Check Your Privilege

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Which moment from the past week best captures the absurdity of pro-Hamas campus protests?

 

This one flagged by Jonah Goldberg is a strong contender:

Marxist dummies dying of thirst a few hours into their “revolution” in the middle of one of America’s wealthiest cities plays like a conservative satire of communist economics. But that’s not the moment I’ll most remember from all this.

 

This scene from the University of Alabama is another keeper, a rare example of “horseshoe theory” captured in the wild. Turn down the sound if you’re at work or around children, as it’s salty:

The right-wingers there seem to have believed that insulting the president would antagonize the left-wing radicals whom they came to counter-protest, never mind that those are the people most likely to refer to Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Now that the two groups have realized they’re allies, who knows what wonderful things they might accomplish together?

 

I wouldn’t choose that moment as the most memorable of the week either, though. The one that sticks in my mind wasn’t captured on video but in print, by a reporter for The Atlantic who went to Columbia University to check out the scene.

 

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

 

If you’re answering a question about the eliminationist ambitions of your cause by mumbling glibly about “privilege,” you either haven’t spent a second thinking seriously about it or you have thought about it and decided that those ambitions are morally acceptable.

 

Menace or cringe. There are no other options.

 

We should spend some time on the concept of “privilege,” though, and not just because it’s eternally hot stuff among the politically conscious campus set. It turns out to be a useful lens through which to examine the protests themselves.

 

***

 

Ask a progressive to define “privilege” and they’ll say … a lot, I’m sure, much of it unintelligible. Leftist political theory as a genre is famously turgid, obtuse, and overly dependent on jargon, the better to signal its alleged sophistication. The woman in the first clip above provides a minor example: After reading her summary of her dissertation, I can’t make heads or tails of what she’s writing about.

 

But we can define the concept simply ourselves. “Privilege” refers to how supposedly neutral institutions end up favoring the interests of politically powerful groups. If a city announces a new “stop and frisk” policy to reduce crime, for example, and the police disproportionately target African Americans in applying it, that’s white privilege at work. If a man gets paid more than a woman does for doing the same work, that’s male privilege.

 

Whether under the law or under capitalism, formal equality is a ruse designed to obscure the fact that true power depends on race, sex, education, and wealth. That’s the leftist view of privilege in a sentence. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread,” Nobel Prize-winning author Anatole France wrote. Policies against vagrancy, begging, and theft apply to everyone in theory but in practice serve the interests of the privileged gentry exclusively.

 

No wonder, then, that Israel slots easily into the “privileged” role among progressives in its conflict with the Palestinians. It’s whiter, wealthier, better educated, and follows the same Western political norms that the privileged here in the U.S. have used to exploit the dispossessed. And of course Israelis have claimed what the left believes is rightly Palestinian land as their own: “Privilege” doesn’t get any more unjust or obnoxious than evicting someone from their home and convincing much of the rest of the world to endorse it.

 

Inevitably, progressives are destined to loathe Israel and to do what they can to reduce the power disparity it enjoys with the Palestinians. (“Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”) What makes the campus protests noteworthy is that this righteous fury about privilege is being carried out by people who are themselves some of the most privileged on Earth.

 

Who, after all, is more privileged than an Ivy League student attending school in the financial capital of the world’s richest country? To be born an American is to be born into privilege, assured of freedoms and a standard of living that most of the world envies. But even within that privileged sphere, a degree from Columbia means your ability to earn considerable wealth and the considerable additional privilege that comes with it depends only on your willingness to do so. The chumps camping out on the quad in Manhattan in pup tents are part of the global elite by any definition of the term.

 

And, importantly, they know it.

 

A few days ago a post about the protests by attorney Elica Le Bon swept across The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. Her analysis was irresistible: Isn’t the nonsense going on at Columbia a simple case of protesters acting out their fantasies of glamorous oppression by “role-playing” as Palestinians, she asked, with the university administration thrust into the role of Israel?

 

They’re “liberating” buildings and “taking back” land on campus. They’re requesting “humanitarian aid,” as in the first clip up top. Many are wearing keffiyehs. Some are wearing Hamas headbands! And according to Le Bon, all of it is downstream from their immense privilege: “You don’t see this in lower-tier schools from kids of lower socio-economic standing because they aren’t plagued with the guilt of privilege that they’re seeking to launder through Middle East role-plays of feigned suffering. This is as first-world dystopia as it gets.”

 

They’re privileged, they know it, they’re uncomfortable with it, and they’re seeking absolution by taking on the trappings of the dispossessed and rebelling against the nearest authority. It’s not a campus intifada or even a protest, really. It’s group therapy.

 

That’s a satisfying analysis. For one thing, it jibes with the humiliating coddling of students that we keep seeing:

They’re not adults rising up on behalf of Palestine, they’re children playing the jihadist equivalent of “cops and robbers” with their campus president. So why shouldn’t they be coddled? Children often are.

 

Le Bon’s explanation also accounts for why the protest effort seems so unserious. It’s cockamamie to vent one’s grievances with Israel at the leaders of American universities, who have no influence over the war in Gaza and more often than not are as stridently leftist in their politics as the protesters are. And it’s pointless to agitate for days on end without making any meaningful demands. The closest the students have come is to call on their schools to divest from Israel, but as others have noted, they don’t seem especially serious about that. If they were, they would use their financial leverage by withdrawing en masse and starving the administration of tuition revenue until it capitulates.

