This Is What American Disengagement Looks Like

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 28, 2020

Tensions had been building for weeks in Syria by late January when forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad launched an offensive on the towns surrounding the last rebel-held stronghold in the country, the city of Idlib.

The Russian-backed Syrian government offensive represented, according to Turkey, a violation of the “ceasefire” agreement Washington helped broker between the nations and non-state forces competing over Northwestern Syria. The attacks had unleashed a new wave of refugees streaming toward the Turkish border, numbering now almost 1 million strong and once again threatening to destabilize Europe. More importantly, Turkey warned, its positions were at risk of being targeted by Syrian forces, and they would retaliate if necessary. And on February 3, six Turkish soldiers were killed by Syrian artillery. Turkey responded, striking 54 military targets inside Syria, reportedly killing at least 76 Syrian soldiers.

But the fighting did not stop. The cycle of attacks and retaliatory strikes between Syria and Turkey accelerated. Five Turkish soldiers were killed on February 10, to which Turkey responded by shelling Syrian targets. Two more soldiers loyal to Ankara lost their lives on February 20, yielding another proportionate response. On February 22, Turkey destroyed 21 “regime targets” after it lost its 16th soldier this month to Assad’s forces. All the while, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned both Assad and his logistical partners in Moscow that his country would not tolerate these attacks forever, and Turkey would be “everywhere in Syria” if it needed to be.

This violence may have climaxed on Thursday in a staggeringly brazen escalation when at least 33 Turkish troops died and 30 more were wounded in an airstrike. Once again, Erdogan’s retaliation was proportionate, attacking Russian and Assad regime strongholds near Latakia with missiles. But the time for proportionality may be coming to an end. Since the collapse of the 2019 ceasefire in January, Ankara has warned the Syrian government that it has until the end of February—this weekend—to halt its advance on Idlib. “We plan to free our besieged observation towers, one way or another, by the end of this month,” Erodgan said this week. The slaughter of scores of Turkish forces has surely only hardened his resolve.

Turkey claims that the strike was attributable to the Assad government, but Russian warplanes supporting the advance of Syrian forces are more likely to blame. You can see why Erdogan would run reluctant cover for Moscow. There are no guarantees that a low-intensity conflict between a member of the NATO alliance and Russian forces won’t spiral into a more dangerous series of increasingly violent confrontations.

This is now the most dangerous period of the conflict since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in 2015 in the earliest days of Moscow’s military intervention on behalf of its besieged client in Damascus. As it did in 2015, Turkey immediately invoked Article IV of the NATO alliance treaty—a provision that compels member states to enter into emergency consultations, a prerequisite for triggering NATO’s mutual defense provisions in Article V. The Atlantic alliance was able to talk Turkey off the ledge in 2015, but the West can produce few inducements that might convince Ankara to endure these deadly assaults on its soldiers and sovereign dignity indefinitely.

None of this should come as a surprise. This is what American disengagement looks like. The United States beat a hasty retreat from Northern Syria last year—a political, not strategic, decision that seemed justified only by the president’s frustration with America’s modest footprint in that lawless part of the world. In its wake, America left behind a fiction of a “ceasefire” arrangement, the fragility of which was apparent to most observers even as the administration was celebrating its achievement. Even if the deal was doomed to fail, said its more candid supporters, so what? This was not America’s fight; it’s time to let the rest of the world fight its wars and get America out. Well, mission accomplished.

For all the consternation U.S. deployments in Syria caused advocates of American retrenchment, the small and cost-effective American presence in the Levant deterred states like Russia and Turkey—whose interests in Syria are in direct conflict—from litigating their grievances on the battlefield. In America’s absence, deterrence has broken down, and the prospect of something far more dangerous now looms large.

American disengagement from such a crisis is an untenable position. The United States will commit itself to de-escalating this potentially catastrophic state of affairs; its interests in this region and in this crisis are imperative. But in that effort, the tools at its disposal are limited. We left them behind in Northern Syria.

The Bernie Bros Have Turned Dangerous in Their Terrifying Witch Hunts

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, February 22, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders says he wants “a political revolution.” His most ardent supporters say they want “blacklists” — their word, not mine.

Revolution or blacklists? They are saying the same thing.

If you want to know what Sanders’ “revolution” would look like, the answer is right there in front of your eyes: One part House Un-American Activities Committee, one part Maoist Cultural Revolution.

Matt Bruenig of the left-wing People’s Policy Project and a sometime contributor to The Atlantic is an ardent young Sandersista. Like most vicious ideologues, he reserves his most intense loathing not for those who are opposite him politically but those adjacent, in this case Democrats who support more centrist candidates, especially those working for former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “It’s very important for us to create a blacklist of every operative who works on the Bloomberg campaign,” he wrote on Twitter, before deleting the post.

David Klion of Jewish Currents also has warned his fellow Democrats that those who back the wrong horse are going to be blacklisted. “It’s a mercy we’re warning you now,” he wrote on Twitter.

