The Global Assault on Freedom

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

You may love Joe Rogan, you may hate him, or you may not have strong feelings about him. I suspect that many of people who profess to hate Joe Rogan have either never listened to him or have listened to little more than a snippet. Zaid Jilani observed, “It’s interesting seeing so many conservatives rally around Joe Rogan when he’s probably more liberal than 90 percent of Americans. Agnostic dude who loves drug legalization, Bernie Sanders, thinks the CIA is awful, etc.” He later made the accurate point that the “average episode of Rogan is about [mixed-martial arts] or drugs and these folks think it’s like a Satanic cult ritual.”

 

Perhaps conservatives are rallying around Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their worldview in order to conclude that a figure is worth defending from an angry mob that desires censorship of differing views.

 

It’s very clear that the people who are the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his show, and likely with that, get his videos off of YouTube as well — are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads.

 

If you listen to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into brainwashed followers:

 

There’s a lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do — maybe based on soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. Specifically, about two episodes –a little about some other ones, but specifically about two.

 

One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of MRNA vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to MRNA vaccines. Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that, those episodes in particular, were labeled as being dangerous, had dangerous misinformation in them.

 

The problem I have with the term disinformation, especially today, is that many of the things we thought of as misinformation a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘if you get vaccinated, you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid’ – you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact. If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,” you would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab, you would be banned from many social media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.* All of those theories, that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been accused of ‘dangerous misinformation.’

 

I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down, and talks to people, and has conversations with them.

 

Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them. Whenever I get things wrong, I try to correct them. Because I’m interested in telling the truth.

 

For a guy who’s supposed to be a dangerous megalomaniac who’s indoctrinating people into a hardline deceitful ideology, Rogan seems awfully humble about what he knows and doesn’t know.

 

Deplatform Joe Rogan? We should give him a medal and hold him up as a role model for conducting probing, open-minded, respectful interviews.

 

Want to know something spectacularly ironic? Drs. McCullough and Malone are opponents of the Covid-19 vaccine in large part because of their skepticism and suspicion of the profit motive of big pharmaceutical companies. Voices on the Left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.

 

Rogan is unvaccinated, has had Covid-19 and fully recovered, and he is no fan of the Covid-19 vaccines. But he has had pro-vaccination doctors such as CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his program. Rogan has all kinds of guests on his program and gives them all a respectful hearing. (If you haven’t disagreed with any Rogan guest about anything, you might have multiple personality disorder.)

 

There’s a giant leap from “Joe Rogan is wrong about this, and here’s why” to “Joe Rogan must not be allowed to have a program where he says these things.”

 

Rolling Stone is deeply concerned about misinformation, you see.

 

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced they “expressed their ‘concerns’ to Spotify over Covid-19 misinformation on the platform, joining a growing group of personalities putting pressure on the streaming service amid a dispute about Joe Rogan’s controversial podcast.”

 

I am only slightly tongue-in-cheek when I declare that Prince Harry should be deported and barred from the United States, and perhaps we should grab Sussex Royal merchandise and throw it into Boston Harbor. This country was founded on the idea that the British royal family doesn’t get to tell Americans what they can and can’t say.

 

Many voices on the Left do not believe that good information can overcome bad information, that truth can overcome lies, and that people need to be free to explore, discuss, and debate ideas as they choose to find the truth. They truly believe that your naïve, credulous, and foolish little mind must be protected from dangerous ideas and “disinformation” and “misinformation” that will drive you to do terrible things. This philosophy is not compatible with the First Amendment, a constitutional Republic founded upon democratic principles, or freedom in general. If you see the general population as children incapable of making their own decisions, you inevitably end up with a powerful overclass making all of the important decisions.

 

There are a lot of governments around the world that wholeheartedly embrace that role as the all-knowing, always-wise, paternalistic, controlling authority figure protecting you from dangerous ideas and your own hopelessly bad judgment.

 

The Chinese government set up a massive, all-encompassing social-credit system to “commend sincerity and punish insincerity” — including using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other technologies. The Iranian mullahs and Saudi Arabian Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are protecting those devout Muslim societies from the temptations of sin and blasphemy. The Russian government explicitly cultivates the idea of Vladimir Putin as the national father figure who always knows best. Sure, the American Left is nowhere near as brutal, violent, ruthless, or authoritarian as those governments. But the operating philosophy is the same: We know best. You cannot be allowed to make those decisions. We must find a way to force you to make the selection that we have decided is the right one.

 

Either you trust your fellow citizens to make their own decisions — and live with the consequences, even if they’re bad consequences — or you don’t.

 

*I think Rogan might have been thinking of New York magazine.

 

Censorship from the Right

 

Of course, the social-media mobs aren’t the only censorious forces at work in American life. It is embarrassing that the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee thought that the graphic novel Maus “was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools” “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” Previously, the graphic novel had been part of the eighth-grade English language-arts curriculum. You can read the meeting minutes here.

