Kamala Harris Is an Idiot

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

Over the last couple of years, as familiarity has bred contempt, and contempt has bred exasperation, I have got into the habit of distilling into uncustomarily blunt terms what I think of our most prominent political aspirants. My modest verdict on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, was that he was “an asshole.” My considered take on his predecessor, Donald Trump, was that he is “a lunatic.” Herewith, to complete the trilogy, I will offer another candid take: Kamala Harris is an idiot.

 

Like the little boy staring at the naked emperor in the famous fairy tale of yore, I can scarcely believe what I am seeing before my eyes. Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete. Harris, the New York Times has variously proposed, has been “strategically vague,” “light on detail,” and “careful.” Alternatively, she has “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge”; learned to respond “to unpleasant questions without answering them”; and shown an ability to “avoid delineating her stance on some issues.” And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”

 

I disagree. I think that word would be “idiot.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea. What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial. Asked by Stephanie Ruhle what would happen to her plan to “raise corporate taxes” and make “billionaires and the top corporations” pay “their fair share” if the “GOP takes control of the Senate,” Harris seemed unable to process the concept. “But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she replied. “And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it.”

 

Shakespeare observed that the wish is father to the thought. Add in the corollary that the thought is the father of the word, and one begins to understand Harris’s problem — which is that she has no useful thoughts because she has no useful wishes, and she has no useful words because she has no useful thoughts. “Why,” asks the commentariat, “has she not improved her answers over time?” The answer is simple: Because she has not improved her thinking over time. It may be true that, in addition to being an idiot, Harris is “nervous,” or “overwhelmed,” or “indecisive,” but, properly understood, those are less separate diagnoses than symptoms of the same underlying ill. The word-salads; the awkward cackle; the stunned repetition of agnostic phrases — they are all byproducts of Harris’s debilitating suspicion that she has no earthly clue what she’s doing. She can’t debate policy because she’s never examined policy. She can’t sell a worldview because she’s never had a worldview. She can’t deftly navigate a paradox or a hypocrisy or a surprise, because, like a man attempting to cover up his infidelities, her political promiscuity has left her tangled in a web of no rhyme, reason, or design. Harris’s aim in each and every moment is to get through the next minute, the next hour, or the next day without being conclusively exposed as a cipher.

 

Last week, Harris was asked on The View what she would do differently than Joe Biden, and, though that remains the key issue in the election, it became clear that she’d never considered the matter before it hit her ears. A few hours later, when talking to Stephen Colbert, she still didn’t have an answer to the layup. She won’t have one tomorrow, or next week, or next year, either. This is who she is, who she was, and who she will always be. She cannot outrun it. If Americans notice prior to November 5, she will lose and retire in ignominy. If they notice a little later, she will win but be disdained within a matter of weeks. Donald Trump’s gift to the nation was to prove to a new generation that character is destiny. Kamala Harris is set to confirm that idiocy is, too.

Confessions of a Republican Exile

By David Brooks

Saturday, October 12, 2024

 

Politically, I’m a bit of a wanderer. I grew up in a progressive family and was a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q. Wilson, Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Irving Kristol, the right was just more intellectually alive. But over time I’ve become gradually more repulsed by the GOP—first by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.

 

So these days I find myself rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time. I’ve taken up residence on what I like to call the rightward edge of the leftward tendency, and I think of myself as a moderate or conservative Democrat. But moving from Red World to Blue World is like moving to a different country. The norms, fashions, and values are all different. Whenever you move to a new place or community or faith, you love some things about it but find others off-putting. So the other 30 percent of the time a cranky inner voice says, “Screw the Democrats, I’m voting for the GOP.”

 

For context, let me explain a little more about my political peregrinations. I think of myself as a Whig, part of a tradition that begins with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party in the 18th century, continues through the Whig Party of Henry Clay and then the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln in the 19th, and then extends to the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt in the 20th. Whigs put social mobility at the center of our politics. If liberals prioritize equality and libertarians prioritize individual freedom, Whigs ask: Which party is doing the most to expand opportunity, to help young people rise and succeed in our society? Which party is doing the most to cultivate energy, ambition, creativity, and daring in the citizenry?

 

Today, Whigs don’t have a permanent home. During the Reagan-Thatcher years, Republicans were the party of dynamism, but now they have become backward looking and reactionary. At the Democratic National Convention, I watched Michelle Obama talk about the generations of mothers who sacrificed so their children could rise and realize their full potential. Those are the people that Whigs like me want the American government to support. So here I find myself, almost all the way to joining Team Blue.

 

But my new suit is ill-fitting. I’m still not fully comfortable as a Democrat. And given that there are many other former Republicans who have become politically homeless in the Age of MAGA, I thought it might be useful to explain, first, what it is about the left that can make a wannabe convert like me want to flee in disgust—and then to explain why, ultimately, I’ve migrated in that direction despite sometimes having to suppress my gag reflex.

 

***

 

Progressive aristocrats could accept these realities and act like a ruling class that has responsibilities to all of society. But the more they dominate the commanding heights of society, the more aggressively progressive aristocrats posture as marginalized victims of oppression. Much of what has come to be called “wokeness” consists of highly educated white people who went to fantastically expensive colleges trying to show the world, and themselves, that they are victims, or at least allied with the victims. Watching Ivy League students complain about how poorly society treats them is not good for my digestion.

 

Elites then use progressivism as a mechanism to exclude the less privileged. To be a good progressive, you have to speak the language: intersectionality, problematic, Latinx, cisgender. But the way you learn that language is by attending some expensive school. A survey of the Harvard class of 2023 found that 65 percent of students call themselves “progressive” or “very progressive.” Kids smart enough to get into Harvard are smart enough to know that to thrive at the super-elite universities, it helps to garb yourself in designer social-justice ideology. Last spring, when the Washington Monthly surveyed American colleges to see which had encampments of Gaza protesters, it found them “almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.” Schools serving primarily the middle and working classes, in contrast, had almost no encampments.

