The Bitter Truth: There’s Still No Rhyme or Reason to COVID-19

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, August 30, 2021

 

Two presidents. Fifty states. One-hundred-and-ninety-five countries. A multitude of different approaches. And still, there’s no rhyme or reason to this pandemic.

 

Vaccines help a great deal. That much we know. Beyond that, though, the coverage of the virus has mostly been partisanship and witchcraft. Here, current as of today, is the per-state death chart per 100,000 people in the United States.

  

Confusing, isn’t it? Try as you might, you will not find a plausible way of blaming this on that party or region or policy that you hate.

 

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an excellent piece on the terrible spike in Florida. “Even a state that made a major push for vaccinations . . . can be crushed by the Delta variant,” the paper observed, while noting that “Florida ranks 21st among states and Washington, D.C., in giving people of all ages at least one shot.” Indeed, the Times noted, nobody is quite sure why this is happening. “Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit,” it concluded, “remains an elusive question” — not least because “other states with comparable vaccine coverage have a small fraction of Florida’s hospitalization rate.”

 

Many of the Times’s readers were frightfully upset by this blunt assessment of the facts. On Twitter, MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin put his fingers in his ears and screamed, “This is not true.” “And,” he added, “you know it. Do better.” Soledad O’Brien, meanwhile, went so far as to describe the piece as “journalistic malpractice.” What a strange, neat little world some people have made for themselves.

 

What Griffin, O’Brien, and others wanted the Times to say was that Red States Are Bad and Blue States Are Good — or, perhaps, as Paul Krugman argued over the weekend, that the North Is Good and the South Is Bad, Just Like During the Civil War. But this simply isn’t correct. If it were, what could possibly account for the death-rate pairings of New York and Mississippi? Of Alabama and Connecticut? Of Michigan and Arkansas? Of Texas and Delaware? Of Idaho and Colorado? For months, many in the press have banged on and on and on about Florida’s governor and then been shocked to learn that, even after a terrible spike — a spike that, mercifully, is beginning to fade — Florida’s record remains better than those of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Illinois; that the number of children who have died in Florida (per capita) is not only exactly in line with the national average, but around five times lower than D.C.’s number, and just over half of New York’s; that, far from lagging behind, Florida’s vaccination rate is above the national average; and that, despite having a disproportionately old population, Florida sits in the bottom half for deaths among senior citizens. The state of Louisiana, which seems to get hit around the same time as Florida each time there is a wave of COVID-19 infections, currently boasts many policies that Florida does not — among them, an ongoing indoor mask mandate that applies even to the vaccinated, a statewide school-mask mandate for all students over the age of five, and, in the city of New Orleans, a system of vaccine passports. Despite this, Louisiana’s death rate is the fourth worst in the nation, while Florida — which has a much older population (as of 2020, Florida has the largest senior population in the union; Louisiana’s is 42nd) — sits in 20th place. What gives?

 

Last night, ABC News reported that there is bad news coming out of Oregon — yes, the same Oregon that’s home to Governor Kate Brown, she of the innovative outdoor mask mandate for the vaccinated. “The death toll from COVID-19,” the outfit noted, “is climbing so rapidly in Oregon in some counties that the state has organized delivery of one refrigerated truck to hold the bodies and is sending a second one.” What, within our Good/Bad dichotomy, can have caused this, one must wonder? Has Governor Brown not frowned enough? Have Oregonians failed to burn a sufficient number of dead radio hosts in effigy? Does the state’s health director sport a bad haircut? Or could it be, perhaps, that this is a terrible virus, that it prompts unpredictable results, and that our present political hysteria is as poor a frame for understanding what is happening in New Jersey and Oregon as it is for understanding what is happening in Texas and Alaska?

 

Israel, which has done everything that the loudest critics on the Left wanted America to do, is nevertheless stuck in the throes of a devastating surge. Israel has instituted repeated and draconian lockdowns (enforced by drone, no less); it has used nationwide mask mandates; it has vaccinated everyone early — and even added booster shots into the mix; and it has even instituted a system of vaccine passports. And, right now? Well, it’s getting crushed. Per NPR, despite becoming “the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19,” it now “has one of the world’s highest daily infection rates. . . . Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.” I wonder: Is Israel a Red State or a Blue State?

 

Much as they would hate to hear this, it remains the case that the most vitriolic voices in our COVID debates are little more than glammed-up conspiracy theorists — the sort of narrow, monomaniacal, quackish people who, in an era not that far removed from our own, would have been selling leeches by the ton. The journalist David Aaronovitch argues that such people tend to fall back on their ideas because the volatility and complexity of the real world is simply too scary for them handle. It is much easier to believe that George W. Bush ordered 9/11 than to accept that America is vulnerable and life is unpredictable, because if George W. Bush ordered 9/11 you can prevent it from happening again by imprisoning him; whereas if 19 guys with box cutters carried out 9/11, it could probably happen again. So it is with COVID-19. It is much easier to believe that, if we put the people you like in charge of everything and make them say the right words on TV, the worst pandemic in a century will bend to their will than it is to accept that human beings are alarmingly susceptible to chaos.

 

The uncomfortable truth is that, beyond developing, encouraging, and providing inoculation, there’s not much that any government can do to guarantee success — and, even when it does what it can, a lot of people are going to resist for reasons bad and good. In their transparent attempts to draw attention from President Biden’s disastrous performance in Afghanistan, certain pundits have begun shouting loudly that we should be paying more attention to the 1,000 or so COVID-19 deaths we’re seeing here in America each day. Well, okay then; let’s do that. While running for president, Joe Biden said he’d “shut down the virus.” It’s been seven months since he took over, and, after a lull, we are now back in crisis. The obvious question, then, is: Why is Biden failing so badly?

