Yes, Amazon Pays Taxes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

The 2020 Democratic contenders are launching a jihad about corporate taxation, and the New York Times is their imam. “Profitable Giants Like Amazon Pay $0 in Corporate Taxes,” the Times headline says above an article that is essentially recruiting literature for the Democratic Socialists of America, “Some Voters Are Sick of It.”

The article quotes Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, saying: “Amazon, Netflix and dozens of major corporations, as a result of Trump’s tax bill, pay nothing in federal taxes. I think that’s a disgrace.”

The problem is that neither the headline nor the claim from Senator Sanders is true.

Amazon has paid billions of dollars in corporate income tax in recent years, though in some years it has paid no tax on profits because — don’t let the accounting terminology scare you off here — it lost money. Amazon has a very large footprint in the culture and in online commerce, but it is not a wildly profitable company; in fact, the usual complaint about Amazon is that it is forgoing profits in the here and now as part of a long-term world-domination scheme.

Companies do not usually pay any tax on profits when they do not have any profits.

But sometimes companies have no tax liability in years when they do show profits. That was the case with Amazon in 2018. There are three main reasons for that worth understanding:

First, the U.S. tax code realizes that businesses have both profitable and unprofitable years, and so it allows businesses to average out their income by carrying losses forward. For example, if Company X lost $25 million this year but makes $100 million next year, it can deduct some or all of that $25 million in losses from that $100 million in income. If the company lost more money in earlier years than it makes this year, then those losses may be enough to offset its income entirely. Some businesses, such as energy, are highly cyclical; others, such as real estate, can take a long time to become profitable. Evening out income between profitable and unprofitable years is one way that the tax code helps to mitigate the effects of the flux. That doesn’t automatically make it a good policy, but it is not obviously a poor policy, either, or a nefarious one. New businesses and expansions requiring large capital investments drive a lot of economic growth and employment, and our tax code encourages them.

Second, our tax code encourages other things, too, including spending on research and development. Companies such as Amazon spend tremendous amounts of money on R&D, and there are tax benefits for doing so. This is not a “loophole” — this is an intentionally designed feature of our tax policy. Government is always eager to encourage R&D spending, manufacturing, investments in physical capacity and equipment, etc., and it has long been the policy of Democrats and Republicans alike to use the tax code to encourage that. Again, not an inarguably good policy, but not an obviously wicked one, either.

Third, stock-based compensation can reduce tax liabilities. (If you want to get into the accounting nerdery of this, start here.) The simplified version: Companies sometimes pay executives (and lowly newspaper editors!) in stock options. A stock option is a contract entitling the holder of the option to purchase a certain number of shares of stock at a certain price; the idea is to align the incentives of the shareholders and their employees by giving both parties a personal interest in the share price, and hence (in theory) the overall health and performance of the business. If a company gives its employees the option of buying 1 million shares at $10, then those employees will make $1 million if they exercise the options when the stock is at $11. The company can then deduct that $1 million from its income as employee compensation. This looks like trickery to some people, because that $1 million didn’t come from ordinary business income but from an increase in the value of company shares, but there is a pretty compelling case that the shareholders are bearing the $1 million expense and therefore entitled to treat it as an expense. Once more, this may not be the right policy, but it’s not obviously the wrong one.

The Democrats and the Times (to the extent that there is a difference when it comes to national political reporting) don’t give a fig about this. The Times makes almost no effort to go into how Amazon’s taxes are calculated. Instead, we get this:

Colin Robertson wonders why he pays federal taxes on the $18,000 a year he makes cleaning carpets, while the tech giant Amazon got a tax rebate.

His concerns about a tilted economic playing field recently led Mr. Robertson to join the Akron chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. At a gathering this month, as members discussed Karl Marx and corporate greed over chocolate chip cookies, it wasn’t long before talk turned to income inequality and how the government helps the wealthy avoid taxes.

“He wonders why.” If only there were some institution out there dedicated to explaining this sort of thing to the general reading public! It could adopt for its motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Once again, Williamson’s Law comes into play: “Everything is simple, if you don’t know a f*****g thing about it.”

Simple — and morally satisfying, too!

The New York Times’ Anti-Semitism Is Shocking, but Not Surprising

By Ben Shapiro

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

This week, the New York Times got itself into hot water for printing a blatantly Jew-hating cartoon in its international edition. The cartoon depicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an elongated dachshund, a Star of David hanging around his neck, leading a fat, blind, yarmulke-wearing Donald Trump through the streets. The implication: The nefarious, animalistic Jew is in control of the Jew-perverted president of the United States.

The image is nothing new. In 1940, the Lustige Blatter, a weekly German humor magazine, printed an image of a tall, ugly, bearded Hasidic Jew taking a tiny Winston Churchill by the hand and leading him across the surface of the globe.

So, what would tempt the New York Times to print an illustration directly from the mind of Julius Streicher? The fact that the Times, like many of today’s mainstream media outlets, has been completely and utterly willing to cover for and, indeed, engage in anti-Semitism, so long as it is disguised as anti-Zionism. Undoubtedly, the editors at the Times believed that the cartoon was merely a criticism of Israel, not a criticism of Jews. That excuse found its logical apotheosis in a 2014 German regional-court ruling that characterized a firebombing of a synagogue as merely a protest against Israel, rather than act of anti-Semitism.

The Times isn’t far behind that court. In the past few months alone, the Times ran a long piece praising the terrorist-backed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel — a movement whose founders explicitly describe it as an economic attempt to destroy the Jewish state. The author of that piece, Nathan Thrall, had previously praised Hamas’s violence against Israel, calling its terrorism the “direct result of the choice by Israel and the West.” Unsurprisingly, the Washington Free Beacon has reported that Thrall is “tied to a large network of BDS supporters that are funded into the millions by the Qatari government.” The Times made no mention of his affiliation.

The Times ardently defended Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) against charges of anti-Semitism, even suggesting that her anti-Semitic attribution of American support for Israel to Jewish money was an important consciousness-raising exercise. Their headline: “Ilhan Omar’s Criticism Raises the Question: Is Aipac Too Powerful?”

The Times suggested that information about Palestinian payments to families of terrorists was “far-right conspiracy programming.” The Times simply ignored Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s calling U.S. ambassador David Friedman “son of a dog,” didn’t report Abbas’s comments about Jews “falsifying history,” and omitted coverage of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar telling Palestinians about to storm the Israeli border, “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

Back in 2015, the New York Times printed a list of lawmakers who voted against the anti-Israel Iran deal — listing them by the percentage of Jews in their districts and noting which ones were Jewish themselves. Back in 2014, the publisher of the newspaper, Margaret Sullivan, had to remind her own reporters to cover the Palestinians as “more than just victims,” thanks to the paper’s insanely one-sided coverage.

The Times’ ugly record of anti-Semitism goes all the way back to 2000, when the newspaper printed a photo of a Jewish student beaten by Palestinian Arabs and defended by an Israeli soldier – but captioned the photo by labeling the beaten man an Arab.

In actuality, the Times cares about anti-Semitism only when it can be used as a political weapon. The Times admitted in November that it had neglected to cover anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City specifically because such anti-Semitism “refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy,” explaining that “when a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square.”

The mainstream Left has engaged in self-flattering blindness when it comes to Jew-hatred. And all too often, that blindness veers into outright anti-Semitism.

The Economics of Tyranny in Venezuela

By Roberto Gonzalez and Liza Gellerman

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Venezuela is a human catastrophe. The evidence is brutally visible and can no longer be explained away by apologists for tyranny. So many people enamored with long-debunked theories had high hopes that for Venezuela — despite the enormous historical and empirical evidence to the contrary — the promise of socialism would work and would not lead to the loss of liberties or drive the once-prosperous nation into poverty. Looking back on the 20th century, we should turn to some of the most prominent thinkers who lived under similar conditions and dissected their experiences for us to learn from. Venezuela’s crisis is a good example of harsh lessons learned by one generation but forgotten by the next.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.

Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”

A prime example of this divorce between intentions and actual consequences is price controls. In 2014, Venezuela’s new Fair Price Law capped the price of goods and services and established a sentence of up to 14 years in prison for those caught “hoarding,” “overcharging,” or “trafficking food.” There is ample economic history revealing the consequences of price controls, which disrupt the equilibrium price set through the interaction between supply and demand. The price ceilings in Venezuela’s case effectively led to long queues, empty grocery stores, and, ultimately, starving citizens. The government set prices artificially low, which resulted in a skyrocketing demand and the overconsumption of basic goods. On the other hand, producers started to make less because it had become unprofitable to sell their products within Venezuela. Instead, they began sending their goods abroad or to the black market, where sellers face prison time for their activity and usually need to pay kickbacks to continue operating. These risks are reflected in higher prices. The real-life consequences of Chavismo’s misguided policies are telling: Venezuelans lost an average of 24 pounds in the year 2017.

Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian rule over Venezuela is the next piece of the Hayekian puzzle. Chávez’s hand-picked successor has further plunged the country into devastation. Hayek’s explanation of “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his seminal book is particularly helpful in understanding the current state of Venezuela at the hands of Maduro. In Hayek’s words, at some point a dictator has to “choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure,” failure meaning the loss of power over the lives of the people. This is the reason, Hayek argued, that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are more likely to stay in power in a society tending toward totalitarianism. This is, again, tragically accurate 75 years after the publication of The Road to Serfdom. Maduro and his inner circle have responded to the outcry for change from the hungry and desperate by unleashing ultraviolent revolutionary collectives in the hopes that millions will get the message, retreat to their homes, and watch — helplessly — as the night of dictatorship keeps falling upon them.

While the majority of Venezuelans suffer, Maduro dines at luxurious restaurants and treats his family to extravagant skydiving adventures. The president’s corrupt behavior is a reflection of his inner circle, which is composed almost entirely of crooks. To name a few, Diosdado Cabello, Chavismo’s second in command, who served as president of the Constituent Assembly under Maduro, is the head of an international drug-trafficking organization known as the Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), along with Néstor Reverol, minister of the interior and justice. Maduro’s nephews, known in the media as the narco sobrinos, are imprisoned in the United States for their involvement in the same drug trade. Meanwhile, Maduro’s former vice president, Tareck El Aissami, now Minister of Industries and National Production, has effectively acted as an ambassador to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, inviting its militants to train with FARC rebel forces in Venezuela. These are just some of the people who have led the country into chaos and who have dutifully followed Maduro while the rest of the country suffers under starvation, looting, illness, and extreme poverty.

Each day that Maduro remains in power represents another day in which the world concedes to the destructive tenets of authoritarianism. The Venezuelan people will be rid of these thieves sooner or later, but the world should have learned a lesson from thinkers such as Hayek the first time around. Now the international community can choose to heed his timeless warnings by taking action and elevating the pressure that’s already been put on the Maduro regime. “Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society,” Hayek wrote, “can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.”

What the European Elections Mean for Britain

By Madeleine Kearns

April 30, 2019

Why are Britons, who voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, and who were scheduled to do so on March 31 of this year, headed toward European elections in May? It’s a good question that, sadly, has no satisfying answer.

Members of the European Parliament are elected every five years. Of 751 MEPs representing 18 nations, the U.K. currently has 73. In February 2018, the parliament voted to lower the total number of MEPs to 703 if Brexit came to pass. But 15 months later, that plan remains on hold.

After nearly three years of politically incompetent Conservative government, Britain is no closer to leaving the EU. And unless Theresa May manages, by some miracle, to pass her thrice-failed deal before May 23, new MEPs will be elected and sent to Brussels to do a job that British voters opted to abolish in June 2016.

In ordinary times, one would be wary of overstating the domestic importance of European elections, which typically have low voter turnout and little bearing on Britain’s general and local elections. But this year’s vote may have broader implications for the country’s future. For one thing, both the Conservative and Labour parties are facing Brexit-induced identity crises. Though both promised to uphold the vote to leave the EU, the Conservatives weakened their parliamentary majority in the 2017 general election and have failed to deliver ever since. May’s attempt at a compromise has been unable to pass. And Jeremy Corbyn is feeling increased pressure from Labour back-benchers to move toward a second referendum, which Remainer MPs hope could stop Brexit entirely.

Amid all this Brexit chaos, signs of a possible electoral realignment have emerged.

Change UK — formerly “the Independent Group” — began as a group of disgruntled Labour MPs concerned about Brexit and the party’s anti-Semitism problem. Its ranks were soon supplemented by a handful of Europhilic Tory defectors. It now has 70 candidates on offer for the European elections, including Rachel Johnson, a writer and journalist who is the sister of Boris Johnson, the pro-Brexit Tory who is currently the polling favorite to succeed May as the leader of the Conservative party.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, has emerged to lead the newly founded Brexit party. Farage’s UKIP did well in the 2014 European elections, and he is confident that his new party will have similar success. He seems to be right; the bloc is currently leading the polls with 27 percent of the vote.

Daniel Hannan, who has served as a Conservative MEP for nearly 20 years and is the author of Why Vote Leave and What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit, tells National Review by phone,

If the Tory party goes into the elections with Theresa May still at the helm, it is going to get what our [American] cousins call a shellacking, and on a different scale than anything that has come before. So, current opinion polls suggest that we would get around 15 percent of the vote in the European elections. That would by some measure be the worst national vote share we’ve ever had. And when I say, “we’ve ever had,” I mean literally since Robert Peel founded the party in 1834. But actually, it could be even worse. Because those polls don’t factor in differential turnout, the fact that all of our activists are on strike, the fact that we’ve got no money, and the central problem, which is the failure to deliver Brexit in the timetable that Theresa May set herself.

Hannan adds that if the Tories are dealt a big enough blow in the European elections, Corbyn might gain “irresistible momentum” in the race to succeed May.

The public is understandably furious. A moderate, clean Brexit was once an entirely achievable aim, but it now seems impossible. The only choices on offer appear to be May’s Brexit-in-name-only plan, a high-risk, sudden, “no deal” Brexit, or no Brexit at all. Whatever happens, one thing looks certain: The Tories’ bungling of the entire process will haunt them for years to come.

Impeachment Would Be a Redundant Judgment

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 28, 2019

The Mueller investigation was supposed to be a legal process concerned with crimes. Investigators identified no crimes to charge, and so it has, naturally, become something else: no longer a theory about a criminal conspiracy — only an irritable mood.

An ordeal that had been conducted under the procedures of law in accordance with legal criteria is now an ordeal that is being conducted under the procedures of politics in accordance with political criteria — or, if you prefer, with moral criteria related to Donald Trump’s character. For those who want to see President Trump impeached and who think of impeachment as a fundamentally political process in spite of its mock-trial aspect, that’s just fine. They’ll take their pound of flesh, however it is had.

The problem with this point of view is that the question of Donald Trump’s personal fitness for office already has been adjudicated as a political matter: That is what happened in the 2016 presidential election. Many critics, myself included, argued that Trump was unfit for the office, both morally and intellectually. We made our arguments, the voters consulted their own consciences, and, weighing these things however it is that voters weigh them, chose Trump. There wasn’t some occult intermediary step in there. That’s how things go in politics: The people behave just as if they had minds of their own! And, sometimes, they get to have their own way.

In terms of Donald Trump’s character and habits, there is practically nothing in the Mueller report — or in the public record since 2016 — that voters did not already know when they elected him. And that is really the fundamental argument against impeaching President Trump: The political judgment called for in an impeachment at this point and in this context properly ought to be understood as beside the point, if we take seriously the democratic assumption that the judgment of the people, rendered in the election, is sovereign.