 

How, exactly, do you tell the story of the Holocaust without any depiction of violence? (Is that why The Diary of Anne Frank is part of so many curriculums? Because in addition to having an author and narrator that kids are more likely to relate to, so much of the violence and brutality of the Holocaust is metaphorically “offscreen,” with Frank’s horrific fate addressed only in a brief section after the diary ends?)

 

Yes, removing a book from a curriculum is not the same as “banning” it, and educators have a responsibility to determine what materials are age appropriate. I suspect the people defending Maus right now would concede it probably wouldn’t be a good choice for kindergarteners. But getting up in arms about the depiction of nudity of an anthropomorphic mouse in a concentration camp is an epic case of missing the forest for the trees. Of course Maus is deeply upsetting. The Holocaust is deeply upsetting! There’s no way to teach about the greatest horror in modern history and to make it emotionally “safe.”

 

This is one of the many advantages of local control of schools. A dumb decision by a local school board gets contained in that community, not statewide or nationwide.

Ukraine, NATO, and Germany

By Andrew Stuttaford

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

I don’t agree with everything that Aris Roussinos, writing in Unherd, has to say in his latest article, not least when it comes to his view that “with every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine.” Cold comfort it may be, but I still think that a “minor incursion” (in President Biden’s unfortunate phrase) is more probable, but what do I know? Roussinos is also careful to say that “no-one can predict with certainty what will happen next,” adding (and it wouldn’t surprise me if the second half of his sentence tells the true story) that “what happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.” Click on the link that Roussinos provides, which is to Michael Kofman’s take on Russia’s next move. It is not reassuring reading.

 

Note this from Kofman:

 

If Putin backs down with nothing, the domestic and international perception will be that he was either bluffing or, even worse, was successfully deterred. Putin will end up with the worst of both worlds, seen as simultaneously aggressive and resistible. Also, while an authoritarian state may care less about domestic audience perceptions, the elites, or the so-called “selectorate,” are another matter. Authoritarian leaders like Putin can find their ability to manage political coalitions diminished if elites perceive them as reckless, incompetent, and increasingly unfit to rule. Putin certainly has options, but this is not a contest in which he can afford to back down cost-free.

 

Both Kofman and Roussinos emphasize the inability of Europe to deter Putin by itself, but it is worth noting, in particular, Roussinos’s focus on the paradox at the heart of Europe’s defense strategy — such as it is:

 

Europe has had since at least 2014 to wean itself off its dependence on Russia, and chose not to, with Germany instead deepening its energy dependency by shuttering its nuclear power plants and constructing the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite American pressure to cancel it.

 

Instead, it is France, energy secure through its network of nuclear power stations, that is playing the greatest EU role in defending Nato’s eastern borders, pushing for a forward presence in Romania and sending warships to the Black Sea. There is a great irony here: the scepticism of Poland and the Baltic states over French proposals for greater European capacity to defend itself from external threats was used by the German security establishment to dampen any enthusiasm for strategic autonomy, with German politicians and analysts making great rhetorical play of the sacred Nato bond. But now that Nato’s integrity is threatened by Russia’s demands that the alliance “pull back” from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 1997, Germany recuses itself from involvement. Through its dependency on Putin’s goodwill, it is ironically Germany that has distanced itself from Nato, a negative form of strategic autonomy from the US, if not from Russia. That great weakness at the heart of Europe, Merkel’s parting shot, now threatens the security of the continent’s eastern fringes.

 

One way or another, Nato’s newer Eastern members will now learn the value of America’s security guarantee compared to that of a strong Europe capable of defending itself.

 

But the idea of a “strong Europe capable of defending itself” was, as the Balts and the Poles realized, a dangerous illusion so long as the vehicle for that defense was, to a greater or lesser extent, to be the EU. Even if it could be structured in a way that avoided the difficulty that some EU members are ‘neutrals,’ there’s also the certainty that, in the event of crisis, the EU’s military decision-making would advance at the pace of the slowest, Germany, say or Italy, not exactly what is needed if it seemed as if tanks were about to roll. And NATO states on the Eastern frontline were also well aware that if the EU were to establish, militarily speaking, ‘strategic autonomy,’ that could easily gut NATO. Moreover, it’s not difficult to see how such an arrangement could easily accelerate American disengagement from a continent seemingly intent on going its own way, a development that would be reviewed as profoundly alarming in Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, and with good reason.

 

If Europe is serious about doing more about its defense, the best answer (apart from, in many countries, boosting defense spending to the NATO target of 2 percent) is to involve a patchwork of coalitions of the willing (including the U.K. and, from outside NATO, countries such as Sweden and Finland: something like this already happens, alongside U.S. forces, in the Baltic region) aimed at dealing with the challenges in a particular geographic region and, if necessary, beyond.

Congress Is Changing — for the Worse

By Peter J. Wallison

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

Republicans and conservatives have been celebrating the likely defeat of the Build Back Better (BBB) bill in the Senate, but that outcome — even if it occurs — may obscure the long-term significance of this episode.

