Terrorism Is Not The Only Reason To Be Skeptical Of Muslim Immigration

By Nick Saffran
Monday, February 27, 2017

When we debate Muslim immigration—as we are again, as President Trump prepares to re-instate a revised travel ban—we mostly think about terrorism. This is a mistake, in part because it can border on fearmongering. Very few Muslims are terrorists, and the proposed restrictions are not well-tailored to stopping terrorists.

But fundamentally, it is a mistake because of what it ignores. Focusing only on terrorism—rather than on the beliefs, habits, and mores of potential immigrants—creates a false dichotomy, in which the opposite of “terrorist” is “moderate.”

This is a fuzzy category. “Moderate” in relation to what? We apply the term to vast numbers of people who have no commitment to political liberalism, the bedrock of Western democracy. As we move beyond a short-term debate about travel bans and refugees, and begin to think about the long-term effects of mass immigration, we must confront its most salient challenge: namely, how to form people into citizens.

Chasms Between the Muslim World and West

Both right and left acknowledge that terrorism cannot be ignored. They also acknowledge that very few Muslim immigrants will be jihadists. What remains is a feverish debate about just how small that small number is, and what sacrifices we should make to get it to zero.

But “not a terrorist” cannot be our standard for potential immigrants. That one has refrained from donning a suicide vest is a paltry indicator of character. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but we know from survey data that many do sympathize with Jihadists. More importantly, an even larger number hold beliefs that many Americans, on both right and left, would consider incompatible with a free society.

A more serious immigration debate would consider some sobering findings from public opinion surveys in the Muslim world. For example, in 2013, Pew released a comprehensive report entitled “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” Though the report has its bright spots—for example, wide majorities of Muslims express support for democracy—it also reveals chasms between the Muslim world and the West.

Muslim Views On Homosexuality and Honor Killings

Take, for example, Muslim opinion on whether homosexuality is morally acceptable. Remember, this is not a question about gay marriage. Here, Uganda emerges as a relative bastion of progressivism, with 12 percent saying “yes.” In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the highest figure is 2 percent.

Maybe this isn’t a big a deal. After all, there was a time in the not so distant past when most Americans disapproved of homosexuality. More important than beliefs on sexual morality is whether, and how, they will be acted upon. That is why the responses to another question—whether honor killings are ever justified as punishment for pre- or extra-marital sex—are disconcerting.

Central Asian and Eastern European Islam tends to be more moderate—in large part because of the secularist legacy of the USSR—but even in those regions, between 15 percent and 50 percent of Muslims believe it is sometimes acceptable to execute girls for sexual impropriety. In all but two countries in the Middle East and South Asia, a majority believe honor killings are sometimes or often acceptable.

How Mass Muslim Migration Affects Gender Relations

We might also ask what mass Muslim immigration might portend for gender relations in the West.

The concerns these numbers raise about the prospect for seamless integration into Western society are heightened by the widespread opposition to intermarriage across the Muslim world. The number who would approve of their daughter marrying a Christian range from just 21 percent in Lebanon down to 0 percent in Egypt and Jordan.

As we move from moral beliefs to political beliefs, the picture does not get much brighter. In most countries outside of the old Communist bloc, overwhelming majorities support making Sharia law—that is, Islamic religious law—the law of the state.

We Must Be Aware Of the Threat Sharia Poses

“Creeping sharia”—the fear that Sharia law is already powerful in the U.S.—has become a leitmotif for paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists. But, in the context of immigration policy, there is nothing paranoid or conspiratorial about paying attention to support for political sharia. As our political idol du jour, Alexander Hamilton, noted in 1802, “foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived.” This does not mean that we must never admit any foreigners from countries unlike our own. But we cannot be stubbornly naïve about their politics.

But what, exactly, is Sharia? Is it fear-mongering to even talk about it? That seems to be the view of many pundits, such as The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who rebuked Newt Gingrich for even raising the issue. Goldberg explains that “sharia, in many ways, is analogous to Jewish law, or ‘halacha.’ (Both words mean, more or less, ‘the way,’ or ‘the pathway.’)” True enough, and the etymology lesson is a nice touch, but not many Jews want to replace the US Criminal Code with the 613 Mitzvot. He continues, “There are several schools of sharia thought, that range from fundamentalist to liberal in approach. The conservative, Hanbali, interpretation . . . is very harsh by Western standards.”

Ah, diversity! Presumably we are to be heartened by this, despite having no idea how many people subscribe to which school. And what exactly does “harsh by Western standards” mean? Do only half of the kids on the soccer team receive a trophy?

Sharia Law Supports Executions And Stoning

Where pundits equivocate, the data provide clarity about what sharia means to the people who believe it should be the supreme civil law. For very large numbers of sharia-supporting Muslims, including 86 percent in Egypt, it means executing apostates (those who renounce Islam). As punishment for adultery, execution—actually, not just execution, but stoning—is even more popular.

Consider, moreover, how these questions tend to warp our notion of the word “moderate.” In Indonesia, only 48 percent support stoning adulterers. Does this mean the slim majority opposed are “moderates”? Maybe, but we have no indication how many instead favor the Qua’ranically mandated punishment of 100 lashes.

What to make of all this vis-a-vis immigration? First of all, we must make something of it. We cannot accept the lazy assumption, asserted without any evidence, that selection effects will render all of this null, because only people drawn to Western culture will come to the West. Some immigrants will be dissenters, like the brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Others will come only for economic reasons. And still others will be like Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb, whose repulsion to lasciviousness in Greeley, Colorado (of all places) spurred his radicalism.

Mass Immigration Will Shape Our Culture

Rather, we must take seriously the possibility that, over the long term, mass immigration will have serious effects on our politics and culture. The birth rate for Muslim immigrants—typically far above the rate for Westerners—makes this possibility even more likely. And even if Muslims remain a small minority, social change will be unavoidable.

