Remaking Conservatism, One Plank at a Time

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

 

Harry Anderson, the guy from the original Night Court, was a great stand-up comedian and magician. He had this bit where he’d juggle weird stuff, including an ax. When he took out the ax he’d say something like, “This is George Washington’s ax. The very one he used to chop down that cherry tree. Unfortunately, the blade had to be replaced years ago. And just the other day the handle broke so I had to replace that too. … But in principle, this is George Washington’s ax.”

 

That came to mind when I was texting with The Dispatch’s executive editor, Declan Garvey, this morning. He told me that he always wanted to write a piece about the GOP as the Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ Paradox. The idea is that a thing ceases to be a thing if it’s completely changed over time. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it:

 

In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens, rescued the city’s children from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this event by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

 

While I think these philosophical issues are really fun to noodle, particularly when applied to concepts of human identity, I want to talk about Declan’s idea (which he gave me permission to steal). 

 

Let’s start by thinking about the best-case and worst-case scenarios for a Donald Trump or Kamala Harris presidency.

 

This is not something I normally do. In my experience the best-case and worst-case scenarios tend to be the most unlikely ones. And, if you spend your life making decisions based on avoiding being eaten by sharks or on definitely winning the Powerball this weekend, you’re going to make a lot of poor decisions. So, let’s rule out the extreme scenarios and stick with the fairly plausible ones. That means ruling out most of the stuff you hear on cable about fascist dictatorships, America-as-Venezuela, and global thermonuclear war. 

 

This is still a harder exercise than it seems at first, because success and failure are in the eye of the beholder to a certain extent. Think of it this way: Ideologues and partisans have different agendas and interests. I’ve found that this is one of the hardest distinctions to explain to people because the two categories are essentially platonic, without many flesh-and-blood examples in real life. We often treat hyper-partisans and hyper-ideologues as synonymous types, in part because most extreme ideologues are also extreme partisans, and they don’t see much of a difference. But there are exceptions. The best illustration of the point would be (some) libertarians. Libertarians have feet in both the left and right, so they aren’t completely at home in either. Thus, the best libertarians tend to focus more on moving policy in their direction. If the Democrats are libertarian on X they’ll root for Democrats on X. If the Republicans are libertarian on Y, they’ll lend aid and comfort to Republicans on Y. In other words, libertarians—at least the ones I have in mind—are very ideological but not very partisan. 

 

There used to be all sorts of issues that worked this way. The National Rifle Association used to give a lot of money to pro-Second Amendment Democrats. There used to be a lot of pro-abortion rights Republicans. But the alchemy of the Big Sort and polarization have transmogrified the parties. 

 

Which is why this kind of distinction is very, very hard to find on today’s left and right. If Republicans are for it, that’s conservative. If conservatives are for it, that’s the Republican position. Ditto for the left and Democrats. Obviously, there are some specific issues that divide partisans internally, but I can’t think of any that would cause a serious left-winger to root for Republicans or a serious right-winger to vote for Democrats. Except of course, for the issue of Donald Trump and his fitness for office. People who say Liz Cheney isn’t conservative because she’s endorsed Kamala Harris are a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. A purely strategic decision that is bad for Republicans is perceived as a rejection of conservatism qua conservatism. I think that’s ridiculous. But lots of very smart people, including many of my friends, see it that way. But let’s put that aside for the moment. 

 

It’s instructive that for a middle-of-the-road type who doesn’t much care about partisan politics or ideological agendas, the best-case scenarios for both presidencies actually look pretty similar: a very good economy, no war, a lot less drama, and maybe some concrete success at getting the border and our fiscal house in order. For people tuned out of politics, Trump’s presidency looks pretty good in retrospect to them. There was a lot of drama—but, again, they tuned a lot of that out—but we had a good economy (until COVID) and little war (for some reason, a lot of people forget that there were more American troops in combat under Trump—in Afghanistan, against ISIS, etc.— than there have been under Joe Biden. And, while final stats aren’t available yet, it looks like more Americans will have died from hostile action under Trump than under Biden). Nostalgia for high wage growth and low inflation is not irrational during a time of high inflation.

 

Meanwhile, the best-case scenarios for hyper-partisans and ideologues are like inverse mirror images. If Trump wins, the best-case scenario for the ultra-MAGA crowd looks a lot like the worst-case scenario for the left. Stephen Miller hits the ground running on Project 2025, Trump crushes the left, dismantles DEI and climate-change stuff, and deports millions of migrants at gunpoint. Maybe he even manages to convince Congress to pull us out of NATO. If Harris wins, the best-case scenario for the left is the worst case for the right. She immediately reverts to the Kamala Harris of 2019, writes a blank check for gender “therapy,” blows billions on globalist alliances, packs the Supreme Court, abolishes the legislative filibuster, and triples down on the Green New Deal. 