 

This privilege-progressivism loop is self-reinforcing. A central irony of the progressive aristocracy is that the most culturally progressive institutions in society are elite universities—but the institutions that do the most to reinforce social and economic inequality are … those same elite universities. Sure, they may assign Foucault and Fanon in their humanities classes, but their main function is to educate kids who grew up in the richest, most privileged households in America and launch them into rich and privileged adult lives.

 

After college, members of the progressive aristocracy tend to cluster in insular places like Brooklyn or Berkeley where almost everybody thinks like them. If you go to the right private school, the right elite college, and live in the right urban neighborhood, you might never encounter anyone who challenges your worldview. To assure that this insularity is complete, progressives have done a very good job of purging Republicans from the sectors they dominate, like the media and the academy.

 

The progressive aristocracy’s assumption that all sophisticated people think like them, its tendency to opine about the right without ever having seriously engaged with a single member of that group, the general attitude of moral and intellectual superiority—in my weaker moments, all of it makes me want to go home and watch a bunch of Ben Shapiro videos.

 

***

 

A second trait that’s making it hard for me to fully embrace the Democratic Party is its tendency toward categorical thinking. People in Blue World are much more conscious of categories than people in Red World are. Among the Democrats, the existence of groups like White Dudes for Harris, or Asians for Harris, is considered natural and normal.

 

This kind of identity-politics thinking rests on a few assumptions: that a person’s gender, racial, or ethnic identity is the most important thing about them; that we should emphasize not what unites all people but what divides them; that history consists principally of the struggle between oppressor and oppressed; that a member of one group can never really understand the lived experience of someone in another group; and that the supposedly neutral institutions and practices of society—things like free speech, academic standards, and the justice system—are really just tools the dominant groups use to maintain their hegemony.

 

These assumptions may or may not be correct (some of them are, at least to a degree), but they produce a boring way of thinking. When I’m around people with the identitarian mindset, I usually know what they are going to say next. Blue World panel discussions put less emphasis on having a true diversity of views represented than on having the correct range of the approved identity categories.

 

But the real problem is that categorical thinking makes it harder to see people as individuals. Better to see a person first as a unique individual, with their own distinctive way of observing and being in the world, and then to see them also as a member of historic groups, and then to understand the way they fit into existing status and social structures. To see a person well, you’ve got to see them in all three ways.

 

At its worst, identitarian thinking encourages the kind of destructive us-versus-them thinking—the demonization and division—human beings are so prone to. Identitarianism undermines pluralism, the key value that diverse societies need if they are to thrive. Pluralism is based on a different set of very different assumptions: Human beings can’t be reduced to their categories; people’s identities are complex and shifting; what we have in common matters more than what we don’t; politics is less often a battle between good and evil than it is a competition among partial truths; societies cannot always be neatly divided into oppressor and oppressed; and politics need not always be a Manichaean death struggle between groups but sometimes can consist of seeking the best balance among competing goods.

 

I find it more pleasant to live in a culture built on pluralistic assumptions than on identitarian ones—which is why I sometimes have to grit my teeth when I visit an elite-university campus or the offices of one of the giant foundations.

 

***

 

The final quality keeping me from fully casting my lot with Blue World is, to borrow from the title of the classic book by the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, its Culture of Narcissism. In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical.

 

According to this way of thinking, people are most likely to thrive and act wisely when they are formed by a moral and social order. In the absence of one, they are likely to act selfish and shortsighted. This is why conservatives spend a lot of time worrying about the cohesion of families, the health of the social order, and the coherence of the moral community; we need these primeval commitments and moral guardrails to help us lead good lives.

 

In 2021, the conservative Christian writer Alan Noble published a book called You Are Not Your Own—a title that nicely sums up these traditional conservative beliefs. You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

 

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

 

But unless your name is Aristotle, it’s hard to come up with an entire moral cosmology on your own. Too often, people in a “culture of authenticity” fall into emotivism—doing whatever feels right. If you live in the world of autonomy and authenticity, you have the freedom to do what you want, but you might struggle to enjoy a sense of metaphysical belonging, a sense that your life fits into a broader scheme of meaning and eternal values.

 

If you lack metaphysical belonging, you have to rely on social belonging for all your belonging needs, which requires you to see your glorious self reflected in the attentions and affirmations of others. This leads to the fragile narcissism that Lasch saw coming back in 1979: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

 

This might be why mental-health problems are so much worse in Blue World than in Red World. In one recent study, 34 percent of conservative students say they report feeling in poor mental health at least half the time. That’s pretty bad. But among very liberal students, 57 percent report poor mental health. That’s terrible.

 

Spending time in Blue World makes me realize how socially conservative I am. I don’t mean socially conservative in the way that term gets used to describe certain stances on hot-button cultural matters like gay marriage or trans issues. (On those topics, I hold what would be considered progressive positions.) Rather, I am a social conservative in believing that the universe has a moral order to it, that absolute right and wrong exist, and that we are either degrading our souls or elevating our souls with every little thing we do. I also believe that the strength of our society is based on the strength of our shared moral and social foundation. And I believe that any nation’s moral culture comes before politics and economics, and when the moral culture frays everything else falls apart. This places me in a conservative tradition that goes back to Edmund Burke and David Hume.

 

***

 

At this point you might be wondering why I don’t just stay in Red World. After all, maybe once Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party ends, the GOP can once again be reconstituted as the most congenial home for a wandering Whig like me. But in the meantime, despite everything that sometimes drives me away from Blue World, there’s more that’s drawing me toward it.