 

And here’s the thing: If that’s an unfair question because it’s a little more “complicated” than that for Biden, then it’s an unfair question because it’s also a little more complicated than that for Phil Murphy, for Ron DeSantis, for Gretchen Whitmer, for Greg Abbott, and for everyone else who has had the misfortune to become a talisman during this terrible time. Given how polarized we are at present, one can easily comprehend why, in its early days, so many political obsessives thought it might be efficacious to use the pandemic as a stick. But now? Eighteen months in? It’s beyond time for them to shut the hell up.

Alexander Hamilton’s Revenge

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

 

Why is it that the political life of China or Russia seems in some important way simpler to us than does the politics of the liberal-democratic world?

 

Probably, we are mistaken, and the political reality in Beijing or Moscow seems — but only seems — simpler than the situation in Washington, London, or Brussels. But there are some differences in the non-consensual societies (as Jay Nordlinger, quoting Robert Conquest, has taught me to call them) that do promise some simplification — that is the sort of thing that tempts the likes of Thomas Friedman to envy Beijing’s power to act, apparently without interest-group obstruction or self-interested procedural shenanigans, in those “China for a day” fantasies.

 

In science fiction, there are stereotype planets (single-biome planets like the ice world Hoth in Star Wars and the desert world Arrakis in Dune) and stereotype civilizations (Star Trek’s Vulcans are logical, the Klingons are martial, and the Ferengi are, as Paul B. Sturtevant put it, “stereotyped crypto-Jews” who “look and behave like the Jews in the worst of Nazi or early-20th-century American propaganda”) and it is all too easy to take a similarly flattened view of the real world: The Chinese are relentless Han ethno-nationalists, the Russians are psychologically fixed on their history as the front line of the Christian West against the Muslim East, etc. Oversimplification is a very efficient way to make yourself stupid. But it is the case that concern for individual liberty does not seems to complicate Beijing’s decision-making the way it does Washington’s and that Moscow’s nationalist agenda will steamroll right over any muffled chirping about the rule of law or liberal-democratic norms. There is not much tension between nationalist ambitions and individual liberty in China or Russia because individual liberty is so lowly regarded as to barely enter the conversation, while the rule of law is whatever the national powers need it to be at any given moment.

 

With that in mind, we should understand the progressive dream of being “China for a day” as a close cousin to the perverse envy that some on the right evince for illiberal regimes such as those of Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán, and a near relation to the Trumpists’ grudging admiration of Xi Jinping: It is rooted in a desire for a simplified politics, one in which we liberate ourselves from the need to work out unsatisfying tradeoffs between competing values by rejecting some of those values. Managerial technocracy under “expert” government offers much the same promise: that we can escape from the messy business of compromise and consensus-building by abandoning the liberal-democratic paradigm for something fresher and more active. You will notice that calls for a “new politics” — whether those are rightist lamentations of the “dead consensus” or Senator Sanders’s demand for a “political revolution” — never point toward a more complex and consensus-driven politics that takes account of a wider array of competing values and discrete interests, but instead push relentlessly toward a simplified, cruder practice, a political equation with fewer variables to take into consideration.

 

This line of thinking infests both parties, and entices both left-wing activists and right-wing activists in the direction of executive aggrandizement, government by executive order, and presidential unilateralism rather than government by legislation, compromise, and bipartisanship. It is a homogenizing politics of larger lumps: We the People vs. the Swamp or the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent.

 

Like many of our political problems, this one is old enough to be practically eternal.

 

We trace our modern democracies to Greek and (to a lesser extent) Roman models, but Western parliamentary forms owe at least as much (and probably much more) to the consensus-oriented politics of the Germanic tribes that left their cultural marks everywhere from Iceland and the British Isles to Lombardy and beyond. It may seem strange to use the word egalitarian to describe societies that practiced slavery and human sacrifice — as in the case of the Vikings mentioned last week — but consider that in the first half of the Viking age, there were no kings as such, and no formal hereditary aristocracy, either. There was social mobility among the three main classes of persons, and the free men of the tribe all enjoyed the right to have their grievances heard and settled under law at a proto-parliamentary assembly, the famous þing, or thing. (The modern English word court, referring simultaneously to a monarch’s retinue, his official venue, and a judicial assembly is a reminder that these were, at one time, essentially one thing, with acting in a judicial capacity being the chief domestic responsibility of a king.) In Norse society, the jarls may have enjoyed rank and title (jarl survives in the modern English earl), but they usually did not enjoy any special formal political power — the power they had came from their followers and from their ability to use their prestige and their wealth to shape public opinion and shove consensus in one direction or another — something not entirely alien to our modern democratic practice.

 

But as these primitive tribal societies became more complex and sophisticated — and as the scope of political questions became national rather than local — they found that they required new modes of government. Like the Americans living under the Articles of Confederation, they came to believe that they needed a more robust national state and, especially, a more active and permanent executive who could focus sustained attention and effort on long-term national interests, something that could not be achieved through ad hoc alliances of tribal chieftains and regional magnates or other similarly temporary and fragile instruments of cooperation. This meant balancing goods and values that often were in tension: A powerful king might be simultaneously a protector of his countrymen’s rights and interests and an insult to their sense of equality; the desire to act decisively will at some margin always clash with the desire for consensus; the principle (sometimes unarticulated) of majority rule will always be in tension with minority and individual rights and with traditions enshrining such rights; the king’s obligation to provide public goods (beginning with physical security) assumes the state’s access to material resources necessary to creating such goods (soldiers have to be paid, roads and fortresses don’t build themselves) which brings the state into conflict with the property rights of individuals. A great deal of what pretends to be political philosophy is in fact only rhetoric put into the service of pretending that these goods and interests are not in conflict.

