Monday, February 29, 2016

The Way Back from Liberalism



By Matt Patterson
Friday, February 26, 2016

The inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is perfectly explicable if you accept the following: The Republican party has failed.

Since the New Deal, there have been six Republican presidents. But Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes all failed to stop the growth of government. In fact, most of the Republican presidents since FDR have been willing and enthusiastic co-conspirators in the care and overfeeding of our government behemoth.

The federal government has now taken over one-sixth of the U.S. economy and stands in direct or indirect control of the entire health and finance sectors. The government knows who you are, where you live, and how much you make, and it can take whatever it wants from your paycheck before you even see it, thanks to the original Big Brother, Social Security.

Let us remember, the Founding Fathers set the Colonies ablaze over the most trifling of taxes. Indeed, the men who founded our republic were perfectly willing to die — and kill — over far, far lesser offenses than the modern American suffers daily.

That can only mean that conservative thinkers have failed to make the case to Americans that government is not the answer to our problems. Politicians of both parties know this, and so merely and justifiably give the people what they want.

Strategically speaking, the failure stems from two disastrous abdications. First, and particularly devastating, starting in the late 1960s conservatives surrendered academia wholesale to liberals, who are now in virtually total control of the education of our children, from kindergarten to university.

Second, the Right completely abandoned entertainment and the arts, which are often wrongly viewed by conservatives as frivolities, diversions to pass the time, something to look down upon. But it has always been through art that ideas, both large and small, both profane and sacred, are spread and absorbed.

Liberals, on the other hand, lost no time in making the most of their extraordinary coups in education and the arts. They knew the value of what they had captured.

Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals moved from academia into a cloistered think-tank world where people who already agree with one another write papers and give talks for their colleagues, while the rest of the nation goes to the movies and downloads favorite songs and shows — which contain the ideas and values of the liberals who made them.

It wasn’t always thus. Our greatest political figure was an artist who understood the power of his medium and its ability to shape thought. He used his knowledge of stagecraft and the psychological acumen his profession gave him to outwit his counterparts in the Soviet Union.

Reagan may be our last great politician, and our last great thinker. His long career as an artist was instrumental in preparing him for both roles. And yet, how many young conservatives these days long for a career onstage or onscreen? How many young conservatives long to be, and are encouraged to be, painters, novelists, poets, filmmakers, comedians? Instead, young conservatives flock to the Imperial Capital in droves looking to score internships at think tanks, in conservative media, and on Capitol Hill. The lucky ones will get jobs in these places — and change the culture not one little bit.

But imagine if a young conservative stays in her home state upon graduation and writes short fiction revealing the evils of Big Government in a new and entertaining way.

Perhaps our hypothetical young conservative will suffer a lifetime of impoverishment, as most writers do. But if she dedicates her life to her art and produces something beautiful in her course, she will be worth 10,000 D.C. interns.

Reagan was an artist. Not a great one, as he would have been the first to admit. But that is hardly the point. Reagan understood intellectually and intuitively that art shapes belief systems in ways both obvious and subtle. And he was quite open about his actor’s training and its usefulness to him in a myriad of ways. Once, when he was asked how an actor could be president, Reagan responded that he didn’t see how anyone could be president without that training.

The point is this: Those trained to express themselves in artistic media are trained necessarily to communicate feelings and ideas, to move emotions from one heart to another, to transmit ideas from one brain to another, via a page, a screen, a canvas.

Smart politicians have always known this. When a young Roman named Octavian became the first emperor a couple of decades before the birth of Christ, this ruthless political genius immediately began co-opting Rome’s great writers for the imperial cause.

Octavian, whom history knows as Augustus, knew that his new regime needed the hearts and minds of the people, and knew that the best and fastest way to those hearts was poetry. Hence, the poet Virgil was commissioned to write an epic history of Rome, culminating in the glorious and heaven-sanctioned rule of the Caesars. The result was the Aeneid, one of the great imaginative achievements of all time.

Today there is a veritable cottage industry of conservatives complaining about American culture.