There isn’t some shocking new thing, and, of course, some Democrats have been talking impeachment since before Trump was even sworn in. The Democrats do not propose to impeach Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, but simply for being Donald Trump. One may sympathize with that, but Donald Trump is the man the voters chose.

And that goes to the real issue here: The Democrats cannot accept that they lost an election to Donald Trump. One sympathizes with that, too, but that is what actually happened, for several reasons: Trump focused on two issues — immigration and trade — that speak to a substantial bipartisan plurality with nationalistic and protectionist impulses rarely taken seriously by mainstream figures in either party; his opponent ran an inept campaign and has been questing after power for so long that both she and the voters are exhausted by it; the “elites” and Washingtonians against whom Trump & Co. inveigh were judged, not without some reason, to merit a trip to the woodshed; the so-called war on terror and the financial crisis of 2008–09 have destabilized formerly sturdy political coalitions. And, of course, it was Republicans’ turn.

Which is to say: The Democrats’ talk of impeachment is partly about 2020, but it’s mainly about 2016, and their adolescent psychic need to believe that the presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the White House was illegitimate rather than an opportunity they simply blew. The theory that the election was thrown by Russian trolls posting dank memes on Twitter is hard to take seriously. If we had a list of every voter whose mind was changed in 2016 by an anonymous social-media account with a Cyrillic bio, then disenfranchising those voters would be a good start on improving things for 2020. Alas and alack, we don’t do that sort of thing. But the argument that bot-executed shenanigans nullified democracy in 2016 amounts to the Democrats protesting: “These trolls robbed us of the support of our natural base: morons!”

There’s no quality control in social media — and less quality control in ordinary news media than there used to be. Lies, distortions, exaggerations, and pure inventions are going to be out there in the intellectual marketplace, whether they originate in Moscow or in Brooklyn. That’s a real problem, but it doesn’t invalidate the outcome of the 2016 election.

There are many reasons to oppose an impeachment at this time: One is that no one has made a very persuasive case for one, all of the Democrats’ arguments up to this point having been transparently pretextual. Another is that the Republican majority in the Senate all but ensures that the process would be purely symbolic, an exercise in chaos for pleasure’s sake. A third is that it normalizes the invocation of a procedure that should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances in the service of ordinary short-term partisan interests. For comparison, consider that there was no serious impeachment talk when Barack Obama authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress — or when he took executive actions that he himself had described as unconstitutional only months before. That suggests a pretty high standard — and if “I think that guy is a fink!” ends up being a common rationale for impeachment, then you’d better make your peace with anarchy, because Washington is going to be a ghost town.

But the most important reason for forbearance here is that a political judgment already has been rendered on Donald Trump’s character — and, if you don’t like how that came out, there’s another chance right around the corner.

Waive the Jones Act

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, April 29, 2019

The United States is producing beaucoup natural gas — you knew that. But do you really know how much? The United States is now the world’s largest natural-gas producer by far, with No. 2, Russia, nowhere close. The growth alone in U.S. natural gas is equal to about twice the annual production of Iran, which is the world’s third-largest producer.

So why are people in New England importing natural gas from Russia?

Welcome to the batty world of trade protectionism.

The United States has on the books and enforces an antediluvian piece of legislation known as the Jones Act, signed into law by that great malefactor of his day, Woodrow Wilson. The Jones Act forbids the transportation of goods, commodities, or people between U.S. seaports unless the vessels used are manufactured, registered, flagged, and owned in the United States — and owned and crewed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. It’s the reason why a cruise ship picking up passengers in Fort Lauderdale can’t disembark them in Key West — and also the reason why we can’t get natural gas from the Gulf Coast to users in the Northeast and in Puerto Rico.

Thanks to our environmentalist friends, we do not have the pipeline capacity to take U.S-produced natural gas from the places where it is processed to the places where the people are. This has some pretty serious consequences: Con Ed has just announced that it cannot get enough gas to serve new customers in the New York City suburbs, which has meant in effect a moratorium on much new residential construction, which obviously can’t happen without utility connections. One workaround has been to put liquified natural gas (LNG) on containers to take it where it is needed.

And that’s where the Jones Act is a problem. The number of tankers equipped to handle U.S.-made LNG that satisfy all of the conditions of the Jones Act is — here, the math gets pretty easy — zero.

There are Americans producing previously undreamt-of amounts of natural gas and eager to sell it. There are other Americans eager to buy it. And in the middle of all that? Russians. Why? Because economic protectionism is moronic, a consistent failure of a policy.

The Jones Act is a sop to a small slice of U.S. shipbuilders and operators — and a gigantic tax on people and companies who transport things and use electricity. It is one of the bone-dumbest laws on the books, pure corporate welfare from a time before penicillin.

There is a very useful concept in political economy: concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. The people who benefit from the corporate welfare — whether it’s the Jones Act, farm subsidies, or the U.S. Export-Import Bank — benefit bigly. Everybody else pays, but it’s spread around thin, so people don’t notice it as much — except when there’s an unusual cold snap in New England and those poor dumb frozen Yankees are having to bring in fuel from Siberia.

Making energy more expensive is bad for everybody — consumers, manufacturers, farmers. (Yes, farmers: It takes a lot of power to run those irrigation pivots.) The Trump administration has made ramping up U.S. energy production a centerpiece of its domestic economic agenda. The president himself has a phobia about trade deficits. That’s the wrong thing to worry about, but if you are worried about it, then it’s worth noting that petroleum imports have been one of the largest contributors to our trade deficits over the years — often the single largest contributor. And we’re hampering the distribution of U.S.-produced natural gas for purely political reasons.

There are some very capable people on Trump’s economic-policy team, and there are also some neo-mercantilist cranks. The president is considering issuing a Jones Act waiver to enable the freer flow of U.S.-produced natural gas. He should do himself and the country a favor and remember that when it comes to energy, more is more.

Black Lives Matter on Campus Also

By David French

Monday, April 29, 2019

Last Thursday, the NAACP suspended its Saint Louis County chapter president, a man by the name of John Gaskin. He was accused of two offenses. The second was a conflict-of-interest allegation that doesn’t concern us, but the first offense should. The NAACP actually suspended a chapter president in part for supporting greater due process for black men accused of sexual misconduct on campus. They suspended him for supporting civil liberties.

The background is relatively simple. The Missouri state legislature has been debating a campus-due-process bill that, among other things, would allow students accused of sexual assault to retain an attorney, learn of the charges against them, and cross-examine the accusers. Interestingly, it would deal with the persistent campus problem of amateur adjudicators by “borrow[ing] judges from the existing administrative court system to hear appeals.”

The Kansas City Star claimed that the proposed law “would give the accused more power than any other state.” If true, that’s a sad commentary on other states. And local activists opposed the law not only on the grounds that cross-examination (one of the essential elements of due process in American jurisprudence) “re-victimizes survivors” but also because the other elements (again, mainly representing basic elements of due process found in all civil and criminal courts) are — in the words of Wendy Davis, director of the Women and Children’s Advocacy Project in Boston — “designed to message females that, especially in the context of education, you’re supposed to be raped and be quiet.” Why? Because due process means “there’s no upside” to reporting. “It’s all burdens, hurdles, punishment, stigma, suffering.”

This of course assumes that the person reporting is actually a survivor, something we need due process to fairly demonstrate.

Gaskin stepped in to note that the “the denial of due process at Missouri’s colleges disproportionately impacts African-American men.” And the best available evidence indicates that he’s correct. As Emily Yoffe noted in an indispensable 2017 essay in The Atlantic, there is rising alarm that the Obama-administration-mandated changes in Title IX adjudication meant that increasing numbers of black men are facing false accusations, with a decreasing number of legal tools available to defend against them.