 

Many of those Germanic tribal societies attempted to resolve the tension between their egalitarianism and their desire for a powerful executive with what Henry Jones Ford described as “the oldest political institution of the race, the elective kingship.” (Ford, who served in the Woodrow Wilson administration, knew something about elective kingship.) The formalities and character of these elective kingships varied over time and between peoples: Certain Gallic tribes elected kings for one-year terms, while most other elected kings held office for life. In Venice, the doges were in effect elected monarchs with constitutionally limited powers. Among the egalitarian Swedes, the early kings were elected at an assembly open to all free men with relatively open terms for candidacy, but in later practice both electors and candidates were restricted. In Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe, the limits on elective kingship grew narrower over generations as the superstition of “royal blood” came to dominate political belief. Societies that had developed for generations without any sort of monarchy, much less a hereditary monarchy, eventually came to believe that they could not function without such a thing. When the American colonists decided that they did not need one, George III was sincere in his concern that the new nation might “suffer unduly from its want of a monarchy.”

 

King George was not alone in this. Alexander Hamilton was a calculating nationalist before he was a Broadway sensation, and his political orientation was very much informed by monarchists such as Jacques Necker (finance minister to Louis XVI) and by his own view that the English system of government was the best the world had to offer. While the great statesmen at the constitutional convention were debating the relative merits of the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan, Hamilton saw serious deficiencies in both and proposed instead a model of government that was in its main points the English model adopted to American circumstances: a popularly elected commons, an indirectly elected senate with untitled lords serving lifetime terms, and — most radical to the modern American mind — an elected king. He didn’t call the king a king but a “governor,” one with far-reaching political powers and a lifetime appointment as long as he remained in “good behavior.”

 

Hamilton’s elected king was in many ways similar to the presidency that eventually took shape: He was to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces and chief national representative in foreign affairs, and would have held veto power over the national legislature. Exactly no one rallied to Hamilton’s banner — in fact, after his five-hour disquisition on his proposal for national government, his ideas never even came up for discussion at the convention, but the echo of them can be heard throughout the Founding era, for example in John Adams’s much-ridiculed proposition that the American president should be styled quasi-monarchically: “His Elective Majesty.” That the president would in any case be a kind of king was plain to Hamilton, as reported in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, which says of Hamilton’s president-for-life:

 

It will be objected probably, that such an Executive will be an elective Monarch, and will give birth to the tumults which characterise that form of Govt. He wd. reply that Monarch is an indefinite term. It marks not either the degree or duration of power. If this Executive Magistrate wd. be a monarch for life — the other propd. by the Report from the Committee of the whole, wd. be a monarch for seven years.

 

There is an echo of that old pre-monarchy Norse practice in the earliest days of the American republic, which was open but more democratic in rhetoric than in practice, in which a genuinely egalitarian ethos coexisted with a system of government in which local magnates and chieftains exercised an outsized influence, putting some considerable distance between equality under the law and equality in fact. (There were monstrous similarities, too, notably slavery-based agriculture.) And, in spite of Alexander Hamilton’s ambitions and John Adams’s anxieties, the president did not behave very much like an elected king, at least for a generation: George Washington, being a demigod, would not condescend to kingship; John Adams was too conservative and too unprepossessing to act the king; Thomas Jefferson was an aristocrat who gave his heart to the French Revolution; James Madison wanted a bank, not a crown; James Monroe, the empire-builder, might have made a king under different circumstances, but republican norms held him in check; John Quincy Adams was too much his father’s son to be dipped in purple.

 

Henry Jones Ford, mentioned above, made his observation about Americans’ resurrecting elective kingship in relation to Andrew Jackson, whose ascent to power (and to an excellent if less-successful musical than Hamilton’s) ushered in a new kind of presidency that was a lot like an old kind of kingship: king as all-father, king as embodiment of the people. As Ford wrote: “The truth is that in the presidential office, as it has been constituted since Jackson’s time, American democracy has revived the oldest political institution of the race, the elective kingship.” But this is a kingship that rises up from the people rather than being handed down from heaven: “The greatness of the Presidency,” Ford wrote, “is the work of the people breaking through the constitutional form.”

 

But it is not kingship, of course, that has distinguished American political life: It is the constitutional form — or it was, until about five minutes ago.

Biden’s Blunders

By Matthew Continetti

Thursday, August 26, 2021

 

Four. That’s the number of crises Joe Biden said the nation faced when he accepted the 2020 Demo­cratic presidential nomination. His list included the coronavirus pandemic, the precarious economy, ensuring racial equity in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, and climate change. By the time Biden became president, he had added to his index of emergencies the fate of democracy, truth, and America’s role in the world. “Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways,” Biden said during his inaugural address. “But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.”

 

They are responsibilities that Biden cannot handle. Not only has he failed to solve the problems he identified during the campaign; he’s created a whole new set of challenges that run from America’s southern border to the Hindu Kush. As a result, the public has re-evaluated his conduct and capability. The buzzwords that filled coverage of Biden’s early days — “hypercompetent,” “normalcy,” “unity,” “transformative” — now seem inappropriate and silly. The comparisons that some pundits made last spring between Biden and LBJ, FDR, and Ronald Reagan were premature at the time. Now they just look ridiculous.

