Progressivism on Campus Takes a Summer Vacation

By George Will

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Commencement season brings a respite from the sinister childishness rampant on campuses. Attacks on freedom of speech come from the professoriate, that herd of independent minds, and from the ever-thickening layer of university administrators who keep busy constricting freedom in order to fine-tune campus atmospherics.

The attacks are childish because they infantilize students who flinch from the intellectual free-for-all of adult society. When Brown University’s tranquility of conformity was threatened by a woman speaker skeptical about the “rape culture” on campuses, students planned a “safe space” for those who would be traumatized by exposure to skepticism. Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times, reported that the space had “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.”

The attack on free expression is sinister because it asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless. Free speech is more comprehensively and aggressively embattled now than ever before in American history, largely because of two 19th-century ideas. One is that history — actually, History, a proper noun — has a mind of its own. The other is that most people do not really have minds of their own.

Progressives frequently disparage this or that person or idea as “on the wrong side of history.” They regard history as an autonomous force with its own laws of unfolding development: Progress is wherever history goes. This belief entails disparagement of human agency — or at least that of most people, who do not understand history’s implacable logic and hence do not get on history’s “right side.” Such people are crippled by “false consciousness.” Fortunately, a saving clerisy, a vanguard composed of the understanding few, know where history is going and how to help it get there.

One way to help is by molding the minds of young people. The molders believe that the sociology of knowledge demonstrates that most people do not make up their minds, “society” does this. But progressive minds can be furnished for them by controlling the promptings from the social environment. This can be done by making campuses into hermetically sealed laboratories.

In The Promise of American Life (1909), progressivism’s canonical text, Herbert Croly said, “The average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.” National life should be “a school,” with the government as the stern but caring principal: “The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?” “Unregenerate citizens” can be saved “many costly perversions, in case the official school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate.” For a survey of today’s campus coercions, read Kirsten Powers’s The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.

In Kindly Inquisitors (1993), Jonathan Rauch showed how attacks on the free market in speech undermine three pillars of American liberty. They subvert democracy, the culture of persuasion by which we decide who shall wield legitimate power. (Progressives advocate government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political campaign speech.) The attacks undermine capitalism — markets registering the freely expressed choices by which we allocate wealth. And the attacks undermine science, which is how we decide what is true. (Note progressives’ insistence that the science about this or that is “settled.”)

For decades, much academic ingenuity has been devoted to jurisprudential theorizing to evade the First Amendment’s majestic simplicity about “no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” We are urged to “balance” this freedom against competing, and putatively superior, considerations such as individual serenity, institutional tranquility, or social improvement.

On campuses, the right of free speech has been supplanted by an entitlement to what Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education calls a right to freedom from speech deemed uncongenial. This entitlement is buttressed by “trigger warnings” against spoken “micro-aggressions” that lacerate the delicate sensibilities of individuals who are encouraged to be exquisitely, paralyzingly sensitive.

In a booklet for the “Encounter Broadside” series, Lukianoff says “sensitivity-based censorship” on campus reflects a broader and global phenomena. It is the demand for coercive measures to do for our mental lives what pharmacology has done for our bodies — the banishment or mitigation of many discomforts. In the social milieu fostered by today’s entitlement state, expectations quickly generate entitlements. Students are taught to expect intellectual comfort, including the reinforcement of their beliefs, or at least those that conform to progressive orthodoxies imbibed and enforced on campuses. Until September, however, the culture of freedom will be safe from its cultured despisers.

When District Attorneys Attack

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 31, 2015

As the old Vulcan proverb has it, “Only Nixon can go to China.” And only Nixon’s political heirs can fix the persistent — and terrifying — problems that continue to plague this country’s law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices.

Exhibit A: Orange County, California.

The sunny Southern California county with a population surpassing that of nearly half the states has a Republican district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, and a big problem on its hands: Its entire prosecutorial apparatus — all 250 lawyers in the district attorney’s office — have been disqualified from participation in a high-profile capital-murder case following revelations that the office colluded with the Orange County sheriff’s department to systematically suppress potentially exculpatory evidence in at least three dozen cases, committing what legal scholars have characterized as perjury and obstruction of justice in the process.