Klion presents a funny case: He wants to make a blacklist, but can’t quite get either the “black” or the “list” parts right. He organized a social-media harassment campaign targeting a Nigerian supporter of Pete Buttigieg, insisting — falsely and without evidence — that the black man in his sights was actually a white woman affiliated with the Buttigieg campaign. He has since been publicly corrected and confessed his error. But that is an old story with Democrats of Klion’s stripe: White liberals operate under the assumption that the role of black liberals is to do what white liberals tell them to do.

Sanders puts forward a great many proposals that are, to put it charitably, unlikely to gain traction in DC, where Republicans still have a vote — especially if those Republicans retain control of one or more houses of Congress. When challenged on this, Sanders falls back on his “revolution” talk. That “revolution” covers a lot: organizing strikes and protests against private companies that do not toe Sanders’ socialist political line; using the pretext of “campaign finance” reform to muzzle political opponents and strip them of their ability to deploy their own resources for political communication and activism; using business regulation to punish his political enemies; etc.

And, of course, it means blacklists. Sanders himself has not endorsed such measures, to be sure. But he doesn’t have to. His revolution is already prefigured in the campaign of intimidation and harassment his minions currently are carrying out on social media, with the usual threats and hysteria. “It’s not just about issues,” Sanders organizer Claire Sandberg put it. “It’s about whether you’re willing to pick the big fights.”

And the little fights, too: Bruenig is promising to target everybody who works for Bloomberg, not just the bigwigs. Given the infamous trollishness and sexism of the “Bernie Bros,” that is not likely to end well.

But these are blacklisting times. In Hollywood, Debra Messing is calling for political nonconformists to be blacklisted; on campus, recent research shows that conservative students are obliged to self-censor to an extraordinary degree; in private life, so-called liberals report that they are much more likely to discriminate against someone for their political views than conservatives are. But the Left was never going to be satisfied blacklisting conservatives. Disobedient Democrats must be punished, too.

If that’s what a “political revolution” looks like, then we should take Che Guevara off all those T-shirts and replace him with Joseph McCarthy, who had a real gift for that kind of thing.

‘Majoritarian Domination’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 28, 2020

David Brooks’s account of Senator Bernie Sanders and his campaign cuts deep, because it is true, and obviously true.

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. This is how populists of left and right are ruling all over the world, and it is exactly what our founders feared most and tried hard to prevent.

Brooks’s colleagues often write that the problem with the country is that it is too divided, and that it requires someone to “unite” us as a whole or in subsections. But saying that the country is “divided” is only a way of acknowledging that there are two parties representing two organic political tendencies and two broad American social tribes that disagree about many of the basic things. The call for “unity” often is the call for “majoritarian domination,” for getting one side to submit to the mastery of the other.

This is a current theme of Democratic partisanship in the New York Times mode. Jamelle Bouie, for example, writes that the first thing that’s needed from a Democratic presidential nominee is “unifying the party, and Sanders can do that,” and that the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn “is the only candidate who can plausibly unite the anti-Trump majority of the electorate.” Frank Bruni, arguing for Pete Buttigieg instead, insists that “fragmentation” is “the greatest problem that America faces,” and that Buttigieg can reduce that fragmentation and hence make “progress on all of those other fronts possible.” David Leonhardt, too, worries about division, and makes the case that Democrats instead should rally behind Senator Klobuchar and “de-emphasize cultural issues—on which voters are much more divided,” describing a purely strategic approach. Michelle Goldberg, arguing for Elizabeth Warren, lays out a model for that “majoritarian domination” that Brooks warns of: “Even if a Democrat wins the presidency in November, Democrats won’t be able to pass significant legislation unless they both take the Senate and eliminate the filibuster. That will make Warren’s mastery of the levers of executive power particularly important.”

Mastery and power!

Brooks is right about Senator Sanders. But it is no less the case that Warren and the rest of that gang have very little interest in anything other than ruling, majoritarian domination, mastery and power—whatever you want to call it. Consider, for perspective, the upcoming Supreme Court trial on Philadelphia’s jihad against Catholic Social Services, which does invaluable work for children in the foster-care system but, in accordance with its religious beliefs, declines to place children in the care of homosexual couples. There are a million foster-care agencies (and adoption agencies, too) that are not Catholic, that serve homosexual couples, that toe whatever political line the corrupt and inept municipal powers of Philadelphia insist on—and one that does not. One deviation is too many. The Left will not have a live-and-let-live solution here, no more than in the matter of adoptions in Massachusetts.

They speak of “unity.” They mean “submission.”

Until we are able to conduct ourselves with genuine respect for the fact that there are real differences in our society, and that those differences involve things that people on both sides of the great divide believe to be morally important, we will not have a politics of the liberal toleration Brooks longs for. We will have majoritarian tyranny and a merciless fight for mastery and power.

And we will have two parties with two standard-bearers who truly deserve one another.

‘Gray Matter’–Deficient Americans

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Former New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.

“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”

He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy” that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Gray matter?

For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.

Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

In the earlier 2008 campaign, then-progressive candidate Barack Obama wrote off the rural voters of Pennsylvania, a state he lost in the primaries to Hillary Clinton. Of those who apparently did not vote for him, he claimed: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

A contrite Obama knew relatively little about rural Pennsylvania other than the stereotypes he had embraced about country life from his Hawaiian prep-school cocoon, Occidental College, the Ivy League, and his subsequent elite, identity-politics cursus honorum.

