A Costly Cease-Fire Deal

National Review Online

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

Israel and Hamas have struck a deal for an initial cease-fire that will pause hostilities for six weeks and lead to the release of 33 hostages. The deal was formally approved by Israel’s security cabinet on Friday and is expected to be endorsed by the full cabinet in time to begin this Sunday. It is the first step in a three-part process that could eventually see the war in Gaza come to an end with all hostages returned to Israel.

 

The deal gave President Biden something to tout in his farewell address and provided some way for President-elect Trump to save face given his threat that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released by the time he’s sworn in. Even though the deal only allows for the gradual return of some hostages rather than the immediate return of all of them by January 20, Trump and his team can plausibly claim credit for scaring Hamas back to the negotiating table as well as convincing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree by leveraging a strong first-term record of supporting Israel. Unfortunately, the publicly available details are also consistent with a more cynical case that Trump had no idea what “hell to pay” would mean, and so he pressured a close ally into a bad deal because he was desperate to avoid an early foreign policy embarrassment.

 

To be sure, there are obvious benefits to Israel in the first phase of the agreement. The deal will secure the release of 33 hostages (about two-thirds of whom are believed to be alive) and provide a respite to a war that has raged on for 15 months, strained the nation’s reservists, put Israeli civilians in the crosshairs of thousands of rockets and missiles, and cost the lives of more than 400 military personnel.

 

With that said, the deal exacts a significant price on Israel. Israelis will be required to withdraw from parts of Gaza that were wrested from terrorists after months of deadly urban warfare. Israel will also be required to release dozens of Palestinian prisoners for each hostage set free. Specifically, for every female Israeli soldier hostage returned, Israelis will have to hand over 50 Palestinian prisoners, including 30 serving life sentences. In another cruel twist, the 33 hostages (who are a mix of living and dead captives) will not be released all at once, but only gradually over the course of the 42-day initial phase.

 

Furthermore, at the end of the first phase, Hamas will retain more than 60 hostages. Securing their release will require significant additional concessions from Israelis in phases two and three. Concessions will likely involve the release of thousands of prisoners, an end to Israel’s war on Hamas, and a full withdrawal from Gaza.

 

The most obvious consequence of such a final deal is that Gaza would swiftly be retaken by Hamas. Even after the announcement of the deal but before its going into effect, Hamas terrorists were seen celebrating on the streets in Gaza in the open. In Qatar, senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya hailed the agreement as proof that the terrorist group could never be defeated. He called the massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 a “source of pride” for Palestinians and vowed that the group would destroy Israel “at the earliest time possible.”

 

The ultimate verdict on this deal may not be delivered for decades. In 2011, Israel agreed to release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the return of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped by Hamas more than five years earlier. Within Israel at the time, as now, there was a mix of controversy about the deal and jubilation over his return, given that Israel is a small and tight-knit society. That lopsided hostage-for-terrorists swap, however, taught Hamas that exploiting Israelis’ love of life by taking hostages could garner massive concessions. More directly, one of those released prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become the architect of the October 7 attacks.

 

Given that the current deal also involves American hostages (two of the three believed to be alive are slated to be released), it has potentially worrisome consequences for the U.S. Because the U.S. has been a leading party to these talks with Hamas, the agreement has set a troubling precedent that we are willing to negotiate prisoner-for-hostage deals with designated terrorist groups that take Americans captive.

 

To avoid the worst-case scenario becoming reality, the incoming Trump administration must give Israelis every reassurance that they won’t be forced into any final agreement to end the war that would leave Hamas in control of Gaza. In an encouraging sign, Representative Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, told Fox News, “We’ve made it very clear to the Israelis, and I want the people of Israel to hear me on this: If they need to go back in, we’re with them. If Hamas doesn’t live up to the terms of this agreement, we are with them.” He added, “Hamas is not going to continue as a military entity, and it is certainly not going to govern Gaza.” Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth expressed a similar sentiment in his confirmation hearing, declaring, “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”

 

No matter how great the temptation will be to get the war over and done with, the new Trump administration must hold firm on these assurances and allow Israel the latitude to walk away from phases two and three of the framework and resume military operations in Gaza if necessary to keep Hamas from regaining power.