One of the questions involves a secret database of jail records related to confessions obtained via informants. Sheriff’s officers denied the database even existed, and their deception was abetted by prosecutors, leading an exasperated judge to issue an order noting that they “have either intentionally lied or willfully withheld material evidence from this court during the course of their various testimonies. For this court’s current purposes, one is as bad as the other.” The judge unsubtly recommends prosecution.

The database tracking inmates’ movements around the jail and the reason for those movements is significant, because Orange County law enforcement and prosecutors were in the habit of placing targeted suspects in proximity to criminal informants, who were rewarded with reduced sentences, favors, or money — payments in some instances ran into the six figures — for helping put together cases against jailed suspects. This practice is illegal. It is one thing if a suspect in custody speaks about his crimes and an informant comes forward to report that confession; it is another thing to operate a program under which the interrogation of suspects is effectively delegated to incarcerated felons who are secretly on the county’s payroll. The lack of present legal counsel is only the beginning of what is wrong with that practice.

To operate such a program is ipso facto a violation of the law and of ethical standards for jailers and prosecutors both. To lie about it is a serious crime. It may turn out to be a lucky thing after all that these defective prosecutions will probably open up a great many jail cells: Orange County is going to have to put these sheriff’s officers and prosecutors somewhere.

The despair-inducing details of the case can be located in the pages of OC Weekly, but the climax so far is this:

    Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Goethals made an unprecedented, historic move after announcing he’d lost confidence in Orange County homicide and gang prosecutors to obey simple legal rules of conduct. Goethals, a onetime prosecutor and campaign contributor to the DA, recused Rackauckas and his entire staff from People v. Scott Dekraai, the capital case stemming from the 2011 Seal Beach salon massacre.

What this means is that the prosecutors’ office is, in effect, an example of that other O.C.: organized crime.

A secret cache of electronic records containing information that is potentially embarrassing to political figures, and the criminal handling of that database, is of course an all-too-familiar story to those of us who have been following the saga of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mails, which were originally in digital form, were converted into paper printouts, and are now in the process of being redigitized before they are handed over to investigators, a process that only the naïve would believe exists for any purpose other than tampering with the evidence. The Orange County authorities had been using their database, called TRED, for a quarter of a century. Prosecutors were aware of it, and the sheriff’s officers who testified before Judge Goethals had made thousands of entries in it. Yet they could not quite recall its existence when honor, duty, and the law obliged them to do so.

This is not a one-off. Prosecutorial misconduct is a plague upon these United States, from the vodka-pickled Democratic political jihadists in Austin to California, where judges complain of an “epidemic” of prosecutorial misconduct abetted by Democratic attorney general Kamala Harris, who is seeking to replace retiring Barbara Boxer in the Senate.

The Democrats have long been acculturated to the climate of corruption that attends government agencies that are largely free of ordinary accountability, where a carefully cultivated lack of transparency shields operatives from scrutiny and normal oversight. Republicans can rouse themselves to action, if only barely, when this involves the federal Internal Revenue Service or Environmental Protection Agency. But deference to police agencies and prosecutors is so habitual among the members of the law-and-order party that they instinctively look for excuses when presented with obvious examples of police misconduct, and twiddle their thumbs in the 99 percent of cases of prosecutorial misconduct that do not involve a Republican elected official.

But only the Republican party has the credibility and the political capital to take on the difficult and sure-to-be-thankless task of reining in rogue police agencies and abusive prosecutors — and they may as well take a look at our scandalous prisons while they are at it. Some Republican leaders, notably Texas’s former governor Rick Perry, have been active and energetic partisans of reform, largely under the banner of the excellent Right on Crime campaign. But this is not really a job for presidents or even governors: This is a job for mayors, city councilmen, district attorneys, sheriffs, and police chiefs. In the bigger cities, Republicans are thin indeed in those ranks. But that is not the case in Orange County. In Orange County, Republicans have no excuse.