 

Before 2021, few people who follow U.S. politics could have imagined that legislation as radical and transformative as the BBB bill might have passed the House and Senate when both were nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Legislation like that has always come to a vote when one party had a massive majority in both houses of Congress, for the simple reason that both parties reflect the vast diversity of the country, and highly controversial or transformative legislation can be passed only when one party has won a landslide victory that it interprets as a mandate for substantial change. Even in that case, there are always representatives and senators who vote their districts and states rather than their party’s ideology.

 

The classic case is the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, another transformative bill. That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson was pressing for FDR-like change in the federal government’s role in the economy, and the Democrats had a massive majority in Congress. Nevertheless, 40 Democrats in the House and 12 in the Senate voted against the bill, which passed the House 226 to 185 and the Senate 61 to 34, with 10 Republicans voting aye. This dispersion of votes is typical of legislation in the U.S. Congress; it’s a reflection of the fact that representatives and senators come from very different communities, which they attempt in most cases to represent.

 

The usual picture is presented by the 2021 voting on the so-called infrastructure bill, which finally passed Congress after the Progressive caucus had released its hold in November. This bill was typical bipartisan legislation; both parties got what they wanted, and the country’s roads, bridges, and transportation system would be the better for it, with 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican House members voting for this legislation, which originated in the Senate.

 

This was not what happened on the controversial BBB legislation in 2021. Although the bill — involving government expenditures and taxes of almost $5 trillion — was at least as transformative as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, every Democrat in the House voted for it and every Republican voted against it. The bill has not yet come to a vote in the Senate — and it may not in the end — but if and when it does, every Republican will vote against it, and every Democrat, with the possible exception of Manchin (West Virginia) and Sinema (Arizona), will vote for it.

 

The important point here is not that two Democrats opposed this bill, but that if not for their opposition, this radical legislation would have passed through Congress and changed forever the relationship between the government and the people of this country. Transformative legislation like this is very rare in Congress, and the fact that it came so close to enactment in a closely divided House and Senate is a puzzle. Either there was something highly unusual about the circumstances in Congress at the time, or Congress has suddenly become ideologically divided in a way the voters themselves are not.

 

When the House and Senate are closely divided, what usually happens is that highly controversial or transformative legislation is sidetracked or buried because party leaders have learned that some of their members see it as a difficult vote. That’s why only when one party has a massive voting advantage are bills like BBB brought to the floor. The leaders know that some of their members can’t vote for the bill, but they can afford to lose those votes if they have a large enough majority. This did not happen with the BBB. Although the House and Senate were closely divided and many members probably had misgivings about the vote their leaders demanded, the Democrats who represented red states or districts were told to walk the plank, and they complied.

 

Moreover, this is not the only case in this Congress where a leader demanded a vote that his members would have preferred to avoid. In early January, Senator Chuck Schumer (New York) required the Democrats in the Senate to vote on whether they would abandon the filibuster on two legislative matters — bills that would have changed voting rules that had previously been considered the province of the states. Although the effort failed, 51–48, it was highly significant for the future operations of the Senate. Forty-eight Democrats are now on record as opposing the filibuster on legislation — something that will change how Congress operates in the future. Not only will this vote jeopardize the reelection of these senators; it also tells the voters that if they ever again give the Democrats a majority in the Senate, there will be no protection for the rights and views of the minority. It also tempts the Senate GOP to preempt the Democrats by overturning the filibuster themselves. Again, like the vote on the BBB bill by House Democrats — many of whom were elected from red states — the Senate Democrats’ vote on the filibuster was an ideological statement, not one cast with the preferences of their constituents in mind.

 

What could be the reasons for this change in voting behavior? The Constitution has no provision for powerful political parties or ideologies that control the votes of their members in the House and Senate. Although political parties developed in the mid-1800s, they have never up to now had an effective way to control the votes of their members of Congress. The idea that all Democratic senators and all Republican members of the House would vote virtually as one was thought to be impossible because of the diversity of the country.

 

It’s possible, of course, that this is a just passing phase, perhaps a temporary reflection in Congress of the polarization in the country. Another possibility might be a shift in how campaign funds are allocated; contributors may be much more partisan than in the past, willing to threaten or punish those who don’t toe the party line. Both Democrats and Republicans now raise most of their funds from small contributions over the Internet by millions of ideologically motivated voters. A senator or House member who toes an ideological line might now be rewarded with more and easier-to-acquire campaign funds than in the past. The media’s bias toward the Left could also be responsible, causing Democrats to stay with their party because they fear media criticism if they differ. The media have also failed — deliberately and consistently — to inform the public about what is in the BBB bill and its likely effect on the economy and the deficit, while continuing to suggest, mistakenly, that the new voting rules the states are enacting will actually impede voting.

 

Whatever its cause, this phenomenon bears watching by specialists in politics and political science. If it has staying power, it will produce a major change in how our government has functioned for more than 200 years.

Trump’s Continuing Disgrace

By Philip Klein

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

President Trump has already inflicted more than enough damage on the country simply because his fragile ego prevented him from acknowledging that he lost the 2020 election. But the January 6 Capitol riot, which followed months of him whipping supporters into a frenzy with his stolen election claims, did not teach him to be more responsible with his rhetoric. So he spent this past weekend making one reckless statement after another — consequences be damned.

