built, often across most of a jurisdiction's land mass).
9. Victor Davis Hanson is not lamenting the U.S. troop draw-down in Germany. From the column:
Germany spends only about 1.4 percent of its GDP on defense. As NATO's largest, wealthiest, and most powerful European member, it sets the example for the rest of alliance.
Merkel's reneging on her 2014 pledge helps explain why less wealthy and influential NATO members also see no reason to meet their obligations.
Germany surely knows that 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the World War II, and the 29th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall — the symbolic end of the Cold War.
Will there be any point in the future when Europe is confident enough to be a full defense partner with the U.S. rather than an eight-decade client?
NATO, of course, still provides a common European defense, but only by habitually relying inordinately on U.S. military contributions. That dependence seems increasingly odd when the European Union has an aggregate GDP nearly as large as America's.
10. Armond White hammers the HBO progressive propaganda film, On the Record. From the review:
I can't litigate this film's allegations, but any honest, alert viewer should notice the angle of On the Record's testimonies. The elephant on screen is linguistic: These black women are already so thoroughly indoctrinated in the rhetoric of grievance that they can only express themselves in social-justice terms. (Their self-description is "We're all light-skinned, we're all attractive" and beneficiaries of "light privilege.") Their language is corrupted — "empowerment," "activism," "women of color," "class indicator" — even as they try to distinguish themselves from/or within white feminist movements.
The result is that On the Record's black showbiz participants and academics (Sil Lai Abrams, Sherri Hines, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Kierna Mayo, Joan Morgan, and others) reduce their culture for white-liberal-approved standards. The irony is in their cooperation with music-industry sexism despite their complaints about "words like 'bitch' and 'ho' coming into the music." And they complain about videos that were "clearly a statement against a large majority of black women and how we look . . . ideology that had been spread by defenders of slavery."
11. Rachelle Peterson takes stock of initial efforts to ban ChiCom-backed / propagandizing Confucius Institutes at American universities. From the beginning of the piece:
Alabama is poised to become the first state to take up legislation banning public colleges and universities from hosting Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-sponsored campus centers that propagandize for Beijing and serve as outposts of Communist Party espionage. State representative Tommy Hanes recently unveiled a draft proposal to ban the centers, which immediately drew public support from Alabama congressman Mo Brooks.
The bill would prohibit public universities in Alabama from "providing support for, funding for, or use of its campus facilities" for "cultural institutes that are affiliated with, funded by, or supported by the government of China." It would affect both of Alabama's existing Confucius Institutes, at Alabama A&M and Troy University. (A third Confucius Institute, at Auburn University at Montgomery, closed quietly a few years ago.)
Hanes says he plans to pre-file the bill in January for the next legislative session and has promised "a strong effort to stop Communism in America." Clint Reid, chairman of the College Republican Federation of Alabama, which supports the bill, says his group intends to "work on this issue until both Confucius Institutes in Alabama are shuttered."
12. Frederick M. Hess and Matthew Rice offer a lesson in the harsh realities and problems that distance-learning will have on many a home and parent and community. From the analysis:
This spring's virtual-learning experiment was underwhelming, to say the least. Researchers at NWEA, Brown, and the University of Virginia have estimated that students will begin the coming school year already woefully behind, with just two-thirds the learning gains in reading and as little as half of the gains in math that we would normally expect. This is hardly a surprise, given that nearly a quarter of students were truant and that, even as the spring semester ground to an end, only a fifth of school districts expected teachers to provide real-time instruction.
Despite assurances from district officials that this fall's remote instruction will be much improved, there's a lot of cause for skepticism. For one thing, the evidence is pretty clear that, for most learners, virtual learning today is significantly less effective than classroom instruction. Research suggests that is likely to be particularly true for disadvantaged students.
Moreover, there's little evidence that school systems worked out the kinks of virtual learning over the summer. Consider New York City's dismal experience with summer learning. In the nation's biggest and biggest-spending school district, despite New York City schools chancellor Richard Carranza's pledge that the city's summer learning plan would get kids "ready to hit the ground running come September," the program was plagued by the same problems that befell schools last spring — from technical glitches to poor curricula to sky-high truancy rates.