 

Every presidency has bad moments. What makes Biden’s rough patch notable is its suddenness and contingency. Only a few months ago, it might have seemed as if he was making progress on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. Unexpected developments, as well as unforced errors on the border and in Afghanistan, have now undermined confidence in his leadership and eroded his public standing. The Delta variant of the coronavirus, inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and national humiliation at the hands of the Taliban have done more than complicate Biden’s efforts to sign into law the largest expansion of government since the Great Society. They have put Democratic control of Congress at risk — and the country in jeopardy.

 

Biden is president because his priorities tracked closely with those of the 2020 electorate. Take the coronavirus pandemic. The plurality of voters who rated it the most important issue in a postelection poll by Fox News supported Biden two to one. While the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research had a slightly more complicated and confusing issue breakdown, it also showed that the voters who had rated either the pandemic or health-care policy as the most important issue went for Biden by lopsided margins.

 

Americans gave Biden’s coronavirus response high marks during the first half of the year. He took the pandemic seriously. His team ramped up production and distribution of the vaccines authorized for emergency use under his predecessor. In a March speech, Biden predicted that the summer of 2021 would “begin to mark our independence from this virus.” In May, the Centers for Disease Control announced that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to wear masks indoors. Case numbers and deaths plunged from January through July.

 

Then things got worse. The first sign that Biden wasn’t in charge of the situation came in April, when the Food and Drug Administration temporarily paused injections of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This decision arrested the momentum of the vaccination campaign and illustrated the dangers of bureaucratic caprice. Meanwhile, the Delta variant of the virus spread among the unvaccinated. Case numbers picked up. Hospitalizations and deaths followed. On July 27, the CDC reversed its previous guidance and recommended once again that vaccinated people in areas of high transmission wear masks indoors. The messages from public-health authorities were contradictory, confusing, and dispiriting. Biden seemed powerless.

 

What was once a political asset turned into a liability. Two-thirds of adults approved of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus in a February 2021 Gallup poll. By August, that number had dropped 16 points. “All party groups are now more critical of Biden’s handling of the corona­virus situation compared with February,” wrote pollster Jeffrey M. Jones, “with approval among Republicans and independents down roughly 20 points.” Moreover, independents have begun to disapprove of Biden’s performance in general. As recently as June, they gave him a job-approval rating of 55 percent. Only 43 percent of independents approved in August.

 

The pandemic was not even the only crisis in which Biden was flailing. The economy was never his best issue — voters for whom it was the top priority in 2020 went for Donald Trump — but the gradual recovery from the coronavirus-induced recession and the passage of the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan helped Biden’s standing at the beginning of his term. In the February Gallup poll, 54 percent of adults approved of his handling of the economy. By August, however, that rating had fallen to 46 percent.

 

The reason was inflation. Rising prices have increased the cost of living, diminished wage gains, and soured voters on the president’s economic management. In a Morning Consult poll from late July, 59 percent of registered voters blamed Biden for inflation. In early August, a Hill-HarrisX poll found that inflation was registered voters’ top economic worry. Around the same time, 86 percent of the registered voters surveyed in a Fox News poll said that it was a concern. The president’s response has been to downplay the threat. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and expected to be temporary,” Biden said in July. He hopes so.

 

Neither racial inequity nor climate change has proven any easier for Biden to fix. “For the second consecutive year, U.S. adults’ positive ratings of relations between Black and White Americans are at their lowest point in more than two decades of measurement,” wrote Gallup’s Megan Brenan in July. Judges have blocked Biden’s attempt to forgive the debts of minority farmers because it violates civil-rights law. Parents nationwide have rebelled against school boards eager to import critical race theory into the classroom. The Black Lives Matter movement has hemorrhaged support. In June 2020, as Biden planned his nomination-acceptance speech, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll of U.S. adults found 57 percent of them approving Black Lives Matter. One year later, 42 percent of Americans approved.

 

The public is worried about crime. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll from early summer, two-thirds of adults said that crime had grown worse over the past year. One-third of adults said that they had witnessed a crime spike in their own neighborhood. Seventy percent of adults called for additional funding for police departments. Seventy-seven percent wanted more cops on the beat. Navigator, a Demo­cratic polling company, reported in July that majorities of Democrats, independents, Republicans, blacks, Hispanics, and whites considered violent crime a “major crisis.” In late June, as fears over public safety became unignorable, Biden tried to reframe the crime debate as an argument for gun control. His messaging flopped.

 

A similar atmosphere of irrelevance and impotence surrounds Biden’s climate policy. Biden reentered the Paris climate agreement but is far from reaching a deal to limit either China’s or India’s greenhouse-gas emissions. He signed a nonbinding, symbolic executive order calling for half of the new auto fleet manu­factured each year to be composed of electric vehicles by 2030. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, paused the issuance of new drilling leases on public lands and waters, suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that the Trump administration had approved, and is under pressure from the Left to restrict U.S. exports of liquid natural gas.

 

Yet Biden has a rather la-di-da attitude toward carbon emissions elsewhere. He acquiesced to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, which makes it possible for Vladimir Putin to cut off energy supplies to Ukraine without jeopardizing Western European markets. He asked OPEC to ramp up oil production, showing more concern for the domestic political cost of high gasoline prices than for the environmental and strategic costs of empowering the cartel. His negotiators in Vienna promised to drop sanctions on Iran’s energy sector if the Islamic Republic reenters the 2014 nuclear deal. The mullahs aren’t into solar panels.

