C.A.A. on vacation

The C.A.A. is going on vacation. Regular posts will resume on Monday, December 09.

Opponents of ‘Unfettered Capitalism’ Are Fighting a Phantom

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, November 22, 2019

Enemies of unfettered capitalism, unite!

For as long as I can remember, people on the left have complained about “unfettered capitalism.” Moderate liberals do it, and of course flat-out Marxists do it.

In his new book, A Bit of Everything: Power, People, Profits and Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz contends that the only way we’ll be able to confront climate change is through a new social contract.

“Capitalism will be part of the story, but it can’t be the kind of capitalism that we’ve had for the last 40 years,” Stiglitz writes. “It can’t be the kind of selfish, unfettered capitalism where firms just maximize shareholder value regardless of the social consequences.”

Senator Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that “we have to talk about democratic socialism as an alternative to unfettered capitalism.”

History texts insist that the New Deal followed in the wake of the unfettered capitalism of the 1920s. The Progressive Era, we’re told, was in part a response to the unfettered capitalism of the late 19th century and the “Gilded Age.” In 1987, the Milwaukee Journal reported that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev planned “to visit Trump Tower, that glittering monument to unfettered capitalism.” In 2016, The Nation, a journal that has been at war with “unfettered capitalism” for nearly a century, ran an essay explaining that America got President Donald Trump because of “America’s brand of largely unfettered capitalism.”

Recently, the concern with capitalism’s unfetteredness has become bipartisan. Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have taken up the cause in a series of speeches and policy proposals. Conservative intellectuals such as Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony have taken dead aim at unrestrained capitalism. J. D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News have suggested that economic policy is run by . . . libertarians.

My response to this dismaying development is: What on earth are these people talking about?

If the Progressive Era was a response to unfettered capitalism, did it accomplish nothing? Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts, regulated the food supply, created the National Park System, and fettered the railroads. The Labor Department was established (by President Taft, a conservative) in 1913. The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act, enacted in 1916, provided benefits to workers injured on the job. The Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act was passed in 1927. And then there’s the New Deal, another famous attempt to slap fetters on the rough beast of capitalism. It created Social Security, formally banned child labor, and established the minimum wage, among countless other restraints on capitalism run amok.

I could go on and on. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the Great Society.

A fetter is a chain, manacle, or restraint. If you think there are no restraints on the market or on economic activity, why on earth do we have the Department of Labor, HHS, HUD, FDA, EPA, OSHA, or IRS?

The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world (i.e., the share of taxes paid by the rich versus everyone else). If you take into account all social-welfare spending, we spend more on entitlements than plenty of rich countries.

Now, if you think we don’t spend, regulate, or tax enough, fine. Make your case. If you think we should spend and tax differently, I’m right there with you. But the notion that the United States is a libertarian fantasyland is itself a fantasy. I mean, by the Hammer of Thor, every summer we get stories of kids being fined for running lemonade stands without a license.

My frustration stems from the fact that we “fetter” the market constantly. And whenever the fetters yield an undesirable result — such as, say, the financial crisis of 2008 — the blame always lands on eternally unfettered capitalism.

Just to be clear: I’m not an advocate for unfettered capitalism. But I am sick and tired of hearing people advocate unfettered government to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist. And I’m particularly dyspeptic about the fact that conservatives are now buying into the same fantasy.

Myles Garrett and the Excuses That Fall Flat

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, November 22, 2019

You probably saw that ugly fight toward the end of last week’s Cleveland Browns–Pittsburgh Steelers game. Shortly after Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph threw a pass, Browns defensive end Myles Garrett tackled him and brought him to the ground, and the two started scuffling. Garrett grabbed Rudolph by the facemask, managed to yank off the quarterback’s helmet, and a moment later, consumed with rage, swung the helmet at Rudolph’s head. Thankfully it was only a glancing blow with the bottom of the helmet; it is not unthinkable that a football helmet hitting a man’s head at full force could crack his skull.

The NFL suspended Garrett indefinitely, adding that the suspension would be, at minimum, for the rest of the year. The league also gave multiple-game suspensions to several other players who participated in the fight.

Thursday, while appealing to the league to lessen his suspension, Garrett claimed Rudolph called him a racial slur just prior to the brawl.

Garrett encountered quite a bit of skepticism over this claim. He never mentioned it at all in any interview over the past week, and his post-game statement declared that he had made “a terrible mistake,” and selfishly “lost his cool,” and apologized to Rudolph.

Rudolph’s lawyer called the Garrett’s racism allegation a lie. Garrett’s teammate, quarterback Baker Mayfield “seemed pretty stunned” when he was told of the new allegation, and told a reporter that it “wasn’t something he’d [previously] heard, including from anyone on the team.” But several of Garrett’s teammates also said that they didn’t think he would lie about something so consequential.

The league announced Thursday afternoon that it could find no evidence to confirm Garrett’s accusation. Late Thursday, Garrett turned to Twitter, suggesting that someone had unfairly leaked the accusation, which he’d intended to remain private: “I was assured that the hearing was space that afforded the opportunity to speak openly and honestly about the incident that led to my suspension,’’ Garrett wrote. “This was not meant for public dissemination, nor was it a convenient attempt to justify my actions or restore my image in the eyes of those I disappointed.”

You’re already hearing the comparisons of Garrett to actor Jussie Smollett. While it’s theoretically possible that Rudolph used the slur, and no other player heard it, and Garrett chose not to mention it to anyone else for an entire week before choosing to tell the league in his appeal . . . many will choose to believe a simpler explanation: Garrett lost his temper, did something terrible, and when facing the end of his 2019 season and a possible penalty carrying over into 2020, made a false accusation to make his actions seem justifiable, in hopes that the league would reduce his punishment.

Many will see this as the latest example of a person caught in an embarrassing situation and playing the race card to avoid accountability. Others may be reminded of a recent phenomenon of those caught in scandals quickly and cynically embracing some progressive cause to use as a shield. When confronted with numerous allegations of sexually predatory behavior, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein offered a disingenuous apology and recast himself as a newly energized activist for gun control: “I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party.”

Upon being confronted with allegations of attempting to seduce a 14-year-old actor in 1986, Kevin Spacey declared, “I choose now to live as a gay man.”

Shortly after the revelations of racist photos on his medical-school-yearbook page, Virginia governor Ralph Northam declared that, “It’s obvious from what happened this week that we still have a lot of work to do. . . . This has been a real, I think, an awakening for Virginia. It has really raised the level of awareness for racial issues in Virginia. And so we’re ready to learn from our mistakes.” Notice that odd pronoun “we”; apparently all Virginians bear some responsibility for the photos that got Northam in trouble.

But it’s worth noting that the gambit didn’t really work for Weinstein and Spacey; it didn’t lead anyone to to cut these famous, powerful, wealthy men any slack. Jussie Smollett did not return to Empire, and while Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx chose to drop all charges in a decision that generated a second firestorm of controversy, the city ended up suing the actor, aiming to recover $130,106 spend on the police investigation. He is currently counter-suing the city for “malicious prosecution.”

Northam hung on, and his party enjoyed wins in this year’s state legislative elections, but that more likely reflects the scandals involving the two Democratic officials in line to replace him and the fact that he’s term-limited. No Democrat is clamoring for him to continue his political career after his term ends. His damage control merely delayed his departure to obscurity.

And now Garrett’s suspension is intact. Pittsburgh sports columnist Tim Benz urged the league to add another game to the suspension “for advancing this unsupported charge against another union player, previously in good standing with the league.” He fears “what Garrett has done has stained Rudolph for life. There will always be some who associate Rudolph with being a racist. And that’s completely unfair, based on the lack of evidence we have.”

There will always be some who associate Rudolph with being a racist, but there will also likely be a larger group of people who associate Garrett with being a liar, or at the very least, see him as a man who offered an implausible counter-accusation after everyone saw him do something inexcusable. Garrett probably did more damage to his own reputation than Rudolph’s.

Why do something like this? Desperate people do desperate and stupid things. They’re facing dire consequences and frantically searching for an excuse to explain their conduct or at least mitigate the coming punishment. Yes, it would be better if people took full responsibility for their actions, with no ifs, ands, or buts. But that’s a tough standard to live up to when a person’s whole world is falling down around them. People often do stupid, self-destructive things when they’re cornered. The recent record dispels the notion that they usually get away with those things, and we can all be thankful for that.