 

The fact that they’re not doing that suggests that they care about the privilege that comes with a degree from Columbia just a bit more than they care about divestment from Israel. That leaves the protests feeling less like an earnest attempt to influence international affairs and more like an unsanctioned extracurricular activity—it’s all inherently juvenile and unserious.

 

As much as I like Le Bon’s read on all of this, though, it’s missing something. There’s another layer of privilege among the protesters that she overlooks.

 

***

 

Many observers of the protests, Jonah included, have noted that universities besieged by Hamas-LARPing dopes are merely reaping what they’ve sowed. “Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged,” Tyler Austin Harper wrote recently at The Atlantic. “Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them.”

 

Academia could select for kids who show intellectual humility and curiosity, to borrow a point from my colleague Sarah Isgur. Instead they’ve selected for kids who feel not merely entitled to demand that their elders “check their privilege” but morally justified in acting aggressively to make sure they do.

 

All told, one might say that progressives, the great enemies of colonialism, have … colonized higher education over the past half-century.

 

And you know how settler-colonialists are. They can be very defensive when you demand that they vacate territory they regard as rightly theirs.

 

The behavior of campus progressives this month has radiated the sense that American universities are “theirs” in a way that isn’t true of other students. It’s been pointed out repeatedly but can’t be emphasized enough that the sort of disruption in which they’ve engaged wouldn’t be tolerated from those whose political beliefs offended the administration’s leftist orthodoxy. In a piece published on Thursday by The Free Press, Abigail Shrier writes:

 

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

 

…

 

Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

 

Anyone who doubts that university “tolerance” policies are being applied arbitrarily is invited to parade through a campus with an image mocking Mohammed and see how long it takes the administration to act, Shrier continues. But you don’t need a hypothetical as provocative as that: Recall the icy panic that gripped the brain trust at Yale when a student merely used the words “trap house” in an invitation to an event in 2021.

 

What’s the word again for when the rules of supposedly neutral institutions favor the interests of politically powerful groups?

 

The special privilege that progressives enjoy at American universities doesn’t factor into Le Bon’s read on the protests but it explains some of their more grotesque excesses. It emboldens them to use tactics that wouldn’t be tolerated by disfavored groups, like occupying buildings. But it also encourages them to try to limit access to parts of the campus as if they own the joint. Which, in a manner of speaking, they do.

Setting up de facto checkpoints to control access to your territory feels very settler-colonialist.

 

One of the first things you learn in property law as a law student is that property rights include the right to exclude. No student on an American campus should properly be able to claim that right against any other; the fact that some campus protesters have done so betrays their sense that the university is their property. They dominate the culture; they expect special dispensation from the authorities; they’re possessive of the land and of the privilege it grants them, so they police it for trespassers. The rest of the U.S. might sympathize with Israel but school is their turf. Go figure that they’ve resorted to the otherwise inscrutable tactic of pitching tents in order to symbolically broadcast their claim to it.

 

As you might hear at a campus football game: Whose house? Our house.

 

So Le Bon’s theory of teenagers cosplaying as Hamas to expiate their privilege as Americans is true but incomplete. The other part of the explanation for what’s happening is progressives reveling in and ultimately abusing their privilege on campus to misbehave on behalf of causes with which the fellow travelers who run the school sympathize.

 

The former is juvenile and embarrassing, the latter is domineering and corrupt. Menace and cringe, again.

 

***

 

All of this feels familiar, no?

 

It’s strange to think of campus progressives simultaneously play-acting as the dispossessed by rebelling against the powers-that-be and behaving as the powers-that-be themselves by aggressively policing their sphere of influence for dissent. You can’t represent the popular resistance and the ruthless establishment at the same time.

 

Except that you can, sort of. There’s another political movement that I write about from time to time that routinely tries to pull that trick.

 

It too postures as a popular insurrection against a corrupt establishment and it too has become a corrupt, ruthless establishment enforcing ideological orthodoxy within its own political niche. Like the kids who took over that building at Columbia, it’s even been known to find itself in a standoff with police from time to time.

 

In fairness, many members of that movement are much less privileged than the average Ivy League student. But plenty are just as privileged, if not more so. And their leader is one of the more privileged people who’s ever lived.

 

The two sides do have some stark differences on the subject of mask-wearing, though, it must be said.

 

All anti-establishment political projects that achieve partial success are destined to be privileged and dispossessed, I suppose. Whether it’s progressivism on campus or Trumpism on the right, a felt sense of dispossession is the moral energy that attracts recruits, and ruthless enforcement of orthodoxy in its own ranks is the mechanism that protects its privilege within its own niche.

 

I strongly prefer not to be governed by either, but there wasn’t much I could do about that when I was a college student and it seems there isn’t much I can do about it as an adult. America loves angry, aggrieved, self-righteous children. We get the government we deserve.

Joe Biden Is 2024’s Chaos Candidate

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, May 04, 2024

 

Higher prices, a broken border, raging wars, violent campuses — is this what Joe Biden promised Americans four years ago?