 

During a Saturday rally in Texas, Trump said of prosecutors investigating him and his business practices that, “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

 

His defenders would no doubt argue that Trump specified “demonstrations” and only if something done was “wrong or illegal.” But we know that Trump has a low threshold for “wrong and illegal” when it comes to prosecutors targeting him, and we saw on January 6 what happens when he summons a mob to demonstrate after convincing them of rampant corruption in the country and in the elections.

 

He also vowed that if reelected, he would consider pardoning January 6 rioters. “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

 

So, the overall message he communicated was that if people riot on his behalf, that he would have their back if reelected.

 

Trump topped things off with a statement issued on Sunday night once again falsely claiming that Mike Pence, as vice president, had the ability to change the outcome of the election. The statement ends, “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump isn’t using some of the more coded language of his Republican defenders, many of who deny there was an effort to overturn the election. Instead, Trump is explicitly stating that he believes Pence should have “overturned the election”

 

No matter how much damage he causes to the country, Trump will never learn anything from the consequences of his actions. The only way to start to change things is for Republican voters pick somebody else in 2024 who does not behave like Trump. Until then, he is not going anywhere, and elected Republicans will remain too afraid to criticize him for fear of retribution should he return to power.

There Are No Easy Cures for What Ails Our Body Politic

Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, January 30, 2022

 

It seems like longer, but it was only 2006 when my friend John O’Sullivan published his book The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, a genuinely fascinating survey of the overlapping careers of the three great heroes of the closing years of the Cold War: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. It is a book that retains its interest even today — in many ways, its interest is heightened by the great difference between that era and this one.

 

Nostalgia must always be resisted, but one might be tempted to give up on politics and public affairs altogether when considering how those three roles have been recast. The descent of the papacy from the sainted John Paul II to the confused and incoherent Pope Francis has left the Catholic world, and the broader Christian world that looks to the pope as an example, bereft of moral leadership; Boris Johnson has shown himself to be a buffoon not fit to carry Mrs. Thatcher’s handbag; and if you are looking for good evidence against the theory of evolution, the drop-off from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden (preemptively underlined by Donald Trump) offers tantalizing possibilities.

 

Hyperions to satyrs, and all that.

 

The president is not the United States — he is not even the majority of the U.S. government — the prime minister is not the United Kingdom, and the pope is not the church or the whole of Christendom. But there is still something in us that wants to vest the legitimacy and authority of key institutions in one man. Republicans already are talking publicly about the 2024 presidential contest (Will it be Ron DeSantis? Will Trump be in the mix?) and Democrats are engaged in mostly private speculation about whether Biden can or should run again.

 

There is no drama without the dramatis personae, but there are other and more important questions to be considered.

 

It is likely that what will mostly powerfully shape the U.S. government 100 years from now — if there is a U.S. government 100 years from now — is the vague and unwieldy matter of the internal institutional culture of Congress: not how one representative or senator behaves but the behavior of Congress as a whole. If Congress continues its slide into self-imposed subordination to the executive, then the presidency will continue to grow more imperial, more invasive, more self-aggrandizing, and, as an almost inevitable result, more autocratic as the decades pass — irrespective of which party controls the office most often. A country with an autocratic, strong-man government will have autocratic, strong-man politics, because the campaigning aspect of politics is only instrumental, fitted to whatever facts it finds, its shape and strategies almost always determined by immediate social realities rather than by any long-term philosophical or ideological program. As Barry Goldwater put it, politicians “hunt where the ducks are.”

 

That raises a second and related question, that of the character of the political parties. Like Congress, these, too, are slowly sinking into irrelevance. This is partly by design, the work of well-intentioned “reformers” who broke up the power of the parties in an effort to “democratize” them without understanding that this would effectively destroy them as functioning institutions. The parties also are diminished by the partisan media (both flavors) that make war on them (the “establishment”), both because they are power competitors and because doing so makes for a compelling storyline: We the People vs. the wicked elites is the theme on MSNBC as much as it is on Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Without parties and other mediating institutions, naked demagoguery almost inevitably becomes the dominant mode of politics.

 

Are there other institutions that might provide these mediating functions? The churches, which ought to be at the center of our community life, have shown themselves to be extraordinarily bad at politics, and when they have engaged actively with public affairs they have more often debased themselves in the pursuit of power than they have elevated the public discourse, profaning the church rather than sanctifying the political world. The universities fail in almost exactly the same way: Scholars in the public sphere more often abandon or pervert their own intellectual standards than they bring light and rigor to the muddle of politics, and the promises of social-media celebrity and punditry careers have seduced many academics into acting as apologists and marketing men for the worst kind of demagoguery.

 

The business community, to which conservatives used instinctively to look, is no more able than these — where corporate leaders aren’t engaged in ordinary petty advantage-seeking, they are easily captured by (or bullied into) woke-ism, and their social analysis appears to be stuck at the superficial level of an inspirational Nike commercial. Privately, many of our business leaders exhibit a great fluency in the issues in front of us — if anything, the conversations in Silicon Valley are more rich and realistic than the ones in Washington — but they are unable to convert this understanding into public action, even self-interested public action.

