Is Liberalism Exhausted?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, February 27, 2015

Canaries are not very formidable birds, but they have their uses. For instance, coal miners learned over a century ago that when canaries gag and drop dead at the bottom of the cage, it’s a sign that maybe there’s something wrong with the air in the mine.

MSNBC is not a very formidable network, but its wheezing is similarly instructive. MSNBC’s slogan is “Lean Forward,” which has a robust sound to it. But it turns out the phrase is a more apt descriptor of how the Peacock Network’s mini-me is poised to teeter off its perch and plunge beak-first into the droppings-stained pages of the fading New Republic below.

It is suffering “cataclysmic ratings declines” (in Politico’s words) from ratings that were already mediocre to begin with. The hope had been that Ronan Farrow, the Prius-dashboard saint of Brooklyn hipsters and the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (or Frank Sinatra), would, like David Hasselhoff in Baywatch, leap into the waters and save the drowning network. It turned out that Farrow’s flotation device was a messenger bag full of bricks. His show has been canceled, as has Joy Reid’s daily show. Other MSNBC stars are being followed around by the Grim Reaper. Al Sharpton, a race-baiting tax cheat with blood on his hands, is slated to be moved out of his 6 p.m. slot, presumably so he can spend more time with his wayward teleprompter.

MSNBC had thought it could mimic Fox News’s success from the left. The problem is that it never understood what Fox News is. MSNBC’s execs saw it through the prism of their own ideological bias and so ended up offering a left-wing caricature of a caricature. Contrary to myth, Fox (where I am a contributor) is in fact an actual news network, albeit with prime-time opinion shows. Meanwhile, a study by Pew found that MSNBC was 85 percent opinion.

The more salient point is that there’s such a small appetite for that opinion. As Josh Kraushaar of National Journal recently observed, Barack Obama has successfully moved his party to the left but has failed utterly to bring the rest of the country with him. In 2012, James Stimson, arguably America’s leading expert on U.S. public opinion, found that the country was more conservative than at any time since 1952.

This might seem counterintuitive, given that Obama was reelected that year, but there’s an obvious explanation. Barack Obama has a singular skill: getting Barack Obama elected. In all the elections since 2008, he has shown a remarkable inability to get anyone else elected, or to move public opinion in his favor. (Obamacare, for instance, remains stubbornly unpopular.) Measured in terms of statehouses, state legislatures, and House and Senate seats, the GOP is stronger today than any point since the 1920s. If you still think Obama has generous coattails, ask Rahm Emanuel for a second opinion.

The president is unbowed, of course. He’s unilaterally using — and abusing — the powers of his office to legalize illegal immigration, throw a wet blanket on cheap energy, and turn the Internet into a government-regulated utility. He has the support of his dwindling party and the equally dwindling mainstream media. But even here his policy agenda is as threadbare as his cultural legacy. A majority of Americans believe race relations have gotten worse since he was elected.

Meanwhile, the cultural Left has disengaged from mainstream political arguments, preferring instead the comforts of identity-politics argy-bargy. You judge political movements not by their manifestos but by where they put their passion. And on the left these days, the only things that arouse passion are arguments about race and gender.

For instance, the feminist agitprop drama The Vagina Monologues is now under fire from the left because it is not inclusive of men who believe they are women. Patricia Arquette was criticized from the right for her Oscar-acceptance rant about women’s wage equality, but the criticism paled in comparison to the bile from the left, which flayed her for leaving out the plight of the transgendered and other members of the Coalition of the Oppressed.

Such critiques may seem like a cutting-edge fight for the future among the protagonists, but looked at from the political center, it suggests political exhaustion. At least old-fashioned Marxists talked about the economy.

Of course liberalism isn’t dead; it’s just resting. But it certainly could use an exciting, charismatic savior to breathe new life and fresh thinking into its ranks. Thank goodness Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings.

The Fatal Flaw in the Iran Deal

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, February 26, 2015

A sunset clause?

The news from the nuclear talks with Iran was already troubling. Iran was being granted the “right to enrich.” It would be allowed to retain and spin thousands of centrifuges. It could continue construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Yet so thoroughly was Iran stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that just last Thursday the IAEA reported its concern “about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed . . . development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Bad enough. Then it got worse: News leaked Monday of the “sunset clause.” President Obama had accepted the Iranian demand that any restrictions on its program be time-limited. After which, the mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want.

Sanctions lifted. Restrictions gone. Nuclear development legitimized. Iran would re-enter the international community, as Obama suggested in an interview last December, as “a very successful regional power.” A few years — probably around ten — of good behavior and Iran would be home free.