 

For starters, it has a greater commitment to the truth. This may sound weird, but I became a conservative because of its relationship to knowledge and truth. In the 1980s, I looked around at all those progressive social-engineering projects, like urban renewal, that failed because they were designed by technocratic planners who didn’t realize that the world is more complicated than their tidy schemes could encompass. Back then, the right seemed more epistemologically humble, more able to appreciate the wisdom of tradition and the many varied ways of knowing.

 

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. As Jonathan Rauch has written, “We let alt-truth talk, but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.” The people who perform those roles and populate the epistemic regime are mostly Democrats these days, and they’re the ones more likely to nurture a better, fairer, more fact-based and less conspiracy-deranged society.

 

Second, I’ve come to appreciate the Democrats’ long-standing tradition of using a pragmatic imagination. I like being around people who know that it’s really hard to design policies that will help others but who have devoted their lives to doing it well. During the Great Depression, FDR recognized that bold experimentation was called for, which led to the New Deal. During the financial crisis of the late 2000s, I watched the Obama administration display pragmatic imagination to stave off a second depression and lift the economy again. Over the past four years, I’ve watched the Biden administration use pragmatic imagination to funnel money to parts of America that have long been left behind.

 

Recently, I watched a current Democratic mayor and a former one talk about how to design programs to help homeless people. The current mayor had learned that moving just one homeless person into a shelter doesn’t always work well. It’s better to move an entire encampment into a well-run shelter, so people can preserve the social-support systems they’d built there. Listening to the mayors’ conversation was like listening to craftspeople talk about their trades. The discussion was substantive, hopeful, and practical. You don’t hear much of this kind of creative problem-solving from Republicans—because they don’t believe in government action.

 

Another set of qualities now drawing me toward the Democrats: patriotism and regular Americanness. This one has surprised me. Until recently, these qualities have been more associated with flag-waving conservatives than cosmopolitan members of the progressive aristocracy. And I confess that I went to the Democratic convention in August with a lot of skepticism: If Democrats need to win the industrial Midwest, why are they nominating a progressive from San Francisco with a history of left-wing cultural and policy positions? But the surging displays of patriotism; the string of cops, veterans, and blue-collar workers up onstage; the speeches by disaffected former Republicans; Kamala Harris’s own soaring rhetoric about America’s role in the world—all of this stood in happy contrast to the isolationist American-carnage rhetoric that has characterized the GOP in the Trump era. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the “Happy Warrior” Democratic Party of Al Smith, Hubert Humphrey, and Barbara Jordan than the Democratic Party of the Squad, and at the convention that old lineage seemed to be shining through.

 

But ultimately what’s pulling me away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats is one final quality of Blue World: its greater ability to self-correct. Democrats, I’ve concluded, are better at scrutinizing, and conquering, their own shortcomings than Republicans are.

 

Red World suffers today from an unfortunate combination of a spiritual-superiority complex and an intellectual-inferiority complex. It’s not intellectually self-confident enough to argue with itself; absent this self-scrutiny, it’s susceptible to demagogues who tell it what to think. Blue World is now home to a greater tradition of and respect for debate. Despite what I said earlier about the rigid orthodoxy of the progressive aristocracy, the party is bigger than that, and for every Blue World person who practices identity politics, there is another who criticizes it. For every Blue World person who succumbs to the culture of narcissism, another argues that it’s shallow and destructive. For every Blue World person who thinks we should have universal basic income, another adduces evidence suggesting that the UBI saps people’s incentives to work and steers them toward playing video games on the couch.

 

In Blue World, I find plenty of people who are fighting against all the things I don’t like about Blue World. In Red World, however, far fewer people are fighting against what’s gone wrong with the party. (There’s a doughty band of Never Trump Republicans, but they get no hearing inside today’s GOP.) A culture or organization is only as strong as its capacity to correct its mistakes.

 

All of this leaves me on the periphery of Team Blue, just on the edge of the inside, which is where I believe the healthiest and most productive part of American politics now lives.

 

I’m mostly happy here. My advice to other conservatives disaffected by MAGA is this: If you’re under 45, stay in the Republican Party and work to make it a healthy, multiracial working-class party. If you’re over 45, acknowledge that the GOP is not going to be saved in your lifetime and join me on the other side. I don’t deny that it takes some adjustment; I find it weird being in a political culture in which Sunday brunch holds higher status than church. But Blue World is where the better angels of our nature seem lately to have migrated, and where the best hope for the future of the country now lies.

The GOP Makes Democrats Pay the Price for Trans Insanity

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

 

There used to be a time when Republican elected officials and candidates shied away from talking about trans issues.

 

They didn’t want to appear extreme or intolerant. Why bother wading in to a fraught cultural issue when there were so many other things to talk about? Deferring to “medical professionals” or “the experts” seemed the easy way out.

 

Now, though, Republicans have emphatically found their voice. Across the political landscape, GOP Senate candidates are hitting their Democratic opponents on their trans radicalism and have them on the run, while the Trump campaign is pounding Kamala Harris on the issue with perhaps the most prominent ad of this election cycle.

 

The chickens have come home to roost, and they are apparently all cisgender.

 

For the longest time, Democrats have gone along with the steadily evolving trans orthodoxy as established by the cultural Left. Existing in a bubble, they assumed that doubters could be isolated or embarrassed into going along and didn’t realize just how wildly out of touch they’d become.

 

It’s one thing to say people should be tolerant of the choices of consenting adults; it’s another to say that minors must have access to life-altering so-called gender-affirming treatments. It’s one thing to say everyone should live and let live; it’s another to say that males must participate in female sports, no matter how manifestly unfair it is to the girls and women.

 

There were plenty of flashing red lights for Democrats to heed. A Washington Post poll last year found that 57 percent of people say that gender is determined at birth. Roughly two-thirds of people said males shouldn’t compete in girls’ and women’s sports. And 68 percent opposed giving children ages 10–14 access to puberty-blocking medication, and 58 percent opposed teens age 15–17 having access to hormonal treatments.