 

Now, I should say, I think both of these scenarios are very unlikely for largely the same reasons. Neither Trump nor Harris are particularly good politicians or administrators. And the more they pursue the brass ring of the best-case scenario desired by their biggest fans, the more opposition and roadblocks they will encounter. 

 

What’s interesting to me is most of my tribe of conservatives who are going to vote for Trump don’t actually want him to succeed on the full MAGA agenda. They don’t want to pull out of NATO. They may want to see a bunch of people deported—I do too—but they understand that a massive domestic military operation is operationally, politically, and in some cases, morally unfeasible. But they also roll their eyes at the idea that Trump will do many of the things that anti-Trump people worry about. Like the normies, they point at the first Trump term and say we’ll get more of the same, which is much better than what we’d get under Harris. In other words, they believe the worst-case scenarios about Harris but reject the worst-case scenarios about Trump.

 

Now, I am extremely skeptical about Trump II being a replay of Trump I (I also disagree with those conservatives about how Trump I was simply a matter of “mean tweets” and the like). He’s angrier, weirder, and more confident now. The major lesson he learned from his presidency is to surround himself with true believers, loyalists, and enablers. Trump won’t defer to the John Kellys, Paul Ryans, and Mitch McConnells, because they won’t be there to talk him out of stupid or dangerous ideas. He’ll be surrounded by people who will respond to his every impulse as if it were oracular genius. Perhaps not entirely on foreign policy: I generally trust Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton not to be idiots or whack jobs. I have no such confidence in, say, Kash Patel. I think it’s preposterous to believe Trump will be talked out of protectionism and industrial policy.

 

But I could be wrong. Where I am more confident, however, is that their vision of the worst-case Harris presidency is wrong. Unlike Trump, Harris will be up for reelection. The same calculations driving her to the center now would remain in effect once she’s elected. Will she do bad and dumb things? Of course. But even if the Democrats win both the House and the Senate, she won’t have the kinds of majorities that Barack Obama enjoyed. Indeed, it seems unlikely the Democrats will take the Senate, which would mean court-packing, the Green New Deal, etc., would be impossible, even if she tried to pursue such things. People forget that though Obama was a very talented politician, once he lost Congress he was pretty ineffectual. Sure, he did some stuff with his mighty “pen and phone,” but a lot of that stuff was erased after Trump took office. Harris would enter the White House a worse politician without congressional majorities, and much, much, less personal popularity.

 

It’s weird. Partisan Republicans love to talk about what a bad politician she is. They talk about how she gives terrible interviews and can’t explain policies. Her inappropriate laughing makes people squirm. And they’re right. She sounds like she cribbed her favorite sound bites from greeting cards and throw pillows at a healing crystal gift shop in Sonoma. But for some reason they think that once she’s president, she’ll be unstoppable? 

 

I think the most likely scenario is that Harris would be a modest failure. Her best accomplishment would be fulfilled the moment she—not Trump—took the oath of office.

 

And here’s where I think the distinction between principled ideologues and partisans becomes most relevant. For partisans, winning is always the highest priority. It’s zero-sum. But if you don’t care much about partisan victories, you can see how partisan defeats can be good in the long run. And not just good for your agenda, but for parties, too. Was it good for the GOP that Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed? No. Was it good for conservatism? Hell no. But for the crash you don’t get FDR and the New Deal. In other words, a 1928 defeat for the GOP would have been good for it and conservatism in the long run.

 

Biden was going to lose badly because he decided to run up ideological victories—to go “bigger than Obama” and push a new New Deal—and it blew up in his face. He was going to get hit with inflation no matter what, but he made it worse by sticking to his “legacy”-padding ideological agenda. If Biden had followed his political interest and served as the moderate normalcy candidate he ran as, he might have been able to stay on the ticket—and win—despite his infirmity.

 

If Harris wins it will be an obvious loss for the GOP in 2024 because of that zero-sum thing. But a weak and unpopular Harris presidency would quite plausibly be better for the GOP in the long run. After all, the Obama presidency was great for the GOP (as was the Carter presidency). Obama’s presidency wiped out moderate Democrats across the country. More than a thousand elected Democrats lost their jobs during his tenure, with state legislatures and statehouses flipping for Republicans. And his presidency—and Hillary Clinton’s candidacy—made Trump’s victory possible. 