Reality Is ‘Zionist Propaganda’

By Seth Mandel

Monday, January 13, 2025

 

The new film September 5, about the live television coverage of the 1972 terrorist attack against the Israeli Olympic team, had piqued my interest mostly because of a basketball game between the Dallas Mavericks and Utah Jazz in March 2020. In the middle of that game, the NBA decided to suspend the season because one of the players had tested positive for the coronavirus.

 

And then the country shut down.

 

Scott Van Pelt, the beloved ESPN anchor, was essentially forced into narrating the onset of the apocalypse live on television. A few days later, Van Pelt told GQ: “Think about this, man: four days ago we were playing games with people. Four days ago. Now, if you go to the grocery store, there’s a can of Manhattan clam chowder and a cucumber with a bite taken out of it. That’s what’s left in four days. And it’s because Rudy Gobert had the coronavirus.”

 

I had never seen anything like it, watching from my living room as a basketball game became the only broadcast in the world that mattered. I assumed there had been nothing comparable at least since that fateful day in September 1972, when Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic residences, murdered two Israeli athletes and kidnapped nine others, all of whom were killed in a botched rescue by West German police.

 

The early drama unfolded on live TV, thanks to ABC’s coverage. Which means the movie about it revolves around the live footage watched by millions in real-time and documented for posterity.

 

And so the “pro-Palestinian” backlash to it is among the most ridiculous temper tantrums I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of anti-Israel temper tantrums.

 

After the new year, the theater chain Alamo Drafthouse began showing September 5 in Brooklyn. Many of its own employees, organizing under its union, were outraged. They petitioned their employers to stop showing the film. Alamo appears, as of this writing, to have ignored them.

 

But it’s the petition itself, which of course soon garnered signatures from all manner of local organizers, that has to be read to be believed. Calling the film “Zionist propaganda,” it reads, in part:

 

Echoing the well-worn pattern seen since 9/11, September 5 is yet another attempt by the Western media to push its imperialist and racist agenda, manufacturing consent for the continued genocide and cultural decimation of Palestine and its peoples. It is quintessential Orientalism: Depicting Arabs and brown people as evil, antisemitic terrorists, while lionizing the very newsrooms that provide political cover and, in many cases, cheer for endless wars and genocide. We’re certain that Alamo’s quirky pre-show won’t provide this context.

 

The movie “depicts” Arabs as “antisemitic terrorists”? The movie is about an actual event, in which Arab anti-Semitic terrorists carried out murderous acts of terrorism. What’s more, the film is about the coverage itself—because a fair amount of what happened was broadcast. People watched it. This was a historical event that happened, like the moon landing.

 

More from the petition: “We, NYC Alamo United, wholeheartedly condemn the Alamo’s willingness to profit off of the genocide of Palestine.”

 

So we have two principles undergirding the opposition to the film. The first is that literal history as it happened is “Zionist propaganda,” and the second is that any depiction of Israelis or Palestinians is “profit[ing] off the genocide of Palestine.”

 

As to the first principle, I happen to agree. Reality is very harsh to the modern Western left’s anti-Zionist narrative, and it is very kind to the position of the Jewish state. As was the case when pro-Palestinian activists picketed showings of footage from Oct. 7 filmed by Hamas themselves, it is very difficult to see Palestinian terrorists as victims if you know what actually happened.

 

As to the second, I’m afraid the wider entertainment world has certainly adopted a pose that does not agree with the premise but abides by that premise’s preferred policy: It’s just too much trouble to show films or publish books with Jews in them, especially Israeli Jews.

 

After all, the Toronto International Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg noted in September, found itself in just such a predicament:

 

My understanding is that TIFF outright rejected September 5, which was the hottest sales title that played at the Venice and Telluride film fests — and, THR reported this morning, has landed at Paramount — ostensibly because it might generate controversy related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, fearing a backlash, the fest did not screen a film that is going to get a best picture Oscar nomination and maybe even win — it could have done so on opening night, which was, appropriately enough, Sept. 5 — but did screen Russians at War, a documentary thats sympathetic portrayal of Russians involved in the Ukraine conflict did result in protests of such a scale that the fest ended up pulling the film.