Even those who oppose mass immigration tend to shy away from discussing the facts above. Many probably fear being tarred as Islamophobic if they suggest that we should be concerned with Muslims’ inclination toward theocracy. But fear of giving offense means relinquishing the only argument that reveals the paradoxes at the heart of our current immigration politics. Progressive causes will not fare very well if mass immigration has political ramifications, given nearly-uniform views in the Muslim world about sexuality, gay rights, abortion, and the subjugation of women to their husbands. For this reason, it’s not surprising that gays in France are increasingly drawn to Marine Le Pen.

A serious reckoning with public opinion does not mean painting the Muslim world as a monolithically bad. It means precisely the opposite. Opinions vary widely by region and even by country. Clearly, some places have done a better job than other at cultivating a moderate form of Islam. We need to pay attention to this when designing our immigration policy.

We Must Focus On Mores, Beliefs, and Practices

Most significantly, a focus on mores, beliefs, and practices would transform our immigration debate by placing assimilation—once considered essential for successful immigration—back at the fore. The data above does not imply that Muslim immigration should be banned, or even reduced. But it must force us to reevaluate two increasingly common—yet potentially contradictory—attitudes towards assimilation. First, that assimilation is oppressive; and, second, that assimilation—or at least acceptance of tolerance and diversity—will happen inevitably.

The first, opposition to assimilation, presumes either that Western societies are fundamentally flawed in some way—indelibly marked by racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.—or at least that they are no better than any other society. But the second—faith in inevitable assimilation—presumes that Western ways of life are so self-evidently good that any person in the right circumstances would prefer them. At once, Western society is understood as so flawed that it would be wrong to impose our culture, but simultaneously as so good that it doesn’t need to be imposed.

What Does A Healthy Immigration Standard Look Like?

These contradictions help to explain why the progressive position on immigration is weak. Progressives are always eager to identify our shortcomings, the ways in which we fail to live up to our proclaimed values. At its best, this eagerness manifests in a reforming spirit. But at its worst, it leads progressives to take liberal society itself for granted. By contrast, conservatives have always been suspicious about the liberal foundations of modern society. At its worst, this suspicion manifests in outright hostility toward, or rejection of, the liberal order. But at its best, this suspicion has given rise to a deep prescience about the fragility of the liberal order.

Our immigration debate stands to benefit from more of that skepticism, and hopefully more of that prescience. Terrorism essentially presents us with a technical question: how do we keep our citizens safe? That’s important, but ultimately subordinate to deeper political questions about what it means to be a citizen in the first place, and about the capacity of our society to fully integrate immigrants. Unless we move beyond the specter of terrorism, we will not be able to ask, or answer, those questions.

U.N. Human Rights Council — Get Out of the Quicksand or Drown

By Anne Bayefsky
Sunday, February 26, 2017

The U.N. “Human Rights” Council starts its main annual session on Monday in Geneva with elected members and human-rights aficionados such as Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar settling into their seats. The question hanging over the head of President Trump is whether his administration will take its place beside these other states and legitimize the most anti-Israel, twisted bastion of moral relativism in the U.N. system.

Barack Obama deliberately designed a quicksand trap before leaving office. He put the U.S. forward for Human Rights Council membership in a U.N. election that occurred just ten days before the American presidential election. Attempting to rule from the grave, Obama knew full well that the U.S. would be occupying a three-year spot that officially commenced on January 1, 2017. The Bush administration had refused to join the Council, or to pay for it, when the Council was first created as a faux renovation of the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission back in 2006. Joining the Council was one of Obama’s very first foreign-policy moves in 2009.

The only way out of the quagmire for the Trump administration, therefore, is to resign.

The State Department’s Obama holdovers are pushing hard for the status quo. State Department spokesman Mark Toner told Politico: “Our delegation will be fully involved in the work of the HRC session which starts Monday.” This result would be the very opposite of draining the swamp.

Moreover, the only survivors in the U.N. Human Rights Council swamp are the crocodiles. There is a permanent agenda of ten items that governs proceedings at every Council session. One agenda item is devoted to human-rights violations by Israel and one generic agenda item is for all other 192 U.N. member states that might be found to “require the Council’s attention.” In classic State Department double-talk, the Obama administration promised that by joining the Council, the U.S. could reform the Council agenda from the inside. The Obama administration tried and predictably failed. But the Obama administration then justified staying on the Council — despite back-of-the-bus treatment for the Jewish state — as a price worth paying for other people’s human rights. Pitting minorities against each other was, after all, an Obama specialty.

Every year at the Council’s main March session, the Council’s Israel agenda item gives rise to four or five resolutions condemning Israel. That is four or five times more than the Council condemns any other state on the planet. Ten years of Council practice incontrovertibly indicates that we can expect a small handful of other countries to be subject to a single resolution and that about 95 percent of states can count on none at all.

Fully aware of this scenario, the Obama routine went like this. The United States would vote against the anti-Israel resolutions, often 46 to 1, with slight variations for the times that European Union states screwed up the courage to abstain. Team Obama would make a nice speech for public consumption about supposedly unacceptable bias against Israel at the U.N. and then turn around and spend American taxpayer dollars to implement those very resolutions.

The quandary cannot be avoided: Is the Obama strategy going to be the Trump team plan? There is no middle ground. Staying on the Council means paying for the Council.

A 2016 Council resolution calls for the creation of a blacklist of all companies that are connected with or do business with so-called Israeli settlements “directly or indirectly.” Not surprisingly, the Council has no comparable boycott scheme for the world’s most heinous regimes. The boycott plot is a full-scale assault intended to strangle Israel economically, in order to compensate for successive failed attempts since 1948 by Israel’s enemies to annihilate the Jewish state on the actual battlefield. American companies that do business with Israel are clearly in the Council’s crosshairs.