His then-opponent Hillary Clinton pounced and attacked Obama as “elitist and out of touch” — and she soon transmogrified, as Obama put it, into “Annie Oakley” Hillary. Remember that, in those few days of her failed first bid to capture the Democratic nomination, Hillary drank boilermakers, talked guns, bowled, and bragged about her solid support among the “white” working classes.

Of course, eight years later Hillary herself wrote off the base of her 2016 opponent Donald Trump as “a basket of deplorables.” And after smearing them as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — you name it,” she boasted that some of them were “irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.” When candidate Clinton went to impoverished West Virginia, she lectured poor and often out-of-work coal miners, promising, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This from someone who gave inane 20-minute talks to Wall Street grandees for over $12,000 a minute — on their expectation that she’d be a compliant quid pro quo political investment.

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden said of Trump’s working-class voters, “They’re a small percentage of the American people, virulent people, some of them the dregs of society.”

Biden, by 2019, had also metamorphosed from good ole Joe Biden of rural and coal-mining Scranton, Pa., to the grandee who could advise doomed coal miners to learn how to program computers: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”

A coal miner might have replied to Joe Biden: “Anybody who cannot do much of anything other than get mired in drugs and illicit affairs can certainly learn how to make $80,000 a month as a consultant to a foreign energy company.”

The disdain for the working and middle classes shown by wealthy liberals who supposedly champion labor is matched by the disdain of progressive government bureaucrats, media, and left-wing Hollywood celebrities. In one amorous exchange to his paramour Lisa Page, fellow FBI agent and Trump hater Peter Strzok said, “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

Strzok, who was the highest-profile FBI employee in most of the major scandals of the past four years — the Clinton email fiasco, the setup of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation of “Russian collusion,” and the Mueller special-counsel investigation — was apparently representative of the FBI hierarchy. One anonymous attorney wrote to another in a text disclosed by the inspector general, “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.”

Marquee reporters often got caught expressing the same sort of disdain felt by progressive politicians and the federal bureaucratic elite. Describing the crowd at a Trump rally, Politico reporter Marc Caputo tweeted, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

The locus classicus of elite progressives’ disdain for working-class Trump supporters was a recent panel on the show of CNN host Don Lemon. Pundits Rick Wilson and Wajahat Ali took turns ridiculing the accent and intelligence of the supposedly Neanderthal rural voter. Or as Wilson put it, Trump plays to “the credulous Boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump that wants to think — ” and here Wilson adopted a faux-Southern accent — “‘Donald Trump is the smart one and y’all elitists are dumb.’”

Then, as host Lemon doubled over in laughter at their impressions of supposed white trash, his two guests adopted “redneck” accents and indulged in an extended parody of the allegedly stupid Trump voter:

Ali: “You elitists, with your geography and your maps and your spellin’ . . . ”

Wilson: “Your math and your readin’ . . .”

Ali: “Yeah, your readin’, your geography, knowin’ other countries, sippin’ your latte.”

Wilson: “All those lines on the map.”

Ali: “Only them elitists know where U-kraine is!”

Progressive derision of the working class, and especially lower-middle-class white America, pre-dated Trump. Remember the decade of hatred that Hollywood expressed for Sarah Palin, her family, and her supposed class, both during and after the 2008 campaign.

Late-night talk-show host David Letterman joked on his show that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter Bristol had been “knocked up” in the dugout by star Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game — as if rural, stupid, and inbred Alaskans are eager to be statutorily raped in their groupie eagerness to seek out celebrities, even in dirty dugouts amid a crowd of thousands.

The list of disparagement could be expanded — do we remember how the media assured us that Harvard Law graduate Adam Schiff was to destroy his counterpart, supposedly hick farmer Devin Nunes — at least until Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the information in the Nunes majority report factual, and by implication found that the Schiff minority version was an assemblage of falsehoods and half-truths?

Why do so many liberal journalists, politicians, and celebrities harbor such contempt for, and show such snobbery about, the white working, and often rural, classes of the American heartland?

The most obvious answers are that the media, elite politicians, and government hierarchy are liberal or left-wing, and the objects of their hatred are mostly conservative. Just look at any election map, color-coded by either congressional districts or Electoral College states, and the nation, geographically, is a sea of red, bookended by two long blue corridors on the coasts, the home of the nation’s tony universities, network news, media hubs, the bureaucratic borg, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street.

Second, there is no cultural, career, or political downside in stereotyping millions of Americans as stupid, crude, and culturally repugnant. Had Don Lemon’s two guests mimicked the dialect of inner-city youths and suggested they were uneducated and thus gullible supporters of Barack Obama, they would have been banned from CNN for life. Or had Peter Strzok suggested that he could smell Obama supporters at Walmart, federal attorneys would probably have found a way to have him indicted by now.