 

None of these moves will appease Greta Thunberg. Nor will they lower energy prices for everyday Americans, reduce the trade deficit, or weaken America’s adversaries. They are the definition of counterproductive.

 

Biden also made a big show of undoing his predecessor’s immigration policies. He suspended construction of the border wall. He lifted the so-called Muslim ban on travel and immigration from 13 countries. He ended the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum-seekers to wait there as U.S. courts adjudicated their claims. He exited the “safe third country” agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that instructed migrants to apply for asylum in the first nation they entered. He exempted minors from “Title 42” protocols that allow for rapid deportation during public-health emergencies.

 

Guess what happened next. The number of individuals detained on the southern border swelled. Every month broke records. July was the busiest month on the border in 21 years. Never has the United States taken into custody more family units and unaccompanied minors. When the fiscal year ends on September 30, more than 1 million illegal migrants will have been detained. Many of them have been released into the U.S. interior.

 

Biden can neither explain nor stop the deluge. At first, he said that the surge was seasonal. It wasn’t. Then Vice President Harris traveled to Guatemala and told migrants not to come. They kept coming. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas recently told Border Patrol agents that “we can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.” Note his use of the present tense. The Trump administration did build a system that mostly secured the southern border. Biden wrecked it.

 

The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is another direct consequence of Biden’s ineptitude. His failure to plan for the chaos that would follow America’s exit resulted in a humanitarian disaster and a potential mass-hostage situation as some 6,000 U.S. troops evacuated tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghan partners from a single airport in Kabul ringed by Taliban checkpoints. Biden’s word has been exposed as worthless. He said that the Afghan army wouldn’t fall to the Taliban. It did. He said that al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan. It is. He said that our allies haven’t questioned America’s credi­bility. They have. The British parliament held the withdrawal in contempt, and former British prime minister Tony Blair called the logic behind it “imbecilic.”

 

That’s an understatement. As the 78-year-old Biden gets ready to exit the political arena, he seems intent on recreating the conditions that prevailed when he entered it a half century ago. Inflation, crime, American retreat — these hallmarks of the 1970s have returned. And they have joined postmodern threats, such as a worldwide pandemic, unchecked migration, climate change, and the global jihadist-Salafist movement. Biden has been president for less than a year. The number of crises buffeting American politics, economics, society, and culture already has multiplied beyond his control.

 

In the run-up to the 2020 campaign, President Obama reportedly told a fellow Democrat, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” No one will make that mistake anytime soon.

Flexing the Quad

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, September 05, 2021

 

It is 7,000 miles from Washington to Beijing, but it is only a little more than 1,000 miles from Tokyo to Beijing. If it sometimes seems that Japan is taking China seven times more seriously than is the United States, the explanation may be as simple as that.

 

Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, is on his way out, and his most likely (though not certain) successor is a former foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, who embodies the increasingly assertive national-defense mentality of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Kishida has suggested that Japan requires, among other armaments, missiles that could be used to preemptively disable Chinese missiles that might be directed at Japan.

 

If you will forgive a little inside baseball, here is an anecdote that might be instructive: A Japanese diplomat, in a conversation reported by China analyst Gregory Kulacki in the Diplomat, expressed skepticism about the credibility of the so-called nuclear umbrella offered by Washington, and declared that “the only cooperative nuclear arrangement that would satisfy him would be for the United States to supply Japan with U.S. nuclear weapons, train the Japanese military to deliver them, and give the Japanese government the authority to decide how and when they will be used.” That diplomat, a Kishida ally, went on to become vice minister of foreign affairs with a portfolio that included the issue of “extended deterrence,” suggesting that his ideas are not seen as off-the-wall.

 

But even if Kishida does not become the next prime minister, it is likely that whoever does will take a much more hawkish view of China, because hawkish views of China are increasingly common within the LDP.

 

Japan had a great deal for which to atone after World War II, and, because it is the only country against which nuclear weapons so far have actually been deployed, its people and its politics are especially attuned to the dreadful nature of such instruments. But it may also be the case that the Japanese have overcorrected in the direction of pacifism — and in the direction of a reliance on the United States that at times is politically electric in Japan, which already is in the process of expanding its military capabilities, and whose leaders have declared the situation in Taiwan a “red line” for Japan–China relations.

 

As Kulacki notes, Japan has twice formally reconsidered its national posture vis-à-vis nuclear weapons, and has twice rejected the pursuit of them. But the last such review was in 1995, and much has changed since then. The China of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin was a brutal, single-party police state, as it is today, but it was one that much of the world mistakenly expected to develop in another direction. Xi Jinping’s China is a different thing and apparently, from Tokyo’s point of view, a more worrisome one.

 

Japan is one quarter of the “Quad,” the informal grouping of four countries — the United States, India, and Australia are the others — intensely concerned about Beijing’s neo-imperial ambitions and working to coordinate responses to them. Japan has a great deal of power — economic power, cultural power, technological power, and even some military power. But its military capabilities are artificially constrained by historical considerations that have been overtaken by events. A well-armed Japan — possibly a nuclear-armed Japan — would be good for the Japanese, good for the United States, good for the Quad, and good for the world. It would need a defter touch than U.S. diplomacy has exhibited in recent years — our position toward Japan’s military normalization should be one of support and encouragement, not one characterized by the petty hectoring with which we too often treat our NATO partners.

 

Speaking of which . . .

 

Japan is not the only country with a leadership change imminent.