The current Council session will reaffirm the blacklist initiative, and various other regular absurdities, such as demanding a return of the Golan Heights to “the Syrian motherland” in order to better protect Syrian human rights. In light of the Council’s composition, there is no chance whatsoever of reversing the outcomes. Merely to whine while being outvoted by a majority of states, for which Israel is either an enemy or a convenient diversionary tactic, would legitimize the vehicle attacking American corporations for doing business with Israel — and our fundamental principles.

Substituting a Human Rights “Council” for a Human Rights “Commission” that retains the same fatal flaws — starting with membership for the quintessential very bad dudes — is the classic example of what the U.N., and the Obama administration, have meant by “reform.” Will the Trump administration follow suit and make yet another speech about fixing the unfixable?

No, Obamacare Has Not Saved American Lives

By Oren Cass
Monday, February 27, 2017

Repealing the Affordable Care Act, Democrats say, will “make America sick again.” Bernie Sanders warns “36,000 people will die yearly as a result.” But as with most ACA defenses, these claims describe an imaginary health-care reform that works, not the legislation passed by Congress in 2010. In reality, the best statistical estimate of the number of lives saved each year by the ACA is zero.

Some studies do suggest that health insurance can saves lives. But these focus either on individuals with private coverage or on the Massachusetts health-care reform law of 2006, which primarily expanded private coverage within the Bay State. The ACA, by contrast, is primarily an expansion of Medicaid; in recent years, the share of Americans with private insurance has declined.

In 2007, just prior to the Great Recession, 66.8 percent of non-elderly Americans had private insurance. By 2015, two years into the ACA’s expansion, that share had declined to 65.6 percent. Taking the larger economic picture into account by looking back to 2007 is crucial, because the private-insurance rate fluctuates with employment. Between 2007 and 2010, employment fell by 5.5 percent and private coverage fell by 7 percent. Between 2010 and 2015, employment rose by 8.8 percent and private coverage rose by 9.5 percent.

ACA implementation has coincided with an increase in private coverage because it occurred during a period of job growth. But 300,000 fewer Americans have private coverage today than would have it if the ratio of coverage to employment had remained at its 2007–10 level over the last six years.

Instead, the ACA has increased insurance coverage by expanding Medicaid. In 2007, 18.1 percent of non-elderly Americans had public insurance. By 2010, that share was 22 percent, and rather than declining as the economy recovered, it continued to climb all the way to 25.3 percent in 2015.

This public-versus-private distinction is crucial, because studies of Medicaid do not find the same positive effects on mortality sometimes seen in studies of private insurance. Researchers have found that Medicaid patients with a variety of conditions and medical needs experience worse outcomes than similar uninsured patients. In a randomized trial in Oregon that gave some individuals Medicaid while leaving others uninsured, recipients gained no statistically significant improvement in physical health after two years.

In the New England Journal of Medicine, a team at Harvard University compared three states that expanded Medicaid in the 2000s with others that made no change; only one of the three achieved a statistically significant reduction in mortality. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Stanford University’s Raj Chetty and colleagues looked for determinants of life expectancy for individuals in the lowest income quartile and found that health-care access was not one of them.

There is one exception to this trend: Medicaid may have significant positive effects on pregnant women and young children. But once again, the ACA is not that policy. Under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, created with bipartisan support in 1997, those groups were already eligible for Medicaid or a comparable program at the income levels to which the ACA expanded coverage for other adults. An identical 42.2 percent of children had public-insurance coverage before the ACA’s Medicaid expansion in 2013 and after its expansion in 2015.

Public-health data from the Centers for Disease Control confirm what one might expect from a health-care reform that expanded Medicaid coverage for adults: no improvement. In fact, things have gotten worse. Age-adjusted death rates in the U.S. have consistently declined for decades, but in 2015 — unlike in 19 of the previous 20 years — they increased. For the first time since 1993, life expectancy fell. Had mortality continued to decline during ACA implementation in 2014 and 2015 at the same rate as during the 2000–13 period, 80,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2015 alone.

Of course, correlation between ACA implementation and increased mortality does not prove causation. Researchers hypothesize that increases in obesity, diabetes, and substance abuse may be responsible. But thanks to the roughly half of states that refused the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, a good control group exists. Surely the states that expanded Medicaid should at least perform better in this environment of rising mortality? Nope. Mortality in 2015 rose more than 50 percent faster in the 26 states (and Washington, D.C.) that expanded Medicaid during 2014 than in the 24 states that did not.

Further, while two years is not enough time to evaluate a policy’s full effects, that is exactly the period over which the Massachusetts study found substantial mortality gains. (Look at the graph on page 589 — the entire improvement from the 2006 reform is achieved by 2008.) Two years of gains from a different policy implemented by a single state a decade earlier can hardly be proof that the ACA saves lives when the ACA’s own two-year track record tells the opposite story.

If one wants to claim dramatic effects from ambiguous data, it is easier to argue that the ACA is killing people. A more reasonable conclusion for partisans of all stripes to accept is merely that the ACA is not saving lives. In statistical terms, neither the accumulation of past Medicaid studies nor current data can disprove a null hypothesis.

What about the specific individuals who can show they have benefited from the ACA’s various provisions, typically by gaining access to costly treatment for a life-threatening condition? Their situation represents a challenge that post-ACA policy should aim to address. But their cases should not be taken as evidence that the ACA has been a broader net benefit to public health.