Third, politics, academia, the media, and entertainment don’t necessarily draw in particularly wise people, especially if knowledge is broadly defined as social skills, empirical education, common sense, and pragmatic experience. According to the rules of the elementary playground, one becomes exalted by ridiculing others. High-school dropouts such as Robert De Niro and Cher seem to appear sophisticated by ranting about Trump and his supposedly ignorant supporters. Don Lemon’s skills seem mostly limited to reading a teleprompter — when he ventures into commentary and analysis, he usually sounds either banal or adolescent. Howling at stupid jokes about the supposed ignorance of the red-state drawler apparently lend the insipid Lemon an air of cosmopolitan sophistication. Michael Bloomberg, for all his billions and cunning, cannot fathom in a debate that, by joking about TurboTax, he only further alienates millions who use it because they cannot hire his legions of attorneys to reduce their tax exposure.

Finally, there is also a psychological explanation for why coastal elites negatively stereotype the churchgoers, farmers, gun owners, and Walmart shoppers of the nation’s interior. Our elite, especially those of our white elite establishment, are not especially comfortable with either poor people or minorities — at least not in the sense of living among them, working alongside them, schooling their children with them, or marrying among them. They sense that such concrete unease — their fear and insecurity — is at odds with their well-meant desire to help the underprivileged in the abstract.

Elites help square that circle of wishing to aid the Other while not being anyway near the Other through the use of medieval-style virtue-signaling. That is, they deplore white racism and privilege by attributing it to supposedly ignorant and less enlightened poor white people, whose illiberality and un-wokeness they can lazily stereotype as responsible for the plight of the underclass.

Our best and brightest cannot be the good white people unless there are plenty of the bad white people. Smearing the latter is a convenient — and cheap — way of showing abstract solidarity with the nonwhite. In reductionist terms, those with undeniable white privilege damn as privileged those who have never been near it, thereby erasing their own privilege and spiritually placing them at the virtual barricades beside those they otherwise keep carefully distant.

Of course, there is also an element of fear, even apprehension, in such demonic generalization, a result of segregation from and ignorance about the physical world. Barack Obama, who once complained about the price of arugula and either had never heard or never spoken the word “corpsman,” knew that he knew nothing about farming or guns or clinging working people. Did he realize that his food, his safety, the maintenance of his home and car depended on others who could do things to keep his world viable that he not only could not do but also could not even imagine? Ask Obama and his class to replace a 30-amp breaker, or prune a peach tree, or drive a semi, and one could see that he assumes others who are supposedly less gifted provide his power, food, and consumer goods, using skills he lacks.

Ditto Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg claims he could teach anyone on an Oxford stage how to be a farmer. But he knows that he has no knowledge of farming, ancient or modern, and has no detailed notion of where or how his fruits, vegetables, grains, and choice cuts arrive at his various estates and hence his table. He may even sense that while the world could do without Bloomberg News, it could not survive without skilled farmers. So he is a bit edgy when he thinks about the physical world of muscle that allows him to be Mike Bloomberg, multibillionaire Socratic dunce.

We need to move beyond the idea that the elite caricature the deplorables because they are insensitive and arrogant. True, they are, but they also do it because they are insecure — and terribly afraid of those they don’t like, but also sense they desperately need.

Sanders Would Radically Shift U.S. Middle East Policy for the Worse

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Friday, February 28, 2020

In the last week, the focus on Senator Bernie Sanders’s past views on Communist Cuba has intensified. Sanders’s continued refusal to disavow his past rationalizations of the Castro regime’s rule has outraged the Cuban-American community and fueled criticism that his brand of Democratic socialism recalls the pro-Soviet Western Left of his formative Cold War years.

Yet for all of the justified anger at Sanders’s stance on Cuba, the debate about U.S. policy toward the former Soviet satellite state is rooted more in the past than in our present foreign-policy challenges. An even more accurate indicator of the way Sanders would shift U.S. policy as president came when he publicly spurned the idea of speaking at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). By denouncing AIPAC for what he described as “bigotry” and “denial of Palestinian rights,” Sanders signaled that he was committed to undermining the pro-Israel lobby whose main goal is to maintain bipartisan support for the Jewish state.

Sanders’s stand is both hypocritical and inaccurate, since AIPAC, which functions as an umbrella group of American pro-Israel organizations, remains publicly committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and is just as likely to hear from liberal speakers at its conferences as from conservatives. In the past, Sanders has had no compunction about speaking at conferences held by the left-wing J Street group, where some speakers have espoused an anti-Zionism that denies Jewish rights. Nor has he stayed away from extremist groups: Last year, he spoke at the Islamic Society of North America, whose leaders have advocated the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews and homosexuals.

Sanders’s repudiation of a group whose conferences always boast leading Democrats and Republicans among their speakers and attendees illustrates his willingness to antagonize supporters of Israel. And that, in turn, is a worrisome indicator of what a Sanders administration’s Middle East policy would look like, and of the kinds of people who would shape it.

Though he has, for the first time in his decades-long political career, begun talking about his “pride” in being Jewish, Sanders seems to be deploying his heritage primarily as a shield against criticisms of his hostility toward Israel and his campaign’s embrace of leading anti-Semites. Representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour are just the most notable Sanders-campaign surrogates to have spread anti-Semitic calumnies about supporters of Israel and touted the BDS movement, whose rhetoric resounds with the traditional tropes of Jew-hatred.