If a fraction of these complainers ever decided to make something besides a blog post or a television rant, they would do more good for the culture than they could possibly imagine. Don’t like the quality of Hollywood films? Go to film school. And — even more important — encourage your children to do likewise.

It is the same with education. How many young politically active conservatives want to be kindergarten teachers or university professors? To ask the question is to answer it. And why not? True, there is no money in the gig, and yet, few professions are as rewarding as teaching. And few do more to shape the future.

So conservatives go to business school, or join the Washington D.C. career conveyor belt, becoming yet another cog in the vast machine that is grinding the blood from our people. For liberals it is the exact opposite. Liberal artists and educators pass their love for these noble pursuits on to their children and their students.

Pick up any textbook in any grade school in this country and you will find it loaded with liberal assumptions, myths, and lies. Conservative parents complain about this, but what do they expect? The teachers and administrators are all liberals for one very important reason: Liberals value education as a way of life. And they are right to do so.

As with art and culture, education is something that is made. The stunning failure of conservatives to see the value in making and contributing to art and education is perhaps the primary cause of our current politically debased condition.

My advice to conservatives: Make something. Fiction, verse, art, film. Make something beautiful that justifies its own existence, and, if you love liberty, that love will automatically become a part of that justification, whether obvious or not.

And whether obvious or not, that love will seep through the words or images, and may just stain some other heart.

It is the only way back.

From Obama to Trump



By Ross Douthat
Saturday, February 27, 2016

The spectacle of the Republican Party’s Trumpian meltdown has inspired a mix of glee and fear among liberals — glee over their rivals’ self-immolation, and fear that what arises from the destruction will be worse.

What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.

Such a recognition wouldn’t require letting the Republican Party off the hook. The Trump uprising is first and foremost a Republican and conservative problem: There would be no Trumpism if George W. Bush’s presidency hadn’t cratered, no Trumpism if the party hadn’t alternated between stoking and ignoring working-class grievances, no Trump as front-runner if the party leadership and his rivals had committed fully to stopping him before now.

But Trumpism is also a creature of the late Obama era, irrupting after eight years when a charismatic liberal president has dominated the cultural landscape and set the agenda for national debates. President Obama didn’t give us Trump in any kind of Machiavellian or deliberate fashion. But it isn’t an accident that this is the way the Obama era ends — with a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.

First, the reality TV element in Trump’s campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008. Presidential politics has long had an escalating celebrity component, a cultish side that’s grown ever-more-conspicuous with time. But the first Obama campaign raised the bar. The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric, the Great Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and Will.i.am music video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance — it was presidential politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie’s Oscar campaign.

And it worked. But because it worked, now we have the nearly-inevitable next step: presidential politics as a season of “Survivor” or, well, “The Apprentice,” with the same celebrity factor as Obama’s ’08 run, but with his campaign’s high-middlebrow pretensions stripped away. If Obama proved that you can run a presidential campaign as an aspirational cult of personality, in which a Sarah Silverman endorsement counts for as much as a governor or congressman’s support, Trump is proving that you don’t need Silverman to shout “the Aristocrats!” and have people eat it up.

He’s also proving, in his bullying, overpromising style, that voters are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial presidency — which is also a trend that Obama’s choices have accelerated. Having once campaigned against his predecessor’s power grabs, the current president has expanded executive authority along almost every dimension: launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress.

In the process, he’s cut the legs from under principled liberal critiques of executive power, and weakened the American left’s role as a bulwark against Caesarism. Which makes it altogether fitting — if deeply unfortunate — that his reward is the rise of a right-wing Caesarist whose authoritarian style and outrageous promises makes George W. Bush look like Cato the Younger.

And that Caesarist, crucially, is rallying a constituency that once swung between the parties, but that the Obama White House has spent the last eight years slowly writing off. Trump’s strongest supporters aren’t archconservatives; they’re white working-class voters, especially in the Rust Belt and coal country, who traditionally leaned Democratic and still favor a strong welfare state.