 

Now, if Harris actually governs as a moderate, triangulating like Bill Clinton and hugging the center, she might be more successful. She might even be reelected. That would be bad for Republicans. But would it actually be bad for conservatism? In some ways, perhaps. But in some ways this would be a victory for conservatives because it would move the Democratic Party rightward, which would move the center of gravity of American politics rightward. And that’s what conservatives are supposed to care about more than mere partisan success. Moving the Overton window rightward would mean that more left-wing ideas would be considered fringe and beyond the pale of the politically acceptable. One of the biggest victories conservatives ever scored in my lifetime was symbolized by Bill Clinton declaring, “The era of big government is over.” When he signed welfare reform, it was bad for Republicans—because it arguably guaranteed his reelection—but it was a huge victory for conservative governance, in the same way that Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s acceptance of the New Deal was arguably the left’s greatest victory of the 20^th century. 

 

Do I think Harris will actually govern like that? Not really. Though I think odds are good she’ll try here and there. She certainly knows that she’ll be doomed if she ignores immigration and the border. 

 

The point is that the most likely best- and worst-case scenarios for a Harris presidency just aren’t that scary and have much more upside than the catastrophists claim. 

 

So, what does any of this have to do with the Ship of Theseus?

 

Well, that’s my most plausible worst-case scenario. I am not dismissing the concerns of people who think Trump will try to be an authoritarian strong man to pad his own conception of a legacy. I don’t think he’d be a Hitler or Mussolini—they were much cannier for starters, and America is not early 20^th century Germany or Italy. I think he’s much closer to a Juan Perón type anyway. Perón was a bad dude, but he was more interested in seeming like fascist strongman than actually doing the hard and ugly stuff. But we’re not mid-century Argentina either. 

 

But what I think is the most plausible—nay, likely—worst-case scenario for a Trump presidency is that current trends continue and accelerate. The definition of what it means to be a conservative has morphed before my eyes in the last decade. I grow weary having to offer examples, but it’s a necessary chore. Conservatives used to be adamant to the point of prudish sanctimony about the importance of good character. Now, to even have a problem with Trump’s boasting of sexual assault—never mind jury verdicts about the same—is to declare yourself a weak-willed cuck and snob. Free markets and free trade used to at least be ideals, even if political necessity sometimes required compromise. But the idea that planners and politicians were smarter than the market was anathema to a movement dedicated to Burke, Smith, Hayek, Sowell, Friedman, Buckley, et al. Now, “industrial policy, done right”—in Marco Rubio’s words—is all the rage. Donald Trump thinks he should pick winners and losers in the economy—from tariffs to overruling the Federal Reserve. Strong alliances were the bedrock of conservative foreign policy from Eisenhower to Bush. Defending, even if only sometimes rhetorically, freedom and democracy and denouncing tyranny was conservative dogma. Trump belittles and mocks democratic allies while fawning over strongmen everywhere. Most of all, the granite spine of modern American conservatism was fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. Donald Trump called for terminating the Constitution as needed to reinstall himself in the Oval Office based on a provable and proven lie about the election being stolen. 

 

I could go on. But you get the point. Trump’s most committed defenders celebrate all of this and call it conservatism. But far more people simply line up like the monkeys who see, hear, and speak no evil because in this partisan climate the only abiding political evil is to speak ill of Trump, at least in public. You can still do it in private, but it’s getting harder in part because more and more people have converted. But it’s also harder because many of the people who know the truth still don’t want to hear the truth as they shovel dirt on conservatism’s grave. They don’t enjoy emptying their shovels, but they do it in the spirit of “let’s get this unpleasantness over with. It’s got to be done to beat Kamala Harris. We’ll dig up and clean off conservatism later.”

 

But conservatism isn’t some gold religious icon you hide from marauders until they leave. A whole generation of young, self-described conservatives think all of this is normal, that they are real conservatives. The last thing they’re interested in is digging up the old idols and putting them back on the altars. They like the new religion. They make money and get attention from the new faith. And so do the new priests who preach it. 

 

Taking the long view, I do think this country is doomed without conservatism. No, I don’t mean in the apocalyptic sense I routinely decry. I mean that what makes this country great needs to be conserved. The new conservatism, despite all of its Make America Great Again rhetorical pabulum, isn’t about conserving—preserving—what is great about America, it’s about replacing conservatism with a kind of right-wing statism, which is just a fancy way of saying conventional right-wing populist nationalism. The change is sudden if you stand opposed to it, but for the partisans, it’s gradual and piecemeal enough that they don’t notice it—or choose not to. 

 

 I’m reminded of a story I first read about in Michael Burleigh’s outstanding The Third Reich: A New History (which I wrote about in Liberal Fascism). In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was constructing a new religion, a “counter-church,” complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can’t just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely anyone will have noticed.