Sanders proclaims himself a champion of even-handed policies toward Israel and the Palestinians. But his effort to damn AIPAC as a hate group is aimed not so much at changing the conversation about the Middle East as at effectively silencing pro-Israel voices in both parties. And that suggests a Sanders presidency would be disastrous for Israel and the wide Middle East.

The key to understanding Sanders’s views on foreign policy is that he has always opposed the projection of U.S. power and influence while supporting revolutionary groups that pose as defenders of the victims of U.S. imperialism. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, that meant sympathy for any foreign regime that opposed American efforts to contain the Soviet Union. Now, it means an end to U.S. efforts to contain Islamist radicals and Iran.

Instead of actively opposing Islamist terror groups such as Hamas, Sanders has called for an end to the international blockade of Hamas-governed Gaza, and for diverting military aid from Israel to that enclave. He is also the most likely of the 2020 Democratic contenders to go further than reinstating Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, actively seeking to appease Tehran even though Trump’s sanctions have at least made the regime’s efforts to achieve regional hegemony via its terrorist proxies more difficult.

Because the consequences of such a shift on the security of our Arab allies and Israel would be catastrophic, Sanders’s AIPAC comments are not merely a squabble about the extent of the pro-Israel lobby’s influence in the U.S. They are an indicator of the grave stakes of the Democratic primaries and, if he wins the party’s nomination, the general election. He must not be allowed to take the White House.

Bernie Sanders Hates America

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn, has stepped in it and stepped in deep with his praise of Fidel Castro’s brutal dictatorship in Cuba and its fictitious advances in, among other things, literacy. Republicans must be looking forward to watching him defend that in Florida in front of audiences composed of the friends, family, and survivors of those whom the Castro regime murdered, imprisoned, tortured, disfigured, repressed, and terrorized — which, it bears remembering, it continues to do, to this day, under Raúl Castro. The Cuban people desperately need our help, not Senator Sanders making excuses for the men who murder and oppress them.

The analogous cases are, as a rhetorical matter, obvious enough: Mussolini had a really strong public-works program. Hitler was a patron of the arts. Franco was . . . pretty fashion-forward, even for a generalissimo. Etc.

Conservatives are as vulnerable to flights of ideological fancy and political passion as anybody. Even the great F. A. Hayek (who rejected the label “conservative” even though he plainly was a conservative as Americans use the word) found himself hostage to excessive enthusiasm, in his case for the repressive rightist government of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s government did make critical reforms to economic policy in Chile. It also committed horrendous atrocities. “Yes, but what about his entitlement-reform program?” is at the very least morally and intellectually insufficient. And the attraction to the strongman form of government always must be resisted, because there is, finally, no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Hayek was gently chided by Margaret Thatcher for his excessive affection for the Chilean regime. Her advice to him is wise counsel for conservatives today: “Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure.”

It is not true that the American Left has no interest in “our traditions and our Constitution.” The Left is very interested in our traditions and our Constitution — it hates these and wishes to see them destroyed. The Left’s war on the Constitution goes back to the foundation of American progressivism under Woodrow Wilson, who considered the Constitution outmoded and a hindrance to intelligent administration. The line of thinking extends straight into modern progressivism: Harry Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to put political speech under government control, a proposal endorsed by every Democrat in the Senate; other related progressive attempts to destroy the Bill of Rights, beginning with the First and Second Amendments but by no means limited to these; the contention by progressives, typified by Ryan Cooper, that “the American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk”; Senator Sanders’s call for “revolution”; etc.

The Democrats may shed a few crocodile tears over President Donald Trump’s supposed assault on the Constitution (Trump’s assault mainly has been on American manners, the importance of which is generally overlooked and misunderstood), but assaulting the Constitution is the foundation of their politics and their jurisprudence: Assaulting the Constitution — reshaping it to better fit progressive political preferences — is what Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were put on the Supreme Court to do. The intellectual and constitutional position that this is impermissible — that the Constitution must be treated as though it says what it actually says rather than as though it said what people invested with transient political power wish it said, which is all the “textualism” of Clarence Thomas et al. actually amounts to — is denounced as dangerous “extremism.” Whatever it is the American Left is on about, it is not the Constitution — not the actual one that has been written down, in any case.

Rather, the Left advocates a new constitutional covenant, one in which the law is written on our hearts — or at least on the hearts of a cabal of left-wing law professors. Senator Sanders is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar of law or economics or intersectionality studies, and he is not a member of the new administrative class that the American Left has been building since Woodrow Wilson. He is only their John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness and announcing the coming of the new kingdom.

What kind of kingdom is it to be?

There is some indication in history, because Senator Sanders’s parroting Castroite propaganda about Communist Cuba’s supposed successes in literacy and health care are hardly without precedent. The New York Times’s infamous Walter Duranty reportage was straight-up Soviet propaganda. Lincoln Steffens’s celebration of Soviet life — “I have seen the future, and it works!” — required a measure of willful blindness. The New Republic at times functioned as a gentle apologist for Stalin and Stalinism. Noam Chomsky and Pol Pot, the American Left and Ho Chi Minh, the American Left and Chairman Mao, the American Left and Castro, the American Left and Hugo Chávez, the European Left and the Ayatollah Khomeini, knucklehead campus dopes and Che Guevara, etc. — the pattern repeats itself. There is a streak of Leninism that runs from the Soviet enterprise through Mao’s China and into the ayatollahs’ Iran. But what Lenin’s revolution really has in common with Mao’s and with Khomeini’s is that each of those ultimately was directed at the same enemy: us.