One more Medicaid study, published last year in Health Affairs, provides perhaps the best lens for policymakers. There, researchers from the Yale School of Public Health found that states allocating less of their social-services funding toward health care had significantly better health outcomes. In other words, efforts to improve public health must remember opportunity cost and ask: What is the best use of the government’s limited resources, especially when it comes to improving the lives of lower-income Americans? The answer to that question is not the ACA.

What Happens When a Party Wakes Up

By Jonathan S. Tobin
Monday, February 27, 2017

So it turns out that Karl Marx was right about history’s repeating itself as farce. That axiom was validated last week when White House spokesman Sean Spicer sought to dismiss the crowds showing up to protest at town-hall meetings for Republican members of Congress this past week. He characterized them as a “professional protestor manufactured base,” distinctly echoing the contempt that the Obama administration showed in 2009 and 2010 when tea-party activists showed up at town halls to hound Democrats over stimulus spending and Obamacare.

It’s true that eight years ago many of the current GOP House and Senate members weren’t yet in Washington, and no one outside of Trump Tower could imagine a Trump presidency. But most Republicans must surely remember the way liberals derided the Tea Party as a fraud, insisting that the grassroots movement was bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers. Worse than that, Democrats believed their talking points and continued to insist that the mass movement of conservative opponents was a figment of GOP public relations. That’s why they were caught by surprise in the 2010 midterm elections. So when the Trump White House as well as some congressional Republicans (including those who have decided to stay away from town halls for the moment, discretion apparently being the better part of valor) treat the turnout of hostile liberal protestors as merely a PR event staged by Democratic paymasters, they’re making a huge mistake.

The point isn’t that there is no organized aspect of the Democratic protests. Of course the demonstrations are orchestrated to some extent, and some Democratic money is helping the left-wing organizers. The same was true of the Tea Party. The point is that the ability to manufacture an effective protest is itself a sign of political life. Democrats learned too late that the tea-party movement was the engine of a GOP comeback in 2010.

Is there really a grassroots movement arising to save Obamacare? Hard as it may be for Republicans who have spent the last several years pointing to the law’s unpopularity, the answer is “maybe.” The ACA might be on the verge of collapse, but millions of Americans who benefited from Obamacare are facing the possibility that the program could end. It would be obtuse of the GOP to imagine that they — and the liberal interest groups that pander to this constituency — are going to accept the “repeal” part of the Republican platform lying down.

Social Security and other major entitlements created no losers; Obama never grasped that this was not the case with the health-care plan he rammed down the country’s throat in 2010. Despite Obama’s many promises, millions of Americans lost their coverage or doctors or found that they were paying much more for plans that didn’t suit their needs. But now that they are in a position to reverse it, Republicans need to acknowledge that those who did benefit from Obamacare will be making their views heard, loud and clear. House Speaker Paul Ryan is seeking a solution that will largely preserve the extension of coverage to those who didn’t previously have it, but fitting this into a bill that the fractious GOP caucus will pass is easier said than done. It’s one thing to protest the expansion of federal power and the creation of a chaotic program that wrecked havoc on the health-care system. It’s quite another to take away an entitlement that benefitted up to 20 million Americans. No one has ever reaped political profit from that.

Moreover, the ability of liberal activists to turn out their base to hound Republicans is also a function of a potentially bigger problem for the GOP — a problem named Donald Trump. The GOP knows that its fate in 2018 and beyond will be linked to whether public disapproval for Trump’s behavior and statements becomes so great that it overwhelms the advantages that ought to preserve their power in the next midterm. If Ryan fails on Obamacare and Trump’s antics become too great a liability, we might look back at the protests in the first month of the administration as the turning point that led to eventual Democratic victories.

But Democrats shouldn’t be too cocky at the sight of liberal crowds shouting down Republicans. First of all, some of these demonstrations are obviously political fool’s gold. Representative Jason Chaffetz and Senator Tom Cotton may have been given a talking-to by opponents at their town-hall meetings, but does anyone seriously believe that support for Obamacare or even enmity for Trump is such that it will flip Utah or Arkansas from the red to blue in a coming election? Trump may put some wind in Democratic sails next year. But the GOP retains its edge in the House because of the way districts are drawn, which is a result of both gerrymandering and districts’ coming into compliance with the Voting Rights Act: Black voters are channeled into majority-minority districts rather than dispersing them to help Democrats win competitive seats, of which there are very few in any case. In the Senate, the Democrats are defending twice as many seats as Republicans are, with many of them in red states; Democrats will have a tough fight to avoid losses, let alone win back the majority.

Democrats could also find, as Republicans did in 2010, that unleashing their activist base has its costs as well as its benefits. The GOP lost winnable races that year because of the primary victories of Tea Partiers such as Kristine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharon Angle in Utah — candidates who were certain general-election losers. The Democrats’ liberal base is equally capable of nominating leftists who could pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

So while Republicans would be mad to think its impossible for the Democrats to ride a grassroots movement back to power, liberals would be equally foolish to assume they will repeat the success of the Tea Party. A lot will depend on the GOP’s ability to govern effectively and how far off the rails Trump’s unconventional style pulls his party. It’s also not a given that Democrats are really listening to the voters who abandoned them in 2016, or that they can keep their left-wing base sufficiently in check. All this means another wave election is a possibility, but at this point, it is by no means certain or even likely.

Bums

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 26, 2017

I have lost touch with my friend Mark, and, assuming he is alive, it will be some work to track him down, because he is periodically homeless or semi-homeless. My first impression was that his economic condition was mainly the result of his having been for many years a pretty good addict and a pretty poor motorcyclist, a combination that had predictable neurological consequences. I never knew Mark “before” — there is something in such men as Mark suggesting an irrevocably bifurcated life — but the better I got to know him, the more I came to believe that he probably had been much the same man, but functional, or at least functional enough.

