C.A.A. on Vacation

The C.A.A. is on vacation this week. Regular posts will resume on Saturday or Sunday.

Will Millennials Survive The Left?

By David Marcus

Monday, September 26, 2016

The New York Times ran a frank op-ed on Friday from a fiction writer burned by the progressive penchant for identity politicking. In her piece titled “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” Lionel Shriver describes an illiberal example of political correctness gone awry that left her hurt and confused.

A millennial woman of color had walked out of a speech Shriver was giving, dismayed that a white woman was defending cultural appropriation. Shriver was dismayed this young woman had labeled as racist and intolerable Shriver’s civil attempt to address an important topic. Shriver was even more dismayed that the liberal press and the institution that had earlier approved her remarks subsequently sided with the offended young woman.

Conservatives should be forgiven if a wry smile lifts their lips upon hearing such a story. It describes a phenomenon we have been warning about and arguing against for years. When self-described liberals find themselves caught in the web of contemporary leftist speech policing, it is a kind of vindication.

But Shriver gets something wrong in her article, and it is central to progressives’ inability to confront the intolerance in their midst. The question isn’t whether the Left will survive millennials. The question is whether millennials will survive the Left, at least as heirs to the Western tradition of intellectual investigation.

Don’t Blame Millennials for What We’ve Taught Them

Mocking millennials’ neediness and intolerance has become common. We bemoan them as special snowflakes who demand kudos for even the most banal accomplishments. We decry their lack of intellectual rigor and unwillingness to participate in a free and open marketplace of ideas. We chide their frequent choice to privilege emotion above reason in their approach to justice. Fair criticisms all.

But millennials are not imposing this flawed philosophy on the Left. They are following orders given by people born long before 1980. In a recent article, Robert Tracinski lays out exactly where these cultural practices’ roots lie: “It’s important to remember that the contemporary code of political correctness emerged from an actual, literal totalitarian ideology. Karl Marx argued that all of culture—ideas, religion, art, everything—was just a ‘superstructure’ built to disguise and perpetuate the real foundation of society, which was the economic relationship between labor and capital. Modern neo-Marxists turned this idea into the slogan ‘the personal is the political,’ which was the origin for the concept of political correctness.”

What we are seeing here is the effect of Marxist nostalgia. What Francis Fukuyama missed in his “End of History” was the extent to which the democratic, capitalist West would in victory reinvent its nemesis, communism, free of all its pesky flaws. He didn’t foresee celebrities wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. We’ve lost the very nuanced relationship between Cold War-era American liberals, Karl Marx, and communism. It wasn’t just that the intellectual and academic American liberals of the 1950s and 1960s feared blacklisting, they feared the totalitarian tendencies of Marx-based governments.

Irving Howe had a complicated relationship with communism. In 1965 he wrote the following about totalitarianism in a piece called “On the Nature of Communism and Relations With Communists”

Now, if we take as typical…Hannah Arendt’s ‘Origins of Totalitarianism,’ and Orwell’s ‘1984,’ we see that both books, whatever their faults and ‘exaggerations,’ did us an immense moral and intellectual service by insisting that totalitarianism was not merely an extension of monopoly capitalism, Russian expansionism, Leninist dictatorship, man’s inherent sinfulness, or anything else. To one extent or another, such elements were present in the totalitarian regimes; but what made them so powerful and frightening was their break with old traditions, be they good or bad traditions: precisely, that is, the extent to which they embodied whatever is distinctly new in the totalitarian ethos.

Howe understood, at least eventually, the horrors the Soviet Union was committing. He lived through them. The young woman who walked out of Shriver’s speech did not. Unlike Howe, she believes in the totalitarian promise of the new ideas about privilege, cultural appropriation, censorship, and speech codes. But she didn’t just wake up one day believing these things. She was taught them. In the words of a classic anti-drug ad, “I learned it from watching you.”

Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind

The Western tradition, at least since Descartes, is one of challenge. It demands that you prove your position for others to accept it. The current academic model is suspicious of this basic assertion. We find its skepticism in the work of the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. He explains Parrhesia, the Greek idea that one should speak freely, that one should say what one knows to be true. He rightly explains that what we think is true is not always true. But for too many academics, Foucault’s limited liability statement has become the end of the Western program.