Capital Matters
Do visit Capital Matters, the new and pretty darned wise NRO section teeming with wisdom and analysis on Things Financial. We are thrilled to share four pieces published there in the last week.
1. Benjamin Zycher reports on the Trump administration's overhaul of misguided Obama regs on methane emissions. From the article:
Let the hysteria begin. The Trump administration has finalized a reform of the federal rules on emissions of methane, the major component of natural gas, from oil and gas production. The existing rules were implemented by the Obama administration in 2016, justified largely as a means of addressing anthropogenic climate change. That justification is deeply dubious, but any relaxation of such regulations is unacceptable to an environmental Left ideologically opposed to fossil fuels. And so an inexorable avalanche of criticism and litigation from the usual suspects is upon us, all of which will ignore several central truths.
First: Neither the Obama rule nor the proposed reform would have any detectable effect on temperatures or climate phenomena over the remainder of this century. (Climate projections beyond 2100 are not to be taken seriously.) Total U.S. methane emissions in 2018 (635 million metric tons in CO2 equivalents) were 9.5 percent of all U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, and about 1.2 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Suppose that U.S. methane emissions were to be eliminated completely. If we apply the EPA climate model, which is based on assumptions that exaggerate the effects of reduced emissions, global temperatures would be about 0.012° Celsius lower than otherwise would be the case by the year 2100. If we apply assumptions more consistent with the modern peer-reviewed literature, that predicted effect becomes even smaller — about 0.005° Celsius. If a complete elimination of methane emissions would have a such a trivial effect, the effect of the Obama rule would be even less significant.
2. Kevin Hassett has 5 Questions for esteemed economist Ed Conard. From the interview:
Q: People are hurting. Don't we have a moral obligation to help them?
A: Most everyone agrees that we should help those in need; and we do. But we shouldn't do it blindly. People demand more spending without knowing how much we spend. Last year — not counting the $1.6 trillion the government spent on retirees — America spent $1.25 trillion helping the poor (welfare, Medicaid, and disability). That's enough to give every person in the bottom 20 percent under the age of 65 $22,500, or $90,000 per family of four — 50 percent more than America's middle-class family earns, which we've already seen is the richest middle class in the world by far.
Unfortunately, we don't give a large share of that money to the poor. Instead, lawmakers use it to buy votes. Nevertheless, America spends more after tax helping the poor than the richest countries in Europe, who, unacknowledged by most, tax their poor with 20 percent sales taxes.
While most everyone agrees that we should help the poor, not everyone agrees that we need to increase government spending from 36 percent of GDP (including state and local government) — which is expected to rise to 41 percent of GDP as Baby Boomers retire — to do it. Countries that have increased government spending as a share of GDP have significantly smaller and slower-growing middle-class incomes.
3. More Hassett: Kevin suggests students making gap-year plans need to rethink that choice. There's plenty of upside in heading straight into Freshman-hood. From the piece:
The next consideration is the impact of these difficult times on supply and demand. Many students will likely choose to take a gap year. That means that the students who don't will benefit from smaller class sizes and easier access to popular classes. And the 2024 graduating class will surely be the smallest in decades. That means that kids who tough it out and go this year will enter the job market (or the graduate-school admissions game) with an enormous numbers advantage. Jobs and admission will be less competitive than ever.
On the other hand, students who choose a gap year move their graduation date to 2025, which will probably be the biggest graduating class in decades. Admissions directors are going to have to stuff more people into the entering class in 2021. A little forward thinking (difficult for an 18-year-old, admittedly) makes a gap year seem like a very bad choice.
As we look ahead to the coming year, schools across the country have taken wildly different stances on the fall semester. The most sensible approach out there has been taken by Cornell University, which is going to rely heavily on pooled testing to isolate sick students and keep healthy students safe. It is likely that students who attend Cornell in the fall will be safer than those who take a gap year. To the extent that a school copies the Cornell protocol, then, health concerns argue for attendance as well.