 

It hardly makes the news in the United States, but the Leader of the Free World is about to retire: German chancellor Angela Merkel, who for 16 years has been an anchor of liberal-democratic values, has reached the end of her career, and it is far from obvious that her conservative Christian Democratic Union will hold on to power after she exits the stage. Her anointed successor, Armin Laschet, made an ass of himself after deadly floods earlier this summer; the Green candidate, Annalena Baerbock, took off like a rocket before promptly crashing into a couple of petty, Bidenesque scandals (income reporting, plagiarism), and now is third in the polls; Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the finance minister and vice chancellor and a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, finds himself, against expectations, the most popular candidate. Though there are some concerns that Scholz might align himself with far-left elements, there is little reason to think that the election of any of these candidates would presage a radical change in German foreign policy. But some major changes might be to Washington’s liking: Baerbock’s Greens are implacably hostile to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and have suggested that it could be shut down for political reasons even once it is operational.

 

Our European allies are dismayed by developments in Afghanistan. They had believed, naïvely, that the end of the Donald Trump administration would mean a more cooperative model of foreign relations in Washington, but President Joe Biden undertook the panicky and headlong U.S. surrender to the Taliban without even pretending to consult them, threatening Europe with, among other things, another refugee crisis.

 

The Europeans, like the Japanese, are increasingly of the opinion that the United States is no longer reliable as an ally or — worse — credible as an enemy. With U.S. foreign policy having been almost entirely subordinated to day-by-day domestic political calculation, the Europeans are, like the Japanese, looking to expand their own capabilities and their capacity to maneuver independent of the United States. And we should encourage our allies to do so.

 

Post-Brexit, France is the only EU country with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and the veto power that goes with that. The EU would like to see Germany added as a permanent Security Council member, and this project deserves the energetic support of the United States. A more powerful European Union serves U.S. interests generally, and, in this case, the move would dilute the power of permanent UNSC members China and Russia — a win-win for Washington.

 

If the events in Afghanistan have made anything plain, it is that the American people — not Washington, not the Biden administration, but the American people — are no longer prepared to “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. It is not even clear that the American people are prepared to pay any price and bear any burden in the pursuit of their own interests against their confirmed enemies. In such a situation, the intelligent course of action is to bolster our allies and those nations around the world that share our values.

 

A cynical argument for this is that an assertive and well-armed Japan is a terrifying problem for Beijing and that a confident and competent European Union is our best bet for keeping Vladimir Putin and his heirs in check. As noted: Tokyo is a lot closer to Beijing than Washington is, and Berlin a lot closer to Moscow. A less cynical, but also true, argument for it is that American interests do, in fact, have a universal aspect, that the interests of the free world are also our interests.

 

To understand this is not sentimentalism — it is pragmatic. Because the rest of the 21st century is going to be dominated by one set of values or the other: Either liberal-democratic values will prevail because the liberal democracies work together to ensure that they do, or authoritarian nationalism will prevail because the liberal democracies die from exhaustion.

No, Afghanistan Is Not the End of American Power

By Rich Lowry

Friday, September 03, 2021

 

Our defeat there was a blow, but by every significant measure, the United States still stands alone.

It’s hard to imagine more humiliating images than what we’ve seen in Afghanistan in recent weeks, from the hasty evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to the chaotic scenes outside the airport.

 

Our surrender to a band of AK-47-bearing guerrillas after 20 years has, understandably, occasioned autumnal thoughts about American power.

 

Even the Soviet Union, on the cusp of full collapse, managed to get out of Afghanistan in good order and leave behind a government that endured for several years.

 

What does it say that we couldn’t match that?

 

Writing in The New Yorker, Robin Wright says the pullout may serve as “a bookend for the era of U.S. global power.” Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, argues that “the botched exit is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending.” Francis Fukuyama says the images in Kabul “have evoked a major juncture in world history,” although he thinks “the end of the American era had come much earlier.”

 

There is no sugarcoating our defeat in Afghanistan and the abject position we put ourselves in during the final days. The withdrawal is a blow to our counterterrorism capabilities, our prestige, and our geopolitical position.

 

For all of that, though, no one in the world has the formidable advantages of the United States, which still outstrips everyone else, including China, on every material metric that matters.

 

Great powers don’t go away easily. The British could be forgiven for thinking that it’d be all downhill after losing their American colonies in a long war joined by their traditional rivals France and Spain. Instead, British imperial power had not yet peaked.

 

Our exit from Saigon in 1975, to this point the touchstone for modern American defeats, was followed by Communist advances all over the map. Yet, within 20 years, we’d win the Cold War and ascend to unprecedented global power.

 

We are still blessed with an extraordinarily favorable geographical position, as a continental nation with friendly neighbors, access to two oceans, enormous reserves of oil and gas, and vast amounts of arable land.

 

We produce about a quarter of global GDP, a share that has held up over the years.

 

We are responsible for an astonishing 40 percent of all military spending in the world. It was ridiculous that Biden made a bragging point of the evacuation, but it’s true that no one else would have been capable of such an operation.

 

We dominate the list of top universities in the world.

 

There is no country people would rather come to. A Taliban spokesperson interviewed on Iranian TV, when challenged why so many people want to flee Afghanistan, rightly pointed out that if American planes were taking people out of Iran, there’d be a rush for the exits there, too.

 

In his book Unrivaled, Michael Beckley of Tufts University and the American Enterprise Institute rebuts the notion that China is overtaking us.

 

American workers are more productive than workers anywhere else. China’s labor productivity has improved, Beckley writes, “but remains half that of Turkey, lower than Mexico’s, and roughly on par with Brazil’s.”