The agreement thus would provide a predictable path to an Iranian bomb. Indeed, a flourishing path, with trade resumed, oil pumping, and foreign investment pouring into a restored economy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile program is subject to no restrictions at all. It’s not even part of these negotiations.

Why is Iran building them? You don’t build ICBMs in order to deliver sticks of dynamite. Their only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads. Nor does Iran need an ICBM to hit Riyadh or Tel Aviv. Intercontinental missiles are for reaching, well, other continents. North America, for example.

Such an agreement also means the end of nonproliferation. When a rogue state defies the world, continues illegal enrichment, and then gets the world to bless an eventual unrestricted industrial-level enrichment program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead. And regional hyperproliferation becomes inevitable as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others seek shelter in going nuclear themselves.

Wasn’t Obama’s great international cause a nuclear-free world? Within months of his swearing-in, he went to Prague to so declare. He then led a 50-party Nuclear Security Summit, one of whose proclaimed achievements was having Canada give up some enriched uranium.

Having disarmed the Canadian threat, Obama turned to Iran. The deal now on offer to the ayatollah would confer legitimacy on the nuclearization of the most rogue of rogue regimes: radically anti-American, deeply jihadist, purveyor of terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria, puppeteer of a Syrian regime that specializes in dropping barrel bombs on civilians. In fact, the Iranian regime just this week, at the apex of these nuclear talks, staged a spectacular attack on a replica U.S. carrier near the Strait of Hormuz.

Well, say the administration apologists, what’s your alternative? Do you want war?

It’s Obama’s usual, subtle false-choice maneuver: It’s either appeasement or war.

It’s not. True, there are no good choices, but Obama’s prospective deal is the worst possible. Not only does Iran get a clear path to the bomb but it gets sanctions lifted, all pressure removed, and international legitimacy.

There is a third choice. If you are not stopping Iran’s program, don’t give away the store. Keep the pressure, keep the sanctions. Indeed, increase them. After all, previous sanctions brought Iran to its knees and to the negotiating table in the first place. And that was before the collapse of oil prices, which would now vastly magnify the economic effect of heightened sanctions.

Congress is proposing precisely that. Combined with cheap oil, it could so destabilize the Iranian economy as to threaten the clerical regime. That’s the opening. Then offer to renew negotiations for sanctions relief but from a very different starting point — no enrichment. Or, if you like, with a few token centrifuges for face-saving purposes.

And no sunset.

That’s the carrot. As for the stick, make it quietly known that the U.S. will not stand in the way of any threatened nation that takes things into its own hands. We leave the regional threat to the regional powers, say, Israeli bombers overflying Saudi Arabia.

Consider where we began: six U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding an end to Iranian enrichment. Consider what we are now offering: an interim arrangement ending with a sunset clause that allows the mullahs a robust, industrial-strength, internationally sanctioned nuclear program.

Such a deal makes the Cuba normalization look good and the Ukrainian cease-fires positively brilliant. We are on the cusp of an epic capitulation. History will not be kind.

Catholic Schools Should Be Catholic, Even in San Francisco

By Ian Tuttle

Friday, February 27, 2015

If you care to learn how thin our conception of religious liberty has become, look to the Bay Area.

In early February, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone released a statement “regarding the teachings and practice of the Catholic Church,” to be included as of August 1, 2015, in the faculty handbook for the four high schools run by the archdiocese. “We, the Archdiocesan High Schools,” it reads, “affirm that we are educational institutions of the Catholic Church, and as such strive to present Catholic doctrine in its fullness, and that we hold, believe and practice all that the Holy Catholic Church teaches, believes and proclaims to be true, whether from the natural moral law or by way of revelation from God through Scripture and Tradition.” Fifteen “affirm and believe” statements follow, which focus on the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality — its espousal of chastity and the inviolability of human life, for instance, and its rejection of same-sex marriage — but are adequately summarized in the first statement: “We affirm and believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and we embrace the teachings about that Church as enunciated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

Cordileone is also seeking to redefine teachers as “ministers” in their contracts, which would make their employment dependent on their adherence to the “statement.” Taken together, Cordileone’s proposals might be summarized as demonstrating that he thinks Catholic schools should be Catholic.

Unsurprisingly, this has been deemed an outrage. In mid February, eight state lawmakers from the Bay Area wrote Cordileone a letter contending that the “Statement” “sends an alarming message of intolerance to youth.” They objected to contracting teachers as “ministers” because it would curtail “the freedom,” among others, “to choose who to love and marry, [and] how to plan a family.”