The American Left believes, and always has believed, that American society is fundamentally corrupt, that American power is a cancer, that American prosperity is a sham enjoyed only by the undeserving, that American business is great barrier to happiness at home and abroad, that the American way is dangerous hypocrisy, that the American foundation is not the story of liberty but the story of slavery and genocide, and that the shortest way to utopia is making common cause with those who oppose this stockpile of wickedness. And so the American Left has found something to love about every monster it can go abroad to find: Lenin and Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Mao, the Castros, the ayatollahs, the Sandinistas (Greetings, Mayor de Blasio!), every tinpot tyrant and posturing revolutionary from Mussolini to Che. Even when it comes to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the Left feels compelled to reinterpret history so that the crimes of Osama bin Laden et al. ultimately can be laid on the Pentagon, Wall Street, Main Street—if Americans are dying in Benghazi, it must be because some crazy American Christian stirred up the locals. If there are crack addicts in Los Angeles, it must be that the CIA was behind it. That is really what Senator Sanders’s weird little rape-fantasy literary œuvre is about — the unshakeable conviction of the Left that American society is fundamentally corrupt, an abomination that only can be saved — if it can be saved at all — by means of “revolution.”

By “revolution” Senator Sanders means investing a great deal of political power — including extraconstitutional power — in him as president. Power to what end? He already has told us, if only we would listen. He hasn’t spent his public career as an aspiring Thorvald Stauning but as an apologist for the likes of Fidel Castro and the Soviet party bosses who kept the gulags stocked with fresh souls.

Does Senator Sanders bear in his heart some secret love for Fidel Castro or the Bolsheviks? Possibly. But that is not the relevant question. Senator Sanders has come to this point not because of what he loves but because of what he hates. He is naturally sympathetic to the Soviets and the chavistas and the Castros because they hate what he hates: American power, American prosperity, the American way of life. Common causes are made by a common enemy.

In this case, us.

Seattle Is Socialism’s Laboratory, and It’s Not Pretty

By Christopher F. Rufo

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Democratic socialists are in the middle of a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Led by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and the “squad” of newly elected congresswomen, the hard-left coalition has laid out an ambitious agenda to transform the United States into a democratic socialist nation. While many commentators have dismissed the rhetoric around the Green New Deal, Housing for All, and End Cash Bail as pie-in-the-sky abstraction, in Seattle, the socialist coalition is quickly translating this agenda into a political reality.

After the socialist Left’s stunning victory over business-backed moderates in last year’s municipal elections, Seattle has effectively become the nation’s laboratory for socialist policies. Since the beginning of the year, the socialist faction on the Seattle City Council has proposed a range of policies on taxes, housing, homelessness, and criminal justice that put into practice the national democratic-socialist agenda. In the most recent session, socialist councilwoman Kshama Sawant and her allies have proposed massive new taxes on corporations, unprecedented regulations on landlords (including rent control and a ban on “winter evictions”), the mandated construction of homeless encampments, and the gradual dismantling of the criminal justice system, beginning with the end of cash bail.

Seattle’s socialists have established a narrative that provides the rhetorical basis for their policies. They argue that the corporate-technological elite, led by companies such as Amazon, has hoarded the rewards of the digital economy and created widespread misery for workers, renters, and people of color. As Seattle-based commentator and Marxist theoretician Charles Mudede has written: “We are in the 21st century. We are in one of the richest cities on earth. And yet, the old war between those who employ labor and those who sell their labor is still very much with us.”

In the socialist vision, the “new class war” is now entering a more direct phase of conflict. They have launched a political campaign to dramatically curtail the power of corporations, landlords, and traditional neighborhood interests, and to build a coalition of socialists, progressives, unions, and the dispossessed that is capable of achieving power. In short, the solution to the class war is to win the class war.

While conservatives and moderates have typically dismissed the socialist movement as a “big-city problem,” the new socialist agenda is no longer confined to the municipal boundaries of places such as Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. Increasingly, the hard-left coalition has turned these cities into “laboratories for socialism,” with the goal of eventually commercializing their policies through the national Democratic Party. Already, Bernie Sanders, the current front-runner in the Democratic primary, has proposed a nationalized version of the Seattle agenda: Tax Amazon, enact national rent control, construct public housing, and end cash bail.

But Seattle’s socialists have gone one step further. In order to consolidate their newfound power, the progressive-socialists have begun to manipulate the democratic process in their own favor: first, by providing all Seattle voters with $100 in taxpayer-funded “democracy vouchers,” which are easily collected by unions, activists, and socialist groups; and second, by implementing a ban on corporate spending in local elections by companies like Amazon. At the same time, black-bloc activists and Antifa militants intimidate any potential opposition by disrupting events, vandalizing homes, and even orchestrating death threats against political adversaries.