 

No, the new conservatism isn’t Nazism, even taking Trump’s increasingly grotesque rhetoric about vermin and enemies within. But it isn’t conservatism as I know it, either. And for me the most plausible worst-case scenario is that a second Trump presidency will spell the completion of a new Theseus’ Ship of “conservatism.” 

The Vilification of Elon Musk Is about Politics, and Nothing More

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

 

Far be it from me to disagree with any one of the assorted Renaissance Men who make up the editorial staff of the New Republic, but I suspect that, in averring late last year that Elon Musk is a “deeply stupid and incompetent person” who “is simply not very good at anything,” staff writer Alex Shephard might have reached just a few feet over his skis. Among the words that Shephard used to describe Musk were “pathetic,” “idiot,” “toddler,” “toxic,” and “moron.” Among the criticisms he offered were that some of SpaceX’s rockets have exploded and that Tesla’s self-driving technology does not yet work perfectly. Among the predictions he made was that it would be a “shock” and a “surprise” if Twitter “exists in a year.” (Shephard has 71 days left for this augury to come true.) His conclusion: Musk “is making the world worse in innumerable ways.”

 

On Saturday, one of Musk’s companies landed a reusable 223-foot-tall space-rocket backwards on a launch tower.

 

Since the publication of Shephard’s piece, the hysteria around Musk has only grown worse. It has become de rigueur within the chattering classes to describe Musk as “evil” or as a “villain”;  one now hears progressives openly fantasizing about President Biden deporting him; and, in the Guardian this summer, Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, went so far as to demand that the federal government silence Musk’s speech online, terminate all of its contracts with Starlink and SpaceX (one must presume that the astronauts stuck on the ISS were against this suggestion), and, if possible, find a way to put him in prison.

 

Why? Politics.

 

Yes, yes, Musk’s critics always present a few fig leaves in support of their complaints. But we can all see what’s happening here. This is about politics and power and the institutional Left’s total inability to accept anyone who is not under its unwavering control. As a pluralist, this offends me for its rank illiberalism. As a human, it offends me for its myopia. And, in this case, it is the myopia that is the worse crime. Elon Musk is a genius. In the space of under 30 years, he has revolutionized online payments, consumer vehicles, satellite internet, and space travel, and he’s working on connecting the human brain to computers. Elon Musk is also a weirdo. He’s socially awkward; he’s capricious; he’s susceptible to conspiracy theories; he’s prone to infidelity; and, yes, he can be embarrassingly childish in public. But you know what? I don’t care. In fact, there is little that I care less about in the known universe. To look at a figure such as Musk and obsess over his political views or his personal flaws or his obvious Asperger’s Syndrome is to miss the point as points have rarely been missed. Not since the Gilded Age has a single entrepreneur yielded so many significant achievements in such a short period of time as has Musk. He said some unpleasant things on the internet? Okay.

 

That Elon Musk is both a genius and a weirdo is no accident. Indeed, historically, the two have not only tended to go hand in hand, but have been inextricable from one another once joined. Howard Hughes washed his hands until they bled, kept his urine in jars, and spent months at a time sitting naked watching the same movie with a cocktail napkin laid out over his penis. Henry Ford was a vicious antisemite who, in his later years, may have been clinically insane. Nikola Tesla was afraid of circles and had to clean his knife and fork with exactly 18 cleaning towels before eating anything. Pythagoras thought that fava beans contained the souls of the dead and that consuming them was tantamount to cannibalism. And don’t get me started on the inventors of Victorian England. John Napier, the aristocratic British mathematician who discovered logarithms and popularized the use of the decimal point, consented to travel nowhere without at least one spider in a box and believed that his pet rooster was trying to tell him which of his servants was stealing from him.

 

None of this matters — or, at least, none of it matters as much as what those people actually did. And, if we want what they did — and, in Musk’s case, what they do — we must learn to accept the detritus with far more patience than we do. The word “eccentric” literally means “away from the center” — or “away from what we think of as normal, ordinary.” And here’s the thing: The sort of person who trailblazes in useful and unusual ways is going to be away from the center in almost every aspect of their lives. That does not give them carte blanche. It does not mean that they cannot be criticized or judged. It does mean that, if we try to bash in the rough edges, we’ll likely lose a lot of the genius, too, and it certainly means that we ought to avoid taking such exception to their politics or their awkwardness or even their unpleasant behavior that we pretend that they are useless, world-destroying morons who should be stripped of their contracts, cast out of polite society, and, perhaps, thrown in jail.