 

It’s only now, when they are getting punished on the issue, that Democrats are coming out and saying, in effect, that they’ve favored the gender binary all along.

 

Fighting off a challenge from Democratic representative Colin Allred, Texas senator Ted Cruz has targeted the congressman for his opposition to a bill called the Protecting Women and Girls Sports Act. In a sign that the attack was working, Allard responded in his own ad: “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.”

 

This led to denunciations of Allred from the left. According to the LGBT publication The Advocate, he “embraced far-right language around gender identity in a new ad” — the offending words presumably being “boys” and “girls.”

 

Similar ads have run wherever there is a competitive Senate race, many of them from the Mitch McConnell campaign outfit, the Senate Leadership Fund.

 

In Ohio, the embattled incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown has also responded with an ad calling the idea that he supports males competing against females in sports “a complete lie.” The spot points out that Ohio has already prohibited such intrusions. But in an interview with the aforementioned Advocate last year, Brown harshly denounced such laws.

 

“I think all this shows is that there’s still so much hate in this country,” he said, “and by extension hate in politics. Politicians who introduce and support these prohibitive bills should be ashamed of themselves, and it’s my hope that their constituents see through these ugly efforts.”

 

Brown wants us to believe that he’s had a sudden — and surely instantly revocable, if he survives — conversion.

 

For his part, Donald Trump is airing an ad during football games highlighting how Kamala Harris said in 2019 that she supported government-funded transition surgery for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. As the ad notes, it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously seeking public office would advocate such a thing.

 

Now, in the final weeks of an extremely tight election, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are being held to account for their ideological excesses. They can cry foul, but they brought it on themselves.

Taiwan’s Provocative Existence

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

The New York Times described an unprecedentedly large Chinese military exercise aimed at surrounding Taiwan with a mock blockade on Monday as “a warning to Taiwan’s government after the island’s president, Lai Ching-te, made a speech on National Day last week that China regarded as a message promoting independence.” I was in the front row for that speech. It seems that what Beijing regards as subversive separatism is subject to interpretation.

 

Lai’s address on Taiwanese National Day, a holiday commemorating the uprising that resulted in the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911, was hardly belligerent. “Their dream was to establish a democratic republic of the people,” the president said of those who “overthrew the imperial regime” of the Qing dynasty. “Their ideal was to create a nation of freedom, equality, and benevolence. However, the dream of democracy was engulfed in the raging flames of war.” Lai invoked the great battles of China’s revolutionary war — a war Chiang Kai-shek’s forces lost — and the Taiwan Strait crises that soon followed. “Though the Republic of China was driven out of the international community, the people of Taiwan have never exiled themselves,” Lai added. If this is a poor substitute for raw nationalistic bellicosity, it will have to do.

 

Lai went on to tout his island’s commercial enterprises, its foreign aid, and the promise of expanding its already vast welfare programs to its citizens. He insisted that neither the Republic of China nor the People’s Republic of China are “subordinate to each other.” He asserted that Beijing “has no right to represent Taiwan,” and the president regards his mandate from Taiwan’s voters as one that compels him to “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.” But while not all Taiwanese agree with these goals, “we have always been willing to keep moving forward hand-in-hand.”

 

Casual observers might see in Lai’s remarks enough to justify Beijing’s outsize reaction to them. After all, he did insist that Taiwan is and will remain a separate political entity from the one governed by the Chinese Communist Party, and he pledged to preserve that condition. But closer observers of the region noted that, tonally, the address was “more measured” than his inaugural address and less provocative than remarks delivered by his predecessor in the presidency. A lot of good that softening did Taiwan among its tormentors in Beijing. The People’s Republic reacted to the scaled-back rhetoric in this speech as though it were an act of war — a reaction that suggests war is China’s preferred outcome.

 

The Taiwanese are confident, though. Perhaps too confident. Officials in and around government seem convinced that their dominance of the global semiconductor industry represents a deterrent against aggression. They can hold the world’s consumer electronics industry hostage in the event of hostilities that would make pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions pale in comparison.

 

But what if deterrence fails? Lai administration officials are quick to defend the sums they’re committing to their own defense, which many regard as insufficient given the acute threat facing their island. The amounts they are spending on defense as a percentage of GDP outstrips many NATO allies, they say, and large amphibious invasions are historically fraught prospects. But I raised invasion scenarios — including those that consist of large-scale air and sea operations that rely on subversive domestic elements for success — that produced drawn faces from my interlocutors. And for an economy that is set to become the world’s 20^th largest by purchasing power in 2026, justifying a 2.5 percent of GDP defense-spending commitment because it’s greater than Luxembourg’s rings hollow.

 

There should be no question that the scale of China’s naval and air-force exercises represents an existential threat to Taiwan’s sovereignty. Moreover, the supposed offense that justified them is little more than Taiwan’s existence. The dragon will not be appeased.

The Democrats Are Alarmingly ‘Low T’

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

 

The vibes are petering out for Harris at the worst possible time for her campaign: right before it ends. The first and most obvious predicate to this observation is that, in a campaign that has been fought to a draw nearly all season (except for that brief swooning moment when the bottom began to truly fall out for Joe Biden), all of us in the media commentariat — nay, not even Nate Silver himself is exempt, truly none of us are free of sin — have been playing something of a “vibes” game over this coin-flip race.

 

For in 2024, bewilderingly few of the old predictable inflection points — debates, press conferences, major media interviews — have existed as guideposts to help us reckon with the course of the race. We have nothing but the polls (polls nobody quite trusts, regardless of what we publicly aver, recalling the misses of 2016 and 2020) to measure against an unprecedented series of political “black swan” events: A legendary debate disaster reveals a conspiratorially hidden condition; a candidate, after having all but secured the official nomination, is forced out in an internal coup to be replaced by his ill-equipped and cipherous understudy; the Republican ex-president opponent is nearly assassinated, more than once. What does it all add up to? Only fools are certain. (“Smart” people like me flatter themselves for eschewing certainty and instead embrace uninformed hunches.)