The San Francisco Chronicle editorialized to the same effect, concluding, “Cordileone could not be more out of touch with the community he has been assigned to serve.” And an online petition has been set up to oppose the archbishop’s efforts. According to signees, the “outdated and discriminatory” proposal “create[s] a culture of fear that denies staff the right to follow their own individual consciences and harms students.” Nearly 6,700 people have signed.

It would be difficult to find a starker juxtaposition between two conceptions of religious life. Cordileone, for his part, has posed the simple question, What is a Catholic school? and offered an answer: A Catholic school is a school that embodies and promotes the vision of the Catholic Church. He thinks that students at Catholic schools should be educated in the Catholic faith, and he thinks that teachers who adhere to that faith are best suited to that task. (He acknowledges that Catholic schools can have non-Catholic teachers; he simply calls for them not to violate the Church’s teachings, publicly or privately.)

These are not new ideas, and Cordileone is not advancing some reactionary scheme. The Catholic Church believes that God has set forth the cosmic order, a sliver of which is available to natural reason, but much of which has been illuminated by the light of revelation. Educating children in the Catholic faith, then, is not supplemental, something to be tacked onto reading and mathematics and the sciences. No, “understanding is the reward of faith,” as Augustine wrote. “So do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe so that you may understand.”

By contrast, Cordileone’s opponents think that a Catholic school should not be allowed to partake in the mission of the Church of which it is part. It should simply be a privately funded public school.

This is the inevitable consequence of a principle that views religion as a private affair. Recall President Obama’s gloss of the First Amendment as “freedom of worship.” He was rightly criticized, because his reading suggested that freedom to practice one’s religion is restricted to churches and synagogues and the ceremonies that happen therein. Exit the sanctuary, and your religion should be hung up until the following weekend. Much the same is happening in the Bay Area.

But what Cordileone is stressing is that being Catholic is, and should be, all-encompassing. It gives to one’s entire life structure and meaning and direction that is just as urgent Monday through Saturday as on Sunday. Our political activities should, wherever possible, defer to the dictates of religious life.

Yet those who would oppose Catholic schools’ being robustly Catholic are unwilling to engage on this level. Rather, they hew to cries of “equal rights” and “freedom of conscience,” unwilling or unable to recognize that their imposition of secular dogma on the religious liberty of Cordileone and his flock is, in fact, the only intolerance in this situation.

Our Illiberal Immigration Policy Leads to Chaos

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, February 26, 2015

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Obama’s executive order that overrode existing immigration law. The result is more acrimony and chaos.

It is a good time to remember that there are more than just two types of immigration — legal and illegal. There also exist liberal and illiberal approaches to immigration.

Take liberal immigration. It is governed by laws passed by Congress and signed and executed by the president. Nearly all Americans accept that no individual can pick and choose which federal statute he chooses to obey, depending on his own perceived self-interest.

Liberal immigration would be entirely legal, meritocratic, and ethnically blind. Skills and education would matter more than proximity to the border or political clout.

The numbers of immigrants would be balanced by liberal considerations: the need for skilled newcomers to avoid dependency on American society, and concern that their arrival not harm the economic aspirations of poor working citizens.

Liberal immigration would aim at rapidly integrating and assimilating immigrants in accordance with further classical-liberal principles. America is not a multicultural society where appearance is essential to our characters, but a uniquely multiracial nation bound by common values where race becomes secondary.

In contrast, illiberal immigration would be the opposite of the above.

A president by fiat would nullify existing laws and order federal agencies to ignore them. Or he would issue executive orders contrary to both his prior promises and to the Constitution.

President Obama did not, as he alleges, override Congress because it failed to act on immigration. Instead he ignored it because Congress would not act in a particular fashion that he found ideologically akin to his own beliefs.

Illiberal immigration would also mean that new arrivals could ignore the cost, time, and inconvenience of applying for visas. Instead, they would simply enter the U.S. illegally and not be transparent about their illegal status.

Illiberal immigration would turn policy away from ethnically blind considerations to focus on ethnic criteria.

It would assume that the enforcement of federal immigration law and the making of immigration policy should react to particular ethnic and political lobbying groups.

Illiberal immigration would not concern itself with the impact of arrivals on the host country, especially the costs incurred by the public or the effect on the wages and services of the poor and working classes.

Also, illiberal immigration would seek — both explicitly by political intent and implicitly by sheer numbers — to undermine easy assimilation, in hopes of creating bloc constituencies with group concerns rather than individual concerns.