 

Around the time John O’Sullivan was writing The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, George F. Will shared a dismal observation about our failed project in Iraq:

 

An old baseball joke is pertinent. A manager says, “Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.

 

How many people away from enduring success is the United States in 2022? The answer is not one, or a dozen, but thousands. The leaders and the critical workers in the field are still among us — they have not been raptured away to Paradise — but our troubled and dysfunctional institutions do not seem to know how to use them. And that is the great problem that we must solve. It is not a problem with a one-sentence or one-paragraph solution, and not a problem that can be solved by passing one bill or a dozen of them.

 

It would be very fine if we found ourselves blessed again with leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But we should keep in mind that this will not be sufficient to turn things around for our ailing republic. And the fact that we are so eager to greet a savior on a white horse speaks to precisely what is most dysfunctional in our politics. The work that we need to do is not the work of one man, or one presidential administration, or even one generation. Most of that work will be performed in obscurity, and it will be generally thankless. But it is work that must be taken on.

The New White Flight

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, January 20, 2022

 

The white upper middle class is deranging American politics. We should have seen it coming.

 

In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund. They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was a lawyer at the conglomerate 3M but no corporate cutthroat. He biked to work and was in the outreach-and-philanthropy department. The Berglunds were “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”

 

Freedom is a moving and sometimes scabrous portrait of the liberal white upper middle class in the George W. Bush years, when this genteelly progressive vision was failing them, not just politically but personally. It is a portrait of a class whose members prize their own savvy — their way of doing good for others while doing well for themselves. Their gift to the world is their cleverness and broadmindedness, and they seek greater freedom to exercise these gifts upon the world.

 

But Freedom portrays something darker. The Berglunds are increasingly conscious that they are completely losing their connection to others. Their son goes to live with downwardly mobile and — to the Berglunds’ eyes — louche Republicans. The Berglunds remain somewhat ignorant and dumbfounded in the face of political criticism from black Americans. Their class is Coming Apart from the rest of the country. And their aspirations have a dark side. Franzen writes as a judgment of one character a line that is prophetic of the Berglunds: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

 

And it all comes to pass. Walter Berglund turns apocalyptic about the environment. “We are a cancer on the planet!” he screams on social media. He goes to Washington and earns a massive salary at a nonprofit. His renewed and now superzealous commitment to the cause leads him to collude with a wealthy Texan to evict poor families from a Virginia mountaintop in order to preserve a habitat for birds that aren’t even endangered.

 

Franzen’s work correctly anticipated that the internal psychodrama and aspirations of this class — his own — were warping American life. He anticipated the turn toward doomsday moodiness and punitive moralism. But he could not foresee how the election of Barack Obama, and the resistance he met, has brought upper-middle-class whites to radicalize on issues of race rather than of the environment.

 

College graduates started voting more for Democrats in the 1980s. High-education voters are now a crucially important part of the Democratic coalition. According to a survey of the available data, Democrats have been constantly expanding their advantage among those with high education. In 2016 the trend was still gathering strength. Thomas Piketty writes:

 

Above high-school level, the relation between education and Democratic vote is strongly increasing: in particular, 70% of voters with Master degrees (11% of the electorate) supported the Democratic candidate, and 76% of voters with PhD degrees (2% of the electorate), vs 51% of voters with Bachelor degrees (19% of the electorate) and 44% of high-school graduates (59% of the electorate).

 

Also in 2016, Democrats for the first time won a majority of high-income voters. Subsequent surveys have seen the reported political affiliation of other professional classes shift leftward, notably that of doctors.

 

White upper-middle-class liberals are bidding for national political dominance of the Democratic Party as a way of crowning their dominance in other culture-shaping institutions. Their gift to the world is not their cleverness over the ignorant, but their righteous fury at the wicked. And it fuels a toxic politics that is zealously attached to protecting their economic privilege.

 

These are the “dream hoarders” described by the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves. The top 20 percent of American earners — the ones beneath the 1 percent, but doing better than four-fifths of their countrymen — voraciously organize to protect their economic privileges. They protected from Obama’s proposed revision the tax privileges for “529” college savings accounts. Through the new congressional majority of 2018, they demanded a full restoration of state- and local-tax deductions. Their congressional representatives demand student-loan forgiveness. All of these are forms of welfare for the upper middle class.

 

* * *

 

At the same time, it is white upper-middle-class liberals in particular who have undergone the “Great Awokening” and adopted beliefs on racial politics that fall to the left of those held by racial minorities. Sociologist Zach Goldberg at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology has demonstrated that white Democrats are significantly more likely than non-white Democrats to prioritize the use of “inclusive” language to avoid offending people with different backgrounds. White Democrats are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to say that citizens should not be allowed to vote on how many immigrants are allowed to move to the U.S. and from which countries.

 

Where upper-middle-class whites have the upper hand, they are the ones defunding the police — even as many police forces are now majority-minority in their composition. It was upper-middle-class white politics that led Seattle to cut the wages of its first black female police commissioner, and funding for the department as a whole. The subsequent exodus of qualified cops and the deadly disorder of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone riots were the result.