 

But, for now, the most recent polls have turned against Harris — she is in fact becoming less popular over time — and thus the mood among Harris partisans has gotten grim. This plane doesn’t feel like it’s going to land without disintegrating on contact with the ground. And so emergency glass is being smashed and panic buttons stabbed across the Democratic coalition: Bill Clinton returns from the dead to rally voters in the Sunbelt, Barack Obama trots out and lectures black men in a huff in Pittsburgh, and Kamala Harris reads from a teleprompter to challenge Donald Trump’s physical fitness — all of them desperately searching for the disappearing working-class male Democratic voter.

 

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, ‘Men for Kamala’ Are from Some Alternate Dimension

Hollywood has been doing its part, too, although I suspect that the Harris campaign and the rest of the media wish they would have left well enough alone. By this point I hope you have all seen the series of third-party pro-Harris advertisements scripted and shot by one of Jimmy Kimmel’s former head staffers. You know the ones I’m talking about, right? In which men boldly explain to the camera how they’re (1) really, totally, I promise 100 percent heterosexual flank-cut slabs of authentic unpretentious dudeliness, which means they’re (2) man enough to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, and What’s your problem, undecided male voter?

 

It’s a failure so spectacular and unwittingly revealing as to defy adequate description, which of course means that I am now going to attempt to describe it for you. “I’m a man,” says one actor, who might have made you genuinely wonder, as the shot intercuts several very non-rural, non-conservative-looking guys repeating the phrase. “I’m man enough to enjoy a barrel-proof bourbon,” says one. (“Neat,” adds another dude, because apparently only effete Republicans put ice in their drinks.) “I’m man enough to cook my steak rare,” proudly adds another, cognizant of the dangers real men undertake when dining at upscale restaurants. A faux weightlifter fixes us with a steely gaze and says he’s “man enough to deadlift 500 and braid the sh** out of my daughter’s hair.” (My suggestion: Aim more realistically for maxing out at 100 lbs first before you get to “braiding the sh**” out of anything, kiddo. Start with your sneakers.)

 

A large man lisps, “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” (Carburetors have not been standard in engines for nearly 30 years, since they were replaced with fuel-injection systems in the early 1990s, and if he truly eats them for breakfast, then this explains his present frame.) “I ain’t afraid of bears,” says another, reminding us inevitably of the mistake women made en masse on social media last year. And then this hectoring chorale of self-described men gets to the point: “I’ll tell ya another thing I’m sure as sh** not afraid of: women.” Yup, real men may not eat quiche, but they do vote Kamala, and these guys are the living proof of it — why, just look at how dudely all of them are.

 

It’s such a marvelous misfire that, at first, I was convinced it was a dark “op” by the smartest and most savagely effective pro-Trump memetic forces on the internet. I mean, how much clearer could the joke have been? The Harris campaign is bleeding male voters of all races and classes outside of educated middle-class and elite suburbia, and here comes a brilliant 30 Rock–style ad to twist the knife, like Steve Buscemi trotting on camera and jocularly announcing, “How do you do, fellow male bumpkins? Why aren’t you voting for Kamala Harris like the rest of the country rubes in the ad?”

 

But no — and, my God, I cannot believe this is true — they meant it sincerely. As my colleagues have already gleefully noted, I underwent a horrible epiphany about it live on Twitter on Friday afternoon, starting from “Clearly this is a right-wing op meant to savage Kamala” to hedging my bets with “God help them if it wasn’t,” and it finally dawned on me that My God, they meant it for real. I was left pondering the same question anyone else would when watching Jimmy Kimmel’s former head writer and a bunch of out-of-work Los Angeles actors simulate masculinity: Are there any remaining normal heterosexual males making branding decisions in the Democratic coalition? Are these writers and actors only working for themselves, pathetically imagining their own idealized “normal male Kamala supporter,” because they’re having such trouble finding any normal ones in daily life?

 

Tim Walz, Relatably Normal Gun-Owning American Male

The same people behind the “Men for Kamala” ad also came up with one for vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, and I will inflict upon you only the link for this one, since Walz was out there this weekend making cringeworthy images for himself without help from his Hollywood friends.

 

Yes, Walz went pheasant hunting with shotgun in hand, and, like almost everything else that he has attempted during this campaign season, it didn’t go so well. If you’ve lived long enough you’ve seen variations on this old political ritual before, in which a politician throws on garish camo and a vest and “hunts” for the benefit of the cameras to prove to “the folks” what an everyday regular Joe he is. I recall similarly unconvincing attempts by John Kerry and Mitt Romney back in the day. (Barack Obama had the good sense to not even bother with a stunt that he considered to be beneath him; John McCain had nothing to prove about masculinity to anybody, ever.) But I figured that Tim Walz, a former congressman from rural Minnesota, would still know how to handle himself. Apparently not!

 

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the opposite of a “gun guy,” and it is for that reason that I recognize what it looks like when a guy unfamiliar with them encounters one. It’s not that I’m anti–Second Amendment, I am merely so completely unfamiliar with firearms that I can honestly say I’ve never even seen one outside of a cop’s holster — or the hands of a distantly glimpsed thug crossing a busy street — much less held or fired one. (Needless to say, I have been the subject of savage mockery internally at NR for this, but these are the wages of growing up in suburban Maryland, going to school in Baltimore, and moving to Chicago — and of having been mugged to date exclusively at knifepoint.)