Every time a liberal outlet expounds upon the common sense of a guaranteed annual income or an end to proactive policing, every time they call our government fascistic, they exacerbate the problem. They see all the value of dis-incentivizing work and forgiving crime, but accept none of the downsides. The millennials who want to burn it all down are their children. Just as Donald Trump supporters are the children of a Right that does not hold to its principles.

Shriver is a victim. She was treated shabbily, and she deserves to vent in The New York Times. But she is not the greatest victim here. The greatest victim is that woman who walked out on Shriver’s speech. She has been sold a bill of goods that conservatives have been warning against for years. Her tenured professors will still have jobs while she struggles.

So let our sympathy not lie with Shriver. She’s doing okay. It’s too bad she was embarrassed, but our sympathy should be directed towards the young people who think what they feel is the be-all and end-all. They are facing a rude awakening. The leftists selling them the snake oil will still be cashing checks when these young people are fired from jobs or killed by police who do not take a postmodern approach to institutional power struggles.

I feel bad for Shriver but, frankly, I doubt she did anything before publishing her grievances to address the real problems facing our culture and its capacity to self-govern.

Unmoored from the Facts, Leftist Police Reform Would Raise Crime Rates

By David French

Monday, September 26, 2016

Last week the Washington Post reported, with more than a little incredulity, that police shootings are on a pace to match or possibly exceed last year’s total. In other words, “even as demonstrations and anger have erupted in cities across the country in recent years, pushing this issue firmly into the national consciousness,” the police keep pulling the trigger. Why?

The answer is in the Post’s own data. Last year it conducted a massive study of all fatal police shootings in the United States, and it found that — surprise, surprise — in the overwhelming majority of cases, the “police were under attack or defending someone who was.” There was no wave of racist executions, no evidence of cops systematically out of control. Instead, there was evidence of hundreds of snap decisions, almost all made in moments of maximum stress — including moments when men and women in uniform thought their own lives were in danger.

Indeed, there is no reason for cops in 2016 to respond any differently to perceived threats than they did in 2015. Should they not intervene to protect lives or seek to save their own?

Yet Black Lives Matters stubbornly clings to the notion that police shootings are the result of racism — and that, nonsensically, police shootings should track the proportionate share of the total population, not the proportionate share of the criminal underclass. To quote the New York Times’ Charles Blow, the problem is not so much “rogue officers” but a “rogue society.” And what’s the solution? Some propose thought control.

Here’s Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: “That’s why we must immediately take steps to demand that local police participate in a national regime of mandatory training — including proper supervision and assessment of bias among police officers and, where necessary, discipline and removal of officers from patrol who demonstrate strong and unmanageable indicators of bias.”

But when a black officer is facing a black suspect with a gun, as reportedly happened in Charlotte, all the training in the world won’t guarantee a peaceful resolution, in large part because all the training in the world won’t allow a police officer to peer into the mind of a man who might shoot him in less than one second — the time it takes to raise a gun and fire.

The number of truly unjustified killings nationwide is extraordinarily small. As the Post noted, white officers kill unarmed black men in less than 4 percent of police shootings, and when we examine those incidents, we find that the number of truly contentious shootings drops even lower. In other words, the vast majority of police shootings are unquestionably justified. A much smaller number represent good-faith mistakes. A tiny number represent criminal acts.

Given the millions of police–citizen interactions, the risk of a fatal interaction is extraordinarily small. Comply with police demands — drop a gun, for example, or submit to arrest — and the chances of dying are close to zero. But if we adjust the balance of power between cop and criminal, granting the criminal greater freedom of action, then the costs can be staggering.

This morning, the FBI released data showing that the murder rate jumped almost 11 percent from 2014 to 2015. While the rate is still far from that of the bad old days of the early 1990s, an increase of that size represents more than 1,500 lives, many of them concentrated in cities where the police have been most under fire.

Activists often stupidly talk as if their suggested reforms would be cost-free, as if a city or a county could adjust a key part of a successful crime-fighting effort — police behavior — without affecting crime rates or the overall safety of the general public. This is foolish. Restrict police rules of engagement and you will grant the far more dangerous person, the criminal, greater latitude. If you maintain rules of engagement and yet try to change things like “unconscious bias,” you’ll intimidate officers into mouthing politically correct platitudes without doing anything at all to alter the split-second calculus that occurs when a man rushes at a cop in the dark, or when a threatening suspect won’t put down his gun or knife.

