COVID-19 Is Not a Unique Hardship for Millennials

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 30, 2020

‘During our lifetimes,” Ryan Brooks suggested recently in a long piece for Buzzfeed News, “the US has always felt like it was in crisis.”

Brooks’s essay is titled “The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Put Gen Z and Young Millennials’ Lives on Hold,” and it is dedicated to the proposition that those two generations have been uniquely unlucky in their timing. In Brooks’s estimation, people of his age are constantly dropping into holes. “The country has always felt like it was in a free fall,” he writes, and this has prompted its younger citizens to endure an “endless sinking feeling that begins when you realize just how severe the situation might turn out to be — climate change, gun violence, debt. You get the sense there’s no turning back to the world you knew prior.” Per Brooks, this chronic lack of turning is causing yet more falling and yet more sinking. “You’re free-falling into a version of the future you didn’t want,” he explains. “That sinking, weightless feeling is what it’s felt like, for the most part, to be alive for the past 20 years.”

Perhaps it is, although I must confess that I’m still unclear as to how a weightless person would be prone to such frequent bouts of sinking. But, if so, it’s also what it’s “felt like” to be alive for most of human civilization. As anyone with a basic grasp of history can attest, the sudden imposition of events is not an interruption of normal life; it is normal life. Brooks casts the last 20 years as being an endlessly chaotic period that began with 9/11, continued with the Great Recession, and has culminated in the coronavirus pandemic. This is arguable, certainly. And yet the complaint would be wholly familiar to someone born in, say, 1905, whose young life began with the arrival of World War I, continued with the Spanish flu and the Great Depression, and culminated in World War II. It would seem commonplace to someone born in, say, 1770, whose early days were set against a backdrop that involved the American and French revolutions and the rise and fall of Napoleon. And it would be regarded as a dull observation even by a member of the post-war generation, whose inaugural memories were the struggle for civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and Watergate, and who spent much of his early twenties hoping to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. Okay, Boomer?

Along with the nine people he interviews, Brooks complains specifically about “climate change, gun violence, debt” — which issues he believes are inspiring existential dread among the young. (“Gun violence” is an odd candidate for inclusion, given that it has markedly diminished over the last two decades.) But even if we accept the premise that these issues should be dread-inspiring, it is not at all clear why they are different from those that animated my parents. My mother and father grew up believing that it was more likely than not that they would be vaporized in a nuclear war — a belief they were encouraged to hold by their parents, their schoolteachers, and the British government. Should they have lived in “endless freefall”?

Reading Brooks’s essay, and examining the trite words of his interviewees, I cannot help but think of my grandfathers, both of whom were plucked away from their already-difficult lives to be sent halfway around the world to kill strangers. My father’s father was a carpenter’s apprentice in 1939, until, through no fault of his own, he found himself at sea being chased around the Atlantic by submarines filled with Nazis. My mother’s father was a country boy from Devon who, despite having no interest in leaving even his home county, ended up fighting throughout North Africa with General Montgomery and eventually taking part in an infantry attack on Monte Cassino. Harold Macmillan’s famous observation that all governments are made and broken by “events, dear boy, events” applies equally to epochs writ large.

When those of Brooks’s persuasion complain about the last 20 years, I suspect that what they are really saying is that they wish it could still be 1997. As a Millennial myself, I have a great deal of sympathy for this desire. The 1990s were, indeed, a fantastic time, especially for a child. And yet that decade, which Brooks calls “the world you knew prior,” remains the exception rather than the rule. I was born in 1984, and between then and my 16th birthday I knew nothing but improvement. The Berlin Wall came down. Communism disappeared. The economy boomed. Poverty was diminished. Technology exploded. There were wars, yes, but if Britain and the United States were combatants, the wars tended to be over quickly and to involve only a handful of casualties on our side. History, we were reliably informed, was over. But it wasn’t. We were merely enjoying an unusually good time.

And now we are not. Or at least, now we are enjoying a good time with frequent interruptions. It is rather tiring having to point this out as often as we do, but it remains the case that people who are born today have it considerably better than anyone has ever had it in the history of the world — especially if they are born in America or Britain or Australia or Western Europe. Kevin D. Williamson is fond of pointing out that in Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, the titular character illustrates his incredible wealth by serving two different sorts of fish at dinner — an indulgence that he describes as “a millionaire’s whim” — and that, today, someone boasting about that would elicit confused laughter. Until the coronavirus spread far and wide, the United States was enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in its recorded history. Even during the coronavirus outbreak, most of us are living in a manner that would have astonished and impressed the potentates of the past. That — not the arrival of exogenous events — is what is different about our time. John D. Rockefeller was perhaps the richest man who has ever walked this earth, and yet, as George Will has noted, because he lived when he lived there was nothing he could do about even a garden-variety toothache. Want to talk about having a “sinking” feeling? Have a root canal without an anesthetic.