The federal government has been inexcusably lax in gathering statistics measuring the real-world effect of its legal mandates, but the anecdotal evidence is alarming. Yoffe points to the example of Colgate University. In the 2013–14 academic year, black students were 4.2 percent of the population, but “black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated.” Across three academic years, “black students were accused of 25 percent of the sexual misconduct reported to the university, and made up 21 percent of the students referred for formal hearings.”

Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gerson, one of the nation’s foremost experts on Title IX adjudications, has reported that the administrators and faculty members who work on campus sexual-assault cases say that “most of the complaints are against minorities.”

Moreover, the modern attack on campus due process means that black men are facing an old problem. Yoffe quotes another Harvard professor, Janet Halley, who accurately notes that “American racial history is laced with vendetta-like scandals in which black men are accused of sexually assaulting white women,” followed eventually by the revelation “that the accused men were not wrongdoers at all.”

But don’t tell that to the NAACP’s national leadership. Gaskin’s position conflicts with the “NAACP’s January 2019 opposition to proposed rule changes at the federal level that would have largely the same effects as the proposed Missouri legislation,” as NAACP national president Derrick Johnson wrote in the suspension letter he sent to Gaskin on Thursday. The NAACP is opposed to the Trump administration’s efforts to enhance campus due process, so it is opposed to state-level efforts to accomplish the same goal.

While the NAACP is free to adopt the positions that it wants to adopt — and to force its chapter leaders to toe the company line — its position is absurd and self-defeating. The NAACP’s Saint Louis County chapter president is right. Its national leadership is wrong. Who has suffered more from rigged tribunals and kangaroo courts than African Americans?

As Scott Greenfield writes in his Simple Justice criminal-defense blog, “there is a price to be paid for creating and maintaining alliances.” The NAACP is in lockstep with much of the Left in opposing due-process reform. It’s being a good ally, and it’s framing its support as a simple defense of Title IX, a key civil-rights statute. But nothing about Title IX mandates depriving young men of their civil liberties. And when there are acute dangers for black men — especially when those dangers bring up the ghosts of past injustices — the NAACP should think twice before it elevates the ideological imperatives of modern feminism over the immediate and direct consequences to a core constituency.

Of course the NAACP should be just as concerned about the plight of black women on campus as it is the plight of black men, but there’s an ancient method of squaring that circle. Due process gives an accuser the ability to state her case and the accused the right to effectively defend himself. And if any American organization should stand for due process, it’s the NAACP. The NAACP should change its position. Without civil liberties on campus, all too many black men will lose their civil rights.

Playing Intersectionality Roulette in the Democratic Primary

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 26, 2019

Joe Biden is being talked up as not only the man who can beat Donald Trump but also the one who can beat Bernie Sanders, which many Democrats see as the first order of business.

There’s one problem with that: Biden is Bernie Sanders.

Old white guy? Joe Biden has hair plugs that are older than the median Democratic primary voter. Sanders and Biden are a year apart — and both of them are older than Trump. Creaky? Creepy stuff in his history? Dusty northeastern union-hall politics? Check all those boxes. Worst: Sanders and Biden, though they are miles apart in rhetoric, are in many ways a couple of outmoded Teddy Kennedy liberals in a party that wants nothing to do with dinosaurs of that particular species.

Don’t bet the farm on either one of them.

Biden is a weird, handsy phony who has been in political office since before I was born, a mediocrity who topped out as vice president to the most insipid nonentity to occupy the Oval Office since Warren G. Harding — and made him look good by comparison. The first time Biden ran for president, I was in junior high. (Go, Rangers!) He’s a hack, a hapless, feckless lifer whose “Regular Joe on the Amtrak” shtick is a ridiculous joke. He’s shameless, once telling a black audience that Republicans plan to “put y’all back in chains,” affecting a quasi-southern black-ish accent. (Do white people say “y’all” a lot in Scranton?) He apparently had considered launching his presidential campaign in Charlottesville, Va., but someone thought better of it. He cited the violence there as his main reason for running for president — as though he hadn’t been running for decades. He didn’t even have the decency to make a pro forma phone call to the family of Heather Heyer, who was killed on that horrible day in Charlottesville, before cynically instrumentalizing her death. “They capitalize on whatever situation is handy,” said Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother. At least Robert Francis O’Rourke mounts restaurant counters and not tombs.

Is Biden the anti-Sanders? Not really. Sanders, for all his notional radicalism, seems like something new mainly because he is so retro: one part SNCC doofus, one part milquetoast Norman Mailer imitator, which is what all that weird rape-fantasy political porn on his résumé is about — that stuff was fashionable back in the days when the author of The Naked and the Dead was running for office. A cultural creature of the 1970s, Sanders is very much of a piece with the post-LBJ Democratic party: He’s what Howard Dean would be if Howard Dean had grown up on East 26th Street in Brooklyn instead of on Park Avenue.

The old-white-guy thing isn’t working out too well for Sanders. In Houston earlier this week for a cracked festival of progressive inanity called “She the People,” Sanders got read the old-white-guy riot act: Pressed about racial issues, Comrade Muppet started to launch into yet another retelling of the fact that he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 — but the crowd shut him down, hooting and laughing at him. “We know!” someone shouted. They’d heard it all before. Sanders, visibly flummoxed, went on to talk up the fact that he’d supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, and the room responded with, approximately, “Jesse Who?”

The Reverend Jackson’s is a name to conjure with no more.

The Democratic party has reached a generational cleavage. Sanders doesn’t seem like the kind of rascal who would have joined Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd in whipping up a “waitress sandwich” at La Brasserie — he is a rascal of a different sort — but he’s part of the same generation. He is old and white in a party whose future isn’t. He’s part of the cohort of aging liberals who are still trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to say “transsexual” or “transgender,” not trailblazing in search of that elusive 72nd gender identity.

The politics here should be familiar.

Republicans settled on Donald Trump in 2016 because they wanted a national repudiation of Barack Obama and all he stood for, and Trump was — and is — the social and cultural antithesis of the Obama type. Republicans did not want Democrats to suffer a mere political defeat in 2016 but to suffer a humiliating rejection, and Democrats helped things along by giving the public a very easy candidate to reject. Democrats going into 2020 are where Republicans were going into 2016: They don’t just want Trump out of office — they’re pretty sure (maybe too sure) that they’re going to get that in any case. They want him shamed, they want those around him shamed, and they want the country to make an executive gesture that says, in essence, “Never again.” And replacing Trump with another rich old white guy would not pack the symbolic punch that Democrats want, even if one of them calls himself a socialist from time to time.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has never uttered an original thought in all of her brief public career; she’s only interesting as a point of comparison to the man upon whom Democrats are for the moment fixated: not Biden, not Sanders, but Trump. The lady from the Bronx is too young to run this time around, but Democrats have a lot to choose from: an actual woman of color, a fake “professor of color,” a gay man, a black man, a Hispanic man under 50. What, exactly, does Joe Biden bring to that particular game of intersectionality roulette? Or Bernie Sanders?

Biden probably shouldn’t worry too much about beating Sanders. And Sanders probably shouldn’t worry too much about beating Trump. Anything’s possible in a presidential election, but if the best Joe Biden can say for himself is that he isn’t Bernie Sanders — that he’s the other white meat — he isn’t saying much.

Insufferable Suffrage

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, April 18, 2019

There’s an insidious movement afoot to lower the voting age to 16. By promising suffrage to the most easily manipulated and emotionally unstable voters in America, Democrats in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, where Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has endorsed the scheme, are pushing to make the electorate quite literally less mature.