Rarely in modern history has so consequential a movement — Black Lives Matter — rested on a more preposterous series of lies. It is not “open season” on black men. There is not an epidemic of unjustified police shootings. And if activists want police actions against black men to shrink closer to their proportionate share of the population, the solution isn’t to ignore actual crime but to decrease criminality.

None of this means there aren’t corrupt cops or even corrupt departments. None of this means that the rule of law shouldn’t apply to police officers just as it does to the population. But the hard, cold realities of crime do mean that unless we want citizens to bear increasing risks and costs from criminal behavior, then we will have to empower police officers to use their best judgment in times of ultimate distress. And when they do, some small number of men and women will die. That’s sad, but it’s not as sad as the much greater toll imposed when criminals, not cops, rule American streets.

Hillary Is an Embodiment of the Left's Disdain for Democracy

By Yuval Levin & Ramesh Ponnuru

Monday, September 26, 2016

This election cycle has left many Americans worried about the state of our republic. Vast swathes of the citizenry are clearly frustrated, dissatisfied, and increasingly alienated from the political system. The major parties’ primary processes have yielded a nightmare of a general election, featuring two exceedingly unpopular candidates, each of whom exhibits some mind-boggling character problems.

For some observers, the concern runs even deeper. They worry that if one of these candidates is elected, our constitutional system will be endangered and an effectively autocratic presidency will become a real possibility in America.

This kind of concern has been raised almost exclusively with regard to the prospect of a Trump presidency. Many liberals, and even some non-liberals, have suggested that Donald Trump is a threat to democratic, constitutional government in America — what the Founders and Lincoln called “republicanism.”

They have a point. Trump inclines to autocratic rhetoric about how only he can solve the country’s problems. He clearly admires foreign strongmen. He is also erratic and unpredictable and tends to disrespect the arduous process of democratic decision-making and the restraints it involves. He argues that American politics and government in our time are in a state of such utter dysfunction that they should be blown apart. These certainly do not sound like the views of a person with a deep esteem for the constitutionally limited role of the president or for the delicate balance of our system of government.

But the observers who raise these concerns tend to perceive such dangers only with regard to Trump, whom they consider a singular menace. Hillary Clinton, they say, is by contrast a run-of-the-mill liberal politician. As the libertarian writer and humorist P. J. O’Rourke put it this spring in endorsing Clinton, she may be “wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

It’s true that Hillary Clinton is a mainstream contemporary liberal, albeit a disturbingly unethical one. She stands out for decades of brazen and unscrupulous dishonesty wielded to advance her and her husband’s political and financial interests — for curiously lucrative investments explainable only by files that have conveniently gone missing, for vicious character assassination against victims of Bill Clinton’s misogynistic abuses of power, for recklessness with national secrets in the service of protecting personal secrets. These would be alarming traits in a president. But the constitutional order could likely withstand, as it has withstood in the past, presidents with similar traits.

Instead, it is precisely in the way in which Clinton seems normal that she poses a serious danger to American democracy. The mainstream contemporary liberalism she represents so well is itself a threat to constitutional government in America. And it is a more concrete and specific threat than Trump — with his bizarre inclinations, his ignorance and carelessness, and his sheer unpredictability — can pose.

Mainstream liberals now advance a vision of American government that is increasingly contemptuous of our system’s democratic character and that seeks to break through the restraints of the constitutional system in pursuit of their policy ends. They advance this vision in three key ways.

***

First, contemporary liberalism has come to ardently champion executive unilateralism. In some respects, this is nothing new. Modern progressivism has always idolized the presidency. Progressivism, as Teddy Roosevelt approvingly put it more than a century ago, is “impatient of the impotence which springs from over-division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.” It therefore “regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare.”

This enthusiasm has waxed and waned, and it is always stronger when Democrats are in the White House. But in the Obama years, it has reached heights unprecedented since at least the early days of the New Deal. Voicing the same kind of impatience TR did with the slow pace of American government, President Obama has repeatedly asserted his power to act alone. “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need,” he told his cabinet in 2014. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he continued, pledging to use the federal bureaucracy to advance his agenda on his own if he had to.