4. Andrew Stuttaford derides the call for a wealth tax in California. From the beginning of the piece:
Among the subjects touched upon in the latest Capital Note are some new proposals to increase taxes in California (yes, it's a day ending with a y). They are all bad, and in all likelihood, self-defeating (yes, it's a day ending with a y), but it's worth noting that they include a wealth tax, something that appears, increasingly, to be in the air. The Wall Street Journal has some of the grisly details here.
So far as the wealth tax is concerned, it would be charged at a rate of 0.4 percent on assets over $30 million. That, of course, will not worry 99 percent (at least) of the population, but it should, because what those who want to impose a wealth tax are saying is that nothing that anyone owns is, in the end, theirs. Once the principle is conceded, the number, whether it is $30 million or $300,000, is merely a matter of negotiation, as is the rate at which it would be levied. Everything you own, you own simply at the pleasure of the state.
Jacobins Beware: The New Issue of National Review Is Out, and It Has Votre Numéro
The September 7, 2020 issue of America's premier conservative journal is in the mail, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology, is instantly available to all right now on the NR website. Of course, if you don't have an NRPLUS subscription, your monthly bites at the apple are insufficient to consume the whole . . . apple. (Actually, you hit the paywall after accessing three pieces . . . so maybe get that NRPLUS subscription going right now). That advise having been given, here's some more: Check out these four selections from the newbie.
1. John D. Hagen Jr. reviews the importance of Thomas Carlyle's classic, The French Revolution, and draws the big fat dots between Jean-Jacques Rousseau's leftist utopianism and the madness on America's streets and campuses. From the essay:
The gospel of Jean-Jacques guides the arc of the revolution. There is a "Night of Pentecost," abolishing feudalism in one session of the Assembly. A constitution is devised, and the "Twelve Hundred Jean-Jacques Evangelists" disperse. Their place is taken by a legislature increasingly controlled by the Jacobins. Carlyle calls them "the Ecumenic Council and General-Assembly of the Jean-Jacques Churches," with Robespierre as their Chief Priest.
Jacobin utopianism fails, as utopianisms all do. This naturally is seen as owing to traitors. "Tremble, ye traitors; dread a People which calls itself patient, long-suffering; but which cannot always submit to have its pocket picked, in this way,– of a Millennium!" Thus, the gospel of Jean-Jacques issues in apocalypse: the murderous rhetoric of Jean-Paul Marat, the September Massacres in the prisons, the Reign of Terror, death-tumbrels to the guillotine. Sentimental visions of utopia lead to atrocity and horror. So has it been in subsequent revolutions arising from utopianism in Russia, China, Cambodia, and other lands. So might it be in our own land if recent trajectories prevail.
The gospel of Jean-Jacques is ascendant in America today. Its libertarian strain is found in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, refining the logic of Roe v. Wade to justify abortion on these grounds: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Rousseau himself abandoned his infant children to near-certain death in orphanages, and this is his legacy — human beings conceived as atomized, arbitrary bundles of desire. Rising out of that legacy are assaults on moral norms of every sort: unrestricted abortion, assisted suicide, ubiquitous pornography, marijuana lotus-eating, insistence that all norms are mere social constructions. This paradigm largely reduces, as Carlyle says, to the maxim that "pleasure is pleasant."
Meanwhile, the collectivist strain of Jean-Jacques's gospel goes from strength to strength. It inspires a progressivism unburdened by any wariness of the will-to-power and human corruptibility. Utopian calls for mass mobilization (a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college for all, a guaranteed minimum income, social workers replacing police forces) ride on a sense of the general will. And that sense of the general will finds unprecedented expression in social media — emotive tweetings to legions of followers, instant consensus, and the merciless suppression of dissent. Our Internet postings resemble the placards flung up each morning on Paris walls. Our Twitter mobs (translated now into street mobs) resonate with a punitive rage suggestive of the French Revolution.