Like many people with mental problems, Mark tended to be repetitious. His rants were as well-rehearsed as any stand-up comedy routine. “My dear, sweet mother said I was a rebel, a troublemaker, and a hoodlum,” he would say. “But she was wrong. I ain’t no hoodlum!” Mark’s conception of himself as a rebel was central to his outlook on life, and it was reinforced by the amusing decision of the local social-services agency to put him into a subsidized apartment in a narrow strip of commercial and retail properties abutting two of the wealthiest communities in one of the wealthiest municipalities in the United States. He reveled in the fact that his mere presence on the street was sufficient to épater le bourgeois.

Part of it was an act, but not all of it. If you saw him on the street and called his name, he’d spin around on you, fists balled up, half enraged and half afraid, ready to fight, until he recognized you, which could sometimes take a few seconds longer than it should have. But then he was all smiles and wry commentary on the passers-by and the police. He’d gesture at passing police cars (he lived about two blocks from the police station) and say, “They all know me,” which was true. We talked about motorcycles and his longing to ride again, and he’d explain to me all the reasons why that was never, ever going to happen. “They’d lock me up,” he’d say darkly, which also was true. He’d sometimes ask to borrow mine, and I’d explain to him all the reasons why that was never, ever going to happen. “You’re a maniac.” This was an approved line of argument. “That’s right!” he’d thunder. Maniac was fine, but he objected to lunatic. He didn’t like bum very much, either, but he was a realist.

Mark was in his fifties at the time, and was still angry at his parents, his teachers, his family, society, and others he thought had failed him. He curated his resentments with the care of a sixth-century monastic archivist. I was in my thirties at the time and resolved to stop doing that.

(I am still working on it.)

The inability to move on from adolescent resentments is a strangely prominent condition among American men, as indeed is the inability to move on from adolescence in general. That is one of the unhappy consequences of the low-stakes character of American middle-class life, by which I mean the fact that the difference between being in the 50th percentile and being in the 55th percentile of whatever index of socioeconomic status you think most relevant is not that consequential in terms of one’s real standard of living. The price of being a little bit of a slacker is not very high in the United States, though the rewards for success can be staggering. Life is pretty comfortable, and you can take six years to finish your bachelor’s degree in art history while working at Starbucks, and it isn’t miserable.

Necessity used to be what forced us to grow up. That was the stick, and sex was the carrot, and between the two of them young men were forced/inspired to get off their asses, go to work, and start families of their own from time immemorial until the day before yesterday. A 20-year-old man with adequate shelter, cheap food, computer games, weed, and a girlfriend is apt to be pretty content. Some of them understand that there is more to life than that, but some do not. David Foster Wallace’s great terror in Infinite Jest was entertainment so engrossing that those consuming it simply stopped doing anything else. (Is it necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 1,000-page novel that’s 20 years old? Well, spoiler alert: It’s Québécois separatists.) He revisited the idea later in “Datum Centurio,” which is one of the all-time great short stories, one that is written in the form of a dictionary entry from the future for the word “date.” Over the course of the definition (and the inevitable footnotes), we learn that pornography has become so immersive in the future that conventional sexual behavior has been restricted entirely to procreation. The final footnote reads: “Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.”

As our collective standard of living gets higher, the cost of individual failure gets lower. This is, we should appreciate, a good thing, especially for people like Mark, who sometimes fall right over the edge of adult life. (I can’t help but think of Wallace again here and his bitterly ironic treatment of a porn outlet called “Adult World.”) The old men who sit in chairs and rail about how peace and prosperity are making us soft and what we really need is a “good war” — as if there were such a thing — are wrong, as they always have been.

But it is the case that the stakes of life are higher in India and China, where the difference of a few points on a test or a few degrees of scholastic prestige can have radical consequences on one’s life. The stakes are higher in a different way in Karachi or Lagos.

Tyler Cowen considers some of this in his new book, The Complacent Class, in which he argues (in the words of Walter Russell Meade’s review) that “the apparent stability of American society . . . is an illusion: behind the placid façade, technological change and global competition have combined with domestic discontent to bring forth a new age of disruption.”

That seems to me likely to be true, though I have no idea what “disruption” is going to look like, and I do not think anybody else really does, either. I suspect it is going to be very hard on the 40-year-old teenagers among us. But we should be thoughtful in our judgment of them. It isn’t that they have got over on us and gained some sort of unfair access to a life of ease. Mark’s life did not look easy to me, no matter how late he slept. Extended adolescence does not represent something that has been gained, but something that has been lost. That’s more obvious in some men than in others, but the principle is universal.

Down with the Administrative State

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, February 25, 2017

I had to take a break from this “news”letter to listen to Donald Trump’s CPAC speech. Then, I had to feed the kid, who’s home sick. Then I had to . . . well, to make a long story short, I’m sitting in my car outside of Fox News in D.C. and I don’t have a lot of time left before the suits in New York start smashing my collection of National Review–themed hummels like Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours when he breaks the glasses at the cowboy bar. Charlie Cooke likes to call me on Skype and pretend to accidentally nudge one off the shelf for every 15 minutes I’m late. (“Oh dear, look at poor Russell Kirk, how shall we ever put him back together again?”)

So, I’m going to start fresh here and see how far I can get before I have to go on air.

When President Trump finally got around to talking about his agenda, I thought it was a very good — i.e., effective — speech. I disagree with all of the demonization of free trade and I thought his disparagement of his predecessors was no less shabby than when Obama said similar things. Also, I could do with less of the “blood of patriots” talk — more on all that in a moment. But if he does all the other stuff he talked about, I would be very happy.

Also, Trump delivered a good performance and it’s not shocking the crowd ate it up. One of the things the mainstream media doesn’t seem to fully appreciate is that just because Trump isn’t having a honeymoon with the press, the Democrats, or a good chunk of independent voters, that doesn’t mean he’s not having a very real honeymoon with Republicans. They want him to succeed and they want his “enemies” not just to lose, but to be humiliated (hence the popularity of Milo in some corners, and a chunk of my least friendly e-mail).