 

Quite the opposite: In his 2020 convention address, Biden said that he would lead America away from Donald Trump and toward “a different path,” where “together” we would “take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light.”

 

Leave aside, for a moment, the garbled metaphors and syrupy language. Consider instead how far away America is from Biden’s gossamer vision. Here is a man who pledged a restoration of national unity and global tranquility if he became president. Not only has he failed to achieve his goals. His very policies put them out of reach. We were promised competence. We got chaos.

 

Back in 2015, Jeb Bush warned his fellow Republicans that his billionaire rival for the GOP presidential nomination was “a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president.” Republican primary voters ignored him. Trump won the nomination and the presidency. His years in office were tumultuous, to say the least. Yet today’s electorate views the instability that Trump brought to Washington differently than the disorder that Biden unleashed at home and abroad. Once there was a single “chaos president.” Now there are two.

 

My colleague at Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald, points out that the past three and a half years have seen a whittling away of the arguments Biden used against Trump. Biden said Trump and his family business were corrupt — only to find himself embroiled in his own family scandal. Biden flogged Trump’s mishandling of classified presidential records — only to have a special counsel investigate him for a similar offense. Biden described Trump as a sower of discord — only to preside over an America coming apart.

 

The widespread sense of confusion and disappointment, the general feeling that the country is a mess, best explains why Biden is losing to Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that just 25 percent of registered voters say Biden’s years as president have been “mostly good for the country.” Forty-two percent of voters say the Trump years were mostly good. A whopping 46 percent of voters, meanwhile, told the Times that Biden’s presidency has been “mostly bad” for the country. Thirty-three percent said the same of Trump’s term in office.

 

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. But voters are not simply looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. They have perceived, on their own schedule and in their own fashion, the connections between Biden’s policies and the economic and social conditions they deplore. The trillions in federal spending that gave rise to inflation. The unwinding of immigration protocols that sparked the border crisis. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. servicemen and signaled to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that America was in retreat.

 

Rather than move swiftly to address the sources of public discontent, Biden and his team have alternated between denial and spin. Price increases would be temporary — and when the cost of living continued to outpace wages, we were told to blame corporations and “big sandwich” and be grateful for high employment and GDP growth.

 

Migration would be seasonal — and when the number of unauthorized border crossings since Biden took office rose to more than 6 million, with more than 2 million illegal immigrants allowed to enter the country, we were told to welcome the newcomers, or blame Republicans, or remember that, as Biden said during a May 1 fundraiser, “immigrants [are] what make us strong,” unlike “xenophobic” countries such as Russia, China, and . . . “Japan.”

 

America would spy on terrorist groups in Afghanistan and fight militants with our “over-the-horizon” capability — and when ISIS-K began killing Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Russians, we were told that everything was under control. When Putin resumed his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we were told that America would stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes and that Putin “cannot remain in power,” even as fear of escalation led us to slow-walk weapons deliveries that would have given the Ukrainians a strategic advantage.

 

And when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed 1,200 men, women, and children, injured thousands more, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians, including American citizens, Biden visited the Jewish state and pledged his support, before gradually distancing himself from Israel’s war on terrorism in a desperate effort to placate the left wing of the Democratic Party.

 

Biden’s combination of bold statements and lazy and clumsy execution allowed America’s adversaries to work their will, from eastern Ukraine to the Middle East to the South China Sea. His reluctance to confront the antisemitic Left contributed to the atmosphere of ambivalence toward pro-Hamas protesters on America’s college campuses. On May 2, when Biden denounced the campus violence in hastily scheduled remarks, it was after much prodding. His comments were brief and late and ineffectual. They were a reminder that a chaotic world reverberates inside the White House, where failed presidents hurriedly react to events rather than establish new facts on the ground.

 

In a contest between chaos presidents, Trump has a double advantage. Not only is he a challenger whose record is viewed more favorably than Biden’s. He is also associated, rightly or wrongly, with authority, with law and order, with the police and the military and the working-class elements in American society. Biden, on the other hand, leads a party highly dependent on the college-educated and advanced-degreed, on campus culture, on pro-Palestinian and even pro-Hamas factions, on activists who desire nothing more than to take to the streets, harass “Zionists,” and tear down the established order.

 

A few commentators, watching the unfolding disaster on campus, have drawn parallels between 2024 and 1968. While there are some similarities, you do not have to look decades into the past for a precedent to the current election. Look at 2016. Then, Donald Trump benefited from chaos on the southern border, rising terrorism, violence against police, and voter dissatisfaction with the economy. He benefited from an opponent whom few voters liked and who often seemed elitist and out of touch. He benefited from the notion that his peculiar brand of crisis was preferable to the crises generated by contemporary American liberalism. That is why people chose Trump. And why they look like they are about to choose him again.

Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

By Judson Berger

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Do you ever get the sense that, in this close election between two historically loathed people, all it would take to win would be for one of them to antagonize voters just a little less?

 

On the bright side for him, President Biden has considerable room to work with — as it seems his administration and allies have been intent on aggravating people as much as possible in quotidian aspects of their lives. And in bigger ways: The FAFSA debacle, for one, has left a huge, Healthcare.gov-sized crater in his government’s reputation, leaving many students — and their parents — in limbo during college-acceptance season. But the annoyances and threatened disruptions are mounting apart from that, often the result not of agency ball-dropping but deliberate regulatory choices. The recent decision to backpedal on a proposed menthol-cigarette ban is one indication Biden realizes the tendency could be hurting him.