Sanders vs. Warren

By Luke Thompson

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick recently jumped into an already crowded race for the Democratic nomination. Politically, they hope to appeal to center-left voters rightly worried about Joe Biden’s flagging early-state poll numbers. Ideologically, they have cast their candidacies as efforts to save a fading breed of centrist Democrat. Neither Bloomberg nor Patrick is likely to win. Instead, for the first time in recent memory, two leftist candidates stand a good chance of seizing the party’s nomination: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

To many observers, Sanders and Warren closely resemble each other. They represent solidly blue New England states, advocate the nationalization of large parts of the economy, and believe that the ills afflicting society result from a political process hijacked by the wealthy few. Yet Sanders and Warren are hardly interchangeable. Despite shared policy goals, they differ in their coalitions, diagnoses of what ails America, theories of change, and, ultimately, prospects in the general election next November.

The Democratic primary electorate is sharply divided by race, age, and gender. The left wing of the party — younger, whiter, and more female — is overrepresented in the Iowa caucuses. Indeed, while national polling suggests that Sanders has a more racially diverse coalition, and that he does well among younger men, Warren is stronger among women of all ages and college-educated white liberals.

Iowa is a do-or-die test for Warren and Sanders; should either win the Hawkeye State, he or she will be the odds-on favorite to win in New Hampshire, where both enjoy a home-field advantage as New England senators. Organizationally, the Iowa caucuses are a monster. Caucuses take place in the dead of Iowa’s notoriously severe winter and feature runoff voting at each of the state’s 1,681 precincts. A viable campaign needs representatives ready to speak at each caucus and trained to court supporters of candidates who fail to hit the 15 percent viability threshold in the first round. The state, and therefore the nomination, may hinge on whose caucus leaders are better trained.

Warren has lately given Sanders a chance to highlight their ideological differences. On Medicare for All, Sanders has bluntly and repeatedly promised to raise taxes to pay for universal coverage. Taxes will go up, he contends, but costs will go down and Americans will no longer have to worry about losing coverage or wading through a morass of paperwork. Warren, by contrast, has promised to give free health care to every American without raising taxes on the middle class.

Setting aside whether any Medicare for All plan is realistic, Warren’s no-tax promise suggests to many on the left that she lacks the resolve to force through a politically difficult reform and would cave to conventional wisdom. Indeed, leftists have reasons to doubt her commitment. She refuses the label “socialist,” was a Republican earlier in life, and has generally tacked closer to the Democratic mainstream than Sanders has. Some of her struggles with candor raise questions about her character. Warren has never satisfactorily accounted for her multi-decade deployment of imagined Native American heritage for personal and professional gain, for instance. Making an obviously false but politically expedient promise — free health care with no middle-class tax increases — reinforces the impression that Warren is not trustworthy.

Warren’s no-tax plan also undermines her credibility with the press, which has heretofore dutifully relayed her self-presentation as a sophisticated thinker, policy wonk, and technocrat with a plethora of Ivy League–certified schemes. Many of her lower-profile plans will not hold up to scrutiny. If the press comes to see her as a phony, she might have to deal with a running series of bad stories about the unviability of her white papers. Sanders, whose messaging has always been high-level and simple (even simplistic), has not offered much in terms of specifics, but as a result he has a minimal paper trail to defend.

Yet these differences go beyond taxes and messaging. They go to a fundamental tension on the American left. Warren comes from the progressive tradition of the Left, whereas Sanders is a legatee of its populist tendencies. Being a progressive first, Warren prefers the technocratic approach. For her, simmering left-wing populism can be used best to attack entrenched power, by electing a president who will fill the bureaucracy with like-minded experts and pass campaign-finance reform to limit corporate influence. In other words, personnel is policy.

Sanders believes that American government is fundamentally broken. In a divided constitutional system, elected officials and regulators alike will be corrupted by special interests and will default to the status quo unless compelled to act otherwise. Control of the bureaucracy is not enough. Rather, for his “political revolution” to succeed, Sanders needs a movement that will last beyond Election Day and exert political pressure on the elected officials and regulators. Absent a confluence of movement, party, and administration, special interests will prevent the passage of sweeping structural reforms.

Put simply: Warren wants to regulate, Sanders wants to legislate.

Whether that distinction will matter electorally come November is unknowable today. However, we have some evidence on which to hazard a guess. First, the national demographic polls mentioned above, irrelevant in a staggered presidential-primary process, come to bear once the parties have picked their nominees. There are very few prospective Elizabeth Warren voters who did not pull the lever for Hillary Clinton in 2016. A replay of the last presidential election might be enough for Warren to win in 2020, especially given heightened Democratic turnout in elections since 2016. However, Democrats suffered from low minority and youth turnout in the Upper Midwest in 2016, and it cost them the presidency.

Sanders does well with precisely the voters who stayed home when Hillary Clinton topped the Democratic ticket. Younger and more diverse voters were essential to his victory in the Michigan primary, for instance, and while primaries are not the same as general elections, they serve as decent indicators if Democrats need elevated turnout to win. Sanders would get more non-voters to the polls than Warren would, and there are few voters who would vote for Warren but not Sanders.

Sanders has overperformed the Democrats’ partisan vote-share in Vermont, whereas Warren has generally undershot other Democrats in Massachusetts in polling and at the ballot box. Admittedly, Warren represents a state many, many times the size of Vermont. Nonetheless, her underwhelming approval ratings at home suggest that she lacks crossover appeal to independent voters. This is especially true in western Massachusetts, which, like many parts of Vermont, resembles the rural and exurban parts of the Upper Midwest that turned out heavily for Trump and doomed Clinton’s candidacy.

Neither Sanders nor Warren would enter a general election without baggage, and both would have to face a messaging onslaught from President Trump. Incumbent presidents tend to get reelected. Combine that with good economic performance, peace abroad, and wage growth, and Trump, despite his unpopularity, stands a good chance of winning a second term, provided there are no major changes in the next twelve months. However, 2016 was won on the narrowest of margins. When we look at only those states that were decisive, Sanders appears as a bigger threat to Trump than Warren does.

Among the Flat-Earthers

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Frisco, Texas — “Am I just dropping a garbage bag full of dead dogs into outer space?”

Okay, so that question is going to need some context . . .

And the context, here at the Embassy Suites Hotel Convention Center and Spa on the dreary Cracker Barrel–pocked exurban northern fringe of Dallas, is the Flat Earth International Convention, which — and this is the first thing you need to know and will be enthusiastically reminded of every seven minutes — has absolutely no relationship of any kind whatsoever with the Flat Earth Society, those heretical, weak-tea, milk-and-water, pansified, considerably less respectable flat-Earth enthusiasts, who, unlike our rambunctious gang here at the Embassy Suites, have basically nothing at all to say about the finer points of Hebrew cosmology, laser-beam experiments disproving the curvature of the Earth, nighttime infrared photography, autographed Illuminati cards, sundry NASA hoaxes (“‘NASA’ stands for ‘Not Always Telling Truths,’” insists one conference-goer as his fellow conferees scratch their heads in pained acronymic perplexation), or any of the other Very High Weirdness on chiropteran display for those willing to fork over the $250 entry fee (cash only at the door, please, because that’s not shady-seeming in any way, and here’s your hand-scribbled receipt from the harried wife of the guy who runs this show — “Sorry, we’re Canadian!” she explains) and enjoy the rich terroir of Embassy Suites coffee and take unselfconscious selfies with a parade of honest-to-God flat-Earth celebrities after a couple of intensely awkward audience Q-’n’-A sessions (heavy on the Q, if you know what I mean and I know that you do!) during which a very wide range of semi-debilitating social-anxiety pathologies is on excruciating display.

From the stage, Mark Sargent smiles down over it all, beatific and imperturbable. He is a hero in this world, a Very Big Deal, indeed.