Americans get their hackles up when you point out that teenagers are probably the most insufferable group in the nation. Well, second-most insufferable. As a group, teens, of course, aren’t immoral or irredeemably broken, like most politicians, just unfinished and slightly unbalanced — awkwardly oscillating between incomprehensible immaturity and unearned confidence, and between impulsiveness and irrational anxiety. Incentivizing elected officials to pander to the fleeting whims and mercurial idealism of people who have been known occasionally to ingest detergent pods is national suicide.

Sixteen-year-olds have good excuses for their lack of judgment: an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, a dreadful public-school system, and coddling parents. Those who want to empower kids to chime in on war and peace and marginal tax rates when they still have to ask their parents for permission slips before going on a class trip, however, do not.

“Across this nation, young people are leading the way — from gun violence to climate change to the future of work. They are organizing, mobilizing, and calling us to action,” explained Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley after introducing an amendment to lower the voting age in federal elections. “Our young people are at the forefront of some of the most existential crises facing our communities and our society at large.”

The mere fact that children can be duped into believing that their communities are facing “existential” crises is in itself a compelling reason not to let them vote. Young people, who Pressley basically admits are being used to further partisan liberal hobbyhorses, should be mobilizing to attain educations, jobs, and fixed gender identities before wasting their time on political protests. Despite the near-religious role that politics, activism, marching, and victimhood have taken up in certain parts of contemporary American life, none of these activities reflect proper republican virtues. Keep it off the streets.

Even young people who can vote tend to avoid the practice. According to a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, the United States ranked 31st out of 35 countries for overall voter turnout — or, as more skeptical observers might contend, we ranked fifth among 35 nations. Among those voters, only 25 percent of young people bother voting at all.

One of the best, and inadvertently most informative, articles on the matter could be found in the Washington Post not long ago. “Many young people don’t vote because they never learned how. Here’s a free class now in schools trying to change that,” the headline explained. The piece went on to explore the struggles of young Americans, purportedly deprived of civics lessons because of funding cuts, struggling to master the complex mechanics of voting.

Maybe it’s because they’ve been convinced by the political class that anything short of the state sending a car to deliver and pick up your mail-in ballot is an act of “voter suppression,” or maybe it’s because they’re so proficient with technology, but young people demand instantaneous results. Whatever the case, if prospective voters can’t crack the mystery of paper ballots — arguably the least complicated and burdensome thing in the life of a citizen — perhaps they need a bit more seasoning.

When New York magazine polled young people to ask why they don’t vote, they found that some were apathetic and others rightly questioned the efficacy of politics as a tool of societal change. Many, also inadvertently, made the case for raising the voting age. Take “Tim,” a twentysomething from Austin, Texas, who has, thankfully, never cast a ballot in his life. The young man explained that he had “tried to register for the 2016 election” but had failed. And anyway, “I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety.” Now, contemporary young people are certainly just as intelligent as anyone who came before them. But — and I will doubtlessly sound like a crank for bringing this up — in the old days a 27-year-old might have already participated in one of the major conflicts of the 20th century, gotten married, had children, and bought a house. If a stamp scares you, perhaps the republic can survive without your political input for a few more years.

So let’s raise the voting age for everyone who doesn’t join the armed forces. There is a far stronger case for it. Of course, it’s a difficult task, because the ill-advised 26th Amendment (passed and ratified in 1971) prevents states from setting a voting age higher than 18. But since the average age of the American voter is 57, let’s use majoritarianism to our advantage.

I would prefer something in the 30-year-old range, but I’m willing to compromise. Neuroscientists generally argue that brain development continues until the age of 25. And it’s around age 25 that young people start making a living and better comprehending the policies that affect their lives. Tacking on eight years also makes sense when we think about long-term trends in life expectancy. The year I was born, an average American could expect to live to nearly 71. Today he can expect to live to be nearly 79.

There is every reason to want teens, uninterested in voting or unprepared to vote, to perform an important civic duty by staying home rather than imposing their ignorance on the rest of us. And if you argue that many adult voters are similarly infantile and ignorant, I say: You’re right. Let’s not create any more.

Who Cares about National Unity?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 26, 2019

Here’s my succinct request to Donald Trump and all the Democrats and Republicans trying to unseat him.

Stop trying to unify the country.

I’ll wait a minute for those of you who need to clutch your pearls or breathe into a paper bag to compose yourselves.

Okay. Now, if you felt a certain amount of horror, revulsion, or rage at that statement, ask yourself why you want the country unified. (If you felt a sudden burst of sexual arousal, I think you stumbled on the wrong “news”letter.)

Seriously, why is unity good? Think about it, please.

Now as I’ve written a zillion times, I think the desire for unity is an evolutionary adaptation. So there’s no need to review all that again, except to say that this doesn’t mean unity isn’t valuable. Love in all its forms, friendship, loyalty, altruism, and all sorts of other things we value are good — or can be good — and they have genetic components too.

But what is it exactly about unity that you think is so damn important? If your answer is simply that “disunity” is bad, that’s understandable. But is that true either? I mean, can’t 300+ million Americans disagree on some stuff without everyone getting weepy? Moreover, it seems to me we’re slicing distinctions as thin as the garlic in the prison cell dinner scene in Goodfellas when people say diversity is among the highest virtues but disunity is one of the greatest vices. If diversity — real diversity — is good, then it is irrefutably the case that some disunity is good too. In a condition of maximum diversity and maximum unity, it follows that all of these very different people — different races, genders, religions, abilities, traditions, etc. — would have to all think alike.

There’s something downright Orwellian about the prospect of shouting at people “We must unite around our celebration of our differences!”

Who the hell wants to live in a world like that?

Unity is Power

Perhaps you desire unity because unity is required to get important things done. This is wholly defensible, and even admirable, depending on the sincerity of the person saying it. Despite what you may have heard, Washington has plenty of decent, civic-minded, and patriotic politicians, policy wonks, and journalists who decry partisanship for the best of reasons. They want to deal with real problems, from the national debt to climate change to various threats from abroad, and they are stymied by the unrelenting ass ache of the current political climate.

But note how the argument here is instrumental or utilitarian, not aesthetic, psychological, or philosophical. We need to unify to get X done. In other words, unity is a tool, a means to an end, not a good in itself. Fire is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Unity is the political equivalent of fire — a source of power. This is why the desire for unity became an evolutionary imperative. The unified group was better at hunting and defeating its enemies than the group lacking a sense of common purpose.

So here’s the thing: That means unity is only as good or bad as the goal you want to attain with it. No one likes a good heist movie more than I do. The gang gets together to rob a bank or casino, and they pull it off by sticking together. But all reasonable people understand that in the real world, that’s an immoral goal (hypotheticals about ripping off bad guys — gotta love Kelly’s Heroes! — notwithstanding). Really unified rape gangs are still evil. Indeed, their evil is compounded by their unity.

What is true of rape gangs is also true of evil regimes. Was Nazi Germany less evil because it could plausibly boast of the sense of unity and common purpose felt by so many Germans? In fact, mobs tend to be evil, or at least dangerous, even when they are unified around an ostensibly noble purpose — because unity can be an intoxicant, causing us to surrender our individuality to the group.

But the unity here is merely the mixer in the intoxicating cocktail. The 100-proof stuff is the power that comes with the unity. For instance, Democrats routinely wax nostalgic for the 1930s and the 1960s as times of great unity. As a historical matter this is crazy talk. The 1930s were a time of violent labor strife and protest. The 1960s were even worse, with domestic terror attacks, political assassinations, and massive protests filling the headlines. This is a great example of how unity is the mask power wears to justify itself. What liberals are nostalgic for is not unity but the kind of power they had back in the good old days. They can’t say, “Man, I really miss having the kind of power to do what we wanted,” so they gauze it up with false phantasms of national unity lost.