 

“It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately,” Rich Lowry writes. The president’s latest quarterly average approval rating, per Gallup, is under 39 percent and, for that period, lower than any of the previous nine presidents’. A brutal CNN poll released on Sunday showed not only Biden trailing Donald Trump by six points while the latter stands trial, but 61 percent viewing his presidency as a failure. Jim Geraghty provides his usual spot-on diagnosis of the underlying political problem:

 

This presidential election is a battle between two candidates and campaigns whose primary concerns and worries are light-years away from those of the majority of the electorate.

 

Trump, true to form, aims to make the race about how unfairly he’s been treated, about the “stolen” 2020 election, etc. And Biden, Jim writes, “would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion,” and so forth. Yet poll after poll show it’s the economy and inflation/cost of living, along with immigration, that weigh on voters’ minds.

 

Instead of focusing narrowly on those things, the Biden administration is pursuing the above laundry list, while also:

 

• Botching the rollout of new college financial-aid forms. This can’t be stressed enough. Jim writes here about how the Department of Education fumbled the congressionally mandated overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid system. Per the Associated Press, the muck-up has, for some, delayed college decisions by months and raised concerns that many students will simply not attend: “Across the United States, the number of students who have successfully submitted the FAFSA is down 29% from this time last year.” In Jim’s words, “God help you if you have a high-school senior applying to colleges this year.”

 

• Finalizing a rule that is meant to raise wages for au pairs but could make the program too expensive for many families, and potentially even double the cost.

 

• Pursuing EPA regulations meant to move manufacturers and drivers away from gas-powered cars and toward electric vehicles and hybrids — on a timetable that seems to underplay the enormous amount of work still needed to build out the charging infrastructure and improve the EV experience itself. As NR’s editorial on the push noted, EVs were just 7.6 percent of new car sales last year.

 

• Pursuing a range of rules that seem designed to torment businesses, dealing with everything from overtime policies to noncompete clauses to emissions disclosures to independent contractors. Some of these emanate from independent agencies — but independent agencies run by people Biden appointed, so the president’s separation from these disruptions is limited. These measures won’t all necessarily redound to the benefit of employees, either.

 

• Until recently, trying to ban menthol cigarettes.

 

As National Review’s editorial explains, proponents of the latter idea considered it an act of racial benevolence, but that assumption inevitably collided with the likely consequences of the rule:

 

Menthols are popular among black smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes, the argument goes.

 

Like many “anti-racist” arguments, this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular with black people doesn’t put very much faith in the decision-making abilities of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like anyone else. . . . A national ban on the type of cigarette preferred by black smokers increases the chances for black people to confront law enforcement and face penalties for evading a ban that most white smokers wouldn’t face.

 

So the administration announced it’s shelving the idea.

 

It’s a start. What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”

 

Democrats, do you ever look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.

 

Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .

 

Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?

Fire, Ready, Aim

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

I haven’t written anything about the Kristi Noem story. Nick Catoggio beat me to it here at The Dispatch and was pretty exhaustive. I appreciate his reluctance to eat off my plate, as it were, by writing about the intersection of dogs and politics, or well, dogs and anything else. But that’s okay. And I don’t have much to add to his analysis. But I do think the way Noem has responded to the story is a good example of why politics is so exhausting these days. 

 

Noem screwed up. I don’t mean she screwed up by killing her 14-month-old dog in one of the great modern examples of victim-blaming. She was a bad dog owner and blamed the dog for it. Nor do I mean her decision to parlay her adrenalin boost into some goat slaughter. I mean she screwed up by putting the story in her own book, and telling the story so badly that she shot herself in the foot. I mean that figuratively, of course (though she should probably avoid wearing those slippers that look like dogs for a while, just to be safe). 

 

Whatever her motivation for telling this story the way she told it, it’s inconceivable she got the reaction she’d hoped for. She blew her chances to be Trump’s running mate out of the sky like a poodle out of a skeet launcher. She may have even hurt her chances to be a pundit on Fox News after she leaves office.  

 

But Noem hasn’t given up. She’s now going around blaming the “Fake News” for her problems. “Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted spin,” she tweeted. “I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock. I chose my kids.” On Hannity, she made it sound like she killed Cujo to protect her kids. We can give her the benefit of the doubt that there’s truth to all of this. The fact remains that she didn’t tell the story that way in her own book. She played down the alleged threat to her kids while hyping how happy the dog was and how bad a hunting dog Cricket was. And, as for the poor goat, she basically threw that in because … I don’t know why. It needed killing or something.  

 

She had every opportunity to tell her story however she wanted, honestly or dishonestly. She chose poorly, to the point where everyone from the ultra MAGAs to the cast of The Five were aghast. Rather than own it, she tried to turn it into a story about how she’s a victim-martyr to the “media.” And, of course, Sean Hannity was all too happy to help. He could have asked, “So, are Brit Hume and Jeanine Pirro part of the ‘Fake News’ media?’” I mean he couldn’t ask that, because, Hannity. But you get the point. 