 

One could charge the white upper middle class of America as committed to a form of ruthless meritocracy in some areas of life and to ruthless egalitarianism in all the others. Debt relief and minimum-lot-size regulations for the households in their neighborhoods. Lawlessness in the name of advancing equality for your neighborhoods. The speech codes that this class invents and adopts in the name of easing the burdens on “the marginalized” are wielded as weapons in an open form of class warfare on the lower-middle-class and working-class kids who do not have the breeding to master that form of politesse.

 

The bastion of political sanity among Democrats is with their non-white voters and their working-class voters. It was Manhattan, by far the richest borough of New York City, that elected a district attorney in Alvin Bragg who was committed to a soft-on-crime agenda, including emptying the jails of nearly any perp who had not committed a serious assault or murder. The far more diverse outer boroughs provided the electoral heft for Eric Adams’s tough-on-crime campaign.

 

Similarly, in the national party, it was black voters and black members of Congress who helped steer the Democrats away from cortado socialists and toward Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries of 2020.

 

Now, it would be easy to leave the matter here and end on the summary judgment. Every politically revolutionary class has been populated by the “guilty bourgeoisie,” who are in­capable of handling privilege with grace or success with generosity. Overwhelmingly employed by larger firms, or in the professions, the members of this class lack the confidence or delusion of being self-made. In a strange way, our radicals are institutionalists.

 

And what is the quality of these institutions? Cutthroat and luxurious. Matt Feeney, who authored the new book Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, documents how the college-admissions process has colonized the life of middle-class families, even those containing only young children. Ivy League schools have expanded their admissions numbers much more slowly than the population of possible applicants has grown. According to Jeffrey Selingo, “Ivy League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years, lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high school graduates.”

 

With the Common Application swelling the ranks of students who apply, the admittance rate drops to well below 10 percent at the top schools. This lack of growth at the top — and the proliferation of non-top-tier schools, whose names investor Peter Thiel has said read like a “dunce cap” on a résumé — has led to ferocious competition even at the pre­school level among parents. In this environment, second-tier schools — the Swarthmores, Dukes, and NYUs — can raise their tuition rates to levels that make them ultra-luxury products, as expensive as an exclusive golf club. In a memorable anecdote, Hamilton College admissions officials included an example of the kind of essay they like to see,  the first line of which was, “On the day my first novel was rejected, I was baking a pie.” The essay concluded with the successful signing of the applicant’s book contract.

 

These dynamics vastly increase the perceived value of admission to a top-tier school. And it subtly reinforces a dark message for the nation’s elites: Your children will have to work much harder than you did to achieve even the relative status you have at present.

 

* * *

 

The American dream included the bedrock faith, which in previous ages most parents had, that today’s children will be better off than their parents. The institutions of American life to which America’s upper-middle-class white liberals are loyal and on which they depend have arranged themselves in a way to destroy that faith in progress and positive-sum outcomes. And what enters the scene if the American dream sours? Misanthropy and rage.

 

This explains, in part, how political correctness has become a status competition, one that is spreading from college into the corporate workforce through the lateral imitation of administrators. What is a Human Resources administrator but a private-sector member of the dean’s office? It is yet another layer of competition and a sorting mechanism.

 

Especially as woke ideology expands the number and type of sexual minorities, it also expands the opportunities of white children to obtain a coveted status as a transgressed minority, a kind of work-around for the drudgery of meritocracy. Previous generations of young people saw the phenomenon of “lesbians until graduation,” but the institutions of American life are conspiring to create the “transgendered until admitted.”

 

And if the American dream feels like a perishing fantasy in the present even for those as blessed as upper-middle-class whites, it is not surprising that they would increasingly adopt and propagate a revisionist history and view of their country — such as that offered by the 1619 Project — that damns America as a set of illusions covering over a substance of capitalist oppression.

 

What this class desperately needs, perhaps what the country needs, is a credible belief in America’s abundance of opportunities, alongside the security of knowing that failures or shortcomings do not forever doom one to a life of misery or exile from the way of life you knew as a child. The virtue of America’s upper middle class is its fastidiousness and inexhaustible energy and ambition. Those virtues deserve and require institutions that channel their energy into enterprises that are truly productive, or at least more productive than being an extension of Human Resources. Perhaps these enterprises would even bring white upper-middle-class liberals back into sympathetic contact with their countrymen — the blacks who resist gentrification, or the deplorables they once wished to leave behind in St. Paul.

Brown University’s Woke Professors Battle Diversity (of Viewpoint)

By Jack Wolfsohn

Sunday, January 30, 2022

 

Amid the leftist-infused classrooms of Brown University lies a small, unassuming white building that houses the Political Theory Project (PTP). As an interdisciplinary research center committed to free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, the PTP has been a haven for conservative and libertarian students for the past 19 years. But it’s not merely a “safe space” for the Right; it has, rather, fostered genuine intellectual inquiry for anyone interested in it.