This is a particular weakness of intellectuals who, like all humans, tend to crave what they don’t have. That’s why they look enviously on regimes that put into action what they advocate here. Tom Friedman drooling over Chinese authoritarianism is one example. Stuart Chase — the New Deal egghead who marveled over the Soviet Union’s accomplishments — captured this spirit well when he wrote, “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”

What the Founders Did

The Founding Fathers were profoundly aware of the perils of unity, which is why they set up the first government in human history deliberately premised on the idea that disunity was valuable. Sure, the Romans and others had systems where power was shared between a monarch or emperor and some kind of parliament. But those systems emerged organically as compromises between different power centers. The kings of England did not want to be weak compared to their French peers. Circumstances, not design, made them so.

The founders studied the past with an eye to seeing what might work for the future. They subscribed to Edmund Burke’s view that “In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from past errors and infirmities of mankind.” The founders put on paper what history had ratified by experience. “Example is the school of mankind and he will learn at no other” Burke said, in perhaps my most overused — and favorite — Burke quote.

The founders wanted to create a new kind of country where individuals — and individual communities — could pursue happiness as they saw fit. They didn’t achieve that instantaneously, and we still don’t have it in meaningful respects, but they set up the machinery to make it achievable. This doesn’t mean the founders were against unity in all circumstances. Their attitude could be described as in necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas. In essential things unity, in non-essential things liberty, and in all things charity. In other words, they understood that unity was a powerful tool, best used sparingly and only when truly needed. Odds are good that this was — or is — the basic, unstated rule in your own family. Good parents don’t demand total unity from their children, dictating what hobbies and interests they can have. We might force our kids to finish their broccoli, but even then we don’t demand they “celebrate broccoli!” I wish my daughter shared my interest in certain things, but I have no interest in forcing her too, in part because I know that’s futile. Spouses reserve unity as an imperative for the truly important things. My wife hates my cigars and has a? fondness for “wizard shows.” But we tend to agree on the big things. That seems right to me.

What is fascinating to me is that in the centuries since the Enlightenment, unbridled unity, enforced and encouraged from above, has been the single greatest source of evil, misery, and oppression on a mass scale, and yet we still treat unity like some unalloyed good.

Just Drop It

Okay enough of all that. Let’s get to the here and now. Joe Biden promised this week that if he’s president, he will unite the country. Newsflash: He won’t. Nor will any of the other Democrats. Donald Trump won’t do it either — and certainly hasn’t so far. George W. Bush wasn’t a uniter. Barack Obama promised unity more than any politician in modern memory — how did he do?

For the reasons spelled out above, our system isn’t designed to be unified by a president — or anybody else. The Era of Good Feelings when we only had one party and a supposed sense of nationality was a hot mess. It’s kind of hilarious to hear Democrats talk endlessly about the need to return to “constitutional norms” in one moment and then talk about the need to unify the whole country towards a singular agenda in the next. Our constitutional norms enforce an adversarial system of separated powers where we hash out our disagreements and protect our interests in political combat. Democracy itself is not about agreement but disagreement. And yet Kamala Harris recently said that as president, she’d give Congress 100 days to do exactly what she wants, and if they don’t she’ll do it herself. You know why Congress might not do what she wants it to do? Because we’re not unified on the issue of guns. In a democracy, when you don’t have unity, it means you don’t get the votes you need. And when you don’t get the votes you need, you don’t get to have your way. Constitutional norms, my ass.

So here’s my explanation for why I don’t want politicians to promise national unity. First, they can’t and shouldn’t try. Tom Sowell was on the 100th episode of my podcast this week, and one of the main takeaways was that we shouldn’t talk about doing things we cannot do. Joe Biden has been on the political scene since the Pleistocene Era. What evidence is there that he has the chops to convince Republicans to stop being Republicans? When President Bernie Sanders gives the vote to rapists and terrorists still in jail, will we be edging closer to national unity? When President Warren makes good on her bribe of college kids with unpaid student loans, what makes you think this will usher in an era of comity and national purpose?

But more importantly, when you promise people something you can’t deliver you make them mad when you don’t deliver it. I’m convinced that one of the reasons the Democrats spend their time calling every inconvenient institution and voter racist is that they are embittered by Barack Obama’s spectacular failure to deliver on the promises he made and the even grander promises his biggest fans projected upon him. When you convince people they’re about to get everything they want and then you don’t follow through, two reactions are common. The first is a bitter and cynical nihilism that says nothing good can be accomplished. The second is an unconquerable conviction that evil people or forces thwarted the righteous from achieving something that was almost in their grasp. The globalists don’t want us to have nice things! The corporations keep the electric car down! The Jooooooooz bought off Congress! The Establishment pulled the plug! The Revolution was hijacked! The system was rigged! The founders were Stonecutters!

Finally, whenever you make things that are supposed to be above or beyond politics and make them part of an explicitly political agenda, you inevitably convince the people opposed to that political agenda that your invocations of grander themes are simply political. If you think nationalism is a great thing, using it to sell tax cuts, school choice or religious liberty will inevitably make opponents of those things dislike nationalism even more. The same applies to patriotism, religion, and every other grand concept.

Church attendance is plummeting in the United States. I think there are many reasons for this, ranging from popular culture to the decline of the family to our education system. But one important reason is that Christianity is increasingly seen as an adjunct of the Republican party. From the AP:

David Campbell, a University of Notre Dame political science professor who studies religion’s role in U.S. civic life, attributed the partisan divide to “the allergic reaction many Americans have to the mixture of religion and conservative politics.”

“Increasingly, Americans associate religion with the Republican Party — and if they are not Republicans themselves, they turn away from religion,” he said.

Yes, I understand this is a complex phenomenon. Some of this is a result of the fact that the Democrats have grown so rhetorically hostile to religious liberty and religion itself (they booed God at the 2012 Democratic Convention!). The GOP certainly shouldn’t be equally hostile to religion for the sake of national unity. But it’s also a product of the fact that many prominent spokesmen for Christianity have made it entirely reasonable to think that you have to be a loyal Republican to be a good Christian. They quote scripture to defend Republican’s sinful behavior and they quote scripture to condemn Democrat’s sinful behavior.

When politicians push national unity in the service of a political agenda, they are insisting that politics is the only metric that counts in determining what it means to be unified.

This country is wonderfully unified on all sorts of questions. For instance:

The vast majority of Americans agree that believing in individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech (91%), respecting American political institutions and laws (90%), accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds (86%), and being able to speak English (83%) are somewhat or very important to being American.

We’re also unified on the myriad other apolitical questions. I don’t have the polling in front of me, but I am confident that the vast majority of Americans believe that families are important, education is good, good manners should be celebrated, slavery is wrong, crime should be punished, children should be protected, hot dogs are not sandwiches, the Super Bowl is fun to watch, Fox shouldn’t have cancelled Firefly, they’re all good dogs, etc. The best way to make these issues sources of division is for politicians to turn them into partisan issues.

The U.S. Military: Like the French at Agincourt?

By Bret Stephens

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Early on a Sunday morning in 1932, a fleet of some 150 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo planes struck the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The ships lying at anchor on Battleship Row sustained direct hits. Also hit were the base’s fuel storage tanks and the Army Air Corps planes parked nearby at Hickam Field.

The surprise was as complete as it was devastating. Only this was an Army-Navy war game, the attackers were American pilots operating from the carriers Saratoga and Lexington, and the bombs they dropped were sacks of flour.

The lesson of “Grand Joint Exercise 4,” as it was called, is that forewarned is not always forearmed. It took the actual sinking of much of the U.S. battle fleet nearly a decade later to bring the lesson home to U.S. military planners that the age of the carrier had arrived.

Fast forward to 2006, when a small Chinese diesel-electric submarine surfaced well within torpedo-firing range from the 80,000-ton Kitty Hawk, having gone undetected by the carrier and her escorts. That incident ought to have been a loud wake-up call to the Navy that the age of the super-carrier is drawing to a close just as surely as the age of the battleship was coming to an end by the 1930s.