2. Michael Brendan Dougherty assesses the rise and tenure of Hungary's Viktor Orban. From the article:
Orban's political success is due not to authoritarian structures but to the delivery of consistent economic growth. The early post-Communist years were known for stagnation and the rude awakening that a free Hungary was not the bread – basket for Europe, as it had thought itself to be, but rather a strange dependent country where EU money passes through but doesn't remain invested, having a final destination back in the West.
Orban's government set a target of growing the economy at a rate 2 percent higher than the average growth of the European Union as a whole. Although nearby countries including Poland and Slovakia outpaced it recently, Hungary has consistently delivered on this promise. And even in the COVID crisis, it is poised to hit the 2 percent mark the other way, seeing its economy shrink by 13 percent against an average European collapse of 15 percent. Orban's government has managed this while delivering a tight labor market and rising wages. The minimum wage has more than doubled during his tenure. At the beginning of Orban's second turn as prime minister, he promised 1 million new jobs — quite a lot for a country of 10 million people. A decade later, the count stands around 800,000. Labor participation soared from 50 to 63 percent.
That growth is aimed at halting and eventually reversing a major problem that has bedeviled Central and Eastern European nations that joined the European Union: the problem of emigration and brain drain. And these are just two parts of the larger problem that Orban sets himself to address: the viability of the Hungarian people, their society, and the state in the 21st century.
Orban certainly used the migration issue of 2015 to political advantage. But there was a chimerical aspect to it. The idea that Muslim migrants from Iraq and Afghanistan want to settle permanently in nations such as Hungary or Poland, known for emigration, was always fanciful, even if some Europeanists claimed to believe it. In such countries those migrants, who would have been allocated from Italy, would have to be settled somewhere. Because there are no preexisting communities for them to join, the process would be quite visible and disruptive. Not to mention highly unpopular. Any government that had tried it would have been thrown out. And the migrants themselves, after sufficient time, would likely have left anyway, making their way to the richer cities with more-established Islamic communities in Western Europe.
3. Spencer Case fingers the growing tendency for the political Left to adopt the manipulative ways of the abusive boyfriend. From the piece:
Consider how the concept of "violence" has been expanded (and then, once expanded, selectively applied) so that any resistance to leftwing ideas can now be equated with violence. In a 2019 opinion piece for Inside Higher Education, for example, a Georgetown professor of philosophy said that rejecting self-identification as the sole criterion for being a man or a woman amounts to "complicity with systemic violence and active encouragement of oppression."
It's no less manipulative to say "You're hurting others!" than to say "You're hurting me!" if you lack justification for saying either. Many political accusations of harm, like the one I just mentioned, are plainly unreasonable. One difference might be that the boyfriend intends to manipulate his partner, whereas the activist has righteous objectives. But I'm not sure we'd think more highly of an abusive boyfriend who really believed himself to be the victim. Moreover, as we shall see, it's unlikely that those who resort to this kind of rhetoric in politics are always guided by noble intentions.
This analysis is harsher than another criticism of the contemporary activist Left. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that much campus mischief reflects enculturated oversensitivity ("safetyism") and sincere acceptance of bad ideas. To my mind, Haidt and Lukianoff exaggerate the role of "bad ideas and good intentions." Vice, and particularly a taste for the pleasure of controlling others, plays a larger role than they acknowledge in motivating bad behavior. Exhibit A is the "Day of Absence"
4. David Mamet offers a geography lesson that discovers reasons for the failing fortunes of America's major cities. Not exactly what you'd expect from an article titled "Max the Hamster." From the piece:
The cities tried to control this — call it good or bad, it is inevitable — progression away from popular commerce through the Potemkin villages of rent control, which only meant that taxpayers were subsidizing those lucky enough to find or canny enough to bribe their way into a cushy spot and spend the money they were awarded somewhere else. Rent control, as Milton Friedman observed long ago, leads only to housing shortages. Manhattan Island is the prime example of a city whose success led to the banishment of its middle class, and to its inevitable future as an amusement park and/or a slum.
There is no way to reverse the trend of commerce, which is to say self-interest. We must all follow our fortune, and the most committed and liberal member of the California teachers' union will, on the day of retirement, most likely take the pension to a low-tax red state.
