The Unbearable Anguish of a Bernie-Trump Election

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 30, 2020

The endless torment to which Trump-skeptical conservatives were first consigned in 2016 has been nothing if not creative. Their latest ordeal, as Washington Examiner columnist David Drucker recently observed, involves their pinning hopes for a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo on, of all people, Joe Biden.

For erstwhile Republican partisans who spent the better part of the last decade opposing the administration in which Biden served, the duty they feel is a special sort of misery. They are rationalizing themselves into pulling the lever for a candidate who accused them of seeking to reimpose slavery on African-Americans, whose instincts on foreign affairs are consistently atrocious, and who has committed himself to a more liberal agenda than even Hillary Clinton’s. But Biden doesn’t want to pay people not to work or nationalize the health-insurance industry, so he finds himself on the moderate end of the present Democratic spectrum. Everything is relative, so why make the perfect the enemy of the good? Disappointment is, after all, the default state of the right’s Trump skeptics.

But Drucker’s dispatch reveals that a new sort of resignation is washing over conservatives in political limbo. As Democratic primary polls shift in Bernie Sanders’s direction, these conservatives are forced to confront the prospect of a Sanders-Trump election. Their anxiety is palpable.

Soapbox progressives are quick to write off this demographic, but Democratic political professionals are not. It wasn’t high turnout in dark blue urban enclaves that made the 2018 midterm cycle what it was for Democrats but the suburbs. There, many educated, affluent, older voters—white women in particular—broke with the president they’d supported in 2016. There is much this administration did in its first two years for voters with conservative impulses to like, but those accomplishments could not quiet their concerns about the president himself.

The president’s moral shortcomings and misuses of his authority are well documented, but Trump skeptical voters with conservative leanings would not just ratify those shortcomings with their vote. They would render a verdict of support for a presidency that is increasingly bereft of the voices that were responsible for the conventionally Republican policies they backed. Those who remain fixed within the president’s orbit are those most willing to cater to Trump’s instincts, which—with the possible exceptions of issues related to trade and immigration—are unpredictable. All voters should be concerned about a presidency that has survived both impeachment and a special counsel probe, but especially voters with an affinity for a limited government. Trump would enter his second term uniquely undeterred by checks on the executive reserved for Congress and the judiciary.

But what is their alternative? If the answer is Bernie Sanders, that’s no alternative at all. A Sanders campaign cannot make the moral case against the president’s character—at least, not in a way that satisfies conservatives’ concerns. Sanders has spent his career subordinating moral qualms to his policy objectives, and every dissident population under the yoke of socialism or indigenous population ethnically cleansed by his ideological allies has suffered as a result. Nor can Sanders effectively campaign against the president’s habit of dividing Americans against each other and indulging in xenophobic rhetoric. At least, not while he has surrounded himself with a growing cadre of activists embroiled in anti-Semitic controversies.

There are few, if any, policy prescriptions Sanders espouses that conventional conservatives unmoved by populist grievance politics would find appealing. Conservative Trump critics who have taken solace in the president’s handling of relations with Israel, as well as his administration’s confrontational approach toward Russia, Iran, and hostile international organizations like the United Nations General Assembly, can look forward to a presidency that would make Barack Obama’s appear conventional by comparison. And while Donald Trump represented a departure from the institutionalism that typified past presidencies, the lack of a populist intellectual infrastructure on the right compelled him to staff his administration with establishmentarians who favored continuity over revolutionary change. Sanders wouldn’t have that same problem. A Sanders administration would have no trouble finding progressive reformers who know how to wield the levers of power in this country to effect radical change even outside the legislative process.

If typically Republican voters who remain unsold on Donald Trump and the GOP he has transformed over the last four years thought 2016 was a devil’s choice, they might not have seen anything yet. A Trump-Sanders race would test the limits of their patience like nothing else.

Lost in Diversity’s Hall of Mirrors

By Christine Rosen

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Presidential campaigns exacerbate solipsism. Not only the solipsism of the candidates and the journalists who cover them but navel-gazing of campaign staffers, who all too often mistake an intense period of political work during a high-stakes election for more worthy labor than it is.

But until recently, campaigns themselves were understood as a tough but rewarding form of employment for people eager to work in the political trenches. Popular culture lionized the “war rooms” of some campaigns (at least when the candidate was a Democrat) and praised the hell-for-leather, relentless nature of the people who worked for them.

No longer. In our hypersensitive times, fear and loathing on the campaign trail have evidently been replaced by diversity retreats and microaggression surveys. As Reid Epstein describes in The New York Times, millennial darling Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is the exemplar of such efforts.