Illiberal immigration would encourage romance for, not disappointment with, the country left behind. And it would result in demands on, rather than gratitude to, the newly adopted country.

The reason why immigration is now a mess is not because there are no liberal solutions, but because there are so many illiberal stumbling blocks.

Many Americans are willing to allow some sort of exemption to the immigrants residing here illegally. Such an exemption would offer a pathway to permanent legal residency to the majority of immigrants here illegally if some liberal criteria were first applied.

First, close the border to illegal immigration to prevent recurrence of these problems. Texas authorities report that 20,000 foreign nationals have crossed the state’s southern border with Mexico in just the last two months.

Ensure that those who have committed crimes in the United States, or who have no history of work but instead only a record of dependency on entitlements, return to their nations of origin.

Those who have just illegally arrived in cynical anticipation of amnesty should likewise return home to go through the process legally.

Make immigration a meritocratic system that does not take into consideration the particular country of origin or ethnic background of the would-be immigrant.

What is holding up legislative compromise and what drove President Obama’s executive order is illiberal opposition to what most Americans see as a liberal compromise.

The advocates of open borders apparently do not wish an end to easy entry without regard to the law.

They do not wish to deport foreign nationals who have broken U.S. laws, or who have no history of productive employment, or who have just arrived in anticipation of amnesty.

They do not wish to reform legal immigration to a completely meritocratic system that might not necessarily favor the current preponderance of arrivals from Latin America and Mexico — and thus might not enhance the political clout of ethnic operatives.

And they most certainly do not wish to end admission to the U.S. on the basis of cheap labor. To do that would increase the wages and bargaining power of working Americans.

The solution to the immigration mess is not to threaten militancy if a particular political agenda is jeopardized. It is not to slam a federal judge who demands adherence to the law. And it is certainly not to scapegoat a generous host for not agreeing to political demands of guests.

The answer instead is simply to act legally — and liberally.

Student-Loan Default Is Not a Moral Good

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Some years ago, I was living in a rundown section of Lubbock, Texas, known locally as the “Tech ghetto” — being populated by a great many young Texas Tech students on modest budgets and the occasional junior staffer at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal earning $400 a week — when I got a knock on my door and opened it to find a not especially prosperous-looking man of some years holding before him a silver tea service, which he was eager to sell me. I began to run through my neighbors in my head, trying to identify which household was most likely to have been burgled in the past five minutes by the man on my doorstep. I would have called the police, but I didn’t have a telephone at the time. I declined his offer, and advised the fellow that I would decline it much more emphatically if in the next minute or so he was still visible from my doorway. But not everyone feels the same way about trafficking in stolen goods — on and around New York City’s Canal Street, hordes of tourists come to pick over counterfeit versions of luxury handbags and high-end watches, counterfeiting being only another form of theft, albeit a slightly indirect one. But there are no illusions on Canal Street — everybody knows exactly what is going on.

You would not know it if you knew the world only through the declarations of Elizabeth Warren and Occupy rhetoric, but bank loans do not generally work like that. JPMorgan Chase does not send out legions of small-time criminals to knock on doors in low-income neighborhoods with the hopes of ensnaring some new mortgage customers, and if you want to open a line of credit with Deutsche Bank, you do not do so by making some discreet, oblique suggestions to a guy with a bunch of fake Gucci purses hanging on his wall before being led into a back room where real business is conducted. If you buy a car on credit, there are dozens of forms to be read, lines to be signed upon, and consultations with third parties. There are reams of bureaucratic documentation involved in getting a simple and straightforward credit card. And student loans are not something that simply happens to unsuspecting young people wandering around the precincts of higher education. They have to be sought out, applied for, approved, etc.

American households have been getting their act together on debt, at least a little bit, since the financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Credit-card defaults, after spiking around 2009, have been in decline, as have mortgage defaults and car-loan defaults. Home-equity loans took a little longer to get straightened out, but defaults on those are in decline, too, and have been for some time. (Much more on all that from the New York Fed here.) But one kind of debt default remains stubbornly on the rise: student loans, which in total add up to more than all U.S. credit-card debt and are much more likely to be in default than any other major debt category, far outstripping credit cards in the No. 2 default position.

On Monday, The New Yorker offered a sympathetic report (“A student-loan debt revolt begins”) about 15 former students of Corinthian Colleges, a dodgy and now largely defunct operator of for-profit schools, who intend to stop repaying their student loans as a matter of principle. “They believe that they have both ethical and legal grounds for what appears to be an unprecedented collective action against the debt charged to students who attended Corinthian schools,” writes Vauhini Vara, “and they are also making a broader statement about the trillion dollars of student debt owed throughout the country.” Senator Warren has called on the federal government to simply discharge the debts of former Corinthian students. An Occupy-affiliated organization called Debt Collective is pressing a similar agenda.