 

So, far be it from me to ignorantly suggest to Tim Walz that “maybe you shouldn’t load a shotgun with the shoulder stock angled in a way that could accidentally backfire directly into your unprotected crotch.” Instead, I decided to turn to my friend and colleague Luther Ray Abel, whom we’re really lucky to have because he happens to sit squarely in the middle of the Harris-Walz ticket’s target demographic: Luther is an impressively bearded Navy veteran, recreational shooter and occasional outdoorsman, and most of all a genuine northern Wisconsinite. Why, when you think about it, demographically, he’s Kamala Harris’s ideal swing voter!

 

Alas, Luther’s notes suggest that he was unimpressed: Like me, he was alarmed at how Walz dangerously reloaded his shotgun against his legs (rather than securing it against his armpit) and proceeded to wave it around like an elephant’s trunk. Luther was even less impressed with Walz’s brandishing one of the simplest long guns in America as his own personal “pheasant-hunting” Beretta A400 and then visibly failing to properly load or handle it. (“It’s a $2,000+ shotgun made for people playing on Easy Mode,” says Luther.) Walz may have once known how to handle himself on a hunting trip. If so, it’s pretty obvious that his skills have gotten rusty since he went to Saint Paul and became governor. Luther’s final thought: “How did nobody distress this man’s hunting clothing before he went out there? The stuff looked like it was fresh from Fleet Farm.”

 

I do not know how many pheasants Tim Walz managed to bag on his hunting trip. I do know he bagged not a single swing vote in any state where it will end up mattering. And, on that note, I look forward to seeing you again next week, as we continue to search for the electorate that will show up next month.

The One Who Will Not Give His Consent

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

I have been pretty unsparing, I think, in my criticism of Donald Trump, his enablers, and his partisans since the beginning of this ugly, stupid, embarrassing mess. It’s cost me a fair bit of money, I suppose, and there are a few old friends I don’t hear from anymore. So be it. But I will admit to being a little bit disappointed by the low quality of the criticism I get. One of the dumbest complaints I hear 1,838 times a day goes roughly like this: “You say Trump is a would-be tyrant, a moron, a monster of moral depravity—which means that you’re saying that the people who support him, half the country, are idiots and moral miscreants and fools.” 

 

Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I am saying. 

 

It doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m saying that, of course—you could make a pretty good case that Trump supporters are just stuck in a corner and that they aren’t all morally culpable and entirely willing participants in a pageant of stupidity and cruelty. But that’s not my case. My case is that these people should be ashamed of themselves, that a self-respecting society wouldn’t allow such a specimen as Lindsey Graham to vote, much less to serve in the Senate. I understand that hurts some feelings out there in the dank, wooly wilds of the “real America.”

 

So what?

 

There are two ways of looking at the fact that gigantic stampeding herds of people buy into stupid and false ideas, believe patently untrue things, do dumb things, or, in the case at hand, support this particular lunatic and would-be caudillo, frequently because they are good Christians who think that what we need in government is this particular griftastical habitual liar and retired game-show host who spent his pre-presidency years appearing from time to time in pornographic films, a “very stable” guy who has a son named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life. “By their fruits shall you know them,” etc.

 

You can say: “Well, ‘We the People’ have to be right, because that’s what democracy is all about, so there must be a little something to this guy, because the holy demos, or at least about half of it, has offered him its transformational blessing.” 

 

Or, two: You can face up to what we all already know, which is that “We the People” are, in their formal democratic aspect, cretins, and that the only really good reason for letting them vote on anything important is that the alternative is war. Democracy can produce good results and it can produce bad results, and the fact that a particular conclusion or position was come to democratically tells us nothing about its wisdom, efficacy, or morality.

 

Democracy is best understood as a procedure for avoiding violence, and it is invaluable in that role—there really is no replacement for it. But the notion that the people we see every day sitting in traffic jams and watching porn on the subway and trying to return 11-year-old truck tires at Walmart suddenly acquire a mystical power of sanctification when they enter a voting booth is pure superstition—and I mean shiny-pebble-worshiping, bone-in-the-nose, “This sounds like some stuff I read about in The Golden Bough”–level superstition.  

 

The greatest argument against populism—the only argument you’ll ever really need against populism—is: the People. The better you know the People, the less you trust them. As Tony Kushner has Thaddeus Stevens put it in Lincoln: “I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want! This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ’em.” 

 

(Stevens adds: “And I look a lot worse without the wig,” which is not in my case strictly applicable, though I am open to the possibility that I’d look better with one.)

 

There is a great paradox at the heart of American life: Americans are, in many capacities, amazing people. Nine-tenths of all the cool stuff in the modern world—from rock ’n’ roll to personal computers to cinema—was incubated in a garage or a spare room somewhere in California. Americans write great novels (not that John Podhortez, hater of Moby-Dick, appreciates the fact!) and make great art and start great businesses. Visit an American community in crisis, and you’ll see remarkable neighborliness, cooperation, and good citizenship. Philosophy, religion, medicine, military affairs, science, music—Americans excel in an astonishing number of fields. The American scientist, the American artist, the American businessman—impressive figures, all.

 

The American voter? A howling moonbat. I’d lend Ozzy Osbourne my truck on a Saturday night before I trusted one of those lunatics with any measure of real power beyond what is absolutely necessary.

 

I have a theory about this, the rough outline of which is this: Americans are more sensitive to certain incentives than are many of the world’s other peoples, and our general competitiveness causes us to respond to social and reputational incentives in areas such as art and science, where economic incentives may not be particularly strong. But even as our newfound idiotic tribalism causes us to regard people “on the other side” as our enemies, our thoroughly sorted social lives ensure that most of us do not spend very much time actually interacting with people who hold different political views. Slather on top of that the ethos of the cult of democracy, which holds that all points of view, no matter how insipid or ignorant, are entitled to a measure of respect as part of our unwritten constitution. The upshot is that there is, for most Americans, no real price to pay for having stupid or wicked political affiliations. As an engineer friend of mine likes to say: “Stupid should hurt.” In the matter of American politics, stupid doesn’t hurt as much as it should—the fact that we are rich, domestically secure, and blessed with an extraordinarily useful constitutional architecture left to us as a legacy by better men protects us from the worst results of this era’s dumb and malicious politics.