Democrats may have ruined Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, etc., and they are well on their way toward doing the same thing to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, etc. If Republicans want to show that they can do better, then fixing the mess in Orange County, a community more populous than Chicago, would be an excellent place to start.

Stop Complaining. The GOP Primary Is Going To Be Awesome

By David Harsanyi

Friday, May 29, 2015

The only thing inevitable in politics is crushing disappointment. So you might as well be entertained.

With all the media concern-trolling about the swarming GOP presidential field, it should not escape our attention that you’re getting exactly what you asked for. Voters incessantly complain about the lack of choices in politics. Well, for the first time in a long time, nearly every faction of the American Right is represented in an open primary.

So have at it, democracy lovers. Because—and apologies to befuddled New Yorker cartoonists—not only does this contest feature ethnic diversity (though perhaps not the identity politics that work so well for Democrats), it features a wide range of substantive ideological disagreements, a rarity for any party in any era.

This week, for example, Rand Paul, the country’s first libertarian U.S. senator, claimed that ISIS’s existence and strength was made possible by Republican interventionists. This triggered Bobby Jindal—a first-generation Indian-American, Rhodes Scholar, governor of Louisiana, and likely presidential candidate—to shoot back that, actually, it was the dithering lily-livered weakness from people like Paul that allows ISIS to exist.

And here you were blaming it all on a bunch of Islamists.

Rand’s position isn’t exactly mainstream among conservatives, granted, but it does force Republicans to defend a foreign policy legacy and make a coherent case for future interventions. But can you imagine a comparable debate about, say, government interference in health-care markets or the cost of fighting climate change within the Democratic Party today? Not even socialist wingman Bernie Sanders—whose positions have gradually conflated with those of mainstream liberals over the past decade—can fabricate an authentic-sounding disagreement with the preordained candidate of the Left.*

Primary candidates are often forced to create intraparty rifts that are barely perceptible to an average voter. Paul’s views on foreign policy are so out of step, though, that they prompted Jindal (and other conservatives) to question why he’s even running for the GOP nomination at all. But couldn’t this question be asked of other GOP candidates?

Take Rick Santorum, who announced this week. Not so long ago, he lamented the fact that too many conservatives believe in “personal autonomy” and he rejects the “idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do …” His contention, basically, is that the Goldwater impulses of modern conservatism—which could just as easily be called the Reagan impulses—should be abandoned.

Now, if for some reason Santorum, the runner-up in Republican primary vote in 2012 who was often portrayed as the “conservative” option for voters, isn’t your guy but you’re still a fan of nannyism, high tariffs, and wage controls … well, there’s always Mike Huckabee. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out recently, we might consider him the philosophical offspring of Progressive-Era heroes like Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and William Jennings Bryan.

There is no candidate in the Democratic Party who could plausibly claim any intellectual relationship to Fred Hayek.

The populist ideas that motivate the likes of Santorum and Huckabee are not going anywhere. A few years back, The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, one of the voices of reformicon movement today, championed Santorum as a candidate that “Electability Republicans” could live with on “the fronts of populism and moralism.” He argued that Santorum represented was a proponent of subsidiarity—the principle that policy should be handled in the least centralized and most local way—and pitted him against those who believe in classical liberalism.

“Subsidiarity” fans have a knack for proposing ideas that empower federal government, weirdly enough. Nevertheless, a number of these proposals have emotional appeal and will undoubtedly find their way into the agendas of other candidates. The reformist-libertarian fiscal divide is not going anywhere. Which means the GOP is likely going to have some meaningful debates about economic policy.

In addition to arguing about foreign policy and taxes, you’re also going to see disagreements about immigration, education, and numerous other issues that are likely create recriminations and further atomize the party—before, of course, everyone comes together again to face a common foe. But who will do it?