 

DeSantis’ beef with ‘beef.’

 

Since I started out playing clean-up to Catoggio, I’ll keep going. Yesterday, Nick wrote about Ron DeSantis’ decision to make it a crime to make or serve artificial meat. Again, I don’t have a lot to add to his analysis. But there are a couple of things I’d flesh out—organically flesh out, of course. 

 

First, I was a little surprised that Nick didn’t connect the dots between DeSantis’ position(s) on Disney and his position on fake meat. (I’m only surprised because Nick is one of the great dot-connectors and receipt-holders of our age.) When DeSantis signed a law designed to punish social media for censorship or something, the law had a special carve out for Disney. “Theme parks” were immune to the regulations. But, later, when Disney (idiotically) waded into the culture war stuff on the falsely misnamed “don’t say gay” law, DeSantis went after Disney’s special tax advantages in the state. The details are wonky, but the relevant point is that DeSantis was for special treatment for Disney before he was against it. He was also against ethanol subsidies as a congressman but for them as a presidential candidate. Where he was consistent, at least as a presidential candidate, was talking about the evils of “corporatism.” Unfortunately, he rarely used the word correctly. Corporatism is an actual form of political economy with deep roots in medieval European and Catholic thought. It’s not “rule by corporations.” That’s how he meant it when he constantly attacked Nikki Haley’s “warmed over corporatism.”  

 

(Corporatism, as promulgated by the church in the 19th century, was a “system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest.” The church was trying to find a “middle way” between laissez-faire capitalism and authoritarian socialism. But before that, the basic idea of corporatism was that nobles, guilds, clergy, and other stakeholders, would work in coordination to maintain the social order.  The root idea of corporatism isn’t a “corporation” like Intel or Exxon-Mobil, but “corporeal” as in “corpus mysticum” or “corpus politicum.” The whole society working as one body—no surprise that the economic system of fascism is corporatism.)

 

In his defense, I suppose, you could say DeSantis was more consistent in his approach than I’m suggesting, given that he often specified that his real target was the “woke corporatism” of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing in general and the “Magic Kingdom of Woke Corporatism” in particular. But just as “common good” has become right-wing speak for “social justice,” “woke corporatism” is right-wing speak for “corporatism we don’t like.” 

 

Now, I don’t like corporatism, full stop. And I probably agree with DeSantis on most of his criticisms of ESG and the like. But banning—criminally banning—artificial meat is right-wing woke corporatism, in the sense that he means it, and quite consistent with the way the popes of yore meant it. He’s pretty honest about it. He justifies the move as a way to protect cattle interests in the state against competition. Nick writes:

 

The governor himself was explicit about the ban’s protectionist intentions. “What we’re protecting here is the [cattle] industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that views things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantis said at his press conference, reminding the audience that Florida has “one of the top cattle industries in the country.”

 

That’s domestic protectionism, crony capitalism, and corporatist on his terms. Culturally fashionable economic interests get protection from innovators and disruptors. When DeSantis issued his “Declaration of Economic Independence” he bemoaned how “large corporations have secured massive carve outs and bailouts. This has become a form of venture socialism in which gains are privatized at the top, whereas the losses are borne by you, the hardworking American taxpayer.” DeSantis vowed, “No more socialism for the wealthy and rugged individualism for small businesses and for individuals. and for working class people.”

 

Well, DeSantis is providing a carve-out for natural—carvable—beef. If you’re a rugged individual or small business in the artificial beef business, DeSantis wants to put you in jail. This is precisely the sort of thing that happened under the corporatist systems of medieval Europe. I wrote a lot about this in Suicide of the West. Guilds—i.e. incumbent industries—hated innovation. Here are some examples I quoted (via Joel Mokyr):

 

• In 1299, Florence banned bankers from adopting Arabic numerals.

• At the end of the fifteenth century, scribe guilds of Paris managed to fight off the adoption of the printing press for two decades.

• In 1397, pin manufacturers in Cologne outlawed the use of pin presses.

• In 1561, the city council of Nuremburg made the manufacture and selling of lathes punishable with imprisonment.

• In 1579, the city council of Danzig ordered the secret assassination of the inventor of a ribbon loom—­ by drowning.

• In the late 1770s, the Strasbourg council barred a local cotton mill from selling its wares in town because it would disrupt the business model of the cloth importers.

 

These things were done to protect the established order, the world as God willed it. One of the backers of the fake meat ban explained that he opposed fake meat because it is an “affront to nature and creation.” I agree with that, aesthetically. But in the 19th century, this was the sort of thing people said about anesthesia. Women should experience pain in childbirth, for instance, because the pain was God’s will. 

 

I know I’ve ventured from my promise of bloggy punditry, but there’s a second point worth making. Stifling innovation isn’t just bad for the economy and hypocritical for supporters of free enterprise—it’s dangerous. Many of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history were discovered by accident. Smart people trying to do one thing ended up doing something much better. Swiss scientist Walter Jaeger was trying to invent a poison gas detector but discovered his device was triggered by his cigarette smoke. British pharmacist John Walker was messing around with some chemicals and discovered that the congealed gunk on a stick burst into flame when he scraped it on his hearth. That’s how matches were created. Percy Spencer was working on a magnetron for Raytheon when he discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. That became the microwave. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident. Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered X-rays while mucking around with vacuum tubes. The stories are endless: pacemakers, Teflon, popsicles (by an 11-year-old), safety glasses, vulcanized rubber, etc. Tea bags were originally just some packaging, but customers started just dunking the whole package in hot water. Bubble wrap was deliberately invented—as wallpaper. 