The assumption that one’s own era is somehow “different” from all the others is as perennial as the temptation to believe that one can eradicate or perfect human nature. But it is an assumption that should be resisted at all costs. There have been only a handful of periods in human history in which a given people not only was predominantly free but had no crises to deal with, and even those become far less appealing upon closer examination. My great-great-grandfather lived through the Pax Britannica at the end of the 19th century and into the Edwardian era. He was also so dreadfully, unyieldingly poor that he had to steal coal in order to enjoy a fire once a week.

I have no doubt that Brooks means well. But he should know that his way of thinking is a gateway drug to conspiracy theory and self-pity, and, in turn, a boon to huckster politicians who are only too happy to encourage the belief that a certain class of people has been dealt a weak hand and that only they hold the panacea. The core component of wisdom is gratitude, and gratitude is impossible without a solid understanding of history. Those who know what came before them are less likely to condemn their own time. “Free-falling”? Onto a featherbed, perhaps.

Harvard Law Takes Aim at Homeschooling

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Professor Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard Law recently caused a stir with her ignorant and nakedly authoritarian Arizona Law Review essay calling for a ban on homeschooling. On its own, the article is bad. In context, it is worse.

Professor Bartholet is hardly the first progressive academic to call for a ban on homeschooling. She is not even the only elite law-school professor to publish a paper on the subject: Robin West of Georgetown Law published a very similar broadside in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly in 2009. Professor West’s assault was based in part on old-fashioned snobbery — she was aghast at the prospect of homeschoolers’ living “in trailer parks” or — heavens! — “1,000-square-foot homes.” (The median 1,000-square-foot home in Georgetown is just under $1 million. In any case, those poor hicks presumably would still be living in their trailer parks even if they sent their kids to public schools.) Her economic argument will be familiar to those who have followed the issue, too: “Their lack of job skills,” she wrote, “passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.” Professor Bartholet made much the same argument, claiming with no real evidence that homeschooling must prevent students from “contributing positively to a democratic society.”

Professor Bartholet cites the case of Tara Westover, who wrote a much-discussed memoir about her experience of being raised in rural Idaho by survivalist splinter-Mormon apocalypse cultists who viciously abused her and her siblings. Her family believed that civilization was going to collapse (remember Y2K?), that she was being controlled by Satan, that modern medicine is a conspiracy, and much else that is batty. Westover also was “homeschooled,” though there seems to have been no schooling involved. (But this is America, and so she went to Harvard and then got a doctorate from Cambridge.) Professor Bartholet takes this as an indictment of homeschooling rather than an indictment of, say, child-abusing splinter-Mormon apocalypse cultists in rural Idaho.

Why?

Homeschooling inhibits the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on some families. “There is no way of knowing how many homeschooled children experience a childhood comparable to Tara’s,” she writes. “But we do know that the homeschooling regime permits children to be raised this way.” If that is to be our criterion, then American life is indeed due for a major social reorganization: Consider the substantially higher rates of rape and sexual abuse of girls and young women that characterize such disparate American locales as poor urban neighborhoods, isolated towns in Alaska, Indian reservations, and “blended families.”

The belief that the state is presumed to be entitled to conduct surveillance on families, and that the public-education system is to be the principal instrument of that surveillance, is founded on two sets of étatist assumptions, one economic and one spiritual, both totalitarian.

The economic argument is straightforward and points back to Prussia, the spiritual homeland of progressivism. From Frederick the Great and Johann Julius Hecker through the Progressive Era to today, schools have been treated as factories that produce what the state needs: able administrators and bureaucrats in the context of the emerging Bismarckian welfare regimes and, later, workers in the industrial economies. Schools organized this way do not exist to serve children or families: They exist to serve the state, and children are not the customers — they are the product.

Changing economic needs changed education. As the economist Joel Mokyr put it:

Much of the education . . . was not technical in nature but social and moral. Workers who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, and to be punctual, docile, and sober. The early industrial capitalists spent a great deal of effort and time in the social conditioning of their labor force, especially in Sunday schools, which were designed to inculcate middle-class values and attitudes.