And he is trying to wrap his head around those hypothetical canine corpses that may or may not be floating about in space. (Also: “Space Is Fake!” as one seminar title insists.) The guy in the audience wants to know how deep he could dig a dog-burying hole in the purely hypothetical case in which he might find himself obliged to bury a garbage bag full of dead dogs, which he very much has on the brain, for some reason. He is concerned about the possibility of falling through into whatever is on the other side, floating there in space like Major Tom with a Hefty Steel Sak full of dead dog. Sargent, who unquestionably has the mien of a man who knows that he is participating in a scam, takes a second. “There is no consensus about how thick the Earth is,” he responds. In fact, there is no general agreement here among the flat-Earthers about what the Earth actually looks like, which of several competing maps and models of it might be accurate or even whether drawing up such a thing is epistemically possible. Being a bunch of guys who have organized a two-day international conference about the shape of the Earth, they strangely do not seem to give a furry crack of a rat’s patootie what the Earth is shaped like. It’s kind of weird.

“All we can do is agree that it’s not a globe,” Sargent says.

That’s one of the funny things about these flat-Earth guys: They not only don’t know a goddamned thing, they don’t claim to know or want to know a goddamned thing beyond the one thing that brings them together, i.e. the thing about the Earth’s being shaped like a ball, a claim they sneer at as an obvious fraud and superstition and hoax put forward by “globalists” to snooker vulnerable believers on behalf of Satan, who has a thing for balls, apparently.

And there is no evading Satan’s great swinging balls here. The flatness of the Earth is the big topic on the main stage, but the hot topic on the sidelines is Satanic ritual abuse, the fixation du jour of the Q-Anon conspiracy nuts who believe that Donald Trump is just right on the verge of leading a massive national purge of Satanic pedophiles, who, as everybody knows, secretly run the world. (Also: Jews! Jews! Jews!) As flat-Earth writer Noel Hadley tells me, “Satan runs everything: music, Hollywood, media, Republicans, Democrats, Washington, Israel, Zionism. . . .” They know Satan when they see him. But they don’t know what the Earth looks like — only that it is not round. And that if people only understood that, then they would . . . change their diets, and vaccine companies would go out of business, as one speaker insisted.

“We don’t believe in a flying pancake in space,” says exasperated conference organizer Robbie Davidson, a Canadian conspiracy hobbyist, “and we don’t believe you can fall off the edge of it.” But what does the Earth actually look like? That, apparently, needs “more investigation,” in the inevitable dodge uttered from the stage. Right outside the door, a guy who looks exactly like a Lord of the Rings elf who retired to be an Uber driver in Colorado Springs is nonetheless selling models of the Earth that look an awful lot like a pancake in space — or, really, a dinner plate, since this sad folk art appears to be made of repurposed kitchenware and electric clock motors, with the sun and moon circling the sky on the minute hand in decidedly non-heliocentric fashion. There’s a big version up on the stage, too. But just because the world is a dinner plate sitting on top of a battery-operated quartz clock motor doesn’t mean that you can fall off the edge — the general consensus here is that Antarctica is actually a giant wall of ice surrounding the flat Earth, making exit impossible.

A bearded man in quasi-clerical garb walks by. Another Lord of the Rings elf in a nametag reading “Angel” confers with Elf No. 1. There’s a guy on a crutch with a ballcap emblazoned “Level-Headed” and a T-shirt reading “Flat Outta Hell!” arguing with a bouncer, who thinks Crutch Guy may have faked his credentials. The bouncer wants to see some government-issued identification: Funny how these guys suddenly trust The Man when there’s conference-goer revenue on the line. Someone across the room denounces the United Nations.

Noel Hadley tells me he is interested in Hellenistic mystery religions, and he has written a book on the subject, an extract from which reveals it to be exactly the illiterate effluence you would expect of a self-published flat-Earth tract written by a man whose Amazon page identifies him as “a former career wedding photographer.” (It’s the word career that really gets it done, there, in that particular sentence.) The hilarious part, the wonderful irony, is that for all his sincere interest in mystery cults and his “research” on the subject, he does not quite seem to understand that he has joined a mystery cult, that the joy and fulfillment he derives from the secret knowledge (never mind that it is not knowledge) of his flat-Earth cult is nothing more or less than the makarismos enjoyed by initiates into the ancient mysteries. It is all around him: A young mother says that she wishes the people she loves “could feel what I feel” when she meditates upon the truth of the flatness of the Earth.

Everybody is after that feeling: the flat-Earthers, the Q-Anon dopes who have got themselves so torqued up that the feebs are worried about them as a terrorism threat, the Bernie Sanders partisans whispering darkly about the “rigged” economy and the shadowy billionaires acting behind the scenes, who control the media, the corporations, the government . . . The social exclusion and isolation that comes from joining a mystery cult isn’t a terrible price to pay but one of the main benefits, the mechanism by which the cult imbues its members with a sense of new identity. They speak about flat-Earth belief as something that follows a conversion experience and sadly note the apostasy of one high-profile social-media advocate who recently left their community.

Which is to say: One conspiracy theory is very like another. The people out in the pews are in a cult, but the men on the stage and hawking books and DVDs and such do not have the faces and souls and elocutions of cult leaders — no, they are exactly like the guys who want to sell you a vacation time-share in Belize, “official” President Donald J. Trump memorial gold coins, miracle cures for baldness or fatness or arthritis or diabetes. And they know what their product is. It isn’t geography lessons.

“His name was ‘Adolf,’” says an older man standing in the lobby. “He was the first politician to figure out the lie.” (Spoiler alert: Yes, he meant that Adolf.) In front of him is a small knot of dumpy flushed anxious Tammys with forearm tattoos, pale wan broken men in Australian bush hats, older guys in denim overalls, and younger men with beards and beanie hats, trying to figure out how to get $5 off their Embassy Suites Hotel Convention Center and Spa parking bill, scanning their tickets and punching buttons on a machine with a label offering in big 72-point type: Validation.

The Failure at the End of History

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

The United States is entangled in foreign intrigue to an extent not seen since the Cold War. This might seem like an odd development for a country whose two leading political parties have taken a turn toward isolationism. But the foreign entanglements that currently consume our national discussions are utterly unlike those seen during our global conflict with the Soviet Union. The espionage of the Cold War era has been replaced by a series of scandals or controversies—some political, some commercial—in which American politicians and businesses entities have been exposed engaging in craven behavior involving parties abroad.

Foremost among our front-page political scandals is President Donald Trump’s odd stance toward the government of Ukraine. The case for impeaching the president rests on his allegedly having halted military aid to our Eastern European ally to coerce Kiev into investigating his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden. Biden, for his part, is contending with his own related political scandal. He has found himself under increased scrutiny for his son Hunter’s role on the boards of both a Ukrainian energy company and a Chinese banking firm during the elder Biden’s term as vice president.

Moving away from the strictly political, there is a different and far less critical controversy involving the National Basketball Association and the government of China. That sorry tale began on October 4, when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted out his support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong who had organized in opposition to Chinese authoritarianism. Soon after Morey’s tweet, the NBA’s official Chinese broadcast partner, a company called Tencent, announced it would suspend all business with the Rockets. There followed Chinese boycott campaigns and endorsement retractions aimed at punishing the team. It turns out that China, according to the New York Times, is the NBA’s “second-most important market” after the United States. And the Chinese response to Morey’s tweet could cost the Rockets as much as $25 million in sponsorships and other revenue.

Morey deleted the offending tweet while many in the league offered apologies of one sort or another. This included a tweet from Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, saying that “@dmorey does NOT speak for the @Houston Rockets.” Heaven forbid that a successful American enterprise be associated with the words “fight for freedom.”

A common thread connects our president’s dangling aid before an Eastern European leader in return for political favors, a vice president’s son who gets paid by Ukrainian and Chinese firms, and the NBA’s moral collapse before Beijing. That thread is part of a great unraveling—the loosening and fraying of our national purpose and resolve following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the wake of the Berlin Wall’s destruction, Americans sought to ramp up economic and political engagement with post-Soviet countries and China. Our reasons were both noble and self-interested—we could gain access to new markets and, by doing so, help to make these countries freer. The noble goal of expanding freedom made our self-interest all the more palatable.

But while this engagement has yielded some good, that’s not all it did. We barely noticed that the process meant the United States was growing more intertwined with kleptocracies. And in time, almost without realizing it, we ourselves would fall prey to some of the kleptocratic temptations and moral compromises that characterize such regimes.

We did make some countries better places. But, in the process, our own politics became a little more like theirs.