These voters had been drifting away from the Democratic Party since the 1970s, but Obama has made moves that effectively slam the door on them: His energy policies, his immigration gambits, his gun control push, his shift to offense on same-sex marriage and abortion. It was possible to be a culturally conservative skeptic of mass immigration in the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. Not so anymore.
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Of course this process has been a two-way street, as bigotry inclined some of these voters against Obama from the start, or encouraged them to think the worst of him eventually. And political coalitions shift all the time: There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Obama White House’s decision that a more ethnically diverse and thoroughgoingly liberal coalition held more promise than continued efforts to keep Reagan Democrats in the fold. (Though Democrats in Congress and statehouses might be forgiven for doubting the decision.)

But liberalism still needs to reckon with the consequences. As in Europe, when the left gives up on nationalism and lets part of its old working class base float away, the result is a hard-pressed constituency unmoored from either party, and nursing well-grounded feelings of betrayal.

Hence Marine Le Pen and the nationalist parties of Europe. And hence, now, Donald Trump.

He is the Republican Party’s monster, yes. But what he represents is also part of the Obama legacy — a nemesis for liberal follies as well as conservative corruptions, and a threat to both traditions for many years to come.

An Open Letter to Super Tuesday Voters



By David French
Monday, February 29, 2016

John Adams was right. “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.” On Tuesday, you have an opportunity to demonstrate the character of the American people. In our nation’s most religious region — in the party where most of the Christian voters are concentrated — it is now up to you to demonstrate that your commitment to character and integrity and truth itself is more important to you than your rage and frustration. And that means rejecting Donald Trump.

The only thing that you can trust about Trump is his willingness to say and do whatever he needs to gain and hold power. Do you think that he’s strong on illegal immigration — that you can trust him to build a wall, to preserve our nation’s borders, and to protect American workers? This is his principal issue, but he’s a hypocrite. He’s hired foreign workers rather than Americans, he’s hired illegal aliens at his construction projects, and he’s in favor of touch-back amnesty — in which vast numbers of illegal aliens will be granted lawful status if they just leave and come back.

If you are a Christian voter, you cannot possibly believe that Trump will protect life. He actually said during a Republican debate that Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things.” Yet Planned Parenthood engages in the mass murder of unborn children, killing hundreds of thousands of babies each and every year. Trump has pledged to keep sending them the millions of taxpayer dollars that help keep that vile organization alive.

Moreover, Trump would subvert the honor of the American military. He has said repeatedly that he would use the awesome power of the American armed forces to kill terrorists’ families. The American warrior is trained to protect innocent women and children from the world’s most evil men. Seal Team Six is not a mafia hit squad, primed to assassinate eight-year-olds and their mothers at schools and playgrounds.

He knows absolutely nothing about military strategy. He openly admires strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and he even complimented Saddam Hussein as a man who “killed terrorists.” Hussein was a terrorist. He funded a deadly suicide-bombing campaign against Israel, sheltered the world’s most wanted jihadists, supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and tried to kill President George H. W. Bush. Indeed, Hussein’s polices and program of “Islamization” laid the groundwork for ISIS.

Ominously, Trump has gathered behind him a swarm of white supremacists and assorted online racists — people who are known for flooding the comment boards and Twitter feeds of dissenting writers with the most vile forms of racial bigotry and hatred, attacking even children as “mud people” or “monkeys.” Yet Trump has played a double game — sometimes denouncing white supremacists, sometimes equivocating, and sometimes even retweeting white supremacists and fascist propaganda.

Trump is not only unrepentant about his many affairs, he’s bragged that “beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names.”

America is facing its Romans 1 moment. Claiming to be wise, we are becoming fools. Millions of Americans admire Trump not because he is good but merely because he is “strong” or he’ll “kick ass” (to quote one Trump supporter I talked to last week). But here are some words the Apostle Paul used to describe the citizens of a godless age: “insolent,” “haughty,” “boastful,” “faithless,” “heartless,” and “ruthless.” These words read like a Trump personality profile. Moreover, the great sins of that age included not just indulging in those vices but also “giving approval to those who practice them.”