 

This gets at the very heart of why humanity started to get rich once—and only once—in all of human history. Innovation was given free rein. That’s the thing about technological and scientific exploration—it’s a process of discovery. Innovation was kept under a wet blanket for millennia to protect the established interests, who rightly feared what the genie would do to them once let out of the bottle. 

I don’t know if artificial meat will ever catch on or be successful at scale. If it is, it will definitely be disruptive. But for it to be actually successful, it will have to be popular, and it can only be popular a) if it’s an affordable substitute for natural meat, and b) if it tastes good. That can only be discovered through competition in the market. 

 

I’m not for giant subsidies for the fake meat industry for the same reason I’m not for DeSantis’ de facto subsidies for “traditional” meat: I don’t know. And neither do the people who think they’re smarter than the market and the innovators. As Virginia Postrel writes in her wonderful book, The Future and Its Enemies, “With some exceptions, the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the dynamic processes through which it is carried.” Fake meat might be a flop. But if it’s a success, it will be a success for a good reason: because it satisfies real human needs. 

 

The people who want to stop innovation in the present are always reluctant to answer the question, “When would you have stopped it in the past?” Before the invention of seat belts, penicillin, the printing press, the microwave, the pacemaker, fertilizer, crop rotation? 

The Curiously Relevant Case of Rick Perry

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Regarding the legal (and legalistic) issues related to the current raft of criminal cases lodged against former game-show host, occasional pornographic-film performer, and disgraced ex-president Donald J. Trump, I commend to you the expert opinions of Dispatch legal analyst Sarah Isgur and frequent Advisory Opinions podcast guest David French of the New York Times.

 

For my part, I have a narrow, but relevant, example to put forward: the felony case against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was indicted by a Travis County prosecutor entrusted with countering political corruption throughout the state of Texas. The prosecutor, a wildly corrupt and out-of-control drunk named Rosemary Lehmberg, indicted Perry for threatening to veto funding for a specific state expenditure: her office.  

 

While she was a Travis County prosecutor, Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving, which is not a great surprise for someone who was consuming about two liters of vodka a week for more than a year in addition to whatever other drinking she did. (I sympathize.) She was pulled over after driving erratically, found with an open bottle of vodka in the car, and came in at about three times the legal blood-alcohol content. That is not great, but the much worse part is that while in custody, she attempted to use her position to bully and threaten sheriff’s officers and other personnel into giving her special treatment and letting her go. She threatened to have them arrested and jailed, among other things.

 

Perry rightly understood this to be an unbearable outrage against the public interest in clean and fair government, and sought—unsuccessfully—to have Lehmberg removed from office. He subsequently announced that as governor he would use his veto powers to block state funding for the office as long as Lehmberg was the incumbent—if Travis County wanted to protect its corrupt prosecutor, Travis County could pay her.

 

Lehmberg retaliated by indicting Perry on felony corruption charges on the theory that, while the governor of Texas has entirely open-ended veto power, it was an act of political corruption for him to use that veto power to try to pressure her to leave office. That was pure nonsense, as the courts eventually decided, and everybody knew it was a vindictive, frivolous case: another outrageous abuse of power from a prosecutor inclined to the abuse of power. Perry was at the time campaigning in the Republican presidential primary while under felony indictment—Donald Trump is not the first to have done so.

 

As our legal writers have observed, there isn’t anything in the statutes or in the Constitution that says you cannot indict a sitting president. There is a Justice Department memo that says the Justice Department won’t do that, and there is the fact that the president, as head of the executive branch, would in effect be prosecuting himself if he were tried under federal law while in office. There isn’t anything that says a local prosecutor cannot indict a president either—that this is not the usual practice is a matter of custom that had not been much challenged before the presidency of Donald Trump, who is a profoundly corrupt, indecent, and immoral man, albeit one who has not yet been convicted on any charge. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it hasn’t always been: President Ulysses Grant was arrested while he was president, and apparently thanked the arresting officer—this having happened in the 19th century, it is worth observing that the police officer who arrested the sitting president was black—and praised him for doing his duty. Grant was a reckless horseman, and the officer had, apparently, given him a prior warning. 

 

I like the story about President Grant, but we don’t live in Ulysses Grant’s world—we live in Rosemary Lehmberg’s world. 

 

The question about legal immunity for presidents mainly has to do with official acts, i.e., with actions taken in the course of performing the duties of a president. Donald Trump believes that such immunity should cover all conduct for presidents, including ordinary crime. It is easy to understand why such a figure as Trump would prefer this, but almost nobody takes that argument seriously. There are some serious reasons to doubt that U.S. presidents are—as opposed to should be—legally entitled to any official immunity, including for plainly official acts while president. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out last week during oral arguments for the case involving these questions, there isn’t anything in the Constitution that explicitly confers such immunity on presidents, while there is plain-text discussion of immunity for members of Congress.