***

For many observers, the defeat of Communism in the Soviet Union and economic reforms in China spelled the beginning of a final global victory for Western liberalism. The most famous expositor of this idea was Francis Fukuyama, who argued in in his National Interest essay “The End of History?” in 1989 (and later in book form): “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama never said that struggles would cease between nations. Rather, he asserted that in the realm of “consciousness,” Western liberal democracy had proved itself more enduring than its chief ideological competitors in the 20th century, fascism and Communism. We won. They lost.

For the United States, the main questions of foreign policy would no longer center on containing or defeating Communism but would rather be about how best to facilitate the large-scale shift toward liberty that was already under way. The answers revolved around directing economic aid and venture capital to the evolving markets in China and the former Soviet Union. Chinese market reforms and the reborn Russia provided openings for the U.S. to invest, literally, in the future freedom of these countries.

To do business with China or the former Soviet Union was to promote what President Bill Clinton called “market democracy.” One version or another of the libertarian notion that free markets create free people found purchase across the political spectrum. In a 1992 New York Times op-ed headlined “Help Russia. Help Ourselves,” the influential Democratic Representative Dick Gephardt wrote, “The U.S. must promote commercial ties with the Commonwealth of Independent States—an effort that will produce jobs and rising living standards in all nations. That means providing preferential trade status, using our oil industry to develop commonwealth energy resources, exporting computers and telecommunications products and aiding U.S. business investment in Russia and the other republics. Every day of delay endangers democratization and market development as well as costing American jobs and profits that will otherwise end up in Japan or Europe.” He ended his piece thus: “If we summon the idealism that enabled the Marshall Plan to succeed in the 1940’s, it would mean American jobs and greater security in the 1990’s, an outcome that sounds like ‘America first’ to me.”

A similar argument, pertaining to China, was stated plainly in 1999 by Henry S. Rowen of the conservative Hoover Institution: “Without exception, rich countries are democracies (more or less) and stay that way. Some poor countries are also democracies, but most are not. And few of the poor democracies stay democratic over time. Although the progression isn’t always smooth, the historical pattern is clear: As countries get richer, they become more democratic. The Asian nations are no exception.”

It’s been a long sad fall from that hopeful idea to our implicitly accepting Beijing’s authoritarian domination of Hong Kong as the price of doing business with China. But it’s not as if there were no warning signs. In fact, the U.S. began to lose its way almost as soon as it set out to write a new chapter in the history of global freedom. Bill Clinton was America’s first post–Cold War president, and we can trace many of our recent woes back to decisions made during his two terms in office.

***

American government and industry were supposed to make aid and business opportunities in China and the former Soviet Union contingent on further reforms and improvements in the countries that sought our help. That way, international engagement would improve the quality of life for those living in these countries while serving American national-security interests. This meant deeper involvement in the political affairs of slippery regimes. But those regimes proved uncommonly adept at hiding their transgressions—and once money started flowing back to the U.S., American businesses and administrations became uncommonly adept at looking the other way.

Bit by bit, instead of these foreign governments raising their standards, we lowered ours. This started long before Daryl Morey was headline news and before Twitter was even conceivable. When it comes to ignoring Chinese troublemaking, the Clinton administration has much to answer for. A few examples stand out.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, weapons proliferation was a chief national-security concern for the United States. Yet our enthusiastic policy of engagement soon found us making dangerous compromises. In 1992, China signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But two years later, the press began reporting that the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation was at work on a secret and proscribed nuclear reactor in Pakistan, selling Islamabad technology to make bomb-grade uranium, and had been contracted to build uranium plants for Iran. The Clinton administration grumbled and briefly halted $800 million in loans to the American companies Bechtel and Westinghouse, which were working on a reactor for the Chinese corporation. But after assurances from the Chinese government, the U.S. approved the loans and granted visas for engineers from the firm.

Then, in 1995, the Clinton administration struck a $500-million-plus deal with the Chinese Great Wall Industry Corp., a firm owned by the Chinese military, that guaranteed it bidding rights to work on the launch of U.S. satellites. This not only encouraged further Chinese proliferation; it gave China access to the technology that it would soon use to point missiles at Taiwan.

As for human rights in China, American contradictions were also visible from the outset. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring that China ease up on its domestic repression if it wanted to continue enjoying its most-favored-nation trade status in the United States. But within a year, he went ahead and granted the Chinese most-favored-nation status while acknowledging that Beijing hadn’t met the demands he had made.

In 1998, not even a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Clinton administration vowed not to criticize China at a UN human-rights meeting in Geneva. When Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng came to visit the U.S. that same year to speak about human-rights abuses in China, he evinced a keen understanding of American indifference. “I wouldn’t call the American attitude towards China abnormal,” he said. “Once a country achieves democracy and material wealth, it often finds it difficult to understand the problems of other societies. That is why we in China relied on ourselves to build democracy, rather than calling on the West for support.”

Things have remained more or less the same up to the present. Some American companies have struggled to find the right balance between doing business and doing good. The most emblematic example of American industry’s thorny position in regard to Chinese human-rights abuses comes from Google, whose founding motto—“Don’t be evil”—has since been abandoned. The Silicon Valley behemoth dove head-first into the Chinese market and soon came up against the jarring reality of government repression.

Chinese Google users were perpetually hacked and surveilled from inside China. Additionally, China regularly censored its Internet and blocked popular websites such as Facebook. At first, Google played along, censoring its own search results to satisfy Beijing. But in 2010, the company decided it could no longer be a party to these abuses and shut down its search site in China. It didn’t, however, pull its research-and-development teams from working there. In August 2018, news outlets reported that Google was at work on a new censored search engine called Dragonfly to be used in China. But four months later, the company abandoned the project after internal debates about the ethics of once again submitting to Chinese censorship. Like the U.S. more broadly, Google sought to do no evil in its business dealings with China and found it impossible. What it will do next is unknown, but it’s clear from the company’s persistent efforts that it will be itching to get back—somehow—into the lucrative Chinese search-engine market.

Other Silicon Valley companies, for all their professed idealism and messianic moralizing, seem entirely at ease with the reality of Chinese oppression. LinkedIn does big business in China by catering to censors’ whims. Apple doesn’t offer a Taiwan-flag emoji to users in mainland China lest the company upset the Chinese government, which doesn’t recognize Taiwanese independence. To make matters worse, as protesters marched for freedom in Hong Kong, the company decided to pull the Taiwanese flag from user keyboards there as well. During the same period, Paypal announced that it would enter the Chinese marketplace.

China is certainly less authoritarian than it was in 1989, but it is far more oppressive than most Americans care to admit. And Fukuyama was entirely too sanguine when he wrote in his seminal essay that “Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared.” In this century, China has been a consistent and dangerous bully in the South China Seas, a fierce competitor among great nations for power and profit across the globe, and the world’s number-one source of intellectual-property theft. Most important, the Chinese Communist Party has had no problem adapting its modes of oppression and aggression to fit the free market. And we’ve grown accustomed to it. The mixed motive behind our post–Cold War engagement with China—profit and democracy promotion—has become decidedly less mixed.

***

The countries of the former Soviet Union are very different from one another, but corruption is a mainstay of them all. Though Communism collapsed as the official economic and governing system, the unofficial system of graft, along with nontransparency and thuggery, lives on. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote in the American Interest, “in its political and economic consequences…large-scale corruption has the same effects as Communism, which, in the last century, fostered repressive governments and sub-optimal economic performances where Communists gained power.” One result of infusing corrupt countries with vast sums of money is that it enables unprincipled rulers to enjoy the popularity that comes from “economic growth,” leaving aside issues such as accountability and human freedom. Another is that wealth gets funneled to those who game the system. This is quite the opposite of what we’d hoped for in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and it’s made Russia itself a booming kleptocracy.

Signs of the coming trouble, again, were visible in the 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world’s largest private investor in Russia, with the overwhelming majority of that investment going into extracting Russian oil and gas. But the Russian energy industry was in the hands of well-connected, enterprising, and unscrupulous businessmen who worked hand-in-hand with Russian officials to make fortunes and then stashed their earnings outside of the country. It was in the 1990s that the term “oligarch” first came into popular usage.