 

For now. 

 

If you look at a figure such as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris—respectively, a vicious and vile would-be tyrant and time-serving party hack whose mediocrity is matched only by her banality—then you might conclude that this country has a leadership problem. But it doesn’t. This country has a citizenship problem. Thanks again to the cult of the demos and to our insane overestimation of the transcendent (as opposed to instrumental) value of democratic procedure, we have reduced practically the whole of republican citizenship to the mere act of voting. That’s why so many of my colleagues are always being asked who they are voting for and pressured to pick one of the major candidates—there’s no practical value in doing so in the case of, say, Jonah Goldberg, who resides in the District of Columbia, which is going to go for Harris by about 103 percent irrespective of any vote Jonah Goldberg might cast. It’s just a demand to salute the flag and to pay homage to whatever imperial gods Antiochus IV has installed in the temple. In our crude time, “good citizen” means “voted the way I wanted him to,” and “bad citizen” means “didn’t vote the way I wanted him to.” 

 

That isn’t good enough. 

 

When Barack Obama lectured American entrepreneurs with the words “You didn’t build that!” he was making a case for a kind of economic collectivism, typical progressive pabulum. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” Well, yes, somebody did. Sometimes, somebody in government at some level does his job in exchange for his taxpayer-funded salary and pension—well, raise my rent! But when it comes to the republic itself, those words are true: You didn’t build that. Neither did I. It is something to live up to. And Americans are failing to live up to it.

 

Plutarch relates this story about Cato the Younger and one of his important political disputes, his fight against Metellus Nepos and Publius Clodius Pulcher, known as Clodius the Demagogue. 

 

Though many invited him to become a tribune of the people, he did not think it right to expend the force of a great and powerful magistracy, any more than that of a strong medicine, on matters that did not require it. And at the same time, being at leisure from his public duties, he took books and philosophers with him and set out for Lucania, where he owned lands affording no mean sojourn. Then, meeting on the road many beasts of burden with baggage and attendants, and learning that Metellus Nepos was on his way back to Rome prepared to sue for the tribuneship, he stopped without a word, and, after waiting a little while, ordered his company to turn back. His friends were amazed at this, whereupon he said: “Do ye not know that even of himself Metellus is to be feared by reason of his infatuation? And now that he comes by the advice of Pompey he will fall upon the state like a thunderbolt and throw everything into confusion. It is no time, then, for a leisurely sojourn in the country, but we must overpower the man, or die honourably in a struggle for our liberties.” Nevertheless, on the advice of his friends, he went first to his estates and tarried there a short time, and then returned to the city. It was evening when he arrived, and as soon as day dawned he went down into the forum to sue for a tribuneship, that he might array himself against Metellus. For the strength of that office is negative rather than positive; and if all the tribunes save one should vote for a measure, the power lies with the one who will not give his consent or permission.

 

The power lies with the one who will not give his consent.

 

Words About Words

 

As my aforementioned friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg has chronicled at book length, one of the big problems with speaking in clichés is that you also think in clichés. I’m still not sure which one drives the other: Whether the mental shortfall produces the shopworn language or if it is the verbal straightjacket that constrains the thinking. I suppose it can go both ways as needed. 

 

So, here’s Barack Obama, supposedly a great orator, on the Republican presidential nominee in 2024: “Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to an end.”

 

I get it. I do. He wants to say that Trump is a self-serving intergalactic douche-rocket who doesn’t have any real concern for the national interest. And he wouldn’t be wrong to say so if that’s what he said. But: “A means to an end” is pretty much the definition of “power,” no? Power is a value-neutral capacity for getting something done. Saying Trump thinks of power as a means to an end is like saying Trump thinks of an airplane as nothing more than a convenient way to fly from one place to another. Well, yeah. Because that’s what it is. The problem isn’t that Trump thinks of power as a means to an end—it is that Trump’s ends are rotten and that his means are rotten.

 

English, Mr. Former Leader: Do you speak it? 

 

Here’s some advice I used to give to my writing students: Read your sentences out loud and think about the literal meaning of the words you have written rather than what it is you intend to say. And then keep revising until the literal meaning of the words in the sentence is what you intend to say. Ain’t no mystery to competent communication.

 

More Wordiness …

 

About Clodius the Demagogue, there is a linguistic legend, probably fanciful. Clodius was a patrician from the Claudia clan, and some have speculated that he changed the spelling of his name to Clodius to seem like more of a bubba. That would fit with the character of Clodius, who had himself adopted by a plebeian family in order to qualify for the office of tribune of the plebs, a powerful position. But the “Clodius” spelling seems to have been old and common, and was used by Cicero (and by Clodius’s sisters) long before his taking up the cause of the plebs. And, as professor Jeffrey Tatum notes, the plebs at the time preferred advocates with more aristocratic ties rather than the more democratic sort, believing that such associations would be beneficial to their cause.

 

Claudius to Clodius—it’s a good story. It just probably isn’t true. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

There are some things that it’s just damn near impossible to get people to understand. One is that there is no Social Security “trust fund,” that the so-called trust fund is really very little more than a figure of speech. Another is that “I’m pro-choice because I believe a woman has a right to do what she chooses with her own body” is an example of begging the question. A third is what “begging the question means.” And a fourth is that businesses and industries do not exist to “create jobs,” and that jobs per se are not necessarily valuable. We could, for example, conscript every person on Earth into a corps of ditch-diggers and ditch-fillers, pay everybody $1,000,000 a year to dig ditches and fill them, and the result would be mass starvation and the end of human civilization rather than prosperity—because human action is the most valuable thing, and we’d be wasting it on non-productive ends. Everybody would have a paycheck, but there would be nothing to spend it on. “Job creation” is a mirage—what’s important is value creation. A century ago, it took scores of people to bring in a large cotton harvest, whereas today a single farmer operating a high-tech harvester can bring in tons of the stuff by himself while listening to podcasts in his air-conditioned cab. Hundreds of thousands of cotton-picking jobs were lost over the years to automation—and everybody is better off for it.