The commerce and wealth of the cities grew with their eminence as aviation hubs, but more air traffic meant bigger airports, farther from city centers, and longer and more arduous commutes. Car travel allowed movement to the suburbs, which meant more cars on the road and unproductive hours (in Los Angeles and San Francisco) on a daily commute.
Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of theatrical talent in the world, but our theaters are mausoleums. Why? After a day in traffic, no one wants to get into the car for another two hours. Finita la commedia.
Elsewhere in the Conservative Solar System
1. Didja know that what's taught at college is "White Mainstream English"? At The College Fix, Sarah Imgrund reports, a groups of professors / ideologues are demanding it be abolished on the name of "Black Linguistic Justice." From the article:
A national professional association of writing instructors recently published a list of demands that argued the current emphasis on standard English is rooted in racism and called for a complete overhaul of how language is taught.
It was published by a subcommittee with the Conference on College Composition and Communication, part of the National Council of Teachers of English.
The statement called for an end to "White Mainstream English," arguing such an action would "decolonize" students' minds and the English language, as well as help students "unlearn white supremacy."
The demands were written by five English professors and a writing scholar and the document is titled: "This Ain't AnThe demands were written by five English professors and a writing scholar and the document is titled: "This Ain't Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!"
"The language of Black students has been monitored, dismissed, demonized — and taught from the positioning that using standard English and academic language means success," the professors argued.
They added such a set-up "creates a climate of racialized inferiority toward Black Language and Black humanity."
2. In the new issue of Commentary, Christine Rosen finds that the Cancel Culture is served with side dishes of grandstanding and kowtowing. From the analysis:
Cancellation and kowtowing are all made possible by the third and most regularly practiced element of woke ideology: grandstanding. As Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke describe in a new book, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, grandstanding is "the use of moral talk for self-promotion," and it's a game everybody plays, particularly now that social-media platforms provide endless opportunities to do so.
Politicians are particularly susceptible to the practice. Grandstanding is Donald Trump's normal register, so perhaps it isn't surprising that his political opponents have escalated their own grandstanding in response; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the federal officers Trump sent to protect a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, as "stormtroopers," for example, and regularly refers to legislation proposed by Republicans as "the worst bill in the history of the United States Congress," as she did about the Tax Cuts and Job Act of 2017. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently engaged in some grandstanding about "white supremacist culture" by criticizing a statue placed in the U.S. Capitol. The statue (which was made by a woman of color) is a depiction of Father Damien, the Belgian Catholic missionary (and canonized saint) who devoted his life to caring for lepers in Hawaii.
While some grandstanders engage in self-promotion to impress others (what the authors of Grandstanding call "recognition desire"), others do it as an expression of dominance. "They use moral talk to shame or silence others and create fear," Tosi and Warmke write. "They verbally threaten and seek to humiliate." The latter is the tendency that has taken hold among the media of late.
How do they do this? By turning issues that are not about morals into moral issues. The petty semantic squabbling about whether to capitalize black or white; the insertion of moral commentary into so-called reporting; the unsubstantiated assertions about racism injected into everyday reporting; all these are evidence of what Tosi and Warmke call "false moral innovation."
Because of its ubiquity and the difficulty in countering it, grandstanding might ultimately prove the most harmful to democratic debate. Grandstanders assume that their listeners will conform to the values the grandstander is ostensibly promoting. They're not wrong; this is why among elite media right now, the most enthusiastic grandstanders (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Wesley Lowery, Yamiche Alcindor) trigger immediate kowtowing by their peers, who understand that grandstanding implies a threat of cancellation if not endorsed.
3. At The European Conservative, Mark Dooley reflects on conservatism, before and after the late Roger Scruton. From the piece:
As I have often written, Scruton was, above all else, a philosopher of love — love of home, of existing things, and of what cries out to be salvaged from the heart of a dying culture. This, he believed, was natural to the human condition, which was why he took aim at those who encouraged rejection at the expense of love. He called it the 'Devil's work,' because it sought to strip all that was beautiful, sanctified, and sacred from the surface of the world. The French seemed to excel at this type of diabolical labour, but I believe that, in the end, Scruton no longer considered Derrida in this category of radical thinker. The fact that he was not included in Scruton's anti-leftist manifesto Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (Bloomsbury, 2015) suggests as much.