Vice President Al Gore played a large and important role in defining Russian deviancy down while encouraging American investment in the former Soviet Union. Beginning in 1993, Gore, along with Russia’s then prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, co-chaired the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which handled a good deal of U.S.–Russia trade and energy negotiations. Before becoming prime minister, Chernomyrdin was head of Gazprom, Russia’s mostly state-owned gas company. This put him in the orbit of the oligarchs, as Robert Bartley went on to note in the Wall Street Journal: “twice-yearly photo-ops with Mr. Gore and Mr. Chernomyrdin served to identify the ‘oligarchs’ with the U.S. and with capitalist reform.”

Optics were the least of it. For years, Russian officials failed to institute the kind of market reforms that the Clinton administration was hoping for, and for years, Washington turned its head. Unnamed C.I.A. officials told the New York Times that, in 1995, they gave Gore a dossier on Chernomyrdin and corruption only to have it returned with a “barnyard epithet” written on it. Corroborating accounts say the word was “bullshit,” written in Gore’s hand. In 1997, less than a year before Russia’s massive financial crisis, Gore predicted a “surge of investment” in the Russian market.

And that was all before the emergence of Vladimir Putin. Putin, the revanchist Russian strongman, in his effort to reclaim the countries in Russia’s “near abroad,” has “weaponized kleptocracy,” in the words of the Hudson Institute’s Marius Laurinavičius. As Joe Biden himself put it in 2015, “the Kremlin is working hard to buy off and co-opt European political forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing anti-systemic parties throughout Europe.”

Has Putin aimed his kleptocracy gun at the United States? Yes. And how has the U.S. responded? In certain key instances, very poorly. This is most evident in the tangle of suspicious or downright dirty deals closely associated with figures connected to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and involved in the early days of his administration. This includes, most notably, the case of Paul Manafort.

A seasoned Republican political operative, Manafort is the American poster boy for cashing in on post-Soviet lucre. Prior to joining the Trump campaign, Manafort made millions of dollars advising Victor Yanukovych, who served as Ukraine’s president from 2010 to 2014. Yanukovych, a consummate political thug, attempted to steal an election and likely poisoned one political opponent. He was also staunchly pro-Russia and a devoted ally of Vladimir Putin’s. After Yanukovych was ousted from office, Manafort worked to rehabilitate the kleptocrat’s image both in Eastern Europe and the West. During this period, according to documents found in Kiev, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions paid Manafort some $12.7 million dollars in cash.

In 2017, Manafort was indicted on multiple charges connected to his time working for Yanukovych and his laundering of the vast off-the-books sums he received. In March 2019, he was sentenced to 47 months in prison. He pled guilty to, among other things, two charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

What is perhaps more concerning than Manafort’s overt crime is the effect that his pro-Yanukovych/pro-Russia work has had on American politics. Documents newly released by the FBI show that it was Manafort who pushed the idea that Russia’s 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee email servers was actually a Ukrainian operation. When Trump moved to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine, lest we forget, the president made it clear to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wanted Ukraine to look into this very conspiracy theory. If there was, in fact, a quid pro quo under way, this constituted half of the quid.

Another prominent Trump figure who advanced the theory that Ukraine was responsible for the DNC hack, according to the FBI, was Michael Flynn, who has his own unfortunate monetary connection to Vladimir Putin. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, served briefly as Trump’s first national-security adviser. In 2015, Flynn sat next to Vladimir Putin at a gala dinner in Moscow in honor of Russia’s state-owned RT television network. At the event, Flynn gave a speech for which he was paid $45,000. He resigned as national-security adviser in February 2017 amid reports that he’d misled the FBI about his communication with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. In December of that year, as part of a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements” to the FBI.

Mike Flynn is no Russian operative. And I think far too much has been made of his case. But a generation ago, someone in his position would never have taken a cent to appear alongside the Russian strongman in Moscow. It would have been, and still should be, an assault on his own dignity. But influential Americans have become so routinized in such dealings that they hardly trouble our consciences at all.

Similarly, someone in Joe Biden’s position, in an earlier age, would have known that his son’s getting $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm was, at least, unseemly. The same goes for Hunter Biden’s time on the board of BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., whose largest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China.

None of this is to say that, on balance, the American urge, after the Cold War, to nurture freedom and good governance abroad was wrong. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a better alternative. We can’t know what China or former Soviet states would look like today had we taken a more reticent approach to their economic and political development. The persistence of Chinese aggression and censorship and post-Soviet corruption indicates, however, that no magical hands-free transformation was ever in the offing.

As with all policies, the American push for market democracy had unintended consequences—consequences that aim right at the heart of our sense of the United States as a freedom-loving nation of laws. This is not to say that the U.S. is “just like everybody else” now. Paul Manafort is in jail for his crimes, and Joe Biden has to reckon with his son’s cashing in. But we’ve picked up a few bad habits from those we’d hoped to help, and those habits have taken a toll, not least psychologically, on the nation.

It is often said that democracy and good governance can’t be exported just anywhere, that they’re too fragile and require special conditions to survive. But there’s a corollary to this: Corruption and the abuse of power are not easily contained. They’ll find purchase where they can. The result is this strange epilogue to the “end of history.” There’s still no worthy ideological rival to Western liberalism, but we’ve managed to make the victory feel far less glorious than it once did.

The Patriotism of the Poor Isn’t So Mysterious

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Francesco Duina is professor of sociology at Bates College and author of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. Over in the Guardian, he grapples with what strikes him as a surprising and troubling phenomenon:

The World Values Survey indicate that 100% of Americans who belong to the lowest income group are either “very” or “quite” proud of their country. This isn’t the case for any other major advanced country in the world. These positive feelings are also resilient: they intensified, in fact, during the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

As long as they remain deeply patriotic, America’s poor won’t rise up. Indeed, they’ll continue to fill the ranks of the military, strive and sacrifice to help America assert itself in the world, and even feed into and support the slogans and successes of the country’s political leaders.

I realize that these days, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is now the subject of jokes about unregulated methane emissions, but way back in 2002 he wrote a book, Now Let Me Tell You What I Really Think that included a clarifying anecdote from Matthews’ days as an armed officer of the U.S. Capitol Police in the 1960s.

But the core of the force was made up of “lifers” from the military, enlisted guys who’d done long hitches with the Army, Navy, or Marines. I’d spend hours hanging out with these guys. My favorite was Sergeant Leroy Taylor. He was one of those citizen-philosophers who instinctively grasped this country’s real politics, the kind that people live and are ready to die for. He and the other country boys would talk about how they would do anything to defend the Capitol. More than some of the big-shot elected officials, my colleagues in blue revered the place and what it meant to the republic. It wasn’t about them, but about something much bigger.

I will never forget what Leroy once told me and the wisdom it contained: “The little man loves his country, Chris, because it’s all he’s got.”

Being poor in America is terrible in a lot of ways. But even the poorest American is ensured a vote upon turning 18, their day in court if charged with a crime with a jury of their peers, a right to a public defender, their right to speak their mind and criticize anyone in government without the state prosecuting him, their right to assemble and protest, the right to own a firearm if they have no mental impairment or criminal record, no search or seizure of their property without a warrant, rights against self-incrimination, the right to believe whatever religion they want or none at all, and the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. There are wealthy moguls in China who don’t have half those rights.

I’d argue the more interesting question is not why do the poor assess living the United States so positively, but why the wealthy assess living the United States so negatively? (And why is there often an implicit assumption that the wealthy see their country clearly and accurately, while the poor do not?)

Perhaps the remarkable opportunities of the wealthy give them a skewed view of life at home and abroad.

Yes, a wealthy person is more likely to have traveled to more foreign countries, and have more firsthand experience with life in other countries. But what do they see in their encounters with other countries? The life of a wealthy person in New York is not all that different from the life of a wealthy person in London or Paris or Dubai or Tokyo or Shanghai. It’s not surprising that almost everyone at the Davos conference gets along well. They’ve all been to the best schools, they all enjoyed enormous opportunities in their careers, they all dress in similar tailored suits, live well, eat well, enjoy the finer things in life . . . It is unsurprising that a CEO from Silicon Valley meets a CEO from Switzerland and, after chatting over a tray of canapes, concludes they’re not so different after all.

If you have been lucky enough to stay or even just step inside more than one luxury hotel in more than one world capital, you’ll realize they all look more or less the same. The lobby of the Four Seasons doesn’t look all that different from one in the Mandarin Oriental, which doesn’t look all that different from the one in Ritz-Carlton, and most of us would be stumped if we had to pick out which one was which, and in which city. There’s a worldwide homogeny to the signifiers of the luxury lifestyle. While there’s a lot of overwrought denunciation of “globalists” out there these days, it’s safe to conclude that most of the wealthy elite in any given nation have more in common with other countries’ wealthy elites than with their own countrymen.