 

If you don’t believe me, go pick some cotton by hand for a few weeks, and then get back to me. 

 

If you really envy the life of a 1950s factory worker, know this: That 1950s standard of living is available to you—cheap. Enjoy that 750-square-foot house with no air-conditioning and a grocery bill that is 22 percent of your household income. 

 

Furthermore …

 

From the Wall Street Journal: “The New Coveted Résumé Line: Flipping Burgers.”

 

A stint in fast food is a badge of honor for business leaders who want to be viewed as humble and relatable—and proof that they worked to get where they are.

 

Vice President Kamala Harris has talked up her long-ago job at McDonald’s while campaigning for president, a way to show she gets the struggles of people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has claimed without evidence that Harris never worked at McDonald’s.

 

The company declined to comment on the dispute. A candidate’s summer job is an unlikely point of contention in a race for the nation’s highest office, but it proves a point: Among powerful people, fast-food credibility is worth fighting for.

 

Well. If you’d like to hear a grizzled old Burger King veteran (me) discuss the business with a well-seasoned former McDonald’s guy (Charles C. W. Cooke), give a listen to our upcoming episode of “How the World Works.” 

 

While you’re over at the Journal, read Carson Griffith’s very amusing “The Anti-Status Watch: Why Men in Finance Love Cheap, Cheesy Watches.”

 

Elsewhere …

 

Behold: The Five Tribes of Anti-Trumpism. 

 

Like the Snoots to whom they are adjacent, the prodigal Neocons have, to a significant degree, already switched teams, returning to their ancestral home: the Democratic Party. One of the fault lines that runs through the anti-Trump right has to do with how attached one was to the GOP to begin with. Some of my friends in the neocon universe were deeply engaged as Republicans per se: advising candidates and officeholders, serving as speechwriters and party operatives, etc. There is something of the jilted lover in their current politics: Sure, they’re going steady with the Democrats now, but their strongest feelings are reserved for their ex.

 

(And there’s even a fair bit of bitter, late-night, wine-glass-in-hand social-media stalking on the anti-Trump right.)

 

Their embrace of the Democrats has the hot flush of a new romance, but these are intelligent and patriotic men and women. If they form a durable new right wing of the Democratic Party (strange as those words are to type!), then the Democrats will be better for it. After November, the smart Democrats, if there were any, would be doing what they could to keep the Neocons in the party this time around.

 

More in the Wall Street Journal. 

 

Incidentally, in reference to the first item: After that piece came out, I got an email from a columnist at the New York Times: “So, who will you vote for?” Missing the point, people!

Trump Seems Intent on Undermining His Tax-Policy Record

National Review Online

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

Rather than building on Republicans’ solid record on tax policy from his presidency and earlier, Donald Trump seems hell-bent on undermining it.

 

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which he signed in 2017, greatly improved the tax code. One of the most significant ways it did so was by doubling the standard deduction. About 90 percent of taxpayers now take the standard deduction, saving them time and money by forgoing itemization while still reducing their tax burden.

 

The law also capped the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000, which raised revenue to compensate for some of the revenue lost from the economic-growth-enhancing tax cuts. The SALT deduction is effectively a federal subsidy for high-tax (read: Democratic-run) states, and eliminating it entirely would encourage even more competition between states to reduce their tax burdens than we have already seen since 2017.

 

Instead, Trump wants to remove the SALT cap and introduce a variety of other complications into the tax code that he had helped streamline, in ways that would have little to no effect on the economy overall and create new hassles and distortions, all for the purpose of pandering on the campaign trail.

 

Trump has said he wants to eliminate taxes on tip income and overtime pay. He frames this as helping workers in lower-wage jobs, but after considering the deductions and credits that already exist, taxpayers in almost the entire bottom half of the income distribution pay no income tax on net, and many actually make money through refundable tax credits.

 

Though it wouldn’t help most low-income workers, it would introduce new complexity into the tax code that others would figure out how to game, making it nearly impossible to figure out what the actual results of the policy would be.

 

By promising to exempt Social Security income from taxation and make interest on car payments tax-deductible, Trump is promising to undo tax reforms from Ronald Reagan. Taxing Social Security income for retirees, part of a law Reagan signed in 1983, is one of the only reasons the program hasn’t gone belly-up already. Removing tax deductibility for most forms of interest payments (except, notably, for mortgages) was a key part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

 

A better way to build on past Republican successes would be by promising to make the tax code symmetrical by not taxing interest income. Additionally, tax-protected universal savings accounts would be a good way to shield Americans from double taxation for the crime of saving for the future.

 

But those options are less suitable for pandering, which is the point of Trump’s tax comments. He announced the car-loan idea in Detroit, the SALT idea in high-tax metro New York, and the tips idea in Nevada, all based on stylized facts about industries and workers in those respective places.

 

These promises are ultimately a cover for Trump’s central economic promise, which he proudly talks about at almost every rally: a massive tax increase in the form of tariffs on all imports. That would likely hurt low-income households more than any of his proposed tax breaks would help them.

 

Kamala Harris wants to undo Trump’s tax legacy, too, by jacking up corporate taxes, slamming small businesses through tax hikes on “the rich,” and adding new taxes that would discourage investment in the U.S. Trump should take his own side in the fight and stop promising to make the tax code more complicated and burdensome than it already is.