 

The great hope for the future of art in America is that bigoted censors make arguments that are too absurd for even corporate chains to take seriously, thus delegitimizing the entire outrage industry. In that sense, the reaction to September 5 is off to a good start.

Global Anti-Semitism’s Leading Lady

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

 

Outgoing anti-Semitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt has done much for the Jewish community over her long career as an educator and writer in the battle against Holocaust denial. Now she has done one more service: revealing that even among the top brass of the United Nations, Francesca Albanese is properly regarded as a blight on humanity.

 

Lipstadt, according to Jewish Insider, objected to Albanese’s ostentatious Jew-baiting directly to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres twice; twice, Guterres responded: “She’s a horrible person.”

 

Though the candor is appreciated, Albanese—the UN special envoy to the Palestinian territories—is in fact so very much more than that. She is a figure of rare menace and depravity. She is “Globalize the Intifada” in human form, a sort of wandering dybbuk serving as a vessel for the unrested spirits of 20th century genocidal anti-Semitism.

 

Although Albanese’s UN appointment comes without a salary, the “world body” for whom she speaks is funded disproportionately by America. Albanese implicates the Western world, its governments and its citizens, in the privileged and unaccountable spread of the world’s oldest hatred at its strongest moment in decades.

 

We can take a brief tour through some of Albanese’s greatest hits, though Albanese is always adding new and fresh examples. Indeed, her prolific output would be seen as evidence of an admirable work ethic were it put to use toward something that wasn’t unambiguously evil.

 

Still, she’s been at this a while. There’s her 2014 rant to the BBC that “the Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system and you will be remembered to have been on the big brother’s side of this Orwellian nightmare caused once again by Israel’s greed,” similar to her insistence that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” There’s her vocal, in-person support for Hamas as recent as 2022; her full-throated call for everyone to “stand with” disgraced anti-Zionist professor David Miller; her assertion that “many Jewish people worldwide,” specifically those who support Israel, “live a lie”; her belief that only a “few” Israelis are non-genocidal.

 

One of my favorite recent Albanesisms, we might call them, took the form of a conversation on X. After bashing the IDF as “rotten to the core,” another user responded to her that Jewish cruelty was without limit. “Jews are capable of eating human flesh,” they said. To which Albanese responded: “Do not attribute what Israel does to all Jewish people, please.” Sort of a backhanded compliment, I’d say, that we’re not all flesh eaters but we’ll take what we can get from Francesca.

 

When called upon for her “expertise” and to speak with the imprimatur of the United Nations, she rattles off Israeli crimes such as, in one breath: “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.”

 

Though it may seem slightly insane that this person has been granted academic legitimacy, it’s true. She is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. (Talk about scholasticide!)

 

Albanese’s Georgetown biography touts her years with UNRWA, the Hamas-adjacent UN agency that has been found to have numerous employees in Gaza-based terror groups and others who took part in Oct. 7 or who held Israeli hostages, as well as her other work with UN agencies.

 

The Georgetown bio also makes much of her co-authorship of a new and updated version of Lex Takkenberg’s 1998 book on Palestinians and international refugee law. And this is where Albanese’s influence can be seen on the development of so-called “scholarship” meant to retroactively shape international law around whatever concepts are most useful toward the cause of seeking Israel’s destruction.

 

UNRWA’s existence has been at the center of debate in recent weeks. Over the past 15 months of war since Oct. 7, 2023, UNRWA employees’ complicity has been revealed to be staggering. Some were recorded on video taking part in the Hamas murder spree, others were found to have held hostages, UNRWA facilities doubled as Hamas communications command spaces or weapons depots or entrances to Hamas’s underground terror-tunnel network. The UN refused to take sufficient action to clean out the rot, so in October the Israeli Knesset passed legislation greatly limiting UNRWA’s legal approval to work in Gaza and the West Bank.