The only question is whether we will learn the lesson for ourselves, or — as we did on Dec. 7, 1941 — have an adversary teach it to us.

The question is also at the heart of an incisive and important essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs by Christian Brose, the former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”

The logic here is the same as the one that decided the Battle of Agincourt, where the humble and effective English longbow made short work of the expensive and vulnerable French cavalry. Today’s version of that cavalry consists of aircraft carriers priced at $13 billion apiece and fighter jets that go for $90 million (and cost $30,000 an hour to fly).

These systems are all beset by the usual technological hurdles, cost overruns and bureaucratic pitfalls. Still, they’d be worth their enormous price if they conferred a long-term, decisive edge over our adversaries, as U.S. technological superiority over the Soviets did during the Cold War.

The problem is that they no longer do. On the one hand, we are burning through billions of dollars by deploying state-of-the-art resources against technologically primitive enemies in the Middle East and Africa. Why? Because, for example, an Air Force obsessed with acquiring fifth-generation stealth fighters still can’t bring itself to purchase a squadron of cheap turboprop planes to patrol, say, the skies of northern Iraq.

On the other hand, we are burning through trillions in order to build a relatively small number of ultra-sophisticated platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to detection and destruction by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. “Put simply,” Brose writes, “U.S. rivals are fielding large quantities of multimillion-dollar weapons to destroy the United States’ multibillion-dollar military systems.”

That’s a recipe for strategic failure on budgetary grounds alone. The coming of technologies like hypersonic propulsion, space-based weapons and quantum sensors (able to detect minute disruptions of air or water) makes it a recipe for rapid military defeat as well — at least if nothing changes.

The answer, Brose argues, is to radically increase the numbers of military platforms, lower their costs, and — within ethical limits — enhance their autonomy. This puts fewer war fighters in harm’s way, creates more (and more difficult) targets for an enemy to track, and makes the loss of any one of them far easier to bear. Right now the Navy is straining to reach a target of 355 ships. It should be aiming for a significantly higher number, much of it unmanned.

So what stops it? The answer is what Brose’s old boss, the late John McCain, called the military-industrial-congressional complex.

“Military pilots and ship drivers are no more eager to lose their jobs to intelligent machines than factory workers are,” Brose writes. “Defense companies that make billions selling traditional systems are as welcoming of disruptions to their business model as the taxi cab industry has been of Uber and Lyft. And as all this resistance inevitably translates into disgruntled constituents, members of Congress will have enormous incentives to stymie change.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. A Pentagon with a visionary and independent leader, a Congress ruled by a non-parochial and bipartisan spirit, and a serious president capable of long-term thinking could change the way America prepares for the next war — to prevent it if possible, to win it if necessary.

For that, we’ll have to wait for a future administration. In the meantime, the risk of being on the losing side of our own Agincourt grows.

Why Zombie Politics Resonate

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Conservatives are acutely aware of our pop-cultural deficit, and sometimes argue that we need more conservative stories on film, on television, on stage, in books, etc. But we do not need more stories that are conservative — we need more stories that are true.

The great works of art that appeal to the conservative sensibility rarely if ever are constructed as self-consciously conservative stories — propagandistic literature lends itself more readily to progressive causes, in any case. What Coriolanus tells us about populism and mass politics is not true because it is conservative but conservative because it is true. The relationship between the beautiful and the true helps to explain how it is that so many actual Communists in Hollywood’s golden age produced works that were moving, true, often patriotic, often speaking to religious faith, and in many cases profoundly conservative. They weren’t out to make something right-wing, but something great.

I doubt very much that either Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead is the product of an overwhelmingly conservative group of storytellers. (From what I can learn of the politics of the writers, that does not seem to be the case.) But both shows are obliged by the nature of their dramatic structures to consider the fundamental questions of politics, and both invite deeply conservative interpretations.

The Walking Dead is, at this point, a show that is only incidentally about zombies. It is mainly a story about the origins of political order, one that has taken several different approaches to Mancur Olson’s idea of the state as a “stationary bandit.” Olson argues that political order has its origins in ordinary rapine and pillaging — at some point, his theory goes, the bandit begins to understand that his own interests are better served not by razing the villages, massacring the farmers, and burning the fields, but by leaving his victims with just enough to survive and to continue producing — so that there is something for him to loot next season. (Murray Rothbard and others made similar arguments describing the origins of the state as organized crime.) As the bandit begins to identify his own long-term well-being with that of his victims, he discovers incentives to stay in one place rather than roam hither and yon in search of new victims — a dangerous undertaking even for the most ruthless of bandits. He takes a proprietary interest in his victims’ property, which he begins to protect from rival bandits. The spoils of pillage become tribute, feudal duties, and, ultimately, taxation.

But reality is not much like “Whig history,” in which mankind and its polities move inevitably and invariably in the direction of progress and prosperity. Nations move backward and forward: Part of the shock and horror of the Holocaust is the result of the fact that it was undertaken not by a tribe of illiterate cannibals but by what had been Europe’s most culturally advanced nation. Venezuela has not always been what it is today. Neither has the United States.

The first part of The Walking Dead’s broad political arc has to do with the attempts of former sheriff Rick Grimes, a partisan of the law in a totemic lawman’s hat, to establish something like the rule of law in the post-apocalyptic chaos. He tries a bit of democracy and finds that wanting, but he continues to work toward a settlement based on rules and procedure rather than ad hoc savagery. And he fails. Much of the plot is the story of Grimes devolving into just another wasteland warlord, albeit one with some conscience and sense of decency. As the survivors begin to coalesce into semi-permanent settlements, they deputize one of their members to draw up a constitution — but a series of crises turns her into one of the coldest warlords of all. She is not a bad person, but the opposite: loving, loyal, fair-minded, deeply humane. She becomes a kind of left-handed military dictator not because of her vices but because of her virtues. She ends up being a kind of mirror image of the nefarious Negan, another warlord who sought not violence and domination for its own sake but order and security.

Many of the characters from The Walking Dead would quickly understand the facts on the ground in Westeros, the troubled kingdom(s) in which Game of Thrones’s titular contest takes place. Game of Thrones is, at its core, a Shakespearean succession drama: Something is out of place in the state, and the gears of the social machine must grind until a new stable settlement is reached. (Game of Thrones’s opening sequence, which presents Westeros as a series of complex machines, is well-conceived.) To Shakespeare’s political sensibility it adds a Dickensian scope, considering the life of the kingdom from many different vantage points: kings and courtiers, yes, but also slaves and prostitutes, religious leaders, children, common people, and literal outsiders, the “wildlings” who live beyond the wall that demarks the northern limits of civilization.

The unhappy reality at the center of the political economy of Game of Thrones is one of particular interest in the Western world just now: that, as the proverb has it, great men seldom are good men, that the characteristics that make one an effective leader — a leader who is genuinely of use to his people — often are the characteristics that make one a god-awful human being. And the converse: that many of the virtues of good men make them poor leaders in difficult times. Jon Snow, who recently (and at the most inconvenient of times) has learned that he is presumably the legal heir to the Iron Throne, is a decent, fair-minded, liberal man — and an almost completely incompetent leader of men. His first real command (of the border patrol, essentially) ends with him being murdered by mutineers. (He is resurrected.) In trying to unite the kingdoms against the same threat that Sheriff Grimes et al. faced – zombies — he ends up getting romantically involved with the conquering Daenerys Targaryen, who believes herself to be entitled to sit on the throne. (She is also his aunt, but he did not know that when he first went to bed with her.) That romantic entanglement leads enemies and allies both to question his motives and calculations — and not without good reason.