 

Alas, I fear that our culture is trending in the other direction. “That so few now dare to be eccentric,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “marks the chief danger of the time,” for “they are the visionaries who make giant imaginative leaps.” Do we want those leaps? Sure, until those who make them say something that upsets Susan in HR, offends Rachel Maddow, or militates on behalf of a political party that is disdained by the bien–pensant. When that happens, all that happy talk of “diversity” and “creativity” and “self-expression” goes out the window, the better to be replaced by censorious stares, demands for sterile compliance, and a return to credentialized mediocrity.

Biden-Harris Threat against Israel Is a Moral Disgrace

National Review Online

Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its terrorist proxies is a political problem for Democrats. While most Americans sympathize with Israel, a segment of the Democratic Party is harshly critical of the U.S. ally and, in some cases, openly pro-Hamas. This contingent is loud and heavily concentrated in the swing state of Michigan. Ever since the October 7 attacks, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to thread this needle by talking about their commitment to Israel’s defense while routinely haranguing Israel for its conduct of the war and pressuring the nation to operate with more restraint.

 

This tension has come into full view over the past week.

 

On the one hand, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. would be sending an advanced anti-missile system to Israel, along with troops to operate it, to bolster the defense against Iran. On the other hand, Biden has been pressuring Israel into a more limited response to Iran’s second ballistic-missile attack in five months, including publicly opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

 

In the midst of this, Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a joint letter to Israeli officials — promptly released publicly — chastising Israel for not ensuring enough humanitarian aid in Gaza and warning that if Israel does not meet the administration’s demands within 30 days, the U.S. could suspend aid to Israel. Conveniently, this would place the potential aid-suspension date a week after the November 5 election.

 

In other words, Harris can spend the closing weeks of the presidential election arguing to the pro-Hamas caucus that the administration has put Israel on notice while still claiming to supporters of Israel that no decision has been made to suspend aid.

 

The substance of the letter places the blame for insufficient aid getting into the hands of Gazans on Israel, claiming that Israelis are creating too many barriers to aid entering the strip. Yet Israel must vet aid going in because Hamas has historically used aid deliveries to smuggle in weapons. Also, Hamas inhibits the flow of aid within Gaza, looting delivery trucks and hoarding food and supplies for their own fighters.

 

The Austin-Blinken letter also criticizes various steps Israel has taken against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, even though evidence points to employees of UNRWA having participated in the October 7 attacks.

 

While the cynicism of the Biden and Harris posture toward Israel may have some rationale in the world of Democratic politics, it makes no sense if the goal is actually to end the current Israel–Hamas conflict, free the hostages, improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and mitigate the risks of a regional war.

 

Preventing Israel from retaliating against Iran with sufficient force will encourage Iranians to keep sending missiles at Israel either directly or through Hezbollah, which will force Israel to respond. Threatening Israel with a suspension of military aid provides an incentive to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to dig in, reject cease-fire proposals, and further obstruct the delivery of humanitarian aid.

 

It is a moral disgrace for Biden and Harris to excuse Hamas’s efforts to block humanitarian aid while threatening to abandon Israel during its righteous war.

Biden Puts Israel in an Impossible Position

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

 

The Biden administration is once again threatening to hold its support for Israel’s defensive operations against Iran’s terrorist proxies hostage unless certain conditions are met. This is quite a conundrum for Israel. It would surely like to comply with the administration’s demands, but, from Jerusalem’s perspective, it already has.

 

In an October 13 letter to the Israeli government undersigned by administration officials Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, the United States accused the Jewish state of cutting off humanitarian aid to parts of the Gaza Strip. Israeli actions have “contributed to starvation and widespread suffering, particularly in the enclave’s north where Israel launched a renewed ground operation nearly two weeks ago,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Israel must “reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory” within 30 days of the letter, it read, or there will be “implications” for the future disbursement of U.S. ordnance and financial aid.

 

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller cast the missive not as an ultimatum but a friendly nudge of the sort that Israel has responded to with alacrity in the past. “We have seen Israel make changes before, and when they make changes, humanitarian assistance can increase,” he told reporters. “We know it can be done, we know that the various logistical, bureaucratic obstacles can be surmounted,” he added.

 

They surely can, although probably not immediately in the areas of the Strip where the Israel Defense Forces are conducting renewed counterinsurgency operations. But the United Nations maintains that Israeli defensive operations in the Gaza Strip are incompatible with the preservation of civilian humanitarian conditions. One or the other will have to suffer.