Professor Bartholet makes much the same case, arguing that children are to be “educated for future employment,” to ensure that they become “productive participants in society, in employment, and in other ways.” She reiterates the homogenizing role of the schools, especially when it comes to immigrants. Homeschoolers, she writes, will not be homogenized but instead “reject mainstream, democratic culture and values.” The compulsory schools are there to ensure their conformity for reasons that are, as Professor Bartholet explains, both political and economic.

And so the economic project, as you can see, was not entirely distinct from the spiritual project.

Professor Bartholet’s aggressive secularism is, ironically, a variation on an old American political tendency in Puritanism. The anti-Catholicism of Puritan New England is difficult for contemporary Americans to appreciate. A Catholic priest could be put to death in colonial Massachusetts simply for being present in the territory. (It is not clear how stringently this law was enforced, though Massachusetts did hang Quakers.) Catholic Mass could not be legally celebrated in much of New England, and Catholics were legally second-class citizens in Massachusetts until well into the 19th century, when the state constitution was amended.

The case against Catholics in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts was that their religious beliefs made it impossible to integrate them into the political system of the time, which was true: In colonial Massachusetts, church and state were effectively united. Later anti-Catholic animus elaborated on that point, and anti-Catholic polemicists in the Revolutionary era argued that Catholics could not be good republicans and democrats, that they were instinctive monarchists, that they were religiously and culturally incompatible with American-style liberty. (One sometimes hears similar arguments about Muslims today.) That the First Amendment would give license to “popery” was a lively concern in the 18th century.

Our nation’s first compulsory-education law, passed in Massachusetts in 1647, was intended as a prophylactic against Catholic incursions. Like many modern progressives, the Puritans believed that the truth of their view of the world was entirely self-evident, and that the only things that could stand in the way of the communication of that truth were ignorance or wicked and mulish heresy. That law, the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” as it came to be known, echoes the familiar charge that the Catholic Church does the work of Satan by laboring “to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue.” Universal literacy would protect the Puritan young against the “false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers,” meaning Christians with religious views at odds with those of the Puritans. That anti-Catholic animus would carry through into the 19th century, with the infamous Blaine amendments — still law in many states — which sought to inhibit the proliferation of Catholic schools by denying them education funding. For anti-Catholic leaders such as Representative James Blaine and his ilk, as for our contemporary progressives, Americans were to have just as much religious liberty as was compatible with their political demands.

(Amusingly, these ancient anti-Catholic initiatives prefigure tutelary assumptions about the state embraced by contemporary right-wing Catholic “integralists” such as Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari. Plus ça change.)

The Blaine amendments are a product of that middle-19th-century hysteria, when the anti-Catholic Know Nothing organization was a major force in our public life, especially in New England — in Massachusetts, the Know Nothings controlled both the governorship and almost every seat in the state legislature. There was a great deal of anti-immigrant racial hokum (“The idea of a ‘melting pot’ belongs to a pre-Mendelian age,” the eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote) and stuff that would have been familiar in 17th-century Massachusetts — but also much that is closely related to the anti-homeschooling arguments of Professors West, Bartholet, et al. Catholic immigrants and their backwards cultures, the argument went, could not “contribute positively to a democratic society” and were likely to “depress the community’s overall economic health.”

Tara Westover is not the first woman to write a shocking memoir about strange people with exotic religious beliefs. The popular literature of an earlier America was replete with tawdry tales from “escaped nuns” (one was a popular lecturer at Ku Klux Klan meetings), and the themes of secrecy and the need for surveillance were prominent then as now: For years, Massachusetts maintained a “nunnery committee” that conducted surprise inspections of convents and religious schools. Professor Bartholet is tapping into the same ancient stream of paranoia and hysteria about minority religious beliefs and nonconformist social and personal habits.

Homeschooling is based on a radical proposition that is utterly incompatible with Professor Bartholet’s politics. Homeschoolers insist that their children are not the property of the state, to be farmed and dispatched in accordance with the state’s needs; the homeschooling ethos insists that the purpose of education is to serve the needs and interests of students rather than those of the state or of business; it insists that there exists a sphere of life that is private and not subject to state surveillance, and that this sphere covers family life and child-rearing unless and until there is some immediate pressing reason for intervention.