Indeed, for years, I had pushed him to write a second edition of his classic Thinkers of the New Left (Longman, 1985), a compilation of devastating critiques of, among others, Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, and Sartre. He consistently hesitated, believing it would bring him unnecessary trouble. Eventually, however, he relented and, after a wonderful dinner in London with our editor Robin Baird-Smith, we hit upon the tantalising title: Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. But, even then, Roger wavered. "You must realise that not all of them are fools," he remarked, "some are even geniuses." I already knew that he believed Derrida was a genius because, one evening, while sipping whiskey in my home in Dublin, he said: "You know, the big difference between Heidegger and Derrida is that one wasn't very bright but wrote profoundly, whereas the other was a genius but wrote gobbledegook." That was my cue to roar laughing — and I duly obliged.
However, the leftist 'genius' he most admired was Sartre. Scruton often spoke to me of Sartre's brilliance as a writer, his capacity to fluidly move between genres to convey a message that was both magnificent yet menacing. Scruton was the great defender of the first-person plural — the 'we' of community, the nation and local settlement. Sartre believed that such an ideal was a stunning example of inauthenticity and bad faith. Scruton believed that in the other person I am granted an intimation of infinity. Sartre thought that "hell is other people." And yet, despite standing for everything that Scruton opposed, it was Sartre that he looked to as an example of how the public intellectual should be regarded.
4. At Spectator USA, Jonathan Leaf finds that Gloria Steinem suffered greatly from spotlight envy. From the article:
Regardless, it was her determination to stay at the top of the movement that appears to have motivated a shocking betrayal. On Christmas Day, 1979, Steinem's friend and fellow feminist leader Phyllis Chesler was raped by Davidson Nicol, a UN official from Sierra Leone. Nicol had diplomatic immunity and, as Chesler soon learned, he had raped other women.
Chesler sought Steinem's help in exposing Nicol. Steinem asked Chesler for patience. In the meantime, Steinem's feminist ally Robin Morgan took over Chesler's attention-getting role as head of a UN panel on women's rights. At that point, Chesler claims, Steinem lost interest in assisting her. Chesler alleged in her book that this was because Steinem feared the rape allegation would harm Morgan's career, and expose an influential black diplomat. Chesler believes that she and the other women had become pawns to be sacrificed. Steinem has never addressed Chesler's allegations and did not respond to a request for comment.
Steinem is not motivated by money. Yet her ideological obsessions and her need for influence and attention have blinded her to the ways in which they have corrupted her character. They also may have negatively affected the interests of women.
5. Money Talks: That great sound of silence, writes Lawrence A. Franklin at Gatestone Institute, is that of Islamic nations clamming up about Red China's persecution of the Uyghur people. From the article:
The world's most influential Muslim international forum, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in a resolution drafted in March last year, in fact commended China's efforts in its care of the country's Muslims. Shortly after, in July 2019, twenty-three Muslim countries supported a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution praising the People's Republic of China's (PRC) efforts "for protecting and promoting human rights through development." This statement rebuffed an earlier Human Rights Council resolution drafted by 22 Western countries urging China to refrain from violating the human rights of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.
Some noteworthy leaders from Muslim majority countries personally praised the Chinese treatment of its Uyghur population. Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, speaking on Chinese state television during a February 2019 visit to China, said it was China's "right" to place Uyghurs in training camps, and to "prevent the infiltration and spread of extremist thinking."
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, when asked by a reporter about China's treatment of its Uyghurs, claimed he didn't "know much about" the problem. When pressed, he continued that China "came to help us when we were at rock bottom." Even Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan backtracked from his December 2019 condemnation of China's treatment of Muslims as "a great cause of shame for humanity." Now Erdogan extradites Uyghur refugees in Turkey back to China where they will most likely face harsh treatment.