If you step into lower-class or middle-class person’s house in “flyover country” in the United States, or Morocco, or Israel, or France, or Brazil, you will much more likely to immediately spot distinctions and differences. Even something as simple as tea with grandma is going to be immediately distinctive from country to country — the Japanese tea set is going to look different from the English tea set, and different from the Turkish tea set, and if you see a samovar, there’s a good chance you’re in Russia. If there is Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera art on the walls, there’s a really good chance the inhabitants are Mexican or have Mexican heritage. You’re more likely to spot symbols of religious faith, flags, sports team paraphernalia — all kinds of displays that declare, ‘this is where we come from, this is who we are, this is why we’re proud to be who we are.’ It is not surprising that poor and middle-class citizens would find “globalism” as an odd and not-that-appealing prospect, and express patriotism (and perhaps nationalism) in ways that wealthier, more cosmopolitan citizens find naive and parochial.

A Dull Debate Night Helps the Front-Runners

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

The United States has never before witnessed a presidential primary debate during an ongoing impeachment process, and while Bernie Sanders insisted that all Democrats can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” tonight’s debate — perhaps overshadowed by the impeachment hearings — was an oddly flat showcase for the candidates, where almost every candidate seemed content to tread water and play it safe.

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow seemed really eager to get the candidates talking about impeachment, which was not in the interest of the candidates. One way or another, impeachment will be over and done with long before Election Day. The candidates wanted to talk about what they could do after January 20, 2021.

Of the ten candidates on that stage tonight, at least seven should be feeling, and should have demonstrated, a greater sense of urgency. This is the November debate. There will be a December and January debate, and then Iowans hold their caucuses February 1. Right now, Pete Buttigieg is leading in Iowa, Elizabeth Warren is leading in New Hampshire, and Joe Biden is leading in Nevada, in South Carolina, and nationally. Time is on the side of those leading candidates. Everybody else should have been making an argument against one of them, but attacks on any of them were few and far between. Judging from the anodyne tone and relatively few direct confrontations between candidates, everyone must be pretty happy with where they are right now. Congratulations, Biden, Warren and Buttigieg. You walked onto that stage in good shape, and you’re walking off in good shape.

One hour and forty-five minutes in, Cory Booker finally got a good shot in at Biden, observing that Biden still hesitated to legalize marijuana, and joked, “I thought you were high when you said it.” But Biden just said he thought it should be decriminalized, and simply ignored — or forgot? — what he had said a few days earlier.

Biden’s biggest foe in the debate might have been himself. Biden said he was endorsed by “the only African-American woman ever elected to the Senate,” thinking of Carol Moseley Braun. Kamala Harris laughed out loud and pointed out he was forgetting someone.

The night brought yet another moment that belongs next to “Chuck, stand up!” in the Biden Gaffe Hall of Fame: “No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger other than in self-defense, and that rarely ever occurs. And so we have to just change the culture, period, and keep punching at it and punching at it and punching at it.” Will any of these gaffes hurt Biden? None of the other ones has before.

Maybe we’ve seen so few candidates breaking out from the pack in these debates because it’s hard to shine in a 90-second increment once every 20 minutes or so. Perhaps it’s almost impossible to gain traction when there are ten candidates on a stage. But a lot of these candidates use their infrequent questions as opportunities to do bite-sized versions of their stump speeches, or roll out their old arguments again. Every month, Bernie Sanders reminds us he voted against the Iraq War. Every month, Harris shoehorns her “Kamala Harris, for the people” slogan into some answer. Every month, Booker invokes dignity and offers some story from the streets of Newark. Maybe it seems new to casual voters who are just tuning in now. If you’ve watched all of these debates, these candidates are repetitive, predictable, and boring.

On policy, the candidates remain in fantasyland, convinced that on Inauguration Day, they inherit a magic wand. Tom Steyer thinks he’s going to enact term limits for Congress. Joe Biden claims he’s going to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state. Bernie Sanders says he will get Iran and Saudi Arabia into the same room “and say we are sick and tired of us spending huge amounts of money and human resources because of your conflict.” (He has turned into Larry David.) We’re left yearning for the pragmatic realism of building a big beautiful wall on our southern border and making Mexico pay for it.

16

Ten candidates qualified for the debate stage, but clearly the MSNBC anchors wanted to talk to only seven. Andrew Yang, Tom Steyer, and Tulsi Gabbard got significantly less time to talk. Yang is currently seventh nationally; he didn’t get a question for the first half-hour.

Gabbard got one question in the first hour. That question did generate impressive sparks with Harris, as the California senator finally got payback for the time Gabbard dissected Harris’ record as a prosecutor months ago. Harris called Gabbard a “full-time critic” of the Obama administration on Fox News, which is an exaggeration, but Gabbard does stand out in the field for objecting to Obama’s management of the VA, intervention in Libya, and stance regarding Bashir al-Assad. Judging from the reaction in the debate hall and Twitter, a lot of Democrats now loathe Gabbard, seeing her as a de facto Republican.

Why the U.S. Is Right to Recognize West Bank ‘Settlements’ as Legal

By David Harsanyi

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s mercurial foreign policy, his support for Israel has been resolute in ways that no other president can match.

It was Trump who finally followed the law and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Every president since 1995 — the year the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which funds the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizes the city as the “undivided” capital of Israel, was passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate — had promised to move the embassy. None did.

It is probably Trump’s uniquely defiant disposition toward group-thinking State Department types that made the move possible. It’s difficult to imagine any of the other 2016 presidential hopefuls braving the massive internal opposition such a decision would provoke. But Jerusalem proper was never going to be the Palestinian capital, and it was about time everyone involved dealt with reality.

It was also the Trump administration that finally recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategically vital strip of land from which Syria and her proxies have launched numerous wars, bombings, and terror operations against Israeli civilians over the past 70 years. Many of the same experts who claimed to be utterly disgusted by the idea of the U.S. ceding land in northern Syria were also grousing about how counterproductive it was for the United States to unilaterally affirm that Israel would control the Golan Heights. Well, Israel was never going to hand back this land to the Assad regime, or negotiate with it, and it was about time everyone accepted this reality.

And yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused.

At the very least, U.S. policy treating Jews who returned to their ancient homeland as occupiers should have been voided the day Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. Because the much-talked-about United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 does nothing to undermine the Jewish claim, no matter how often it’s misrepresented by Israel’s antagonists. In it, the U.N. established Israel’s legal right to negotiate a peace with defensible borders with existing states. Resolution 242 doesn’t mention the word “Palestinian” anywhere. Nowhere does the resolution call on Israel to withdraw to the pre–Six-Day War lines. Nowhere does it stipulate that Judea and Samaria should be Judenfrei.

As always, though, any decision that helps Israel is framed by many in the media as an effort to weaken “Palestinian efforts to achieve statehood.” This is myth. Fatah might have deluded its own people and the world for decades, but there’s no conceivable peace deal that includes a truly divided Jerusalem or a Right of Return or any indefensible border with a Palestinian state. No sane nation would consent to the creation of an antagonistic neighbor under those terms, much less allow the remnants of the Palestine Liberation Organization and their on-and-off political partners Hamas and their Iranian benefactors to set up shop. None of Trump’s moves undermine peace. They simply clarify the contours of a realistic deal.

Most coverage also framed Pompeo’s announcement as a Trump-administration assist to the embattled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps it is. If so, it’s good work by Bibi. It’s important to remember that both of Israel’s major parties and a wide majority of its citizens have welcomed the Trump administration’s actions. Ninety-six out of 120 Knesset members were supportive of Pompeo’s announcement. At one time, America’s Jewish community as well would have overwhelmingly supported these moves.

Of course, the Trump administration’s new position doesn’t mean that Israeli tanks will be rolling into the West Bank and annexing Hebron, as hysterical progressives seem to believe. Israel has never eyed appropriation of Arab population centers. It’s done everything it can to allow responsible Arab self-governance. (Hey, when was the last election in the West Bank?) What it does mean, as Pompeo clearly states, is that final-status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will be predicated no longer on a fantasy of “occupation” but rather on the reality of disputed land.