The debate about homeschooling is not really about educational outcomes — there are good and bad homeschooling practices, good and bad public schools, good and bad private schools, etc. — but about who serves whom and on what terms. Do American families serve the state or does the state serve them? Do we live our lives and raise our children at the sufferance of the state, or is the state an instrument of our convenience? Professor Bartholet casts her vote with the Know Nothings.

The World Is Awaking to the Ugly Realities of the Chinese Regime

By Therese Shaheen

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Earlier this month, a McDonald’s restaurant in Guangzhou, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, was forced to remove a sign warning that “black people are not allowed to enter.” Upon removing it, McDonald’s told NBC News in a statement that the sign was “not representative of our inclusive values.”

That sounds like what it almost certainly is: a product of the company’s communications department, called in to do damage control. And while we can accept that the McDonald’s corporation itself is not, on the whole, racist, the sign does unfortunately represent China’s values.

As National Review’s Jim Geraghty has noted, the incident is an example of the “xenophobia and racism” on display just now in China. This phenomenon is not new to the PRC, but the government has an extra incentive to lean into it now, because it helps the government’s concerted campaign to deflect blame for the global coronavirus pandemic.

There is ample evidence of this. A recent Reuters report noted that ambassadors from several African nations recently engaged the Chinese foreign ministry to raise concerns about how their citizens are being mistreated in China. Passport holders from African countries are subject to extreme stop-and-search practices. Many who are coronavirus-negative are being forced into 30-day quarantines anyway. Foreigners from a range of countries who can document clean bills of health are being denied entry to places of business and other facilities simply because they are foreigners.

Much of this is taking place in Guangzhou, known to some as “Little Africa” because it has the largest African-immigrant population in China. To some extent, African immigration to China is a by-product of Xi Jinping’s effort to build a global network of trade and infrastructure investment that gives the regime a perceived geopolitical advantage over the West in the developing world. Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other immigrants to China are all too happy to take advantage of the work and educational opportunities China offers. But many of them have learned the hard way just how limited the country’s kindness is.

In fact, China’s ill-treatment of foreign-minority populations reflects how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. Muslim minority Uighurs are being held in so-called re-education camps intended to strip them of their religious and ethnic identity, and in many cases subjected to forced labor. In Tibet, which China has oppressed since the very beginning of Communist rule in 1949, things have gotten worse under Xi: Last year, Freedom House named Tibet the second-least-free territory on Earth, behind only war-torn Syria.

It would be natural to presume that such discrimination is a regrettable result of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who are more than 90 percent of China’s population and dominate its society. (By comparison, ethnic Uighurs, for example, make up less than 1 percent of the population.)  The Han Chinese, with 1.3 billion members, are the largest ethnic group not just in the PRC but in the world. Antipathy, oppression, and discrimination toward minority ethnic groups in a country with such a dominant majority is regrettable but not surprising, and not unique to the PRC.

Beijing’s response to critics who note all of this is to try to drown them out by highlighting America’s own well-documented history of racial discrimination. But that’s the point: Our historical sins are well-documented, and they inform just about every aspect of our public policy. A free press and other institutions hold up our actions for the world to see. There is no mystery about how our country continues to deal with the effects of the institutionalized discrimination that persisted for nearly two centuries after our own founding, and for a century after we fought a war to end it.

That said, there is a quality to the pattern of behavior in the PRC that transcends ethnicity. Chinese racial discrimination is horrifying in its own right, of course. But it also suggests a farther-reaching chauvinism that is emerging as the defining characteristic of the Xi era.

Han Chinese make up the same percentage of the population in Hong Kong as on the mainland, and are 97 percent of the population in Taiwan. Neither Hong Kongers nor Taiwanese have suffered any less at Xi’s hands for that. Nor, for that matter, have the 400 million mostly Han Chinese living on less than $5 a day in the country outside China’s megacities, who face vicious discrimination from urban elites.

In some ways, the gulf between the rich in China’s cities and the poor in its rural areas has been institutionalized through the longstanding “hukou” system of internal registration, which hampers movement between regions and creates what amounts to an economic caste system. While Xi has made hukou reform a priority in order to create greater opportunity for urban migration and prosperity, the system continues to reinforce the divide between urban haves and rural have-nots. As the former become wealthier and more global in their perspective, the disdain they frequently show for those who are different — whether from Africa or rural China — is becoming more pronounced.