What can opponents of socialism do? First, recognize that it must be fought on all fronts. While the socialists form a small minority of the national electorate, they have demonstrated the capability of seizing power in America’s major cities, which are home to much of the digital “means of production” in tech, media, advertising, entertainment, and research. The business sector in cities such as Seattle must recognize that the progressive-socialists are no longer interested in gaining reasonable concessions; they intend to overthrow capitalism itself.

Over the past decade, the dominant corporate strategy has been to quietly advocate for neoliberal economic policies, while pandering to the cultural mandates of “diversity and inclusion.” That era is now over. As the experience in Seattle reveals, the socialist Left cannot be appeased on cultural issues — they are fighting a war against capital and they intend to win it.

If the business sector wants to protect its own interests, it must rapidly adapt to this new reality. It’s no longer enough for local Chambers of Commerce to drop leaflets before local elections; they must build a permanent counterbalance to the progressive-socialists. They must begin by commissioning original policy research, funding local neighborhood groups, and building a political alliance of conservatives, moderates, and old-line liberals. In other words, they must reestablish a balance of power in America’s cities.

If nothing is done, the laboratories of socialism in America’s cities will become a national problem. It’s time to shut them down.

How Much Does It Suck to Live in Modern America?

By Robert Verbruggen

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Last week brought us an argument over the work of Oren Cass, the conservative think-tanker who thinks the economy is squeezing families far more than it did in decades past. This week brings us The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It), a very brief book making essentially the opposite case, by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. It’s a much-needed look at everything that’s going right in this country.

This debate is fundamentally one of glass-half-empty, glass-half-full. America faces some problems no one can deny: Strain spends some time discussing how suicides are rising, how the opioid epidemic claims tens of thousands of lives each year, how prime-age men are slowly leaving the labor force, how some towns have been harmed by automation and globalization, how productivity growth has been mediocre, etc. But then he explains how strong the economy is overall, how well-being has dramatically improved for the typical person, and how people born poor in America still have a chance to make it to the middle and upper classes. The central message is that we should fix what has actually gone wrong, not overthrow the entire American system on the thought that everything has.

The strength of the economy is hard to deny. Overall unemployment is below 4 percent. Fewer than 1 percent of workers have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. And wages have gone up continuously for several decades.

Yes, wages are up, not stagnant, in Strain’s estimation — and he walks readers through the many methodological choices researchers have to make when measuring such a thing. Should you focus on the median worker? The mean wage? Hourly or weekly wages? The average wage for a “nonsupervisory or production” worker, excluding managers? How to adjust for inflation? And how long of a time period should you worry about?

Strain’s ultimate approach is to look at the hourly numbers for production and nonsupervisory workers, and to adjust for inflation using the “personal consumption expenditure” deflator. By this measure, wages (whether looked at through the mean, median, specific percentiles, etc.) have been rising at a decent clip since the 1990s. Strain admits the trend looked a lot worse in the 1970s and 1980s, but points out that even 1990 was 30 years ago already — meaning that if you go back much further, you’ll be talking about an era when hardly any of today’s workers were even in the labor force. It’s not of any obvious relevance what wages were doing 40 or 50 years ago.

To see the difference all this makes, take a gander at this chart — in which I’ve recreated Strain’s Figure 7, the profile of which is used on the cover of the book (though he gives his data in 2019 rather than 2012 dollars). Pay special attention to how the trend looks after 1990.

And then compare it with this one, which uses a different inflation adjustment, measures median weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary workers, and separates men from women:

The trend line is still promising for women, but not so much for men.

I agree with Strain that his inflation adjustment is better (see some gory details about the differences here). But I also think that, in a book about populism, he could have spent more time looking at the sex differences in both the level and the trend of earnings — with men still making more than women, but women gaining more than men. Male wages have become a fixation for right-wing populists ranging from Tucker Carlson to Oren Cass to Marco Rubio, while folks on the other side of the aisle are far more concerned about the fact that there’s still a sex gap in earnings at all. The one thing both sides can agree on is that the government needs to focus on boosting the labor-market performance of one sex in particular. This book has little to say about whether either side has a legitimate gripe, though Strain does express some sympathy for the relatively small group of “male workers who never finished high school.”

Strain also surveys the quality-of-life improvements that everyone knows about but few really, truly appreciate. Medical care has improved drastically, air and car travel are safer, work weeks are shorter, technology is far better. For all the whining that people do today, I doubt many would take an offer to be born 30 years earlier instead.

Another key element of The American Dream Is Not Dead is a complicated analysis of intergenerational income mobility, which might be the thing most commonly meant by the “American Dream”: Strain runs the numbers to see how often kids do better than their parents did. His results are unsurprising — there is a correlation between parent and child outcomes, which you would expect given that kids get both their genes and much of their social capital from their parents. But the link is far from perfect. If someone’s parents were in the bottom 20 percent when they (the parents) were in their 40s, there’s a 64 percent chance the child will not be in that same lower quintile at the same stage of life, including a 7 percent chance he’ll be in the top 20 percent. Further, nearly three-quarters of kids outearn their parents in absolute terms.