And he has frequently thought he had to. The starkest exemplar is surely a set of executive actions on immigration, taken in 2012 and 2014, that sought unilaterally to normalize the immigration status of roughly half of the 11 million or so immigrants who reside in the U.S. illegally. Their status has been the subject of a raging national controversy for well over a decade, and Congress had considered and rejected legislative action on the subject several times in this century. But the president decided time was up and he would act alone — even though no previous president had considered unilateral action on this scale constitutionally permissible, and even though Obama himself had on numerous occasions expressed agreement with this consensus.

In justifying these actions, Obama claimed merely to be setting a policy on how the executive branch would exercise its prosecutorial discretion. But he repeatedly undercut this justification by referring to his impatience with Congress and describing his own steps as a substitute for legislation. “To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better or question the wisdom of [my] acting where Congress has failed,” he said, “I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

This retort was, of course, not an answer at all but an admission that the president had exercised a fundamentally legislative power in violation of the basic structure of our constitutional system. A federal appeals court has since suspended his order, deeming it unconstitutional, and an evenly divided Supreme Court has for now sustained that suspension. But the president and his party continue to insist it is an appropriate use of executive power. Indeed, Hillary Clinton thinks it doesn’t go far enough. “If elected president,” she said in a written campaign statement in April, “I will do everything I can to protect the President’s executive actions and go further to bring more people relief and keep families together.”

Immigration has by no means been the only arena in which President Obama has acted alone and beyond the authority of his office. In the implementation of Obamacare, for example, he has repeatedly altered the substance of the statute to bend it to his will — suspending or refashioning mandates, creating exemptions and waivers where none existed in law, and even providing public dollars to insurance companies without a congressional appropriation. In one instance, in 2013, the House of Representatives moved to codify in law a year-long delay in the law’s employer mandate that the president had unilaterally created. But instead of welcoming the move, the president threatened to veto the measure because it was unnecessary in light of his executive action.

“Net neutrality” regulations on Internet-service providers were the subject of another long-running debate. Congress never showed much interest in enacting them, so President Obama directed the Federal Communications Commission to implement them using the legal pretense that a deregulatory law enacted in 1996 gave the agency all the authority it needed. Over the years, congressional support for a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has grown — but not fast enough for the Obama administration, which has had the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pretend that a ban was implicit in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This kind of executive unilateralism obviously did not begin with Obama. And there were certainly times when George W. Bush also asserted the authority to act (specifically in foreign and defense policy) without involving Congress. But these were debatable extensions of presidential power in arenas where the executive was indisputably intended to be most powerful in our system. In the Obama years, we have repeatedly seen such assertions in what are plainly legislative realms — and Hillary Clinton, as the good mainstream liberal she is, would surely seek to press those further.

***

The second way contemporary liberalism threatens our constitutional order is closely connected to the first: Today’s Left is the party of the administrative state, which is often the means by which executive unilateralism operates but is also far more than that. The term “administrative state” refers to the tangle of regulatory agencies that populate the executive branch, including agencies that are at least nominally “independent.” They increasingly govern beyond the control of the other branches and therefore at times genuinely outside the confines of our constitutional system.

These agencies frequently operate by issuing rules and regulations: several thousand of them every year. These rules are supposed to implement federal laws, but both the growing vagueness of major legislation and the growing assertiveness of the regulators have increasingly meant that the agencies basically legislate through their rules. Some of them then also adjudicate disputes arising from their own implementation of these rules, effectively lodging legislative, executive, and judicial power in a single institution.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47. Many Americans subject to the jurisdiction of particularly aggressive regulatory agencies might well agree. But the power of such agencies has been growing by leaps and bounds in the Obama years.

Two especially clear illustrations have been the president’s energy and environmental agenda and his approach to financial regulation. Without congressional authorization, the administration has used the Environmental Protection Agency, the supposedly independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies to pressure energy producers, the auto industry, power utilities, and others to toe the president’s preferred line. In one particularly egregious instance, the EPA moved in 2014 to require the states to regulate electricity production and consumption to meet a set of arbitrary carbon dioxide–emission targets — under threat of restricting their residents’ access to electricity.

Meanwhile, the administration’s implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulatory reforms has empowered both old and new agencies to legislate, regulate, and adjudicate immensely complex and highly significant changes in federal law with very little oversight or accountability. But these are hardly the only arenas in which the administrative state is operating beyond the limits of our constitutional system. The immense freedom enjoyed by administrative agencies is a much more concrete and practical threat to our constitutional democracy than even the prospect of an incompetent demagogue in the White House — and it is actively championed and endorsed by Clinton and her party.