Xi-era chauvinism is beginning to create a backlash around the world. One example is the cooling ardor toward the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s aforementioned effort to gain footholds in foreign markets. Many projects have caused host countries to take on excessive debt. In one instance, a strategic port in Sri Lanka was ceded to China when the debt burden became too high. Politicians in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other countries have reversed earlier positions of support because of what they see as China’s discriminatory debt diplomacy.

This backlash is appearing even in European countries that once saw China as a potential counterbalance to the Trump administration. In Sweden, for instance, some cities have ended sister-city relationships with Chinese counterparts, and the country has closed its Confucius Institute schools, dealing a blow to one of Beijing’s other soft-power propaganda operations. European leaders, including NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenburg and French president Emmanuel Macron, have also called for better understanding of how Beijing handled the coronavirus pandemic and pushed back against China’s campaign to deflect blame for it.

In short, the world finally seems to be recovering from its decades-long love affair with the PRC, which peaked with the rise of Xi, who was initially viewed as a reformer who would bring China onto the world’s stage as an equal, responsible actor. The true nature of the regime is becoming more apparent, and the world doesn’t like what it sees: the dreadful treatment of ethnic minorities and the rural poor; the obvious interference in Taiwan’s recent presidential election; the belligerence toward Hong Kong as the “one country, two systems” agreement is systematically dismantled and pro-democracy leaders are arrested or just disappear; the bullying of emerging economies through debt diplomacy; and now what is very likely a global pandemic caused by Chinese negligence.

For the first time since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre 30 years ago, the world has awakened to these ugly realities, and if anything good has emerged from this chaotic geopolitical era, that might be it. Here’s hoping that more aggressive action to counter Beijing comes next.

De Blasio the Denier

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 30, 2020

In the middle of March, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was among those not entirely sold on social distancing as a prophylactic measure against the coronavirus epidemic. “If you love your neighborhood bar, go there now,” he famously said. A few days later, he was threatening to padlock the city’s synagogues — permanently — if social-distancing protocols went unheeded.

We sympathize with those New Yorkers driven to drink or inspired to prayer by Mayor de Blasio’s incompetence, vanity, and stupidity, which have been highlighted by but are by no means limited to his response to COVID-19. For the time being, they must suffer in their households rather than in congregation.

In all likelihood, the coronavirus has been spreading in New York since February. The city’s jam-packed subway system, carrying five million riders a day, should have counseled particular vigilance. But even with the examples of California’s and Washington’s cities before him, the mayor was slow to move. He dragged his staff along to a crowded YMCA for a workout even as he was ordering gyms closed around the city. The city schools remained open until March 15, and it was left to New York governor Andrew Cuomo to negotiate their closure while teachers were threatening a wildcat strike. De Blasio delayed against the advice of his own aides and health experts. A 36-year-old principal subsequently died of COVID-19. The city’s refusal to disclose infections in the schools “kept families in the dark and left more lives at risk,” as one city councilman put it.

De Blasio was warned in early March that the city needed to take more aggressive action against the epidemic, but he wrote off advice from health commissioner Oxiris Barbot and others, worried that a lockdown would hurt the city’s economy. Extended deliberations controlled by political concerns rather than medical ones wasted precious time. “He has long distrusted the top brass of the health department,” Politico reports, “feeling they do not understand politics and public relations.” That may be the case, but their job is not public relations — it is public health.

Ignoring the advice and recommendations of the relevant experts in order to tend to his political concerns, Mayor de Blasio effectively became a member of that class of villain most hated by his progressive allies: a denier. His refusal to concede the facts and his desire to subordinate good policy to political expediency were compounded by his general executive incompetence, for instance in leaving city agencies without necessary guidance for implementing work-from-home policies. He insisted that the city’s hospitals were well prepared for the crisis; the actual situation in the city’s public hospitals was shortly thereafter described as “apocalyptic” by one physician.

De Blasio did manage to name his wife as head of a coronavirus-recovery panel. He always has time for that sort of thing. Mrs. de Blasio is fresh off of watching $1 billion walk out the door while overseeing a fruitless mental-health initiative. She has time on her hands and is rumored to be considering a run for elected office herself.

De Blasio moved with much less dispatch than did colleagues in California and Ohio, among other places. And then, after dawdling for so long, de Blasio flipped. We always are happy to see a politician amend his views to accommodate new facts, but Slowpoke de Blasio’s subsequent overcompensation, and the sanctimony and viciousness he brings to the effort, is something else.