 

The example of Rosemary Lehmberg is one little piece of evidence that obviously official acts within the core executive powers of a chief executive (which a governor is) can nonetheless be read as potential crimes if an enterprising prosecutor so desires. The cases may come to naught, but that doesn’t make them necessarily any less politically useful to partisans or toxic for democratic procedure.

 

None of this is especially relevant to the Trump case at hand, which mostly involves private conduct that would be outside the scope of any plausible immunity claim. Like many of my lawyer colleagues, I was somewhat mystified by Jack Smith’s inclusion of Trump’s desire to fire one attorney general and replace him with another as part of the criminal case against him—choosing his own attorney general is something presidents get to do, provided there is no evident crime involved, such as taking a bribe to fire one Cabinet member and replace him with another. Firing a political appointee because he will not toe the political line is something that would be very hard to understand as a crime, even in the context of the broader Trump-led coup d’état effort after the 2020 election, which was—in my view and, I am confident, in the view of any reasonable jury that should ever get to consider the case in full—a criminal conspiracy. 

 

Consider, for example, the murder case against Barack Obama. There wasn’t one. In my view, President Obama should have been impeached and removed from office after ordering the assassinations of two American citizens—jihadist social-media propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son—who were killed not in the heat of battle but after being put on a hit list (Obama’s lieutenants bragged to the New York Times about it) and targeted for extrajudicial killing. What Barack Obama did wasn’t ordinary criminal murder—it was much worse than that. A self-respecting Congress would have acted against him (Sen. Rand Paul, before he devolved into … whatever it is he has become … tried to do so) and drawn a bright line in policy regarding the assassination of American citizens.

 

But Congress failed to act. Would it have been better, from a civic or constitutional point of view, if some prosecutor had attempted to construe Obama’s national security policy as a murder conspiracy? I do not think that it would. There are a lot of variations on the theme of Rosemary Lehmberg out there, and a lot of Republican answers to Rosemary Lehmberg out there, too. 

 

There are plenty of plausible charges upon which to convict Donald Trump. And for every plausible felony charge against him, there are 14,697 non-criminal reasons he should never again be entrusted with any kind of political power and never should have been in the first place. The scars of the Trump presidency will be on our constitutional order for generations, and the issue of indicting, trying, and convicting former presidents for acts taken while in office will be part of that. Some kind of qualified immunity for plainly official acts, both during the term in office and after, seems to me a reasonable measure—but it also seems to me that this is a question for Congress, not a question for the Supreme Court. As Justice Thomas noted, there isn’t any obvious textual source for any claim of immunity for presidents. An immunity statute written by Congress would do well to include a provision permitting the removal of such immunity (perhaps by a two-thirds vote or as part of an impeachment sentence) in the case of truly outrageous offenses done under the color of official acts. 

 

Rick Perry was indicted on felony charges for threatening a veto. The case against Donald Trump isn’t anything so obviously vindictive or trivial. But the history of our republic does not begin with Donald Trump and—one hopes—it will not end with him, either. This is something we need to get sorted out before there is an even more corrosive test case. The taste for tyranny is not limited to men as lazy and stupid as Donald Trump—and we simply have to prepare for the possibility of a more competent and capable demagogue.

Don’t Bring Gaza to America

National Review Online

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

What is the Biden administration thinking? Reports say that Biden administration officials are batting around plans to bring Palestinian refugees from Gaza to America under the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Such an initiative would be a security nightmare, a potential diplomatic problem, and likely to work against the political interests of the Biden administration.

 

The Biden administration’s top political problem is its negligence of immigration law, combined with its expansive abuse of asylum and refugee status, both of which caused the record flow of aliens into the country. In December of last year, 371,000 illegal aliens were encountered by border enforcement, a new monthly record. That is like encountering the city of Cleveland and a few of its suburbs.

 

The Biden administration has completely neglected even the basic screening of illegal entrants into the United States, even the type of screening liberals believe in, such as for Covid, before giving them bogus trial asylum status that will effectively allow them to stay forever. And now the Biden administration thinks it’s wise to give a special incentive for Gazans to come to the United States as refugees. This is a population in which 70 percent of those polled believe the terroristic assault against Israel on October 7 was just and good. It’s no surprise that neighboring Arab countries, led by Egypt and Jordan, have steadfastly rejected any Gazan refugees.

 

Beyond the very real security issues of bringing in a population sympathetic to Hamas, there are also diplomatic problems. Refugees would have to be certified by the United States as fleeing some form of persecution. That could mean fingering Israel or its armed forces as their persecutor, causing an immediate diplomatic scandal with Israel and lending indirect support to the most geopolitically obtuse nations of the world, such as South Africa, which launched a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ with the support of Ireland.

 

Besides provoking the ire of border hawks, a category which includes a large majority of the nation, a Gazan resettlement program will not even solve the administration’s political problems with the far Left, as it will be reinterpreted by Hamas supporters as cooperation with Israel’s determination to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinian Muslims.

 

If we are looking for signs of brain death in the Biden administration, a plan to settle Gazans as refugees in the United States is one of them.