Competing with Erdogan for "hypocrisy honors" is Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who in a July telephone conversation with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping pledged his continued support for "China's just position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other issues concerning China's core interests." Abbas admitted to no lack of consistency in his accusations of alleged Israeli abuses of Palestinian Arabs and his fawning support for China's treatment of his fellow Muslims in Xinjiang.
6. At Quillette, Andrea Bikfalyi and Marcel Kuntz condemn the injection of racial politics and tribalism into the sciences, and hopes the American madness does not go whole-hog international. From the article:
The racialization of discourses, a phenomenon that has spread rapidly to other Western countries from the United States, is increasingly metastasizing into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The process is on display at numerous scientific institutions and journals, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. In Science, chemist Holden Thorp declared that "the evidence of systemic racism in science permeates this nation [i.e., the United States]." In an unsigned editorial, Nature editors pledged to end (unspecified) "anti-Black practices in research." They also declared that they lead "one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship," and that "the enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices."
This is the language of religious confession, not scientific analysis. As scientists ourselves, we feel insulted by such blanket self-denunciations — since we are not racists, have never been racists, and have never met colleagues who, to our knowledge, acted in a racist manner.
This obviously does not mean that there are no racists working in scientific fields. But our experience suggests they are not common or prominent in modern professional communities. We also reject the use of the term "systemic racism," a term injected by critical race theorists into the discourse, which presupposes the idea that racism is built into the structures of our working environments.
7. What Margaret Mitchell's much-misconstrued novel, Gone With the Wind is, and isn't, gets a thorough analysis and explanation from Bruce Bawer in The New Criterion. From the commentary:
Historians of Reconstruction might call this an oversimplification of reality: surely not all of the former slaves who made it to the first rank of the new social order had previously been at the bottom, and surely not all of the house servants stayed on with their former masters. But as a generalization, this will do. Today it can be considered offensive even to acknowledge that a certain percentage of former slaves preferred to remain in servitude, albeit as free citizens, rather than to strike out on their own; but why is it hard to believe that people who'd only known one home in their entire lives, and had always felt secure in it, chose to stay there rather than risk poverty and homelessless in unfamiliar surroundings? (One of the sentimental conceits of our time is that everybody thirsts for freedom. Alas, no. Give Muslims in the Middle East freedom and they vote in a theocratic tyranny; give Russians freedom and they elect Putin.)
When Mitchell is accused of depicting blacks condescendingly, Exhibit A is always Scarlett's slave girl Prissy, a flibbertigibbet who was played in the film by Butterfly McQueen. But Mitchell also created Aunt Pittypat Hamilton, a white woman who's at least as much of a fool as Prissy even though she's a half-century or so older. (Both characters could have been conceived by Mitchell's favorite novelist, Charles Dickens.) Mitchell also gave us Uncle Peter, Pittypat's slave, who is the de facto master of her household and without whom Pittypat would not be able to run it; he protects her and orders her about, for her own good, as if she were a child, and she always obeys. After the war Peter stays on with Pittypat, and when she learns that the Northerners want to give black people the vote, she says: "Did you ever hear of anything more silly? Though — I don't know — now that I think about it, Uncle Peter has much more sense than any Republican I ever saw and much better manners." (The line doesn't appear in the movie.) Pork, a house slave at Tara, has a similarly protective relationship with Scarlett's father, Gerald; indeed, he's the closest thing Gerald has to a son, and when her father dies Scarlett gives his watch to the former slave. (This did make it into the film.)
Despite the rigidity of social categories in the Old South, then, Mitchell recognizes that relations between whites and blacks aren't fully defined and delimited by the official owner–slave paradigm. When Scarlett is stung after the war by Uncle Peter's disapproval of her, Mitchell offers this gloss: "Not to stand high in the opinion of one's servants was as humiliating a thing as could happen to a Southerner." Rhett, who respects virtually nobody, tells Scarlett after their marriage: "Mammy's a smart old soul and one of the few people I know whose respect and good will I'd like to have." He treats Mammy, Mitchell tells us, "with the utmost deference, with far more courtesy than he treated any of the ladies of Scarlett's recent acquaintance. In fact, with more courtesy than he treated Scarlett herself." When Scarlett upbraids him, saying that he "should be firm with Mammy, as became the head of the house," Rhett laughs and says that Mammy's "the real head of the house."