Increasingly, these agencies have absorbed portions of the “power of the purse,” which is supposed to belong exclusively to Congress. Some of them fund themselves through fees. When congressional Republicans sought to use Congress’s funding power to prevent the immigration bureaucracy from enforcing President Obama’s unilateral policy, one obstacle in their path was the fact that the fees that the bureaucracy charges go directly to it rather than to the Treasury, and so it could continue to operate as it wished without a congressional vote to fund it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the Left’s most prized achievement within Dodd-Frank. Simultaneously with its creation, it was given a statutory right to funding from the Federal Reserve rather than through congressional appropriation. In effect, it is an independent agency within an independent agency, well removed from effective congressional oversight.

The Obama administration has also pioneered another way for the government to direct money as it wishes without the involvement of Congress: reach legal settlements that include “voluntary” donations to selected nonprofit groups. Liberal organizations have received millions of dollars from Bank of America thanks to one such settlement.

The contemporary liberal legislative agenda mostly consists of granting these agencies more power and making them less accountable. Much of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank consisted of open-ended delegations of power to the bureaucracy. The administration’s contraceptive and abortive-drug mandate, which has caused so much controversy, began this way. Even the extremely liberal Congress of 2009–10 that passed Obamacare was not willing to say that the Little Sisters of the Poor should have to cover contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees — and members of the thin majority that voted for that law have said they would not have voted for it had it included such a provision. The law did, however, allow the secretary of health and human services to make “preventive health care” services mandatory for employers, and that’s how the administration used its authority (and how a future administration could decide that coverage of surgical abortions is mandatory, too).

The courts cannot, for a number of reasons, be expected to keep the modern state running according to perfectly Madisonian procedures. But they have pushed back on many of the Obama administration’s dubious legal claims. The administration has lost unanimously at the Supreme Court 44 times, setting a record. But the administration has not just sought to make its policies independent of Congress; it has also sought to insulate them from judicial scrutiny.

It has sent “guidance letters” to interfere in the disciplinary policies of schools and universities and, recently, in their policies regarding the use of bathrooms and locker rooms as well. These letters are supposedly not regulations and thus not subject to the notice-and-comment requirements that allow for some modest transparency and accountability in the regulatory process. They are also less subject to judicial review and less transparent in general: They don’t force their recipients to comply, after all; they just strongly suggest that the recipients will be safer if they do. Deferred-prosecution agreements, whose use is on the rise, are another way to regulate off the books: They are a kind of plea bargain in which a company agrees to undertake whatever the government asks in return for a reprieve from legal harassment. The EPA’s power-plant regulations were designed to bypass the courts in a different way: The hope was to make them a fait accompli before they drew an adverse ruling.

***

If Clinton makes less use of such maneuvers, it is likely to be for a troubling reason. The attitude of the judicial branch is itself changing in a way that threatens the capacity of the courts to defend our constitutional system — and once again it is the mainstream contemporary liberalism Hillary Clinton represents that is driving the problem.

This is the third way in which that liberalism is a threat to American constitutional democracy. Liberal judicial philosophy understands the courts, like the executive branch, to be in the business of advancing what is properly understood as a legislative agenda. In essence, liberals want everyone but Congress — at least so long as they do not control it — to advance such an agenda. This preference leaves them with an entirely consequentialist attitude toward the courts, and they are increasingly uninterested even in making a case for such an attitude as a form of constitutional interpretation.

In the 2014–15 Supreme Court session, in which both a health-care-related case (King v. Burwell) and a same-sex-marriage case (Obergefell v. Hodges) were decided in ways that affirmed important liberal policy goals, the liberals on the Court made for a kind of silent majority. In each case, they allowed a Republican appointee who sided with them (Chief Justice Roberts in the first case, Justice Kennedy in the second) to pen a convoluted opinion that sought to draw some link between the outcome and some kind of legal or constitutional principles, and they did not even trouble to write in concurrence or to articulate a liberal interpretative approach that would independently justify the outcome.

Old tropes about judicial “activism” and “restraint” can obscure the root issue of judicial lawlessness. Whether in “actively” overturning acts of Congress or state laws or in showing “restraint” and affirming a statute or regulatory action they approve of, liberal judges now frequently pursue substantive policy outcomes rather than advance some particular understanding of our constitutional system and its limits. And those policy outcomes are almost always precisely the same ones liberals pursue through a hyperactive presidency and an overreaching administrative state.