 

According to the U.N.’s World Food Programme, food aid entering Gaza’s northern enclaves cratered in October as the IDF encircled a position near Jabalia where Hamas operatives were reportedly attempting to regroup. The civilian population there — some 400,000 civilians, according to estimates — is under increasing pressure to move southward away from the fighting. “Hunger remains rampant, and the threat of famine persists,” the U.N. organization told CNN. “If the flow of assistance does not resume, one million vulnerable people will be deprived on this lifeline.”

 

The Israelis seem perplexed by the veiled accusation that they are deliberately engineering a famine in this extremely localized part of the Gaza Strip. “Israel has not halted the entry or coordination of humanitarian aid” said the military outfit responsible for the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza. What’s more, other U.N. organizations do not report a catastrophic disruption of their food aid distribution networks. “Despite the challenges,” the Times of Israel reports, citing a statement from U.N. deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq, “the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and its partners are distributing bread, meals and flour to designated shelters and beyond.”

 

Neither Israeli officials nor U.N. representatives dispute the claim that aid deliveries have been truncated as a result of the fighting, and it’s in neither party’s interests to see U.N. representatives caught in the middle of those combat operations (at least, those U.N. representatives who aren’t on Hamas’s payroll). What is in dispute is the relative risk of hunger in those areas. Caution is warranted. The U.N.’s relative ability to recognize the prospect of famine is a matter of debate. After all, it was only four months ago that the U.N.’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) was rebuked by its own Famine Review Committee, “which found that previous famine projections were not plausible due to incorrect assumptions, misinterpretation of data, and a significant omission of food entering Gaza through commercial and private sectors,” a Hayom report read.

 

The mischaracterization of the humanitarian conditions in Gaza of which the IPC initially warned made international headlines and yielded to widespread outrage over Israel’s handling of the war that began on October 7, 2023. The clarification that revealed the extent to which the whole affair was made up didn’t receive nearly the same level of coverage. And, if Israeli denials are any indication, the same sequence of events appears to be unfolding all over again. Certainly, this time could be different, but there is no greater indicator of future results than past performance.

 

Regardless, the pressure is once again on Israel. But the Biden administration has imposed an impossible conundrum on Jerusalem. If Israel has just 30 days to wrap up new counterinsurgency operations in the Gaza Strip’s northern territories, it would have to do so with unnecessary disregard for the lives of both the IDF and Gaza’s civilians. Speedy military operations in densely populated urban areas are also bloody operations, and the Biden administration would surely react with just as much horror to that outcome as it has to the tactics Israel is presently employing. But a more methodical approach designed to preserve as much life as possible may extend beyond Washington’s arbitrary timeline. What’s more, the circumstances that are contributing to Washington’s apprehension may be yet another product of an imperfect information environment and the selective interpretation of facts on the ground by Israel’s monomaniacal critics in the U.N. What a predicament.

 

Indeed, imposing this predicament on Israel seems to suit the Biden administration’s political objectives, even if America’s strategic goals in the region are frustrated in the process. The elusive fact of famine in the Gaza Strip seems immaterial. Rather, the impression that the threat of a humanitarian catastrophe looms forever just over the horizon appears to be an impression the administration wants to cultivate. If the Biden administration hopes to see its Israeli partners emerge from a speedy war against Hamas victorious, it’s doing everything in its power to thwart that objective by impugning its ally’s actions and motives while depriving Jerusalem of the tools it needs to see this war through to a rapid conclusion.

 

If you’re confused, so is the Biden administration. When it comes to Israel’s post-10/7 defensive operations, this White House doesn’t know its own mind. It may be incumbent on voters to make it up for them.

Kamala Harris Flails on Fox News, as Expected

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

 

After months of avoiding difficult interviews, Kamala Harris finally walked into the lion’s den today, sitting down for an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. When the interview was announced the other day, I noted to my colleagues what a gamble this was for Harris, the sort of move her handlers would allow only if their previous strategy of avoiding all unscripted media interactions had become untenable. It was a gamble that did not pay off for her. That it rated only as a sad failure rather than a spectacular news-making disaster means that her partisans are treating it like the greatest public resurrection since Christ rolled away the stone.

 

You can watch the entire interview here if you like. (The Trump campaign posted it in its entirety, announcing, “Our newest ad just dropped.”) Harris sat for 26 minutes, taking tough questions from Baier that she simply refused to answer. When asked about immigration and the border right off the bat, for example — specifically how many illegals the Biden-Harris administration has released into the country — she began filibustering and fell back on vague generalities as she fought with Baier over the fact that she kept interrupting and doing everything except answer his questions. (“Let me finish,” she repeatedly said, before reciting pre-rehearsed non-answers.) It was annoyingly substance-free mush.