Baseballery
Baseball's fraternal frivolities warm the heart cockles, and was there ever a day for brotherly star-alignment as happened on a Tuesday afternoon — September 20, 1955 to be precise — in Detroit, as the middling Tigers, a tad over .500 but at 16.5 games back, long out of contention, played host to the newly minted Kansas City Athletics, a 63-87 team that was a year removed from its final game in the City of Brotherly Love?
But it remained awash in that love, never mind having relocated to the Midwest. The roster for the A’s in 1955 included two sets of brothers — the first of only two times that has ever occurred in MLB history (all at the same time). And on this particular day in the Motor City, the quartet all played, albeit in a losing cause, as the Tigers prevailed, 7-3.
The Athletics' starter, Glenn Cox, should have stayed in bed: In 1 1/3 innings, he gave up 8 hits and 7 runs, all earned, and handed over the ball to southpaw Bobby Shantz, who three years prior had led the AL with 24 wins, and earned the league's MVP Award. Come 1955 (he had miles to go: Shantz would pitch another nine years before hanging up the spikes) he had hit a rough patch — his record was 5-10. But on this day, Shantz had his stuff, and for 1 2/3 innings he held the Tigers hitless. Opportunity kept his appearance short: He was pulled by A's manager Lou Boudreau for pinch hitter Enos Slaughter when his team rallied in the top of the Fourth. Enter brothers: The Athletics 18-year-old rookie third baseman, Clete Boyer, a part of so many Yankee pennant winners in the coming years, singled to load up the bases, and then the A's catcher, Billy Shantz — brother of Bobby, singled to drive in a run. The bases were loaded with Big Brother Bobby in the on-deck circle. Hence the Slaughter option.
For the record: Enos hit a sac fly, bringing in what would be the A's final run of the afternoon. In the Eighth, Boudreau handed the ball to the much-older sibling of Clete: Cloyd Boyer, the fourth brother to play in that game. He put down the Tigers in order. Cloyd would pitch in two more games that year, his final appearance in the Big Leagues (younger brother Ken Boyer was in his rookie season with the Cardinals — he'd go on to win the NL MVP in 1964, and finish his career in 1969 with the Dodgers).
The Brothers Shantz would play again on the same team — the 1960 New York Yankees, but never in the same game (indeed, Billy appeared in just one game — the last of his career — and only to substitute as catcher in the Ninth for Yogi Berra, who had been hit by a pitch in the bottom of the Eighth). Clete Boyer played third that day for the Bronx Bombers, and smacked a home run.
By the way: The Tigers' winning pitcher on that 1955 afternoon was rookie and future Hall-of-Famer Jim Bunning.
Also: Playing for the Tigers at third base that day was AL RBI leader Ray Boone, in the midst of his 13-year career, and the first of many Boones to play MLB and earn All-Star distinctions. Son Bob Boone caught 19 seasons, and Bob’s sons, Aaron (12 seasons) and Bret (14 seasons) also played for the same team at the same time, on the Cincinnati Reds in 1997 and 1998.
And it was on the last game of that 1998 season that a Fraternal Foursome graced the same team’s lineup for a second time. About which we will share in an ensuing Baseballery.
A Dios
In this longest-ever year, it's possible we have seen nothing yet compared to what madness might lay ahead of us (or lie ahead of us if you prefer). Do pray for those things needed in such times, in particular wisdom and charity and courage. The word on the street is this: Ask and it shall be given, seek and ye shall find.
May You and Yours Be Immersed in the Creator's Sweet and Tender Mercies,
Jack Fowler, who is happy to consider advice on loin-girding if sent to jfowler@nationalreview.com.
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