This aggressive progressivism threatens our democratic-republican form of government because it begins by seeing the restraints on power inherent in our constitutional system as obstacles to be overcome. It (correctly) perceives that they can best be overcome by weakening the Congress and strengthening the executive and by using the courts as an instrument for both of those ends — thereby making the courts both too strong and too weak to properly serve the constitutional system.

Such contempt and disregard for Congress (the most democratic branch) and for the limits on the powers of the other branches is contrary to the design and aims of our Constitution, and it subverts accountable government and thereby leads not only to a weaker democracy but also to public policy that is more poorly thought out and less effective.

***

Liberals generally justify all of these work-arounds that subvert normal democratic politics and constitutional processes by claiming that they are but responses to the alleged dysfunction, extremism, and nihilism of conservatives. But such complaints amount to little more than the kind of impatience with our system — and with the very existence of opposition to their ideas — that progressives have articulated since at least Teddy Roosevelt. Conservatives oppose many liberal policies and do use the mechanisms of our constitutional system to attempt to prevent and reverse them. It’s true that our system greatly empowers such opposition: It is frankly premised on the notion that most policy ideas are bad ideas and that making change slow and difficult is likely to serve the country.

That the Constitution makes the work of progressive ideologues frustrating is not an excuse for ignoring and subverting it. That the constitutional system will not acquiesce in its own debilitation is not a justification for debilitating it. Arguments for doing so amount to unprincipled excuses for lawlessness. They make elected officials less responsible, and they are expressions of an impatience with constitutional democracy, not a defense of it.

This is how mainstream liberalism now subverts and threatens our democracy. It is nothing new, but it has gotten significantly worse in the Obama years. It threatens to get only more so under Hillary Clinton, who makes no secret of wanting to use the powers of the presidency to further distort all three branches of our government to better enable liberal governance.

And it is not as though we are giving up government according to the constitutional template in favor of living under the wise edicts of an enlightened elite. The policies that the liberalism of our era yields are deeply unwise and often unjust, and their unwisdom and injustice are connected to their flouting of constitutional forms. Policies ordered by the courts are likely to be more extreme than the policies that would result from democratic give-and-take: Witness our abortion laws, some of the most permissive in the world. Policies developed by bureaucracies and imposed through subterfuge are likely to deform the institutions to which they are applied, as when universities start policing professors’ speech to compel compliance with the latest missive from Washington. Agencies are less likely to act with restraint when their projects have not been subject to the discipline of winning majority support in the House and the Senate as well as approval from the White House. Today’s version of progressive government — the version to which Clinton is committed — is bound to be experienced by millions of citizens as divisive, alienating, out of control, and even corrupt.

This truth hardly negates Donald Trump’s very significant problems. He, too, is not well suited to filling the role that our constitutional system envisions for the federal government’s chief executive. But it does mean that concern for our constitutional system and our democracy cannot amount to a case for Hillary Clinton. Trump could surely do great harm, though no one really knows what he would try to do or whether he would prove capable of doing much at all. Clinton, meanwhile, is an eager champion of a political vision deeply hostile to American constitutionalism and, unlike Trump, is also likely to be able to bring into power alongside her, or to retain in their positions, hundreds of other committed liberals who share that hostility and have the expertise and experience to do something about it from various politically appointed perches in the executive branch.

***

So what is a constitutionalist to do? In this presidential election, there are no good options. But this year presents us with more than a presidential election. At the heart of the Left’s ambitions, and at the core of many of the troubles bedeviling our constitutional system today, is the weakening of the Congress. That weakening has been driven in part by dereliction on the part of members of Congress from both parties and in part by aggressive hostility from the other branches — and particularly the executive.

Restoring constitutional government will be a long slog. But it is perfectly clear that it requires a strong and assertive Congress, at the very least to resist the ambitions of the other branches but ideally also to restore the prerogatives of the first branch — to rein in the administrative state and the increasingly lawless executive and to begin to bring our constitutional system back toward its proper balance.

However constitutionalists end up voting for president, it is imperative that they elect a Congress so inclined. This year, given the options, they may be able to do no more than that. But they must make sure they do no less.

Make Black Helicopters Great Again

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, September 24, 2016

‘He has been a creature of light at a time when the world has been darkening,” says David Ignatius.