 

UNRWA exists solely to cater to the Palestinians despite the existence of a wider UN refugee agency. This is to keep the Palestinians stateless and under a different definition of “refugee”—one that simply has no basis in law and serves solely to perpetuate the conflict. Takkenberg’s first edition of his book was careful to note that “the refugee concept, embodied in the UNRWA definition, does not necessarily coincide with the one generally employed in the context of international refugee law.” Albanese’s 2020 revision, on the other hand, spends a great deal of time and energy blurring this line and rationalizing the trend of treating the UNRWA refugee classification as a legal imperative not until the Palestinians are repatriated but rather until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself is resolved.

 

Albanese may appear to be a ridiculous character, but she has colonized the institutional power and reach of the UN to disfigure international law in the pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish state. So, yes, she is a “horrible person.” But shouldn’t that appellation be applied to anyone who materially enables her, Mr. Secretary-General?

NYT: By Midsummer, Senate Democrats Secretly Believed Biden Was No Longer Fit for Office

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

We knew the general gist of how Democratic lawmakers lost all faith in the octogenarian Joe Biden in the past year, and how Biden’s abysmal performance on the debate stage the night of June 27 prompted a panic. But this morning’s New York Times offers Chuck Schumer’s version of events, and the details are pretty jarring:

 

If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic. . . .

 

When [Schumer] asked whether Mr. Biden had talked to his pollsters about his chances of winning the race, the president shook his head.

 

“Well, I have talked to them,” Mr. Schumer said. “My guess is you have about a 5 percent chance. None of your pollsters disagree with me.” [Emphasis added.]

 

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Biden never met with, and apparently never heard directly from, his own presidential campaign pollsters:

 

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race. . . .

 

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

 

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

 

Why? Why did Biden’s pollsters never meet with him? Did Biden’s closest advisers and handlers believe he couldn’t handle receiving bad news?

 

Getting bad news is a big part of the job of the president!

 

This does explain Biden’s recent nonsensical insistence that if he had stayed in the race, he would have beaten Trump. Apparently, Biden didn’t realize he was losing, and losing badly, until shortly before he withdrew from the race. And he may well have forgotten that already.

 

Also in the Times article:

 

“Mr. President,” Mr. Schumer said then, “the only way you’re going to save this is to show up day in and day out, with unscripted town halls. And people will be able to smell if it’s spontaneous, and it will show that this was a one-off.”

 

Mr. Ricchetti assured Mr. Schumer that the president would put doubters at ease when he participated in a news conference after a NATO summit in Washington the next week. But the majority leader was not at ease.

 

“That’s not even close to good enough,” he fumed.

 

That was the NATO summit where Biden, introduced Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.”

 

Even congressional Democrats doubted that Biden himself was actually making the decisions in the White House:

 

Democrats on Capitol Hill seethed. In a closed-door lunch the next day, senators said the president was being selfish. They questioned whether he had even written the letter himself, or whether his aides or maybe even his son Hunter had written it for him. . . .

 

The July 11 meeting was grim. Democratic senators, even normally reserved ones who were close with Mr. Biden, erupted. The usually quiet Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and former paratrooper, said he could no longer support his commander in chief unless Mr. Biden could produce two neurologists to issue a public report saying he was fit to serve, and then hold a news conference where anyone could ask questions.

 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Mr. Biden’s aides that the silence from the majority of Democratic senators should not be interpreted as a sign of support. It was out of respect and affection to allow Mr. Biden time to gracefully exit the race, but it would not last forever, he said, because if they continued to vouch for his fitness, they would be “lying.”

 

So elected Democratic officials either knew Biden was mentally no longer capable of handling his duties, or had serious doubts, but held their tongue. And they wonder why the country doesn’t trust them anymore!

Congratulations on Your Fiasco

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, may not have Mitch McConnell’s vote, Axios reported on Thursday. And if the former Senate majority leader withholds his support, McConnell may provide the Senate GOP conference’s quieter members, who value the maintenance of the U.S.-led order abroad over even their standing with Trump and the MAGA movement, cover to do the same.