Daenerys, on the other hand, is a power-mad megalomaniac — and, so far, a much more effective leader. She may be traveling the world freeing slaves, handing down rough justice, and building multinational coalitions for her own selfish reasons, but she understands her own reasons. She knows what she wants, and that she has to give the people she rules what they need if she is to achieve her own ambitions. This is not a matter of mere calculation: Like most successful megalomaniacs, she sincerely believes that her own destiny is fundamentally identified with the good of the people she rules and those she means to rule. She can be transactional when necessary, and will take good advice when she recognizes it, but she is a true believer, too: in herself.

The Walking Dead offers its survivors a couple of clear choices: They can have peace, trade, security, material prosperity, the rule of law, and cooperation, or they can have slaughter and brigandage. The choice would be obvious to almost everyone — if not for the presence of the external threat and the trauma of social collapse. Game of Thrones offers a less clear choice, but does make an implicit case for things like federalism and the separation of powers, inasmuch as most of the Seven Kingdoms’ domestic troubles come from the fact that whoever sits on the Iron Throne expects not only to reign but to rule, and that the very different peoples of the kingdoms are, corporately, ungovernable — not even by terror, as the assassination of the Mad King makes clear. Again, it is possible to imagine how a modus vivendi might have evolved, if not for the external threat of the White Walkers and the privations of the long winter.

That these stories should resonate so strongly in our own political moment is a little strange. Unlike, say, at the height of the Cold War, there is no existential foreign threat to the United States and our way of life. Unlike, say, 1968 or 1861, there isn’t very much in the way of political violence at home, either. These are reasonably peaceful and prosperous times.

But our mood is not the mood of peaceful and prosperous times. That is, I think, the result of a series of earlier crises, minor and major, that were stacked on top of one another in a particularly destructive way: the convulsion of the 2000 presidential election, in which many Democrats believed (with varying degrees of good faith) that they were robbed by the Supreme Court; the events of September 11, 2001, shortly thereafter; the sense of paranoia and crisis on both sides of the political aisle that followed; the confusion about the Iraq War and its casus belli; the 2008–09 financial crisis; that extraconstitutional abuses of the Obama administration and the criminal misdeeds of the IRS and other agencies during those years; the emergence of procedural maximalism as a congressional political norm. Even with the Soviet menace, Vietnam, stagflation, etc., the majority of Americans spent most of the postwar era feeling relatively safe and secure in a way that no longer really holds. There is a sense that our constitutional order has fallen into disorder, that the system — as figures as different as Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren insist — is rigged.

And so our minds naturally turn to the basic questions of politics. By what sort of people do we want to be led? On what terms? Within what limits? To what ends?

You won’t get much of that from our elected officials, the professional commentators, or the academic philosophers. If you want to get a real feel for our politics, you’ll have to turn to a couple of dopey television shows about zombies.

The Bakshish Primary

By Kevin D. Williamson

April 24, 2019

One of the strange tasks of conservative journalism is taking left-wing policy fantasies seriously—more seriously, in many cases, than do the Democrats and their allied party mix of salty nuts.

In many cases, you’ll get more substantive policy specifics in conservative critiques of progressive proposals than in the progressive proposals themselves. The Democrats took the so-called Green New Deal so lightly that they didn’t even bother to proofread their marketing material and nix the cow-fart jokes before sending it out to the great wide world, and then were so embarrassed that they felt compelled to lie about it.

You ever hear Ramesh Ponnuru make a cow-fart joke? I didn’t think so.

If you want there to be a genuine, productive political discourse, then generally you should avoid things like imputing bad faith to the other side and accepting intellectual dishonesty from your own side. And that means sometimes kind of glossing over the actual bad-faith stuff when it’s festering stinkily right there under our noses, i.e. taking seriously Senator Kamala Harris’s $315 billion teacher-raise proposal as an economic and education-policy idea rather than treating it as the opening bid in a vote-buying scheme, which is what it transparently is.

In South Asian and Middle Eastern usage, there is a very useful word of Persian origin: bakshish, the meaning of which is wonderfully plastic: It can refer to alms given to beggars (Mark Twain mentions an “infernal chorus” of “bucksheesh” in The Innocents Abroad), customary tips paid to service providers, or bribery and extortion involving petty bureaucrats. The alloy of condescending philanthropy, customary patronage, and apple-stealing political corruption expressed by bakshish is better fitted to the current attitude of the 2020 Democratic presidential aspirants than the connotations of any ordinary political term I can think of.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student-debt proposal is pretty poor policy and possibly the dopiest thing she’s put her name on since those self-help books (The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan!) all those years ago: It’s a handout to the people in our society who are least in need of one (those who have gone to college, who pay on average only about 4 percent of their income in student-loan payments) combined with a handout for those who are going to be least in need of one (those who are going to college). The people who are in generally dire economic condition and who have the fewest resources and opportunities are not college graduates who have received loans at a subsidized rate, but people who never were on the verge of going to college, who in many instances never finished high school. Down the street from where the Democrats are holding their 2020 convention in Milwaukee sits North Division High School, where a third of the students fail to show up on any given day, where two-thirds fail to graduate in four years, where 7.5 percent achieve mere “proficiency” on standardized tests and 0.0 percent achieve math proficiency. The price of a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Haverford College is not what these kids are worried about in life.

But those kids are not an important political constituency. Resentful underachievers with degrees in cretin studies are.

Likewise Senator Harris and her teachers’ bonanza. We are accustomed to hearing otherwise, but teachers are a relatively high-income group. They like to preach the poor-mouth, but the typical teacher as an individual earns more than the typical household does, and, since we’re on the subject of Milwaukee, it is worth noting that the average public-school teacher there takes home more than $100,000 a year in salary and benefits. Let’s repeat that: Milwaukee public-school teachers get more than $100,000 a year on average in salary and other benefits. That’s more than the average computer programmer, the average engineer, the average chemist or geoscientist, the average architect, etc.—a hefty sum, given the results they produce.

We hear a lot about how Big Oil and the NRA throw money around to buy politicians, but in truth, they are minor spenders on politics: In the 2016 cycle, the American Petroleum Institute was No. 262 on the list of big political spenders, and the NRA was down there at No. 500. At the top of the list? Teachers. With a combined spend of $63 million, the two major teachers’ unions (the AFT and the NEA) spent more than any political donor in 2016 save Fahr LLC. (Fahr, which donated exclusively to left-wing and Democratic causes, made an unusual gift of $89 million to NextGen Climate Action in 2016, which put it at the top of the list.) That’s not a one-time thing: The teachers’ unions and their allied public-sector unions are reliably among the biggest spenders in politics, and they support Democrats overwhelmingly. When the Democrats propose to dump a few hundred billion dollars into the pockets of those unions’ members, they are in effect appropriating money to themselves.

Senator Warren’s proposed wealth tax has been tried out in other countries—and found wanting. As recently as the 1990s, a dozen or more European countries had wealth taxes of the kind she proposes, and almost all of them have abandoned them—most recently, France gave up its attempt to tax financial assets in 2017. The reasons are obvious enough: If the tax is applied to relatively modest sums, it constitutes a heavy tax on the savings of the middle class; if it targets billionaires, it produces capital flight and distorts other economic behavior. In either case, the difficulty of administration (the value of financial assets changes by the millisecond) and the relatively modest revenue yields have shown these taxes to be of limited effectiveness as economic measures. But as psychological measures, they have much to recommend them—if you think that class-warfare shenanigans are the way to get nominated in 2020. Which may be the case.

There is good reason to continue treating the Democrats’ 2020 proposals as though they were genuine policy ideas and not cynical vote-buying schemes: Some people, somewhere, probably take these ideas seriously, and that makes articulating serious objections to them necessary. But at the same time, let’s not kid ourselves about what’s going on here: This is bakshish on a grand scale, with a twist: It’s trying to bribe us with our own money.