There was a time when I was more amused than appalled by Trump. There was a time when I believed that his disregard for political correctness could have some positive side effects. Those days are long past. The crucible of the campaign has revealed him to be petty, malicious, and vindictive. He isn’t as bad as his critics feared — he’s worse. But the most disturbing thing isn’t that Trump exists — cruel and ambitious charlatans will always be among us — it’s that millions of Americans are embracing him because of his cruelty, because of his malice.

If Trump prevails, we will be left with both great American political parties celebrating and exalting people who personify the worst of values. The Democrats, of course, offer no moral refuge. Hillary Clinton’s personal corruption is matched only by her boundless ambition, and she is completely committed to not just preserving the atrocity of abortion on demand but subsidizing it with taxpayer dollars.

I began by quoting one Founding Father. Let me end by quoting another. Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Trump is running not for president of a constitutional republic but to be the strongman of a failing state. A virtuous people would stop him in his tracks. But are we a virtuous people? Tuesday will help tell the answer.

Nothing Will Redeem the Ruined Reputations of Trump’s Republican Collaborators



By George Will
Sunday, February 28, 2016

Donald Trump’s distinctive rhetorical style — think of a drunk with a bullhorn reading aloud James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake under water — poses an almost insuperable challenge to people whose painful duty is to try to extract clarity from his effusions. For example, last week, during a long stream of semi-consciousness in Fort Worth, this man who as president would nominate members of the federal judiciary vowed to “open up” libel laws to make it easier to sue — to intimidate and punish — people who write “negative” things. Well.

Trump, the thin-skinned tough guy, resembles a campus crybaby who has wandered out of his “safe space.” It is not news that he has neither respect for nor knowledge of the Constitution, and he probably is unaware that he would have to “open up” many Supreme Court First Amendment rulings in order to achieve his aim. His obvious aim is to chill free speech, for the comfort of the political class, of which he is now a gaudy ornament.

But at least Trump has, at last, found one thing to admire from the era of America’s Founding. Unfortunately, but predictably, it is one of the worst things done then — the Sedition Act of 1798. The act made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish, or cause it to be done, or assist in it, any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame, or bring either into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against either the hatred of the people.” Now, 215 years after the Sedition Act expired in 1801, Trump vows to use litigiousness to improve the accuracy and decorousness of public discourse.

The night before his promise to make America great again through censorship, Trump, during the Houston debate, said that his sister, a federal judge, signed “a certain bill” and that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito also “signed that bill.” So, the leading Republican candidate, the breadth of whose ignorance is the eighth wonder of the world, actually thinks that judges “sign bills.” Trump is a presidential aspirant who would flunk an eighth-grade civics exam.

More than anything Marco Rubio said about Trump in Houston, it was Rubio’s laughter at Trump that galled the perhaps bogus billionaire. Like all bullies, Trump is a coward, and like all those who feel the need to boast about being strong and tough, he is neither.

Unfortunately, Rubio recognized reality and found his voice 254 days after Trump’s scabrous announcement of his candidacy to rescue America from Mexican rapists. And 222 days after Trump disparaged John McCain’s war service (“I like people that weren’t captured”). And 95 days after Trump said that maybe a protester at his rally “should have been roughed up.” And 95 days after Trump re-tweeted that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks. (Eighty-two percent are killed by whites.) And 94 days after Trump said he supports torture “even if it doesn’t work.” And 79 days after Trump said he might have approved the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. And 72 days after Trump proved that he does not know the nuclear triad from the Nutcracker ballet. And 70 days after Trump, having been praised by Vladimir Putin, reciprocated by praising the Russian murderer and dictator. And so on.

Rubio’s epiphany — announcing the obvious with a sense of triumphant discovery — about Trump being a “con man” and a “clown act” is better eight months late than never. If, however, it is too late to rescue Rubio from a Trump nomination, this will be condign punishment for him and the rest of the Republican party’s coalition of the timid.

“Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, / In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.” So begins James Russell Lowell’s 1845 poem protesting America’s war with Mexico. The Republicans’ moment is here.

We are about to learn much about Republican officeholders who are now deciding whether to come to terms with Trump, and with the shattering of their party as a vessel of conservatism. Trump’s collaborators, like the remarkably plastic Chris Christie (“I don’t think [Trump’s] temperament is suited for [the presidency]”), will find that nothing will redeem the reputations they will ruin by placing their opportunism in the service of his demagogic cynicism and anti-constitutional authoritarianism.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Hate Crime Is Almost Nonexistent



By Josh Gelernter
Saturday, February 27, 2016

As you’ve doubtless heard, this year’s Oscars haven’t got any black actor or actress nominees. It’s a big deal in Hollywood, and I’m sure it’ll be a big deal tomorrow evening at the big show, but I don’t find it too scandalous — no one could reasonably expect a 20-nominee sample to be representative either of actors at large or the country. And frankly, I didn’t give it too much thought one way or the other until a statistics-minded friend pointed something out: Over the last 20 years, there have been a total of 80 Oscar winners in the four categories of best leading and best supporting actor and actress. Of those 80 winners, 10 were black — which means that over the last 20 years, black actors have won 12.5 percent of the Oscars for acting. According to the last census, 12.6 percent of the American population is black. So — unintentionally, I assume — the motion-picture academy has actually produced a surprisingly America-representative winners’ circle.

(Though 80 is still too small a sample to read much into.)

This got me thinking: With all the sturm und drang about bigotry in the United States, how bad are things when you look at them from the objective, statistical point of view? Obviously, there’s no way to measure abstract hate, but I figure you can get a decent look at active American hate by using the FBI’s hate-crime statistics; they’re quite broad, and include violent, nonviolent, and property crimes.

According to the data from the most recent available year — 2014 — the most targeted group per capita is Jews. As several National Review writers have already pointed out, a Muslim — notwithstanding the president’s Islamophobia speech — is less than half as likely to suffer a hate crime as a Jew is. And this is not an especially anti-Semitic country. In fact, it’s just the opposite: According to the Anti-Defamation League, the United States is very nearly the least anti-Semitic country in the world. According to the FBI, 1 of every 8,372 Jews suffers a hate crime. Speaking as a Jew myself, I have to say those are admirably good odds.

And though being Jewish is the statistical worst-case scenario, hate-wise, every demographic group endured some bigotry in 2014, including Protestants, Catholics, and atheists; whites, blacks, and Hispanics; gays, straights, and the mentally and physically disabled. All told, 1 in every 47,421 Americans suffered criminal discrimination. Which means that, in 2014, you were more than three times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy League school than you were to suffer a hate crime.

More concretely: According to The Economist’s actuarial tables, you were more than 40 times more likely to accidentally kill yourself than you were to suffer a hate crime. Even if — heaven forfend — you’re a Jew, you’re still five times more likely to inadvertently off yourself than you are to experience illegal hate.

And you don’t worry about accidentally killing yourself, do you? Certainly, you shouldn’t: Worrying about accidental death is the road to crippling OCD and agoraphobia. You don’t tell your kid to think about the fact that when he eats dinner, there’s a 1-in-100,000 chance he’ll choke to death, or that when he goes to bed, there’s a 1-in-150,000 chance he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck. If you did, you’d end up raising a basket case.

Along the same lines, we might all consider making less of a big deal about hypothetical racism, like a year of all-white Oscar nominees. Or a year of all-Christian ones. As a Jew, I realize that there are anti-Semites in the United States — but I realize too that they’re a tiny minority. If I assumed that everyone who wished me Merry Christmas was a Nazi, I’d go crazy. As crazy as if every time I heard someone laugh I assumed he was laughing at me.

I know that, personally, I always prefer not to think people hate me.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but imagine if we presumed everyone to be innocent of racism until proven guilty. What a wonderful, microaggression-free world that would be.