 

Now, however, the PTP is under a sadly familiar sort of attack from many of Brown’s left-leaning professors. These professors feel threatened by the PTP because the courses offered by the center, such as “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism,” “Capitalism: For and Against,” and “20th Century Political Economy” tend to offer a centrist or libertarian angle on issues that challenge the progressive orthodoxy on campus. Their criticisms of a bastion of free thought at Brown are misguided and should be rejected.

 

The Political Theory Project makes clear in its mission statement its commitment to viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech and expression. Thus, the PTP has sought to bring to campus through its Janus Forum Lecture Series ideologically diverse speakers to debate issues such as the extent of the threat of climate change, whether the U.S. should support Israel, and whether “rape culture” exists on campus. For years, the PTP has held free-flowing conversations at which participants sparred openly on contentious issues and debated controversial opinions. But rather than welcoming such exchanges, some students and professors have accumulated negative feelings toward the project that now spill over into open denunciation.

 

These resentments percolate at the exact moment that discussions between the administration and faculty regarding the proposed creation of a new Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), which would absorb the PTP and its programs, are ongoing. The proposal was put forward by Brown University president Christina Paxson and is backed by provost Richard Locke. However, many faculty members are pushing back. They allege the PTP is right-leaning, and they strongly oppose the fact that the PTP has received funding from the Koch Foundation. Associate professor of history Seth Rockman stated, “Many members of our faculty have felt that the PTP has been a pernicious presence on campus for nearly 20 years and that it has thumbed its nose at many of the commitments we have made to diversity, equity and inclusion.” Associate professor of American history, American studies, and ethnic studies Naoko Shibusawa has made her political motives for opposing the proposal clear. Shibusawa said that the absorption of the partially Koch-funded PTP into a PPE Center would be “furthering the Koch agenda, in ways that would be contrary to the very values and mission that Brown is trying to promote. Feminism, reproductive rights, anti-racism, science.” Unlike Shibusawa, one may have assumed that Brown’s mission was that of a traditional university: the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

 

Despite their criticism of the Political Theory Project’s funding, Brown professors are noticeably silent about the large donations Brown receives from left-leaning corporations. Among Brown’s largest corporate donors are the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both of which support liberal causes. Bill Gates has also been embroiled in scandal, having once maintained a suspicious relationship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And Gates continued meeting with Epstein even after Epstein had been found guilty of soliciting prostitution from minors, but the faculty is not objecting to that donation.

 

As for the professors’ lament that the PTP is right-leaning, it’s worth noting that there is no shortage of leftist professors on Brown’s campus. The first day of freshman year, almost all of my professors found room in their lectures to rail against then-president Donald Trump, no matter whether the subject was history, economics, or astronomy. It is difficult to find a class where a professor does not inject his or her leftist views into their lectures. While the school purports to value diversity, there is an obvious dearth of viewpoint diversity. This is why the PTP is so important.

 

The Political Theory Project has been a welcome place for conservative and libertarian students who have difficulty finding classes at Brown in which they can speak freely. According to Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62 percent of college students felt that their campus climate prevented students from saying things they believed. This is why places such as the PTP — and, on the other side of the country, Stanford University’s similarly nonconformist (and unjustly attacked) Hoover Institution — need to exist. The PTP serves as a free-speech refuge immune to the radical campus climate at Brown. As one of the few outspoken conservatives on campus, I have taken classes offered by the PTP. I was more engaged and felt more comfortable speaking my mind freely. And I know I’m not the only person on campus to have benefited from the PTP’s work.

 

If and when the Political Theory Project merges with the new Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Center on campus, there will be a wider array of ideas and viewpoints accessible to the Brown student body. One hopes that the Political Theory Project will remain true to its mission, and free speech and free expression will receive a larger platform. The Brown administration would be smart to reject the arguments of activist professors and continue as planned with the merger of the Political Theory Project with a new PPE Center.

Putin Can’t Be Appeased

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, January 29, 2022

 

Vladimir Putin has deployed some 100,000 troops to Russia’s border with Ukraine. He has moved fighter jets and antiaircraft defenses into neighboring Belarus. He has around 6,000 soldiers, as well as air and naval assets, in Crimea, the peninsula in south Ukraine that he annexed illegally eight years ago. His insurgents have waged a “frozen conflict” in east Ukraine for close to a decade. His digital army launches routine cyberattacks against Ukrainian infrastructure. And yet, if you listen to “realist” foreign-policy analysts, all this is somehow America’s fault.

 

It was a mistake to allow former provinces and satellites of the USSR to join NATO, we are told. It is hubris to believe that one day Ukraine might join NATO and the EU. It would be reckless to deploy U.S. troops to defend Ukraine (a policy President Joe Biden has ruled out explicitly). America is overstretched, the realists go on. It is inward-looking and uninterested in the fate of freedom in Eastern Europe. Better to provide Putin an “off-ramp” from the present crisis. Better to declare, once and for all, that Ukraine will never join the Western alliance. Putin might be satisfied with a veto over NATO membership. He might stand down. He might save face.