What does not seem to have occurred to Senator Warren, to Debt Collective, to the Corinthian 15, or to Vauhini Vara and the editors of The New Yorker is this: The students in question do not owe money to Corinthian Colleges. They owe money to third parties, those being private lenders and the federal government. As an instrument of protest, they might as well stop making their car payments, skip their rent, or boost mocacchinos from Starbucks — the people who lent them money are no more responsible for Corinthian’s woes than are their landlords and baristas.

This is classic leftist misdirection. The students in question took out loans and used their credit to purchase a defective product, no different from putting a bucket of magic beans on a MasterCard. They made poor decisions with other people’s money, which is not entirely surprising: Access to other people’s money is an invitation to making poor decisions. There is an excellent case to be made that they were defrauded by Corinthian — or, at the very least, that Corinthian failed to deliver on services contracted — and that the students are therefore entitled to a refund of the money they paid to the firm. But just as MasterCard is not responsible if you put a lemon on your credit card (you’d be shocked how many people purchase cars with credit cards), Bank of McNasty and Uncle Stupid are not responsible for legal adults who borrow money to buy subpar educational services. This is not to say that the students in question weren’t mistreated — it certainly appears that they were — but they were not mistreated by their banks.

Michelle Obama famously complained about having to make cumbrous student-loan payments early in life, blithely oblivious, as she tends to be, that one has a moral obligation to pay one’s debts, and that student loans are generally made at concessionary interest rates, meaning that somebody, somewhere, is doing you a favor by lending you money at below-market rates.

Part of the problem is that nobody much knows what a market-rate loan for a college education should really look like. Most student loans are either made by the federal government or guaranteed by the federal government; the 2010 Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility (ho, ho!) Act, which was rolled into the Affordable Care (ho, ho!) Act, eliminated federally subsidized loans and replaced them with direct federal loans. If you think of the student-loan bubble as being like the subprime-mortgage bubble — and it is — then SAFRA “solved” the problem of subprime lending in the private sector by replacing it with subprime lending by the government. There are basically no underwriting standards when it comes to student loans, which are mainly made to young people who have little or nothing in the way of credit histories upon which to evaluate their creditworthiness. Intelligent approaches, such as taking into account the institution being attended and the degree being sought, naturally are unthinkable, implying as they do such inegalitarian outcomes as a Wharton MBA student’s being judged a better risk than a women’s-studies major down the road at Temple or an “individually designed major” major at Menlo College paying 40 grand a year.

See if you can spot the pattern: The federal government decides that health insurance is a right, but also decides that traditional methods of evaluating health-insurance risk are unfair (read: “politically unpopular”), gets directly involved in the market, and health-care prices go way up; the federal government decides that access to mortgage credit is a right, but also decides that traditional methods of evaluating mortgage-borrower risk are unfair (read: “politically unpopular”), gets directly involved in the market, and housing prices go way up before crashing and causing a worldwide financial catastrophe; the federal government decides that access to student loans is a right, but also decides that applying traditional methods of risk evaluation to those loans is unfair (read: “politically unpopular”), gets directly involved in the market, and college prices go way up . . .

If you make cheap money — credit at below-market rates — available for the purchase of X, then the price of X will typically go up. Dodgy operations like Corinthian (or Countrywide) will spring into existence to soak up the great raging streams of money being shunted into the X market. Just as people will buy more expensive cars when zero-interest financing is available, and people will buy more expensive houses when squat-down-interest-only-Crazy-Eddie-clown-show mortgages are available, people will spend money irresponsibly on higher education when they are spending somebody else’s money, which is exactly what is happening when the federal government arranges loans at concessionary rates. Sweetheart financing is a favorite federal gimmick, because the federal government, unlike a bank, does not have to account for or price the risks it assumes when making loans. If the federal government just gave students money rather than giving them money indirectly by offering them loans without the risk properly priced in, that spending would have to show up on a budget, somewhere. Discounted financing is one of the ways that the federal government spends money on political constituencies — college students, politically connected businesses and industry groups — without having to honestly account for the money spent.

But there’s more than $1 trillion in student loans out there, and you’re on the hook for a lot of it — not in a bank-bailout, too-big-to-fail, indirect way, but explicitly. And the default rate continues to climb — and the progressives are embracing loan default as a moral good. If you think that’s smart financial management, I know a guy who will make you a great deal on a silver tea service.