Recently, staffers on Buttigieg’s campaign who “identify as a person of color” were asked to complete a survey about “Microaggressions in the Workplace” that included such questions as whether or not a “white colleague” has “interrupted/ talked over” them, or failed to include them on a “relevant email chain.” Further questions explored their feelings about having an idea dismissed “without explanation” and even asked, “What does good allyship feel like?”

As well, in early December, the campaign hosted a “mandatory half-day retreat about diversity and inclusion.” This event evidently didn’t achieve its intended goals, since, as one staffer told the Times, “there was a daily ‘emotional weight’ on people of color who felt they were employed in order to help the campaign meet its ambitious diversity targets.”

Buttigieg has struggled to gain support from non-white voters since he first launched his campaign, and his eagerness to discuss his own diversity hiring practices is clearly part of his effort to bolster his bona fides on race. “Team Pete” took its struggle sessions public in response to the Times’ story, posting a lengthy description of its diverse staff and boasting: “We’re proud that 40 [percent] of our campaign’s senior advisors identify as people of color, 46 [percent] of our senior leadership and department heads identify as people of color, 40 [percent] of our entire campaign staff identify as people of color, 52 [percent] of our staff are women, and 28 [percent] of our staff identify as LGBTQ+.”

Team Pete also emphasized that the campaign was dedicated to fostering “safe, supportive environments where people on staff can speak freely about these issues in a trusted space.”

But a presidential campaign is about the furthest thing from a “safe space” as one can imagine. It’s a relentless, often brutal slog with only one winner. People who work for campaigns usually do so with the knowledge that the job requires a tolerance for behavior and demands on their time that are different from a regular job. That’s no excuse for bad behavior by campaign staffers, of course, and, in some cases, candidates have been pressured to fire staffers whose behavior is outlandishly offensive.

Still, while it is routine for campaign staffers to leak to the press in order to further a positive narrative about their candidate (or a negative one about their opponents), it is unusual to find them blathering on to reporters about their own hurt feelings. Or spending valuable time in the lead-up to the first Democratic primaries engaging in tearful emotional wellness sessions about “Building Belonging” into the campaign.

The real test of Buttigieg’s trust-building exercises and microaggression questionnaires is this: Have they made his campaign better? If his polling numbers among non-white voters are any guide, they have not.

Diversity might be a strength, but diversity pandering might prove at best to be a harmful distraction for his campaign, and at worst an example of inauthenticity on matters of race that, ironically, could further sour the already-skeptical non-white voters Buttigieg is so eager to get.

The Equal Rights Un-Amendment

National Review Online

Friday, January 31, 2020

Three states have gone to court to get an amendment added to the Constitution. House Democrats plan a vote in support of this scheme. What the Left is attempting to do here is to subvert Article V of the Constitution — the part that spells out the proper way to amend the Constitution — in order to make it easier for liberal judges to impose their policy preferences on the nation.

The purpose of the Equal Rights Amendment is to put seemingly innocuous language into the Constitution — declaring men and women equal before the law — that could then be used to force policy changes that the democratic process will not yield. The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have issued a report that speaks favorably of using the amendment to secure paid family leave, prohibitions on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the end of policies that have a disparate impact on women. (Physical standards for firefighters could be held unconstitutional, for example.) Using the amendment to shore up the alleged right to abortion also gets a positive mention, naturally. If these policies should be adopted at all, legislatures should do it openly and deliberately rather than sneaking them through.

When Congress originally submitted the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972, it gave it a March 1979 deadline. Deadlines have been a common feature of amendments, one the Supreme Court unanimously declared permissible in 1921. The ERA didn’t get enough states to ratify it before that deadline. Congress then, by a simple majority, purported to extend the deadline for three years — an act declared unconstitutional by the only court to review it. (It takes a two-thirds supermajority, the kind the ERA got in 1972, to submit an amendment for ratification.) The ERA didn’t get ratified by the new, dubious deadline, either. At that point, in 1982, everyone — including the Supreme Court — acknowledged that the amendment was dead.

In recent years, however, three states have claimed to ratify it. Their legal claim is that the amendment was validly submitted to the states, but the deadline is invalid. The states that rescinded their ratifications, the argument maintains, also acted invalidly. House Democrats are moving legislation to invalidate the deadline retroactively. They claim Congress can take this action free from both the two-thirds supermajority requirement for an amendment and the presidential-signature requirement for ordinary legislation.

None of these maneuvers is consistent with the rule of law. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has conceded that any effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment would have to involve starting over: getting a new supermajority of Congress and new state ratifications. Legislators and the court should not participate in this charade. The judicial system could start by quashing the states’ lawsuit.