 

We have demographic challenges, but other big powers, especially China, will be aging faster. Over the course of the century, Beckley notes, China will lose half of its workforce, or 470 million people.

 

Our alliance system is an enormous force-multiplier, a network that, according to Beckley, “encompasses 25% of the Earth’s population and accounts for 75% of world GDP and defense spending.” China’s formal ally, in contrast, is North Korea.

 

None of this is to deny that the contemporary United States is racked by self-doubt, poisonous politics, and institutional failure.

 

It is only to say that if we are determined to squander our global position, it will take much more time and folly to do it. A further downward slide, like the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul itself, will be a choice, not an inevitability.

This Is Your Brain on Identity Politics: Abortion Edition

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Saturday, September 04, 2021

 

Identity politics doesn’t just make people annoying. It makes them stupid. If everything is ultimately about race, then, well, everything is ultimately about race. Tax cuts? Race. The Constitution? Race. Crime? Race. All of politics, with its nuances and its undulations, becomes nothing more than an investigation into skin.

 

There’s an oddball sketch from the British comedy troupe Big Train that mocks this sort of monomaniacal thinking. A new man is introduced to a couple of friends in a pub, and he responds to literally everything by contending that it must be a veiled reference to his not being married:

 

Person A: Yeah. Yeah, we were on the train. Um . . . Yeah, we were in the carriage and there were a couple of kids kicking a can of Coke about…
Person B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know how this story ends.
Person A: Yeah?
Person B: Ends with me not being married, doesn’t it?
Person A: What?
Person B: You think I don’t know what you’re saying? Coke cans. Not Tango, Coke cans. You’re talking about me not being married again.

 

Shockingly enough, the poor guy in the sketch who is trying to tell a story is not, in fact, talking about the man he has never met before not being married.

 

Enter Politico, which has a piece up today titled, The Real Origins of the Religious Right, the purpose of which is to suggest that the tens of millions of Americans who care deeply about abortion do not actually care about abortion, but are just good old-fashioned racists:

 

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

 

It would be worth addressing the historical argument being made here at greater length. But, for now, I want to push back against the broader implication of the piece, which was summed up well by the editor-at-large of Newsweek, MSNBC’s Naveed Jamali, who argued this morning that “the pro-life movement has always been about white supremacy.”

 

This is the sort of nonsense that one begins to spout when one has turned off one’s brain, and, instead of thinking questions through, decided that that can be only two sort of people in America: Good People and White Supremacist People. It is also a ridiculous non sequitur. It is not true that the pro-life movement came out of “white supremacy.” But even if it were — as is true of, say, the gun control movement, which until 1970 really was inextricable from racism — that would in no way imply that modern pro-lifers were motivated by animus toward people who aren’t white.

 

They’re not. Indeed, the argument doesn’t even make sense. Per a research paper put together by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, and presented to Congress:

 

According to the 2011 Abortion Surveillance Report issued by the Center for Disease Control, black women make up 14 percent of the childbearing population, yet obtained 36.2 percent of reported abortions. Black women have the highest abortion ratio in the country, with 474 abortions per 1,000 live births. Percentages at these levels illustrate that more than 19 million black babies have been aborted since 1973.

 

Moreover:

 

According to the Departments of Public Health of every state that reports abortion by ethnicity; black women disproportionately lead in the numbers. For example, in Mississippi, 79 percent of abortions are obtained by black women; in Washington, D.C., more than 60 percent; in Georgia, 59.4 percent; in Alabama, 58.4 percent.

 

Clearly, there is no white supremacist in the world who would look at these numbers and say, “boy, we’d better stop that.” The idea is self-evidently absurd, which is why real-life white supremacists tend to be militantly pro-choice. When one adds to this that, per polling from last year, white people seem to have almost identical views on abortion to Hispanic people, the claim becomes sillier still.

 

All told, the core position held by pro-lifers is simple: That an unborn child is alive, and that it is wrong to take innocent life. They may disagree on a few details or on the most appropriate set of government policies, and they may have arrived at their beliefs for different reasons or at different times (despite being an atheist, I have always been pro-life — even in England, where that is an unusual position). But the root contention is pretty elementary: That there are two bodies involved in a pregnancy, and that deliberately killing one of them is morally wrong. Jimmy Carter, as with almost everything else at stake in our modern politics, simply doesn’t enter into the equation.

Three Points on Afghanistan

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, August 29, 2021

 

Joe Biden must have thought he was finally due for a run of good luck.

 

After a Senate career that resembled the Rio Grande — long but shallow, and grand only in name — he was a figure of fun in the Obama administration and slid immediately into obscurity. He didn’t even run for the big job in 2016, and nobody was looking for him. His prospects were resurrected by the unlikely phenomenon of Donald Trump, perhaps the only man in American politics both tawdry enough to make Joe Biden look statesmanlike and incompetent enough to lose an election to him.

 

And the timing could not have been better for Biden as president-elect. The worst of the COVID-19 epidemic was behind us (or so it appeared at the time), and the hard work of developing vaccines against the virus had been done, leaving only the considerable but manageable logistical challenge of the vaccination campaign. The worst of the economic suffering associated with the epidemic had passed — GDP had grown at an astounding 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2020 and a solid 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter — while employment and wages had been headed in the right direction.

 

It might have been a very enjoyable retirement, the best-case scenario for a man whose basic unfitness, both intellectual and moral, for the office has never been in serious doubt.