You’ve got Ted Cruz, and he’s all in. Carly Fiorina brings newly honed political competence to wherever Hillary happens to be right now. (Though it’s difficult to imagine that anyone who’s had to fire American workers could run for president in this populist age.) Governors Jindal, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry—all, probably in—all have varying records of success in different areas of reform on the state level. There is legacy candidate Jeb Bush, cash-rich with faint chances. And there’s Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American from Florida, who may be the least wealthy senator in the United States and probably the one with the best shot at the nomination. This oligarchy of ours can’t get anything right.

If you’re not crazy about any of those options, there’s former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who represents what we should probably refer to ambiguously as the anti-establishment vote. And I’m sure I’m forgetting a kook who shouldn’t be taken seriously.

In this week’s Quinnipiac poll, Bush, Carson, Huckabee, Rubio, and Walker are each at around 10 percent support among Republican voters. Paul has 7 percent. Cruz has 6 percent. Christie has 4 percent. Fiorina has 2 percent. With this sort of parity it’s going to be a while before any egos allow candidates to drop out even if they’re only here to sell books.

Few things are more comfortable for a political party than ideological homogeny. So whether all these candidates reflect a party having a debate or whether it’s a sign that the party is fraying is another question. But, Republicans, this is what you wanted.

*You’ll also note how warped the media’s coverage of these races can be. There’s already been a number of deep dives investigating how Sanders can help shape the race. At the same time, journalists have spent an inordinate amount of time focused on the abundance of candidates or the slim prospects of GOP hopefuls, including new entrant George Pataki—a two-term moderate governor of the second—most populous state in the country. And it’s true that Pataki has virtually no popular support among conservatives. It’s also true that Pataki is, by any rational measure, more prepared to be president than Bernie Sanders. Actually, he’s probably more prepared than Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons’ Favorite Way to Lie

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, May 30, 2015

When my daughter was little more than a toddler, she wrote all over the wall with a pen in my wife’s home office. We confronted her about it. She listened intently, trying hard to be surprised by the news of this defilement of our domicile. “What happened, Lucy?” we asked.

After a long and nervous pause, she replied, “I know what happened.” Excited by her own duplicitous inventiveness and restrained by her desire to sell it, she said very seriously, “A bad girl must have come into the house and did this.” She tsk-tsked, “What a bad girl,” shaking her head while looking at the wall.

I need not dwell on the implausibility of roving bands of ninja-like naughty toddlers — or lone-wolf munchkins — breaking into nice homes to scribble on the upstairs walls and then depart leaving no other trace of their schemes. I simply bring this up to say that my daughter’s “a bad girl did it” gambit is a wildly more powerful and resolute claim of innocence than “you have no smoking gun.”

My column from yesterday is on this very point. So I won’t recycle it here. I will, however, recycle from an infinitely better “news”letter I penned a couple months ago. I wrote, “If you want to know what Hillary Clinton would be like as president, you’re seeing it right now. There is no other Hillary. This is her.” It’s Hillary all the way down.

And I wrote that before the Peter Schweizer book came out. I wrote that before Sidney Blumenthal was awakened from his slumber by a congressional subpoena (rumor has it he sleeps upside down in a basement at the Clinton Foundation wrapped in his own mothwings).

My point isn’t that I am prescient. My point is that Hillary is predictable. I could have written that in 2000 when she went on her last “listening tour” in a Scooby van, or at almost any other moment of the last 30 years.

There are no “new” Hillarys. There are, on occasion, new strategies to dupe people into thinking there is a new Hillary. But these Potemkin do-overs are usually as pale, thin, and see-through as the skin of an agoraphobic Goth computer programmer. The simple fact is: This is her. There is no other her. There is no other Bill, either, by the way. They are Clintons and they are eternal, Aesopian, unchanging. The tackiness and the lying, the parsing and corner-cutting, the entitlement and fakery: This is what they do. Scandals swirl around the Clintons like the cloud of dirt surrounding Pigpen not because the Clintons are the victims of their enemies, but because the Clintons are their own worst enemies. They do this to themselves. They create these problems. They are the authors of their own torment because this is who they are.