Nancy Pelosi Is Already Attacking the Legitimacy of the 2020 Election

By David Harsanyi

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

‘Nancy Pelosi just stated that ‘it is dangerous to let the voters decide Trump’s fate.’ @FoxNews In other words, she thinks I’m going to win and doesn’t want to take a chance on letting the voters decide. Like Al Green, she wants to change our voting system. Wow, she’s CRAZY!” tweeted Donald Trump Tuesday.

Well, not exactly. Trump’s tweet quotes a Fox News reporter summarizing Pelosi’s position, not the speaker’s statement verbatim. Left-wing Twitterverse, of course, was immediately able to jump all over the president’s clumsy wording and act as if the substance of his contention was wholly untrue. It wasn’t.

In her Dear Colleague letter pushing back against Republican anti-impeachment talking points, Nancy Pelosi wrote this: “The weak response to these hearings has been, ‘Let the election decide.’ That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections.” Is he?

If a Republican had suggested that a presidential election was a “dangerous” notion, he would have triggered around-the-clock panic-stricken coverage on CNN and a series of deep dives in The Atlantic lamenting the conservative turn against our sacred democratic ideals.

What Pelosi has done is even more cynical. She’s arguing that if Democrats fail in their efforts to impeach Trump — and, I assume, remove him from office — then the very legitimacy of the 2020 election will be in question before any votes are cast.

Though most liberals have long declared the 2016 contest contaminated, as far as we know, absolutely nothing — not even the most successful foreign efforts in “interference” or “meddling” — damaged the integrity of the election results. Notwithstanding the belief of over 60 percent of Democrats, precipitated by breathless and often misleading media coverage, not one vote was altered by Putin, nor was a single person’s free will purloined by a Russian Twitter bot or Facebook ad.

And, contra Pelosi’s implication, whatever you make of Trump’s request from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s shady son, not one voter will be restricted from casting a ballot for whomever they please in 2020. In truth, voters will know more about the inner workings of Trump’s presidency than they have about any other administration in memory. Maybe they care, maybe they don’t, but that’s not up to Pelosi.

Rather than safeguarding the integrity of our elections, Democrats have corroded trust in them. Post-2016 calls for increased control over speech on the Internet, for instance, pose a far greater danger to American freedoms than anything our enemies at the Kremlin could cook up. And if the contention is that the only truly legitimate election is one that is free of any attempts to mislead voters, as seems to be the case, then we might as well close up shop. Because the presence of unregulated political rhetoric is a feature of a free and open society. We will never be able to, nor should we aspire to, limit discourse.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, either, that this habit of injecting doubt into the electoral process is nothing new. For the past 20 years (at least), Democrats have shown a destructive inability to accept the fact that a bunch of voters simply disagree with them. If it’s not “dark money” boring into their souls, it’s gerrymandering, special interests, confusing ballots, voter suppression, crafty Ruskies or the Electoral College. Democrats can’t lose on the merits. Someone, somewhere, has fooled the Proles into making bad decisions.

All that said, it is Pelosi’s constitutional prerogative to try to impeach Trump for any reasons she sees fit, even if her goal is only to weaken the political prospects of her opponent. No, it isn’t a “coup,” but it’s certainly not a constitutional imperative, either. It’s a political choice.

In the end, the presidency happens to be one of the things we do decide via elections. That will almost surely be the case when it comes Trump, and Pelosi knows it. And when Trump isn’t removed by the Senate, and if the results don’t go the way Pelosi hopes, she’s preemptively given Democrats a reason to question the legitimacy of yet another election.

Leaked Xinjiang Papers Confirm The Chinese Communist Party Is Full Of Lying Murderers

By Helen Raleigh

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The New York Times’ Asia correspondents Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley dropped a bombshell last Saturday by reporting on the Xinjiang Papers, a 403-page collection of reportedly classified documents including speeches by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other Communist Party officials on plans to carry out the massive incarceration of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang and government directives instructing local officials how to coerce Uyghur students to return home with lies and threats.

The leak of such classified documents out of China is unprecedented. Ramzy said on Twitter that the person who leaked these documents was from the Chinese political establishment and “expressed hope that the disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi Jinping, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.” We should thank this leaker for risking his or her life to expose the true evil of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their own words. The Xinjiang Papers confirm what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang is an ethnic cleansing, and the CCP is ruthless and untrustworthy.

State-Conducted Torture, Rape, and Imprisonment

The United Nation defines ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” Some of the coercive practices used to remove civilian populations include “torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population.” These have happened and are still ongoing in Xinjiang, a supposedly “autonomous territory” in northwest China and home to many ethnic minorities in China.

There are about 14 million Uyghur Muslims living in Xinjiang. Between one to three million of them have been sent to “re-education camps” since 2014, most without any criminal charges. Inside these camps, Uyghurs are reportedly ”forced to pledge loyalty to the CCP and renounce Islam, sing praises for communism and learn Mandarin. Some reported prison-like conditions, with cameras and microphones monitoring their every move and utterance.” An international tribunal also found evidence of forced organ harvesting inside these camps.

Uyghur women probably suffer the worst: rapes, sexual assaults, forced implants of contraceptive devices, and even forced abortions inside the camps. They are not safe outside the camp either. There are reports of either forced marriages to Han Chinese men or co-sleeping arrangements against these women’s will. In these cases Chinese men who are assigned to monitor Uyghur women whose husbands were sent to camps sleep in the same bed as these women.

Besides unspeakable human suffering, Uyghurs are losing their religious sites and cultural heritage. It was reported that more than two dozen mosques and Muslim religious sites have been partly or completely demolished in Xinjiang. Researchers believe hundreds more, smaller mosques and shrines have also been bulldozed, but they lack access to records to prove it.

The magnitude of cultural destruction appears to surpass what happened under Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Uyghurs are concerned that with adults locked away and mosques razed to the ground, their children will grow up without any knowledge of their cultural and religious identify. What Beijing has done and continues to do in Xinjiang is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

The Chinese Communists Want Ethnic Cleansing

The leaked Xinjiang Papers confirm that’s exactly what the CCP wants. In 2014, after a series of Uyghur Muslim militant attacks, including a knife attack that injured more than 100 people, Chinese leader Xi gave a series of private speeches to CCP members. According to the Xinjiang Papers, Xi complained that the tools and methods Xinjiang police used were “too primitive.” He demanded that “the weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering” to wipe out radical Islam in Xinjiang. He was also recorded saying, “We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy.”

Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Chen Quangguo, who has carried out the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang since 2016, is Xi’s attack dog. He carried out Xi’s directive by incarcerating millions of Uyghurs in prison-like camps, forcefully collecting Uyghurs’ DNA, blood samples, and fingerprints, and confiscating passports to prevent freedom of movement. He vowed to “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” including Han officials who refused to carry out his orders.

Even though Xi also paid lip service to religious tolerance in some of his speeches by reminding his overzealous comrades to respect Uyghurs’ right to worship, under Xi, all religious beliefs in China must be “sinicized,” meaning adjusted to serve the CCP. Government-sanctioned Christian churches in China often hang Xi’s portrait next to the cross, equalizing his status to God.

Early this year, the Chinese government published a plan to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism.” These speeches and directives also show why the CCP’s crackdown on Muslim and ethnic minorities isn’t limited to Xinjiang and has little to do with extremism. It’s reported that the kind of repression Uyghurs experience in Xinjiang has now spread to two other ethnic groups in China, Hui Muslim and Dongxiang.

You Can’t Trust Anything They Say

The Xinjiang Papers not only show the CCP’s thinking and planning behind the Muslim crackdown, but also how it plans to lie about it. The most telling is the directive on “how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017.” The reason this is important is because per the directive, “Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country. The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”

The directive instructed local officials and police to meet returning students as soon as possible and if students question where their families are, local officials and police were instructed to say “They’re in training schools set up by the government,” and “They are treated very well, with high standard of living, free room and board.”

If a student asks when he can see his family or when they will be free, the officials are instructed to say that the student’s family members “had been ‘infected’ by the ‘virus’ of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism.” The directive also explains the reason even family members who seem too old to carry out violence could not be spared from the camps, because “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

The directive also gives veiled threats to students, warning them that their behavior will determine how long their families will stay in the camps. Students are also told to be grateful for the CCP’s benevolence and generosity.