De Blasio launched a broadside against “the Jewish community” after a large crowd turned out for a rabbi’s funeral in Williamsburg as though the event corporately implicated the more than 1 million Jews living in New York City, drawing criticism from the city’s ADL and other local Jewish leaders.

De Blasio has instructed police to follow a “zero tolerance” rule on gatherings and has threatened to enforce his policy with arrests. Perhaps he has not entirely thought through the social-distancing implications of mass arrests.

The coronavirus epidemic was a test for Mayor de Blasio, and he has been found wanting — which should be no surprise to anybody who has witnessed the dramatic decline in the quality of city life under his watch. The tricky question of balancing the consequences of an enforced economic stoppage against the risks of an unknown and poorly understood viral epidemic in a free society with democratic norms has gotten the better of better men and better mayors than Bill de Blasio.

His incompetence has endangered the lives of his constituents and made the coronavirus situation worse than it had to be. But it is his tinpot-tyrant posturing and his ridiculous preening that really set him apart from your run-of-the-mill municipal bungler.

Unhappily, there is no treatment for what ails Bill de Blasio, and no cure in sight for New York.

Who?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is still alive, has endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

That is inspiring: A corrupt, decrepit, exhausted relic of the 1990s has given her blessing to a corrupt, decrepit, exhausted relic of the 1970s. Mrs. Clinton already has lost an election to Donald Trump, a visitor from the 1980s, and Joe Biden might very well do the same.

(Or not.)

Mrs. Clinton’s endorsement is a reminder of Biden’s role as the candidate of continuity. Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president — basically a predictable old white familiar man who spent the Obama years in a dusty case labeled “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” — but he might have served as comfortably in a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration. Or more comfortably, even: Barack Obama was, among other things, a mild and desultory critic of the 1990s settlement, the Bill Clinton–Newt Gingrich dyad that left the budget balanced and no one entirely satisfied.

One element of the 2008 Democratic primary was the muttered debate between those who saw the techno-utopianism of the Clinton era as the apex of practical American politics and proposed returning to it after the detour of the George W. Bush administration and those who saw in Obama a critique of the moderating New Democrat elements of the 1990s and desired a politics with more kick. Obama won that debate, and Biden came along for the ride to offer assurance to those who worried that the relatively unknown and freshly minted senator from Illinois might prove to be too radical.

Which is to say, in 2008 Mrs. Clinton was the continuity candidate in the Democratic primary and was rejected. In 2016, she was the continuity candidate in the general election and was rejected. In 2008, Democrats decided that they wanted something more than Bill Clintonism with ovaries. In 2016, Republican primary voters were offered several continuity candidates and a few ideological pugilists such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. They opted instead for radical discontinuity in the primary, choosing in Donald Trump a man with only the lightest affiliation with the Republican Party and no affiliation at all with the conservative movement that does the Republican Party’s thinking for it to modest effect and very little thanks. And the candidate of radical discontinuity prevailed in the general election.

Many Republicans remain quite pleased with Trump. His 2020 job-approval ratings among Republicans have ranged from a low of 88 percent to a high of 94 percent and were at 93 percent in the most recent Gallup survey. His overall approval ratings in 2020 have ranged from a high of 49 percent to a low of 43 percent, where he currently sits.

Trump is a ubiquitous president but not a very energetic one: Out of the 700 or so key positions that require confirmation, nearly 200 remained vacant as of Monday morning — 146 positions had no nominee at all, 20 had a presumptive nominee not yet formally nominated, and 79 had nominees not yet confirmed in spite of the fact that the president’s party controls the Senate. The New York Times reports that his working day consists mainly of yelling at Fox News and then berating reporters at his regular coronavirus briefings, recently suspended. The president, enraged by the Times account, spent hours berating reporters by Twitter, where he was incessantly mocked for his spelling (“hambergers,” etc.) and his apparent misunderstanding of what a Nobel prize is and how “Nobel prize” is spelled.

But 93 percent of Republicans are satisfied with all that.

Most Republicans do not wish to return to the pre-Trump era. (We few remaining Eisenhower Republicans meet in a very small room and speak only in whispers.) Many Democrats evince a certain wistfulness for the Obama years, but that is more of a question of pecking order than anything to do with great Democratic policy victories, which were in fact few and far between during the Obama years: Even the landmark health-care law of 2009 began unraveling before it was enacted, and the system it tried to establish is today a wreck.