 

Democrats, of course, will tell you that Harris just delivered a performance for the ages, a bravura Christopher Hitchens–like masterclass in adversarial interviewing that puts to bed forever all doubts about her competence. I know this because several hundred Democrats are currently insisting as much to me on social media. Others are less considerate, simply accusing me of being a Trumpist hack blinded by my partisanship.

 

I get a chuckle out of that, because as readers probably already well know, I think that neither Harris nor Trump should ever be president, and I consider the fact that one of them inevitably will be in the Oval Office as evidence of God’s judgment on a sinful nation. But that detachment also liberates me to assess political performances without indulging in the partisan need for them to be “a win for my team.” Heck, I’d have loved it if Harris had gone out there and revealed heretofore unsuspected power levels to the nation while deftly parrying Bret Baier’s questions. It would have been yet another shocking twist in the craziest presidential election cycle of my lifetime. But she could not do that. Kamala Harris simply lacks the capacity to surprise anybody, because, as my colleague Charlie Cooke politely pointed out the other day, Kamala Harris is an idiot.

 

Instead, people are so desperate for a change in narrative that they’re mistaking Harris’s flailing unpleasantness for “fighting spirit.” Perhaps you are as well, and if so I can only warn that you have gotten too lost in the fog of the late-stage campaign to step back and take proper perspective of what, in any set of circumstances other than those of 2024, would instantly be rated a notable disaster. The countless reviews I see flooding in from the Left along the lines of “she should do more adversarial interviews, she does better in them” underline the politics-as-team-sport habit of making the best of a bad situation. Harris “did good” by this logic merely because she seemed aggressively snippy. To partisans, that’s at least a sign of feistiness from an otherwise moribund and intellectually vacant campaign. (Literally: “She fights!”) What she failed to do, however, is remotely persuade the few undecided voters out there.

Trump Gives the Harris Campaign What It Needs

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

 

It’s a sad commentary on the state of intra-Republican political affairs when merely pledging to uphold the law is described as breaking with Donald Trump.

 

“Obviously we don’t want to have the United States military, we’re not going to have that, be deployed in the United States,” said Representative Byron Donalds, a staunch Trump ally, on Tuesday. “That’s been long-standing law in our country since the founding of the republic.”

 

The rebuke was occasioned by the former president’s cynical musing about the many subversive agents operating in the United States and the need to deploy the armed forces to subdue them.

 

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo over the weekend. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” The comments, which veered wildly away from Bartiromo’s premise, reveal the extent to which Trump remains fixated on what he called “the enemy from within.”

 

If he is restored to the White House, it’s not likely that Trump would be able to violate the Posse Comitatus Act at will. But nor would Trump be entirely bereft of the tools that would allow him to do just that, and his former defense secretary, Mark Esper, thinks he would certainly try.

 

In a recent CNN interview, Esper recalled how Trump “wanted to use the National Guard” and “active duty military as well” to subdue the often violent demonstrations that erupted across the country in the summer of 2020. There are safeguards against that level of presidential interference in state-level affairs, and those guardrails held in Trump’s first term. “But my sense is his inclination is to use the military in these situations, whereas my view is that’s a bad role for the military,” Esper added.

 

Trump’s remarks are a godsend to the Harris campaign at a time when it needs all the help it can get. The vice president’s campaign and its allies are doing all they can to publicize Trump’s remarks, but it is unlikely that Republicans have been privy to that rhetoric. The Right long ago learned to compartmentalize the former president’s imperious pronouncements. He, unlike his predecessors or would-be successors in the Oval Office, cannot be taken at his word, some argue. Rather, his comments should be subjected to exegesis by a priestly caste who can divine from them their most banal interpretation. This, we’re so often told, is the only intellectually serious way to interpret Trump’s guttural utterances.

 

That is irrational nonsense. More importantly, it’s nonsense to which the voters that matter in a general election do not subscribe. Republicans often let events fomented by Trump’s shorthand illiberalism get away from them by simply ignoring their significance. The result is a runaway news cycle in which Republicans play no part in shaping public perception. That’s not just bad practice, it’s an abdication of elementary civic duty.

The Education Department’s Inexcusable Inaction in Confronting Antisemitism

By Tal Fortgang

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

 

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella anti-Israel organization comprising dozens of campus groups and responsible for occupying university buildings this past spring, marked the anniversary of October 7 as only it could: by apologizing — for its previous condemnation of one of its leaders’ calls for violence against Zionists on campus and beyond. CUAD clarified its position on violence: “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance. . . . Violence is the only path forward.”