Bold-Faced Lies to International Audiences

According to the Xinjiang Papers, Xi also anticipated international backlash and told his comrades, “Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang.” When foreign media started reporting on the massive incarceration in Xinjiang, Beijing first denied it. Later it insisted the camps are not prisons but vocational training schools and Uyghurs chose voluntarily to take government-sponsored free training.

When asked about the destruction of mosques, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson claims “China practices freedom of religion and firmly opposes and combats religious extremist thought… There are more than 20 million Muslims and more than 35,000 mosques in China. Religious believers can freely engage in religious activities according to the law.”

The CCP has a long record of lies and more lies. Xi promised former President Obama that China wouldn’t militarize the South China Sea. Yet In 2017, CSIS, a Washington-based think tank, reported that satellite images showed China had built new military facilities on its man-made islands in the South China Sea, including missile shelters, radars, and various communications facilities.

China promised that the goal of its “One Belt One Road” infrastructure program is to help underdeveloped nations build roads and bridges and stimulate local economies out of the goodness of its heart. Now more and more of those countries that signed on to the program find themselves trapped in mountains of debt and several, including Sri Lanka, had to sign away the control of their major sea ports to China.

China promised the Hong Kong people “One Country, Two Systems” for 50 years under the joint declaration with the United Kingdom. But in 2017, only 20 years after Hong Kong’s handover, a Chinese Foreign Ministry called the joint declaration a “historical document that no longer had any practical significance.” Now central Hong Kong, including several universities, has become a battleground between freedom versus tyranny.

The Xinjiang Papers confirm what we already knew: the CCP lies; it’s cruel and can’t be trusted to uphold international norms; what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang is an ethnic cleansing. The UN says ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity and such acts could also “fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.”

Apparently no Muslim country is willing to call China out so far because they are a total sellout to China’s money and influence. Western democracies, especially the United States, need to do it. It appears the Trump administration, especially Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has stepped up criticism of the CCP for failing to live up to its commitments or abiding by basic morality and international law. Hopefully they will add the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang to their long list of grievances.

The Immoral Attack on Capitalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

This is a time of great forgetting, and one of the things that has been forgotten is why we have a federal government and what it is there to do.

From Senator Marco Rubio and his “common-good capitalism” to Senator Elizabeth Warren and her “accountable capitalism,” politicians right and left who want politicians to have more power over private economic decisions assume a dilemma in which something called “capitalism” must be balanced against or made subordinate to something called the “common good.” This is the great forgetful stupidity of our time.

Capitalism is not a rival to the common good. Capitalism, meaning security in one’s own property and in the right to work and to trade, is the common good that governments exist to secure.

The U.S. government exists to see to the liberty of the American people. That is it. That is its only reason for being. It is an instrument and a convenience, the purpose of which is to ensure that Americans are able to enjoy their liberty and property — liberty and property being overlapping concepts.

What is contemplated by Senator Rubio and Senator Warren — along with a few batty adherents of the primitive nonidea known in Catholic circles as “integralism” and everywhere else more forthrightly as “totalitarianism” — is to invert the purpose of the U.S. government. Protecting Americans against those who would use force to curtail their liberty and take control of their property for their own ends is the duty of government; Rubio, Warren, et al. would have the government become the party that curtails Americans’ liberty and takes control of their property for its own ends. Which is to say, in the name of the “common good,” they would organize an assault on the actual common good the U.S. government was in fact constituted to protect. This account isn’t fringe libertarianism — it’s right there in the founding documents.

Being the nightwatchman is a difficult and generally thankless job, one that tends to receive attention only for its failures. But that is the job Senator Rubio and Senator Warren asked for and campaigned for. But there is a lot more political juice in being the bandit, taking control of other people’s property for your own purposes. And let’s have no more high-minded talk about the national interest from Senator Rubio, whose idea of the national interest is broad enough to encompass shilling for billionaire sugar barons, or from Senator Warren, who has never met a tax increase on rich people she didn’t like except for the one on medical-device manufacturers, who are (surprise!) clustered around Boston.

We’re supposed to give up our property rights so that these two and their ilk can use corporate welfare to fortify their own political interests? Hard pass. And considering how obvious it is that political incentives control this kind of decision-making and control it utterly, the notion that the internal management of any given firm presents us with questions of unconflicted and unitary “national interests” that can be discerned and evaluated by a committee of lawyers in Washington and acted upon honestly is absurd. It is indefensibly stupid.

The sentimental rhetoric of our time obscures facts that used to be obvious. For example: Corporations do not have shareholders — corporations are shareholders, and those shareholders have employees. Shareholders are the people who actually own a company, and everybody from the CEO on down works for them. The “stakeholder” thesis put forward by Rubio and Warren would strip shareholders of control of their own property and use that property in the service of interests of other parties, who are not its rightful owners. Control of property is effectively ownership of that property, which is why you hear so often in Mafia cases about a certain gangster who “owned or controlled” this or that business, exercising effective ownership irrespective of whether his name is on the title. Milton Friedman, who apparently has gone out of fashion among conservatives currently fascinated by the vacuous shiny object called nationalism, called this notion “shareholder primacy,” but it is simply the exercise of property rights in a particular institutional context.

Shareholders are not “capital providers.” Shareholders are owners, and they own their shares the same way you own your house, or a farmer owns his farm. Stripping them of their property rights is robbery, just as it would be if the government took away your house or your car or your savings. (Senator Warren also proposes to seize Americans’ savings.) You can dress it up in whatever half-baked political notions or theoretical window-dressing you like, but it’s the same old might-makes-right politics: “We want to take control of what you have and use it for our own purposes, we have the numbers and the guns to make that happen.”

One of the things you will not hear from Senator Warren is that many CEOs are extremely sympathetic to reforms that would diminish the power of shareholders over their own property. That is because shareholders, especially well-organized ones, can be a giant pain in the ass for underperforming CEOs and for corporate management more generally, and shareholders’ metrics of performance tend to be things that can be quantified rather more robustly than the goo-goo do-goodism demanded by the Left or the “national greatness” horsepucky in vogue among the Right. There is nothing a CEO likes less than a bunch of angry shareholders saying, “Where’s my money?” Rubio and Warren would give them a pretext to partly ignore such uncomfortable questions.

Pope Francis and other moralistic critics of capitalism reliably overlook the fact that the great prosperity currently enjoyed by North Americans and Western Europeans — and, increasingly, by the rest of the world — is a product of the very model of capitalism they so intensely disdain. They spend a great deal of time and energy thinking about how to divvy up the goods without giving a second’s serious thought to how it is we came to have such a vast pile of goods. Like prosperity just happens by magic. Pope Francis can talk about feeding the poor — Monsanto actually does it while spending considerably less time inflicting ignorant homilies on the world. This prosperity came from somewhere. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t the cleverness of Senator Rubio or Senator Warren. It wasn’t the big ideas of Pope Francis, to the modest extent that he has any economic ideas worth identifying as such.

(Increasingly, I take the same view of popes that I do of presidents: They have important work that needs doing, and I could stand to hear a good deal less from them until they have figured out how to run their own organizations; the deficiencies of the U.S. government are much discussed in these pages, but who thinks the Catholic Church is a well-administered organization? Every now and then you need an Abraham Lincoln or a Pope John Paul II, but mostly what’s needed is quiet, competent administration.)

The “stakeholder” ideology would simply redefine away the property rights of millions of Americans and others who could have bought cars and sneakers but chose instead to buy assets with the goal of making a return on those investments — putting money at risk while providing the financial basis for a great deal of the innovation and growth (and jobs and tax payments) associated with what we call, for lack of a better word, capitalism. Creating uncertainty regarding the basic property-rights regime imposes real costs on the economy, and those costs are, almost invariably, borne disproportionately by the poor and by less-skilled workers — i.e., by the very people all this nonsense is supposed to be helping.

“Life, liberty, and property” in a sense constitutes three different ways of saying the same thing. To undermine the intellectual and moral basis of the pattern of life that has given rise to the great prosperity we now enjoy — and “we” in this case very much encompasses the poor — is backward and destructive. To do it in a spirit of political careerism, and the need to put something seemingly new and exciting in front of a mob that has grown jaded and bored by its own prosperity, is morally indefensible.