 

The Biden administration’s utterly lawless record and ad hoc amnesties, work-permit giveaways, and special-status awards to Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans mean that appeals to the rules will not work. Congress must be proactive, affirmatively banning U.S. funds and resources from being used for these purposes. If we’ve learned anything, though, it’s that it is very hard to save Biden from himself.

Don’t Become Sweden

By Rich Lowry

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

There must be worse ideas than admitting refugees from Gaza into the U.S., but none immediately come to mind. 

 

According to CBS News, one proposal the Biden administration is considering is “using the decades-old United States Refugee Admissions Program to welcome Palestinians with U.S. ties who have managed to escape Gaza and enter neighboring Egypt.” Another possibility is “getting additional Palestinians out of Gaza and processing them as refugees if they have American relatives.”

 

Who knows how serious the internal deliberations are, and, presumably, any such programs would be small-scale. That said, few would have thought President Biden would allow millions of people to walk into the country over the southern border, but here we are. 

 

The response to any consideration of letting Gazan refugees into the country in any numbers should be, “Don’t become Sweden.” That admonition from conservatives once was exclusively about the risks of adopting an overweening welfare state; now, it also has to be about the perils of adopting a heedlessly open-handed, self-congratulatory immigration policy.

 

If the Biden administration thinks it can send a message to the rest of the world — and perhaps to Dearborn — about our admirable liberality by accepting large numbers of people from the Middle East who don’t share our values, Sweden has been there and done that. 

 

The Scandinavian country has managed to transform itself from an overwhelmingly peaceful society to one with a gangland violence problem — without really trying, or certainly without intending to. 

 

To conjure an image of contemporary Sweden, think less IKEA and more bombs blowing up outside fashionable Stockholm restaurants. 

 

Sweden welcomed more than 150,000 refugees from the broader Middle East in 2015, an act its leaders framed as a moral triumph. Given the country’s population of roughly 10 million, this was a huge number. 

 

In about two decades, Sweden decided to go from a largely homogenous society to 20 percent of the population being foreign-born, in part, as an exercise in virtue-signaling. (The percentages among young people are much higher.)

 

In 2015, the prime minister Stefan Löfven couldn’t have been more puffed up and morally self-important about the decision to take migrants en masse. “My Europe takes in refugees,” he intoned. “My Europe doesn’t build walls.” 

 

His Europe was incredibly short-sighted and naïve. 

 

The country assumed that poorly educated people from an entirely different culture would fit right into the Scandinavian nation, because, you know, Sweden is Sweden. What could go wrong?

 

As James Traub in Foreign Policy magazine notes, this decision was very costly. Sweden spent more than 5 percent of its overall budget on refugees in 2016. 

 

And, more importantly, it has created social problems where there were none before, at least not on this scale. 

 

Sweden, in effect, seeded its country with the equivalent of the Paris suburbs. Stefan Hedlund writes of “the emergence of neighborhoods where almost all residents are immigrants, where unemployment rates are very high and where the children of immigrants go to schools where no other children, often not even teachers, are proficient in Swedish.”

 

With this, inevitably, has come disorder. Fatal shootings have doubled over the last 30 years, and on a per capita basis, Stockholm has 30 times the gun violence of London, according to the Wall Street Journal.

 

Only Albania has a higher rate of gun deaths among sizable European countries. 

 

If the shooting incidents aren’t bad enough, the hand grenades and bombs are particularly hard to ignore. 

 

The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said, “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”

 

The Wall Street Journal report cites “turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities.”

 

Young migrants are indeed heavily involved. About 45 percent of suspects in gun-related murder and manslaughter charges are aged 15–20, according to the Guardian. That’s an increase from 23.6 percent in 2012. (Meanwhile, overall youthful offending has declined a bit.)

 

The background of the prominent gang leader Rawa Majid is telling. Referred to as the “Scandinavian Pablo Escobar” by one expert, he was brought to Sweden as an infant by parents from Iraqi Kurdistan and assimilated into a life of crime thanks to his cousins.

 

The chief of Sweden’s central bank has warned that the violence could harm the country’s long-term economic prospects, and across the political spectrum, everyone who hated the idea of walls a decade ago now supports a much more restrictive approach to immigration, as well as tough-on-crime policies. 

 

If Biden wants an even further shift to the right on immigration in the U.S., admitting Gazan refugees would do it. 

 

There’s simply no reason to go out of our way to take refugees from the most dysfunctional culture in the Middle East, shot through with political and religious radicalism and support for a terror group. 

 

It’d especially make no sense to pluck them out of Egypt, the country right next door to Gaza, with a similar culture and values. Many Gazans, after all, ultimately come from Egypt.

 

Of course, we’d be told that all of the prospective refugees are the most pro-American, philosemitic people in all of Gaza. As a practical matter, though, they’d only be checked for terrorist connections, while there’s no effective mechanism for screening for their social and political attitudes.

 

Given how refugees ramify, accepting any significant number would be a choice to create a Gazan diaspora in the United States. Refugees are rapidly eligible for green cards and citizenship, and can in short order bring in family members, in the classic dynamic of chain migration. 

 

We shouldn’t go there and, if we have any doubt about that, should look to Scandinavia. Sweden has indeed created an example for the world. Just not the one it expected to.