 

At demonstrations marking the anniversary, students at Columbia were photographed holding signs depicting paragliders, a reference to the Hamas operatives who infiltrated Israel’s south and massacred, tortured, and raped Israeli civilians. “Long live the Al-Aqsa Flood,” read one, using Hamas’s name for the atrocities. Throngs of chanting students called for more violence against Israelis and the dismantling of the Jewish state.

 

Of course, this sentiment prevails far beyond the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights. Swarthmore’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) wished their followers a “Happy October 7th,” calling it a “glorious day.” Stanford’s SJP celebrated “Gaza’s historic uprising” and lauded “the axis of resistance in Iran, Yemen and Lebanon,” an apparent reference to the launching of missiles at Israeli cities by Tehran and its proxies, the Houthis and Hezbollah. On campuses across the country, students and faculty wave the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, both designated by the State Department as terrorist groups, and call for violence against Israelis — a national-origin group protected under U.S. anti-discrimination laws.

 

Some of these abhorrent expressions may technically be protected speech. But that does not mean the federal government, which disburses billions in grants and other funding to these well-heeled schools, must continue subsidizing them as they devolve into terrorism-indoctrination facilities.

 

The U.S. Department of Education, which regulates higher education by dangling funding before university administrators to lead them where the DOE thinks they ought to go, has several simple and powerful tools at its disposal to address this debacle. The department has already faced pressure, in the form of heated congressional hearings and public outcry, to take definitive steps to strip radical-infested campuses of federal support. But it has thus far dragged its feet, making excuses about budget constraints that do not hold up when considered against the slate of regulatory options available.

 

Here’s one weird trick the DOE could do: send university administrators — who will hate this — a clear and direct statement warning that if their school does not take a particular necessary action, it will face swift and severe consequences. To be more specific, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona could easily issue guidance to universities like Columbia, reminding the people in charge that federal funding comes with strings attached — strings currently under tension from campus groups calling for violence. Chief among the conditions on funding is adherence to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on national origin in any program receiving federal financial assistance. Columbia, along with several other universities, is already under investigation for failing to address antisemitic harassment, and Secretary Cardona has said that “if an institution refuses to follow the law to protect students, we would withhold dollars.” One informal guidance letter — indicating that if Columbia fails to expel all students who celebrated and called for violence as part of October 7 events on campus, the department will rule against the university and revoke federal support — would push recalcitrant administrators to solve the problem.

 

But Cardona need not rely on civil-rights law, which often gets tangled up in complicated legal definitions, to justify cracking down on universities that fail to afford all students equal protection of their rules. The DOE could also use universities’ own anti-discrimination rules against them. Right now, it is not clear what function these rules serve: If these student-group statements are not violations, it is hard to imagine what would be. Columbia’s policy, for instance, prohibits “acts that denigrate or show hostility or aversion toward one or more actual or perceived members or associates of a Protected Class,” including “verbal abuse; epithets or slurs; . . . insulting or obscene comments or gestures; calls for genocide and/or violence; and the display or circulation of written or graphic material in any form, including but not limited to social media.” Yet its students unabashedly do all of the above — culminating in the use of graphic material on social media to call for violence while using epithets abusive to Jews and Israelis — and Columbia has done nothing about it.

 

Cardona could threaten Columbia and its peer institutions that failure to immediately apply their own anti-discrimination rules without fear or favor toward any group will cause their federal funding to dry up. Again, all it takes is one letter.

 

There is plenty for legislators to do to put a halt to the spread of extremism on campus, including writing more explicit legislation authorizing investigations and prosecutions of those who support designated terror groups. (Other executive agencies, especially the Department of Justice, should also be springing to action.) But at the very least, if the secretary of education continues to dither, Congress should haul him in for more hearings. When Cardona went before Congress in May, he repeated the line that his agency lacked the funding to deal with the avalanche of civil-rights complaints. But all that does is highlight the department’s failure to exercise its power; it is certainly no excuse for its failure to pressure universities to clean up their messes. Lawmakers should demand answers about why the department has failed to use its power in even low-cost ways to address obvious and dangerous extremism on campuses.

 

We have become accustomed to federal agencies sitting on their hands when faced with politically inconvenient situations. The DOE has become like a parent reluctant to discipline his misbehaving child, threatening to act on the count of three and then counting “two . . . two and a half . . . two and three-quarters . . .” never to reach a breaking point. For all its gentle reminders that discrimination and harassment are unacceptable, it still won’t take the uncomfortable step of doing what needs to be done. Inaction is a choice, especially when there is a readily available remedy. If that is a choice the Department of Education will continue to make, even in light of the shameful displays we’ve recently witnessed, the American people deserve to know before Election Day.