 

True, Putin might not invade Ukraine if America and NATO acquiesce to his most recent demands. But he would soon make new demands, new threats, and new incursions. History teaches as much. Appease Putin? The West has tried exactly that for over a decade. And the West has nothing to show for it. Putin hasn’t been satisfied with diplomatic overtures. He isn’t deterred by slaps on the wrist. Putin keeps asking for more.

 

The Russian strongman announced his turn toward bellicosity at the Munich security conference in 2007. Flush with cash from high oil prices and gloating over America’s difficulties in Iraq, Putin assailed the “unipolar model” of American global leadership as “not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.” He called the deployment of antiballistic-missile systems in Europe provocative and the “next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race.” He said that NATO expansion was “a serious provocation” intended to weaken Russia. The history of his country “spans more than a thousand years,” Putin lectured. Russia “has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy.” This wasn’t an academic lesson. It was a warning.

 

Message delivered. The implicit threat split Europe. At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, President George W. Bush wanted the alliance to issue “Membership Action Plans,” or MAPs, to Georgia and Ukraine. He was overruled. No MAPs were offered. Instead, NATO promised that one day both countries would be members. NATO thought it could placate Russia. Ukraine and Georgia tried to make the best of a wispy, abstract pledge. They held out hope that NATO would make good on its word. They were naïve.

 

Putin read the situation more accurately. Europe was trying to be nice, to keep the bear happy. He could carry out his “independent foreign policy.” A few months later, Russia invaded Georgia on the slimmest of pretexts. Russian tanks approached the capital, Tbilisi, before falling back to the line of control. Georgia’s democratic government was preserved — for a while. In the years since, Putin manipulated Georgia’s politics by proxy and diminished the country’s hopes for independence, for a flourishing civil society. The Western response was light — a rush to negotiations, a few economic sanctions, a lot of “concerns” and “calls.” Not enough to reverse Putin’s gains.

 

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was an alarm. We slept through it. One of the war’s many consequences was that Senator Barack Obama named as his running mate the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. Once in office, Obama, Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched an effort to “reset” relations with Russia. Obama canceled missile-defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland. He signed the New START Treaty limiting nuclear weapons. He involved Russia more closely in nonproliferation efforts and in diplomacy with Iran and North Korea. He aided Russia’s effort to join the World Trade Organization. According to a White House press release issued in 2010, “President Obama and his administration have sought to engage the Russian government to pursue foreign policy goals of common interest — win-win outcomes — for the American and Russian people.”

 

Putin doesn’t believe in win-win outcomes. He believes in win-lose outcomes: Putin wins, you lose. Obama crashed against a wall of atavism and paranoia. Putin became convinced that Hillary Clinton was behind the 2011 antigovernment protests in Moscow. He blamed U.S. officials, not native Ukrainian sentiment, for the 2014 Maidan protests that toppled the government of pro-Kremlin prime minister Viktor Yanukovych. (Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he remains.) Weeks after the Maidan revolution, Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of east Ukraine. The West responded with another round of denunciations and sanctions. Putin shrugged them off. In 2015, he deployed Russian troops to Syria. In 2016, he interfered in the U.S. presidential election. Obama left office with U.S.-Russian relations at a low point. The open hand had been met with a clenched fist.

 

Why? Because Putin’s aims are different from our own. He wants to resurrect the Russian empire. He wants to undermine the post–Cold War settlement. American foreign policy, meanwhile, alternates between bouts of democratic idealism and episodes of sullen retrenchment. Putin is lucky: His rule coincides with a long spell of American self-doubt and withdrawal from world leadership. Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, also tried to reset relations with Russia. He wanted to appeal to Putin on a personal level. It didn’t take. Putin doesn’t want a friend. He wants facts on the ground to strengthen Russia’s international position. He wants to solidify his rule. On this and other topics, the Trump era had a schizophrenic quality. Trump had nothing but nice words for Putin, yet Trump’s energy, defense, and strategic weapons policies undermined Russian interests. Neither the first nor the last man to be confused by Trump, Putin bided his time.

 

His moment arrived in 2021. Joe Biden is now the fourth U.S. president to take office with the desire to improve relations with Russia. Biden immediately renewed New START. He took little public action to respond to Russian cyber-offensives. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline at home and didn’t apply sanctions to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would feed natural gas directly from Russia to Western Europe. He involved Russia in talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal. He left Afghanistan in violent chaos. When Putin built up his forces around Ukraine in the spring of 2021, Biden granted him an in-person summit in Geneva and launched a U.S.-Russian nuclear dialogue. When Putin resumed pounding the war drums, he and Biden held a remote summit last December. Biden took Putin’s phone call on December 30. He and his secretary of state maintain that there is a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. “So, there’s room to work if he wants to do that,” Biden said at his press conference the other week. “But I think, as usual, he’s going to — well, I probably shouldn’t go any further.”

 

No, Joe, you really shouldn’t. It’s far past time to recognize that Vladimir Putin can’t be appeased. He can only be deterred and resisted. And the moment to act, to establish facts on the ground that serve our purposes, is now. Before Putin asks for more. Before it’s too late.