Jesus? Try again. Ignatius is talking about President Obama. About his “sterling assets,” his “idealism,” his “moral clarity,” his “calm intellect,” his “personal and polyphonous” address to the United Nations General Assembly, his “valedictory” speech in defense of the “liberal international order at a time when it’s under severe stress around the world.”

For a stress-induced headache you take an aspirin. What’s happening in the world today requires something much stronger. A farcical ceasefire in Syria has Americans blowing up Assad loyalists and Russians blowing up aid convoys. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs horrify. China is more assertive by the day. Iranian terrorist, cyber, missile, and maritime threats are unimpeded.

“Obama will leave behind the right ideas for restoration of an American-led order,” writes Ignatius, “but sadly, also, the inescapable fact of its decline during his presidency.” I have read this sentence many times in amazement. Ignatius notes the decline of the “American-led order” over the last eight years while absolving the commander-in-chief of any responsibility.

I didn’t listen to Obama’s speech in sadness. I listened in dismay. Dismay at the blithe and aloof manner in which the president described the current moment he helped create, disgust at the sanctimony and elitism of a globalization “course correction” that is really just a doubling down on current policy.

“Polyphonous”? Whatever you say, David. It was also revolting.

“This is the paradox that defines our world today,” Obama told the U.N. “A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before, and yet our societies are filled with uncertainty, and unease, and strife.”

We are indeed richer, fatter, and more peaceful. We have more toys. So why is it that we are also anxious, polarized, dismayed? No answer is offered. The paradox is not resolved. Instead we are admonished to “press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration” rather than “retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.”

Why? “The principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundations for progress in this century.” But this is a non sequitur. One second he’s saying a world constructed under liberal democratic principles has also brought social disintegration and unhappiness, and the next second he says the answer is — more liberal democracy.

Nor is the president’s “better model” of global integration different from the status quo. He says economic policies intended to lessen inequality will reduce tribalism despite pointing out earlier that tribalism exists in the midst of peace and prosperity.

He wants his climate treaty to go into effect despite not submitting it to the Senate for ratification. “We have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.” And “we can only realize the promise of this institution’s founding — to replace the ravages of war with cooperation — if powerful nations accept constraints.” Because

I am convinced that in the long run, giving up some freedom of action — not giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests, but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term — enhances our security.

We’ll be safer if Ban Ki Moon has a greater say over our lives.

I don’t buy it, I never have, and that is the point. None of this is any different from what President Obama has been saying for eight years. And during this time America’s global position has eroded, our friends have been confused, our enemies emboldened, a Caliphate established, and ethnic, racial, and economic tensions resurgent.

Not to worry. One more speech will do the trick.

I’d like to posit that there is no paradox. The material prosperity and security of the West matters insofar as it has given our political, business, and cultural elites a false picture of human needs, motivations, and priorities.

What is driving the forces of “nation and tribe and race and religion” is not economics but pride and shame. The indignity of abasement, the thirst for recognition, the quest for dominance vis-à-vis other groups both within and without the nation. These are parts of “our common humanity” that the ideology of liberalism fails to recognize. That is its weakness.

China builds its forces after a “century of humiliation.” Russia asserts itself after the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the Soviet collapse. Islamic militancy, wrote Bernard Lewis decades ago, is part of a “rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness.” The English, Germans, French, Greeks repudiate the E.U. because they feel insulted by the hegemony of Brussels.

It’s the same at home. Sexual minorities struggle for equal treatment in both the public and private spheres. African-American communities revolt over maltreatment by police forces. And a large number of voters, many of them whites without college degrees, protest affronts to their status, their thoughts, their concerns, their agendas, their hierarchy of values.

These battles aren’t about how much you have. They are about who rules over you. Will D.C. and Brussels make decisions or will Moscow and Beijing? Will you have a say over which treaties your nation enters, which refugees settle in your community, what can and cannot be said, which facts are deemed important and which not?

President Obama’s speech at the U.N. was almost a parody of liberal theory. It presented a homogenous world governed by rationally administered universal principles, a vision of affluence and peace, of moral imagination and compassion and hybrid identity. These are noble ideas. They have motivated men for centuries. Yet so detached has the theory become from the everyday reality of the people that it is ossified, hollow. It’s dogma. And it is careening toward a fall.