There are nits to pick with this analysis. For example, Strain adjusts incomes to account for household size, meaning, bizarrely, that one can achieve more “upward mobility” by having fewer kids, and that declining fertility over time is seen as kids’ systematically outperforming their parents. (It makes sense to adjust for household size when measuring poverty, because it’s more expensive to feed four mouths than it is to feed three. But if two brothers grow up in the same house and end up earning the same amount of money as adults, it’s absurd to say they have different levels of upward mobility if one chooses to have kids while the other opts for fancy cars.) Nonetheless, Strain’s work here is a handy demonstration that the “socioeconomic status” of one’s birth is not one’s destiny.

And I have one criticism of the book more broadly: There isn’t a whole lot here about how “populism could kill” the American Dream. Strain has his own free-market-leaning policy prescriptions and conveys a distaste for protectionism, Medicare for All, and a $15 minimum wage, but he never really proves the claim that’s made in the book’s subtitle — though I suppose one can’t ask too much of a document that barely breaks 150 pages, including the endnotes and two responses from critics (Henry Olsen from the right and E. J. Dionne from the left).

People often fall into a belief that life was somehow better in the past. In The American Dream Is Not Dead, Michael Strain shows it wasn’t, while not denying that the U.S. faces real challenges even in our prosperous age. It’s a good gift for that pessimistic reactionary down the street.

The Moral Failing of Bernie Sanders

By Mona Charen

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

According to CNN, Bernie Sanders “has been consistent for 40 years.” Some find this reassuring. Bernie is not a finger-in-the-wind politician who tacks this way or that depending upon what’s popular. On the other hand, if someone has never changed his mind throughout 78 years of life, it suggests ideological rigidity and imperviousness to evidence, not high principle.

Why make a fuss about Bernie’s past praise of Communist dictatorships? After all, the Cold War ended three decades ago, and a would-be President Sanders cannot exactly surrender to the Soviet Union.

It’s a moral issue. Sanders was not a liberal during the Cold War, i.e. someone who favored arms control, peace talks, and opposed support for anti-Communist movements. He was an outright Communist sympathizer, meaning he was always willing to overlook or excuse the crimes of regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua; always ready to suggest that only American hostility forced them to, among other things, arrest their opposition, expel priests, and dispense with elections.

Good ol’ consistent Bernie reprised one of the greatest hits of the pro-Castro Left last week on 60 Minutes. When Anderson Cooper pressed the senator by noting that Castro imprisoned a lot of dissidents, Sanders said he condemned such things. But even that grudging acknowledgment rankled the old socialist, who then rushed to add, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”

Actually, the first thing Castro did upon seizing power (note Sanders’s whitewashing term “came into office”) was to march 600 of Fulgencio Batista’s supporters into two of the island’s largest prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara. Over the next five months, after rigged trials, they were shot. Some “trials” amounted to public spectacles. A crowd of 18,000 gathered in the Palace of Sports to give a thumbs-down gesture for Jesus Sosa Blanco. Before he was shot, Sosa Blanco noted that ancient Rome couldn’t have done it better.

Batista was a bad guy, one must say. But summary executions are frowned upon by true liberals.

Next, Castro announced that scheduled elections would be postponed indefinitely. The island is still waiting. Within months, he began to close independent newspapers, even some that had supported him during the insurgency. All religious colleges were shuttered in May 1961, their property confiscated by the state. N.B., Senator Sanders: Castro also found time to knee-cap the labor unions. David Salvador, the elected leader of the sugar-workers union had been a vocal Batista opponent. He was arrested in 1962 and would spend twelve years in Cuba’s gulag.

The Black Book of Communism recounts that between 1959 and 1999, more than 100,000 Cubans were imprisoned for political reasons, and between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot. Neighbors were encouraged to inform on one another and children on their parents. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Cuba imprisoned gay people in concentration camps. Like other Communist paradises, Cuba’s greatest export was boat people. About two million of the island’s 11 million inhabitants escaped. Countless others died in the attempt. Did Sanders ever wonder why a country that had done such great work on literacy and health care had to shoot people to prevent them from fleeing?

Bernie Sanders has credulously repeated the other great propaganda talking point about Cuba: its supposedly wonderful “universal” health-care system. It’s not wonderful. Even those wishing to give Cuba the benefit of the doubt note the lack of basic necessities. Many hospitals in the country lack even reliable electricity and clean running water. A 2016 visitor found that patients in one Havana hospital had to bring everything with them — medicine, sheets, towels, etc.

The only working bathroom in the entire hospital had only one toilet. The door didn’t close, so you had to go with people outside watching. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found, and the floor was far from clean.

Yes, Cuba has high rates of literacy, but the state wanted readers in order to propagandize them. Granma tells people what to believe and forbids access to other sources of information. To this day, the regime controls what people can know. There are two Internets on the island. One for tourists and those approved by the government and the other, with restricted access, for the people.

Bernie Sanders has access to all the information he can absorb, and yet he remains an apologist for regimes that violate every standard of decency. Unlike the Cuban people, he is responsible for his own ignorance and pig-headedness. He claims to be a “democratic socialist,” but as his Cuba remarks suggest, the modifier may be just for show.