Don’t Get Fooled Again

This is an important political point because the Clinton strategists and spinners are invested in a theory that electing a woman will be transformative. It will be like that scene in Excalibur where King Arthur, rejuvenated by the Holy Grail, revives the brown and wasted crops and forests simply by riding by. We already had one experiment in this kind of magical thinking. It worked for Barack Obama. I don’t think it will work for Hillary. Obama was new and fresh. Hillary . . . isn’t.

I think this offers insight into why Hillary is betting it all on reviving the Obama coalition. I’ve written many times that I don’t think she can succeed. But maybe I’m wrong (“It’s happened before” — The Couch). And, more to the point, I’ve come to realize it’s the only strategy open to her. She can’t run to win moderates, independents, and swing voters (save for a subset of women who will vote strictly on identity-politics lines), because these voters can’t be Jedi-mind-tricked into ignoring all of her baggage. Only the hyper-partisan, the extremely uninformed, the incurably gullible, and, of course, the heavily bribed can get really excited about Hillary Clinton.

How to Listen to a Clinton, Cont’d

I’m thinking, the phrase “eats like a bird” is really bogus. I mean, they eat nuts and bugs all day long; that’s a lot of protein, particularly given their size. But that’s not really important right now (Sorry, I’m writing this in my backyard watching my birdfeeder — which my cats consider to be a poorly-constructed and frustrating cat feeder — as I write this).

Where was I? Oh, right, I’m thinking “How to Listen to a Clinton” should be an occasional feature of this “news”letter. Why? Well, first of all it’s kind of in my wheelhouse. Second, I’m always looking for copy on Friday mornings and, well, if there’s a more renewable resource than Clinton lies, I’m hard pressed to think what it might be.

As I said last week, the Clintons’ favorite way to lie is by telling the truth selectively. There are a lot of benefits to this oh-so-lawyerly technique. It sounds more plausible. It frustrates journalists. It comes in handy when your lies are exposed or you’re asked about them under oath. The downside is that when you use the truth to tell lies, you embed implied confessions in the silences. “There’s no smoking gun” isn’t a denial, it’s a passive-aggressive way of saying, “You’ll never catch me!”

Over at Discriminations, John Rosenberg compiled some good examples of similar rhetorical techniques by the Clintons and their sock puppets.

In 2002, being open about her presidential ambitions would be politically inadvisable, so Hillary denied it, Clinton-style:

    Responding to reports and comments from anonymous friends and advisers that she plans to run for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton told the Associated Press that “I don’t know who those people are or where they’re getting their information from because they’ve never had a conversation with me they can quote.”

“Never had a conversation with me they can quote” is not the same as “these conversations never took place.” In fairness, lots of politicians lie about their presidential ambitions. My point here is to illustrate the style of Clintonian lies, not the magnitude of them.

    When asked by Diane Rehm if Webb Hubbell’s silence had been bought, Hillary Clinton replied, “There’s no evidence of that. There will not be any evidence of that.”

That is not a denial either. This is the kind of thing Tony Soprano says when he knows all the bodies have been disposed of at Satriale’s.

Here’s Bill in 1997 in response to his fundraising tactics.

    I don’t believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I had changed government policy solely because of a contribution.

If one parses this with Clintonian precision, this is actually closer to a confession. He says it is a “fact” that he changed policy. But also note the weasel word “solely.” Were contributions a factor in his decisions?

Consider all of the skid-greasing money sluicing into the Clinton Foundation from arms manufacturers, uranium moguls, and the like (not to mention children’s charities!). No doubt there are arguments one can make on the merits for the decisions donors were lobbying for. Every lobbyist I’ve ever met — and I’ve met hundreds — can make good, or good-sounding, arguments for their position, just as every country lobbying FIFA for a World Cup billet can make its case on the merits. It’s just that sometimes a little baksheesh helps officials see those merits more clearly.

And finally, here’s Lanny Davis on Fox News last month:

There’s no evidence that President Clinton, that I’ve seen yet, tried to influence any decision by any governmental agency.

Yes, and there was no evidence that a bad girl didn’t break into my house to draw on the wall, either.