 

That’s the upshot of the piece. But it concludes with a question mark about the extent to which the Senate Democrats, who are beholden to a progressive interpretation of geopolitics, might break with their party’s leadership to back their former Democratic colleague. For his part, Chuck Schumer thinks he can keep his caucus in line. Of all Trump’s nominees, the report concluded, “They see Gabbard” as the candidate they are most likely to derail.

 

But do Democrats have a strategy? If Axios has accurately described Schumer’s thinking, probably not. “Minority Leader Chuck Schumer views the party’s grilling of Hegseth as a success,” the dispatch read. “He’ll demand the same for their treatment of Gabbard, HHS nominee RFK Jr., and FBI director nominee Kash Patel.”

 

If that’s the plan, Gabbard can start measuring the drapes at ODNI today. Maybe he’s just saving face, but Schumer has no right to the view that his party’s grilling of Pete Hegseth was anything like a success. Spectators to that exhibition were treated to an overwrought display of maximum pique from Democrats, whose theatrical hostility to Hegseth and deliberately hyperbolic misinterpretation of his views made Trump’s defense secretary-designate look sober, rational, and unperturbable by contrast.

 

It was a textbook backfire. As Rich observed of Democratic garment-rending during this confirmation hearing, “They were often shrill and visibly frustrated, surely creating more sympathy for Hegseth among any Republicans not already with him.” And given the partisan makeup of the Senate chamber, that’s all that matters. Hegseth’s confirmation was likely but not assured before the hearing. It was all but a done deal afterward.

 

So, we must ask ourselves how Schumer is measuring “success.” We can’t say he defines it as making irrefutable arguments about Hegseth’s lack of fitness for the role to which he was nominated — Democrats didn’t effectively make that case. If they’re not going to scuttle the nomination, then Schumer must measure “success” in the number of gushing media reports over the Democratic Party’s scene-chewing histrionics and the small-dollar donations that coverage unlocks.

 

As successes go, this one is little more than a consolation prize. But the Democratic Party has encountered nothing but setbacks and losses since November 5, so maybe they have to make the most of what they’ve got.

People, Places, and Things

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

I will remind readers here of Williamson’s First Law: “Everything in life is really, really simple, provided you don’t know a [expletive deleted] thing about it.” 

 

Consider the California wildfires. 

 

About California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the wildfires currently plaguing the state, Donald Trump wrote with his trademark combination of pre-Oedipal rage and illiteracy: “This is all his fault!!!” Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been trying (and failing) to out-Trump Trump since 2016, has also heaped scorn on California’s elected officials: “The people of southern California have every right to be angry. Their elected officials failed them greatly.”

 

Sen. Cruz took a rather more nuanced view of the wildfires that scorched Texas in recent years, for example by sponsoring legislation that would have taken into account whether cattle lost in the fires were pregnant when calculating compensation for ranchers. Cruz spurred other federal agencies, such as the Small Business Administration, into action, too. A single wildfire in my part of Texas, the 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire, burned more land—about 1 million acres—than all wildfires combined burn in California in a typical year. Was that a terrible failure of leadership in Texas? 

 

Well, you know, it’s complicated—it always is when it’s your business. 

 

The Smokehouse Creek Fire in 2024 burned 1,654 square miles of largely rural land, an area larger than the land area of Rhode Island and nearly that of Delaware—more than three times the area of the City of Los Angeles and about 40 percent of the area of Los Angeles County. It was huge, the largest wildfire in Texas’ recorded history and the largest anywhere in the United States in 2024. And with all due respect to the two people who died in the fire and the many more who suffered property damage, it was a relatively minor affair. 

 

It is not as though California does not have political problems—boy, does it. But the fundamental challenge wrapped up in these Southern California wildfires is one of geography. Los Angeles’ well-deserved reputation for sprawl masks the fact that it is, after New York City, the most densely populated metropolitan area in these United States. And while Los Angeles has nothing to compare to the population density of New York City’s most jam-packed census tracts, which run as high as 200,000 people per square mile—it does have tracts that contain 90,000 people per square mile. The Smokehouse Creek Fire mainly affected Hutchinson, Roberts, and Hemphill counties in Texas, which have population densities per square mile of: 23, 3.7, and 2.6. Southwest of these in Loving County, conditions can get pretty dry and brushy, too, and wildfires are no doubt of real concern to the 60-odd people who live there and give it its 0.1 person per square mile population density. 