Indeed, I think there’s good reason to believe that the honeymoon is more intense precisely because Trump is under such a sustained assault. Something similar happened under George W. Bush when the Left lost its collective mind and did everything it could to undermine a wartime president. Conservatives — me included — out of a sense of both loyalty and anger rallied to Bush and had a tendency to overlook certain foibles and mistakes for the greater good. We may not be at war — at least not like we were in, say, 2005 — but the Left and the media are clearly at war with Trump. And because Trump often makes it difficult for his allies to defend him on ideologically or politically consistent terms, the attachment is often more emotional than rational. Ann Coulter titling her new book “In Trump We Trust” or, as Kellyanne Conway put it on Thursday, saying that CPAC should really be called “TPAC” (i.e., Trump-PAC) gets right to the heart of the situation. Politics on the right is increasingly about an emotional bond with the president.

Which brings me to Trump’s comments on the media and fake news. Trump said:

Remember this — and in not — in all cases. I mean, I had a story written yesterday about me in Reuters by a very honorable man. It was a very fair story.

There are some great reporters around. They’re talented, they’re honest as the day is long. They’re great.

But there are some terrible dishonest people and they do a tremendous disservice to our country and to our people. A tremendous disservice. They are very dishonest people.

You do see what he’s doing right? The guy who once literally pretended to be his own publicist hates anonymous sources? The guy who powered his way into politics by claiming “very credible sources” told him that Obama’s birth certificate was fake is upset by “fake news”?

That’s the guy who hates anonymous sources and thinks they shouldn’t be “allowed” to talk off the record? Trump says that not one of the nine sources in the Flynn story exists. But Flynn was fired anyway. Well, that’s interesting.

Trump’s White House — like all White Houses — routinely floats stories in the press on background. Will he not allow them to do that?

Now, I think the press relies on anonymous sourcing too much. And I think many of these anonymous sources have been unfair to Trump. But what Trump is doing is preemptively trying to discredit any negative press coverage, including negative polls. According to Trump, the only guy you can trust is Trump. Trump is the way. Trump is the door. In Trump you must Trust.

If you recognize that, great. And if you want to defend it as brazen — and arguably brilliant — political hardball, that’s fine too. But if you actually believe that the only source of credible information from this White House and its doings is Trump himself, then you should probably cut back on the Trump Kool-Aid.

Something similar is at work with the delightful show put on by Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon. It is entirely possible — even likely — that reports of their seething existential animosity for one another are exaggerated. But if you watched that performance yesterday and came away believing that these two guys are ripe candidates for a buddy-cop movie then you should probably avoid watching infomercials or you’ll find your garage full of Tanzanite and ShamWows.

What struck me during the Reince-Bannon show was when they both insisted in various ways that they always knew they would win the election (not true) and that everything they are doing has been carried out with flawless precision. This is an addendum to the “In Trump We Trust” argument. The upshot here is that they want you to think that any bad news is fake news because they’ve been right about everything so far. Conservatives — far more than liberals — should understand that politicians make mistakes and never have complete mastery of the details or the facts on the ground. That is at the heart of the conservative critique of government and it does not go into remission when Republicans are in office. Blind faith in experts and politicians is unconservative no matter who is in power.

Down with the Administrative State

The most interesting thing about CPAC so far wasn’t Trump’s speech but Bannon’s performance. He removed all doubt (even before Trump’s speech, which re-confirmed it) that he is the Mikhail Suslov of this administration (Suslov was the chief ideologist of the Soviet Politburo until he died in 1982).

I have been very hard on Bannon of late, but let me say that I thought he did a very good job. Charles Krauthammer is right that merely coming on stage without horns was a PR victory.

I will also say that I loved his comments about “deconstructing the administrative state” — though I do wonder what’s wrong with the term “dismantle”?

Deconstructing the administrative state is a kind of nightingale’s song for many intellectual conservatives, particularly my friends in the Claremont Institute’s orbit. It’s been great fun watching mainstream journalists, who are not fluent in these things, talk about the administrative state as if they understand what Bannon means. The “administrative state” is the term of art for the permanent bureaucracy, which has come untethered from constitutional moorings (please read Phillip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, or Charles Murray’s By the People, or my forthcoming book — which as of now has some 75 pages on this stuff). Most of the law being created in this country is now created on autopilot, written by unelected mandarins in the bowels of the government. It is the direct result of Congress’s decades-long surrender of its powers to the executive branch. The CIA is not the “deep state” — the FDA, OSHA, FCC, EPA, and countless other agencies are.

If Bannon and Trump can in fact responsibly dismantle the administrative state and return lawmaking to Congress and the courts (where appropriate), then I will be ecstatic, and I will don the MAGA hat. But that is a very big if. The bulk of that work must be done by Congress, not the presidency. And any attempt to simply move the unlawful arbitrary power of the administrative state to the political operation of the West Wing will not be a triumph for liberty, it will simply amount to replacing one form of arbitrary power with another.

The Wages of Nationalism

And that brings me to Bannon’s other Big Idea: “Economic nationalism.”