 

But the world has a way of intervening. George W. Bush had campaigned for the presidency as an education-reformer skeptical of “nation-building” adventures abroad, but 9/11 changed that. It remains mysterious why President Biden provoked the crisis in Afghanistan that has upended his presidency — the withdrawal of U.S. troops was a Trump priority, and Biden is not especially beholden to those. It may be as simple — and as profane — as the fact that Biden did not want to spend September 11, 2021, watching MSNBC pundits bemoaning that U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan 20 years after the precipitating event. Joe Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972, ought to have learned from Richard Nixon’s example that ending an inconclusive war is a complicated undertaking with very little political payoff.

 

The retreat from Afghanistan has presented a horrifying display of political cowardice and incompetence. It is likely that Democrats will pay a price for it at the polls, provided that Republicans resist their neurotic urge to debase themselves in some dramatic way between now and the midterm elections. But there are concerns beyond the question of short-term political advantages. Our policy in Afghanistan is not going to be one of open-ended military engagement and nation-building.

 

So, what is our Afghanistan policy going to be?

 

Three points that should inform our thinking.

 

First: Afghanistan policy is China policy. Afghanistan borders China, and much of the suffering in Afghanistan has its origins in Pakistan, which is today something between a Chinese client-state and a Chinese colony. China has several interests in Afghanistan, some of them in conflict. While the bosses in Beijing no doubt take a certain satisfaction in watching Americans scuttling off in ignominious defeat, they do not relish the thought of a revivified Islamist movement inspired by the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and perhaps interested in turning its gaze to Xinjiang, where Beijing is busily reducing the Muslim population. Beijing doesn’t want Afghan opium crossing the border into China — and some very powerful people in China see opium and heroin as competition to the bootleg fentanyl (and its precursors) produced in China and distributed worldwide under a legal regime one Brookings scholar describes as “freewheeling.” Afghanistan sits atop some $1 trillion or more in rare-earth minerals, the development of which would undermine China’s dominant position in the production of those commodities, with both economic and strategic consequences. While we cannot ignore the horrifying suffering of the Afghan people, we should keep in mind that U.S. interests in Afghanistan have never been exclusively, or even principally, about what happens inside Afghanistan.

 

Second: Afghanistan policy is European policy. Our European allies (and our allies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere) are bitterly disappointed by our headlong retreat from Afghanistan, a policy that has been executed with little to no substantive consultation or coordination with those allies. The Europeans who had been hoping that the end of the Trump administration would mean a shift in the conduct or content of American engagement with the rest of the world are awakening to the fact that presidential unilateralism in foreign affairs is not a characteristic of the Trump administration or of Republican administrations but of U.S. political practice at large. The Biden administration hardly even consulted Congress, which is controlled by members of President Biden’s own party, much less with our allies in Brussels and London. And if Afghanistan policy is China policy, then Europe policy is China policy, too: The United States has shown itself unable to secure its interests in Afghanistan, where our enemy is a half-organized rabble of gangsters and fanatics — how much less likely is it that the United States will be able to secure its interests vis-à-vis China while going it alone, or effectively alone? In the coming decades, it is very likely that we will see one of two conditions prevail: Either the world will be increasingly dominated by China, or an alliance of the United States, our allies in the English-speaking countries, and the European Union will contain China under a system of multilateral institutions and global norms that reflect liberal-democratic values rather than nationalistic-autocratic values. We let our allies down in Afghanistan, making it more likely that they will let us down in the confrontation with China.

 

Third: Afghanistan policy is law-enforcement policy. My friend Andrew C. McCarthy has argued eloquently and persuasively against the “law-enforcement approach” to dealing with jihadist terror, the deficiencies of which he understands precisely because his background is in prosecuting terrorists as criminals after they have committed atrocities. But the law-enforcement model has two important things going for it: One, we may take a law-enforcement approach because we apparently are determined not to maintain a conventional military engagement in Afghanistan, and, though one assumes that there are agents from the spookier corners of U.S. government being dispatched to do unspeakable things to unspeakable people, such measures go only so far; two, a law-enforcement model makes some sense because we are dealing with the Taliban, which is, as I have argued for some time, best understood as being first and foremost a crime syndicate.

 

This is not to say that its Islamist fanaticism is not sincere, but the Sicilian progenitors of the modern Mafia were no less committed to religious orthodoxy, and in their time they even resembled the Taliban down to such details as enforcing social conservatism in dress and manners and policing public displays of vice. Religious fervor and criminal intent can, in the right circumstances, go hand in hand, and often do.

 

And with international aid drying up and no domestic economy to speak of, the Taliban will be especially reliant on the production of drugs (not only opium and heroin but now also methamphetamine) and other criminal undertakings for money, which it is going to need — desperately. With the Americans licked, the top strategic threat to the Taliban is the Afghan people’s detestation. The Taliban do not want to spend the next 20 years in the role of Americans — fighting an insurgency that they have the power to defeat in every individual confrontation without ever defeating it in toto. The Taliban apparently have learned something from organizations such as Hezbollah, and they apparently intend to become a provider of public goods — not only a guarantor of physical security but also a patron of social welfare and development. But it takes a hell of a lot of heroin to build a highway. If the Taliban are going to try to buy consent, the price is going to be high.

 

These factors will interact in complicated ways. For example, while the United States surely would like to see less heroin and fentanyl coming across our borders, the profits from such drug sales present a second dimension to the issue because they may fund Taliban efforts to entrench and legitimize their rule, possibly through the development of the country’s mineral resources or through flashy infrastructure projects — which probably would be carried out with Chinese aid by Chinese firms in the service of Chinese strategic and economic interests, as in Pakistan.

 

We can run from Afghanistan, but we cannot hide from the consequences.