 

Of course they’re counting the cattle. There isn’t much else to count besides rattlesnakes. There is a reason that this part of the world is known as the Big Empty. 

 

Southern California’s climate and vegetation make it fire-prone. Whatever effect climate change is having on the fires right now, fires were in the main much larger in the 19^th century, when something on the order of 4.5 million acres burned in a typical year, as opposed to the median damage from 2000-23, about 650,000 acres a year. (The mean damage is nearly 1 million acres; there have been a few big outlier years.) The wildfire story is a lot like the hurricane story: The loss of life and property damage is considerably worse today than a century ago not because of climate change but because of population change, with people moving into fire-prone or hurricane-prone areas in large numbers, with many of them building unusually expensive houses in these scenic locales. Even if one accepts the largest estimates of the effects of climate change, the most important factor in lives lost and dollars forfeited is that in the middle of the 19^th century there were only 2,240 people living in El Cuidad de los Angeles, while what is today Dade County was home to all of 83 people in 1860. 

 

You can still see the aftermath of the Smokehouse Creek Fire, if you are willing to do some driving. And if you drive in from nearby Amarillo, you can tour through the million acres that burned in the East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006. That got into more densely populated areas than the Smokehouse Creek Fire did, but nothing like Los Angeles. The Bastrop County Complex Fire in 2011 burned up 50 square miles not far from Austin—only two people died in that very costly and destructive fire (nearly 1,700 buildings were lost), but you can imagine how much worse it would have been had it reached Austin. And Texas is a lot more urban than people may assume: Of the dozen largest cities in the United States, five of them—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth—are in Texas. In the main, these cities are, like their California counterparts, heavily Democratic, with a very familiar kind of urban politics. (Dallas’ Republican mayor, Eric “Not the ‘Cliffs of Dover’ Guy” Johnson, was elected as a Democrat and switched parties; previously, Fort Worth had been the largest Texas—or U.S.—city with a Republican mayor, the city’s “nonpartisan” municipal elections being a polite fiction.) Politics in Ted Cruz’s home of Houston look a lot like politics in Philadelphia or Chicago or in the city Houston most resembles—which is, of course, Los Angeles. But Houston doesn’t burn as much as it floods. 

 

It’s easy for Cruz et al. to piss on California, and it is not as though California doesn’t have it coming. But when Texas burned, Sen. Cruz didn’t offer those flatland farmers and ranchers a stern lecture on self-reliance and the necessity of digging fire lanes—he put his hand into the federal cookie jar on their behalf, which is what senators do. And when Californians want to do the same?

 

Don’t be surprised if Republicans insist that is … different. 

Can Democrats Govern?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 16, 2025

 

How in the heck did the Republicans become the party of good governance?

 

Relatively good, I mean. 

 

The joke about the GOP used to be that Republicans campaigned on the belief that government doesn’t work and then worked hard to prove that once in office. The Republicans were, for a long time, a party that really did only one thing in power: cut taxes. Republicans didn’t cut spending, didn’t reform entitlements, didn’t radically reorganize government along lines of greater efficiency or accountability, but they would—whether it was economically appropriate or not—cut taxes when given the chance. Even Donald Trump, who promised to be (and, unfortunately, is) a different sort of Republican, did almost nothing else with Republicans’ 2017 trifecta except sign into law an utterly conventional Republican tax bill put together by Paul Ryan. 

 

Democrats are the party of government employees. But the party of the bureaucrats isn’t necessarily good at bureaucracy—and, in spite of the low reputation of the word “bureaucracy,” there is no substitute for effective, competent bureaucracy in a free society. Ultimately, competent bureaucratic administration is what determines whether schools are worth a damn or the trash gets picked up.

 

Or whether, instead, wildfires are permitted to burn out of control. 