Rich Lowry and I have been going back and forth on nationalism vs. patriotism quite a bit. I’m not going to revisit all of that because it’s already gotten way too theoretical. But what I do want to say is that when nationalism gets translated into public policy, particularly economic policy, it is almost invariably an enemy of individual liberty and free markets. This should be most obvious when it comes to trade. The Trumpian case for economic nationalism is inseparable from the claim that politicians can second guess businesses about how best to allocate resources. For instance, Trump boasted today:

We have authorized the construction, one day, of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines. (APPLAUSE)

And issued a new rule — this took place while I was getting ready to sign. I said who makes the pipes for the pipeline? Well sir, it comes from all over the world, isn’t that wonderful? I said nope, comes from the United States, or we’re not building it. (APPLAUSE)

American steel. (APPLAUSE)

Now, you may think the command to buy American steel is a great policy or that the statism implicit here is a small concession in light of the benefits it creates. It certainly seems that the applauding crowds at CPAC think that. But let’s take a moment and recognize what that applause represents: The flagship conference of the conservative movement rose to its feet to cheer protectionism and command-economy policymaking. That is a remarkable change of heart.

Bannon is desperate to launch a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure program in the name of economic nationalism. He thinks it will be as “exciting as the 1930s.”

Well, “exciting” is one word for the 1930s, but it’s not the one I would use and it’s not one that conservatives — until five minutes ago — would have used. FDR was a proud economic nationalist. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was slathered in nationalism. It was run by Hugh Johnson, the man who ran the draft during the First World War and who tried to literally militarize the economy. Under the NRA, a dry cleaner, Jacob Maged, was sent to jail for charging a nickel under the mandated price for pressing a suit. Under the NRA, big businesses created a guild-style corporatist political economy.

Economic nationalism taken to its logical conclusion is socialism, with pit stops at corporatism, crony capitalism, and the like. When you socialize something, you nationalize it and vice versa.

Now I don’t think that Trump and Bannon want to go nearly that far. Many of their proposed tax and economic policies will help the free market. But nationalism has no inherent limiting principle. The alt-right nationalists despise the Constitution precisely because it is a check on nationalism. For the unalloyed nationalist mind, it’s us over them, now and forever — and the definitions of “us” and “them” can get dismayingly elastic. (“This is the core claim of populism,” writes Jan-Wener Muller in What is Populism, “only some of the people are really the people.”)

In their initial essay, Rich and Ramesh write:

Nationalism should be tempered by a modesty about the power of government, lest an aggrandizing state wedded to a swollen nationalism run out of control; by religion, which keeps the nation from becoming the first allegiance; and by a respect for other nations that undergirds a cooperative international order. Nationalism is a lot like self-interest. A political philosophy that denies its claims is utopian at best and tyrannical at worst, but it has to be enlightened. The first step to conservatives’ advancing such an enlightened nationalism is to acknowledge how important it is to our worldview to begin with.

Not to repeat myself, but in this telling, nationalism is a passion — one that Rich and Ramesh believe needs to be tempered by adherence to certain principles about the role of government and other enlightened understandings about society and man’s place in it. It seems to me that when that nationalist passion runs too strong, when the fever of us-over-everything lights a fire in the minds of men, the thing that Rich and Ramesh want to use to temper that passion could rightly and fairly be called “patriotism.” And therein lies all the difference.

The G-File That Was to Be

So now that I’ve gotten that out of my system. I’ll return to this regularly scheduled G-File, though I’ve had to cut some of it out for length, which will sound like a circumcision joke in a minute.

Every Friday morning, I stare at a blank screen like Homer Simpson watching Garrison Keilor: “Stupid keyboard, be more funny!”

The hardest thing about this “news”letter is the first sentence. The second hardest is the last sentence.

Once I break through the dam, though, I have a hard time stopping the flood. Indeed, the reason this logorrheic epistle runs so long is that once I get going, I have no idea how to stop. Like Bill Clinton’s attitude toward interns, I always feel like more is more.

Since you brought up Bill Clinton, let’s talk about penises.

Some of you may know that I went to an all-women’s college. I wouldn’t call myself the Rosa Parks of gender integration — I’ll leave that to the historians — but it was a heady experience. I learned more about Foucault than The Federalist Papers and got into a lot of arguments with feminists of every stripe (and there are quite a few stripes).

Back in the 1980s, one prominent wing of feminism was very big on the whole “sex is rape” thing. “No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it,” Andrea Dworkin famously argued. Some uncharitably — if not entirely inaccurately — said that this was a particularly convenient argument for Ms. Dworkin. Though I think Zardoz was more pithy: “The penis is evil”:

I bring this up because yesterday the noted scholar Chris Cuomo said that twelve-year-old girls who don’t want to see a penis in their locker room are intolerant.

One Twitter user on Thursday morning asked Cuomo to respond to a twelve-year-old girl who “doesn’t want to see a penis in the locker room.”

Cuomo called such an attitude a “problem” and wondered if she is not the issue but “her overprotective and intolerant dad.”

“Teach tolerance,” Cuomo added.

This is a classic example of having such an open mind that your brain falls out. Cuomo, I assume, believes it was wrong for Anthony Wiener to tweet pics of his man-business at young women, but he apparently thinks if you have any problem with the potential exposure of the Organ Formerly Known as Evil to even younger girls — in actual 3D space — you’re a bigot or were raised by one.

Against Nationalizing the Transgendered

Look, I’m a bit of a squish when it comes to the transgendered. Interpersonally, my belief in the importance of good manners trumps some of my ideological and scientific commitments. When I meet someone who was born a man but lives as a woman, I may have some opinions she doesn’t like but I’m going to show some common courtesy and respect her desire to be something biology says she’s not.

But where I get off the bus is on statements like this: “We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions.”

The claim that men can get pregnant is a funny one coming from a Left that constantly insists the Right is “anti-science.” Now, it may be true that some women who decide they want to be men can get pregnant, but that’s because they are women. The idea that there are 56 different genders is not one found in science, but in smoky dorm rooms and in academic seminars where the fluorescent lighting eats away at brain cells. It is a modern form of romantic rebellion against the allegedly oppressive constraints of science and reason. The old romantics had it much easier. When the French poet Gérard de Nerval famously walked his pet lobster through the Tuileries Garden — “It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep” — it was easier to shock the bourgeoisie.

I firmly believe that society should have some compassion for the transgendered. And that’s true whether you take transgenderism on its own terms or if you think it’s a disorder of some kind. Cuomo is right that people should err on the side of tolerance.

But you know who else we should have tolerance for? Twelve-year-old girls who don’t want to see male junk in the girls’ locker room. We should also have tolerance for parents who do not like the idea of their daughters going into bathrooms with cross-dressers or any other grown man who insists that he has a right to use the little girls’ room. And there are, by my rough calculation, 1 million times more people who fall into these latter categories.

Hard cases make for bad law. Life deals a lot of hard cases to people. The way the Founders got around the problem of hard cases is by pushing most questions down to the most local level possible. They were wary of trying to nationalize every issue. The Trump administration was entirely right to change the federal government’s guidance on this issue. They would be wrong, in a spirit of nationalism, to declare that every school, city, and state should follow a single “right-wing” policy toward the transgendered, just as it was wrong for the Obama administration to impose a single “left-wing” standard. If some communities come to different conclusions about how to handle the question, based upon local values, limited resources, etc., so be it. Who is to say that even the Wonder Twins of policymaking — Bannon and Priebus — can know better than a local school board or city council?

Appeasement Never Works

By George Weigel

Saturday, February 25, 2017

At first blush, Luis Almagro would seem an unlikely candidate for the disfavor of the current Cuban regime. A man of the political Left, he took office as the tenth secretary general of the Organization of American States in 2015, vowing to use his term of office to reduce inequality throughout the hemisphere. Yet Secretary General Almagro was recently denied a visa to enter Cuba. Why? Because he had been invited to accept an award named in honor of Cuban democracy activist Oswaldo Payá, who died in 2012 in an “automobile accident” that virtually everyone not on the payroll of the Castro regime’s security services regards to this day as an act of state-sanctioned murder. Payá’s “crime” was to organize the Varela Project, a public campaign for basic civil liberties and free elections on the island prison, and he paid for it with his life.

The regime’s refusal of a visa for the head of the OAS caused a brief flurry of comment in those shrinking parts of the commentariat that still pay attention to Cuba, now that Cuban relations with the United States have been more or less “normalized.” But there was another facet of this nasty little episode that deserves further attention: While Almagro’s entry into Cuba was being blocked, a U.S. congressional delegation was on the island and, insofar as is known, did nothing to protest the Cuban government’s punitive action against the secretary general of the OAS.

According to a release from the office of Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.), the CoDel, which also included Senators Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), Michael Bennet (D., Colo.), and Tom Udall (D.,N.M.), and Representative Seth Moulton (D.,Mass.), intended to “continue the progress begun by President Obama to bring U.S.–Cuba relations into the 21st Century and explore new opportunities to promote U.S. economic development with Cuba,” including “economic opportunities for American companies in the agriculture and health sectors.” I’ve no idea whether those economic goals were advanced by this junket. What was certainly not advanced by the CoDel’s public silence on the Almagro Affair while they were in the country was the cause of a free Cuba.

There were and continue to be legitimate arguments on both sides of the question of whether the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba should be lifted. And those pushing for a full recission of the embargo are not simply conscience-lite men and women with dollar signs in their eyes. They include pro-democracy people who sincerely believe that flooding the zone in Cuba with American products, American technology, and American culture will so undermine the Castro regime that a process of self-liberation will necessarily follow. That this seems not to have been the case with China is a powerful counterargument. Meanwhile, my own decidedly minority view — that the embargo should have been gradually rolled back over the past decade and a half in exchange for specific, concrete, and irreversible improvements in human rights and the rule of law, leading to real political pluralization in Cuba — seems to have fallen completely through the floorboards of the debate.

But as pressures to “normalize” U.S.–Cuba relations across the board increase, there ought to be broad, bipartisan agreement that Cuban repression, which has in fact intensified since the Obama initiative two years ago, should have its costs. If, as Congressman McGovern averred, he and others want to move Cuba–America relations into the 21st century, then let him and others who share that goal agree that Cuba should be treated like any other country: meaning that when it does bad things, it gets hammered by criticism and pressures are brought to bear to induce or compel better behavior in the future.

“Opening up” without pressure has never worked with Communist regimes. It didn’t work when the Vatican tried it in east-central Europe in the 1970s; the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI made matters worse for the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It didn’t work vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the years of détente, which coincided with some of the worst Soviet assaults on human-rights activists. It hasn’t worked with China, where, as in Cuba, repression has increased in recent years.

To will the end — a 21st-century Cuba where the government behaves in a civilized fashion and economic opportunity is available to all Cubans, not just those favored by the regime — necessarily involves, at least for morally and politically serious people, willing the means: which must include holding the current Cuban regime to account when “opening up” does not extend to basic civil liberties for the Cuban people, and when “opening up” does not include a decent respect for the hemispheric proprieties, such that the head of the OAS is summarily refused entry into Cuba.

That the Almagro Affair had to do with an award named for Oswaldo Payá, a true martyr in the cause of freedom who was inspired by Christian Democratic convictions, suggests that the Castro regime and those who wish to inherit its power are nervous. Authoritarians confident of their position would not have reacted so stupidly to an award being given to a left-leaning, Spanish-speaking, Latin American politician — unless, that is, they were afraid that the memory of Oswaldo Payá would be rekindled in the ceremony in which Almagro received the Payá Award. All the more reason, then, for congressional delegations and others to end the Neville Chamberlain routine, stop appeasing the Castro regime, and start taking steps to ensure that what Congressman McGovern called “the progress begun by President Obama” is, in fact, progress in Cuba — and not just economic progress, but progress in human rights and the rule of law.