 

Democrats’ reputation as a party of governance is at a low ebb just now, and it isn’t only their incompetence in California. The wildfire story isn’t primarily a policy story or a political story—wildfires have ravaged California since prehistoric times—but thinking people with a little bit of long-term memory might ask themselves how it is that Ron DeSantis’ government in Florida always seems about as prepared for hurricanes as they can be—down to having extra linemen and equipment pre-positioned to swoop in and restore electricity service—while in California the Palisades reservoir has been out of commission for nearly a year because of a defective “covering designed to preserve water quality,” i.e., a torn tarp. 

 

Thomas Jefferson believed that “the best government is that which governs least,” which is a sentiment dear to my libertarian heart. And, while it is not exceptionlessly true, there is a lot of truth to that maxim: My native Texas is not what I would call an especially well-governed state, but it is not in most things a much-governed one, at least at the state level. And that seems to work about well enough. 

 

Here’s one way to think of the current state of affairs: These United States have altogether about 335 million people living in them, but 1 in 3 of those millions live in California, Texas, Florida, or New York. I suspect that it is really in these states that the relative reputations of the red-state model and the blue-state model are being made, in the main. 

 

Florida was for a long time a kind of a political mystery: It was a purple state by the numbers but one in which Democrats couldn’t win an election to save their lives. Florida is many things to many people, but one of the things it is is what you get when you have more or less unified control of state government by Republicans who—this part is critical—have a living memory of real political competition. 

 

Democrats have not got a whiff of the governorship in Texas since 1995, haven’t controlled the state Senate since 1997, and have basically been relegated to the kiddies’ table in the state House since 2003. Republicans have enjoyed similar dominance for a similar time in Florida, but the elections have been a lot closer, and Florida has sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate as recently as 2012. And Texas is a little more Republican and a little less Democratic than Florida. (The Pew numbers are not what you’d expect, showing a small Democratic affiliation advantage in both Texas and Florida. Color me skeptical.) Texas Republicans are, in my experience, more confident in the durability of their commanding position than their Florida counterparts are. That confidence may be misplaced, but that’s for another column. 

 

Florida has enjoyed a string of very competent governors with a strong orientation toward ensuring the reliable delivery of state services and encouraging a business-friendly tax and regulatory environment. Jeb Bush, Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis are very different kinds of men and politicians, but all did very fine executive work in Florida. And Florida remembers. George Bush and Rick Perry were popular in Texas for a reason; and, while I don’t know anybody who points to Greg Abbott and his circle as the personifications of administrative excellence (and Texas politics is fertile ground for grotesques such as Ken Paxton), it is hard to argue with the state’s growth and its generally attractive economic environment—though housing affordability has become more of a problem in the Lone Star State as the workforce grows faster than the housing supply. 

 

Texas and Florida tend to lead the lists when it comes to rankings of business-friendliness, as indeed do Republican-leaning states generally. California and New York are not at the bottom of those lists, but they aren’t at the top, either, in spite of being home to premier cities such as New York City and economic powerhouses such as Silicon Valley. 

 

Perversely, Republican governors other than George W. Bush have had a hard time of it as presidential contenders in recent years, precisely because good governors must perforce do a lot of clear-eyed, nonideological, necessarily bipartisan work—governor stuff—that irritates ideologues and hyperpartisans. The kind of thing that might read as “bipartisan pragmatism” to the general electorate reads as “sellout” to GOP primary voters. But their big-state Democratic colleagues lately spend a lot more time auditioning for Jonah Goldberg’s “parliament of pundits” than they do making a good job of governor stuff. California’s Gavin Newsom acts like he’s running for secretary general of the United Nations half the time, and New York’s Kathy Hochul cannot muster the courage of her convictions even when she happens upon something that is both good policy and popular with her progressive allies, such as congestion pricing, which she has partly undermined, out of pure political cowardice, by reducing the toll from $15 to $9. (Want to actually change commuters’ behavior? Try $40. Want a real radical change? Try $200.) Meanwhile California burns, and the State of New York cruelly reminds residents of the state of New York, which isn’t exactly what anybody wants it to be. 

 

And so Republicans do, amazingly enough, appear to be the party of slightly but meaningfully better state governance. If mostly by default.