The conservative writer P. J. O’Rourke in 2016 offered a mock endorsement of Mrs. Clinton over Trump, saying: “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.” Don’t expect Biden to take that up as a slogan, but the former vice president implicitly is offering himself as a “return to normalcy” candidate on similar lines — a creep, a liar, a feckless time-serving hack of the lowest and meanest kind, but within normal parameters. That fits in with the basic bedrock dynamic of 2020: For Democrats, it’s anybody but Trump, and, for Republicans, it’s anybody but any Democrat. With a severe economic contraction on the way and an epidemic still raging, Trump’s argument for himself right now is, “Boy, things were great, right up until they weren’t!” Biden’s argument is that the worst day with Biden will be better than the best day with Trump.

The lines are drawn, but I wonder how many Americans really want a return to normalcy. They may not all want Trump, and they mostly may not want a confessing socialist such as Bernie Sanders, but from the Obama campaign to the Tea Party movement to Occupy Wall Street to the Trump campaign, there is plenty of evidence that 21st-century Americans are done with 20th-century politics and that they are inconsolably dissatisfied with what has been on offer from the two major parties. There is a demand, often dangerous and destructive, for radical change. Joe Biden is unlikely to slake that particular thirst.

Biden was first elected to the Senate the year I was born. He is a product not of the Clinton years but of the Nixon era. Even with an aging electorate (the median age of a voter in the 2016 election was 51), he is a dusty holdover of a time that is quickly receding into ancient history.

(These things move quickly: In 2011, the late Phyllis Schlafly graciously organized a little book event for me in Washington; watching Cate Blanchett play her in Mrs. America, among the hairdos and groovy interiors of the 1970s, it could not be more obvious that she was, after all, more a part of Jack Kennedy’s world than Mark Zuckerberg’s.)

Mrs. Clinton came to prominence when most Americans had never sent an email or heard of a web browser. Joe Biden was elected to the Senate in the first year that color televisions outsold black-and-white models. He comes from the other side of a great divide — and that is not only a matter of age. “Hillary Endorses Biden” is a headline that belongs on newsprint, like “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

The response to Mrs. Clinton’s endorsement in 2020 was, “So, what?”

The day after tomorrow, it will be, “Who?”

‘I Was Just Hoping to Get a Fair and Equal Treatment’: Tara Reade Calls Out Democrats’ ‘Me Too’ Double Standard

By Jack Crowe

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

As someone who spent her career working for Democratic politicians and advocating liberal causes, Tara Reade was shocked by the treatment she’s received from her co-partisans since publicly accusing Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her when she worked as a staff assistant in his office in 1993.

Reade, 56, claims that in the spring or summer of 1993, a senior staffer told her to meet Biden in a Capitol corridor to deliver a duffel bag. While there, she says, Biden forced her against the wall and penetrated her with his fingers. She first made the allegation during a podcast with political reporter Katie Halper last month and has since described the alleged ordeal in interviews with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Business Insider.

Reade told National Review in a Tuesday phone interview that, since coming forward, she’s been subjected to “shocking” treatment from those she had expected to come to her aid: the very people who championed a woman’s “right” to be believed during the Kavanaugh confirmation episode two years prior, which Reade confirmed she followed at the time.

Biden’s guilt has by no means been established. But the candidate himself has yet to be asked about the allegation at all — despite sitting for interviews with a host of prominent reporters over the past month. His campaign spokeswoman has re-upped a single categorical denial when asked for comment following each new development.

Two women, one a former neighbor and the other a former coworker, recently told Business Insider that Reade described the incident in separate conversations two years after it allegedly occurred. Reade’s brother and one friend have also said she told them about the assault soon after it happened. But other former Biden staffers, including several that Reade says she had told about the incident, have denied her account.

Reade initially claimed in 2019 that Biden had touched her back and neck in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, but she didn’t say anything about sexual assault. She now attributes that apparent inconsistency to fear about the repercussions of making such an extreme claim about a presidential nominee.

“I was too frightened to come forward at first,” Reade said, adding that she nearly overcame her initial trepidation in the fall, but stopped short of publicizing the allegation after receiving a death threat.

Reade emphasized that when she came forward with her allegation, she didn’t expect the reaction that Democrats, journalists, and Me Too activists displayed during the Kavanaugh confirmation — just the minimal level of respect accorded to women alleging sexual assault in more “normal” circumstances. (Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford was unable to present a single contemporaneous witness to support her account.) “I was just hoping to get a fair and equal treatment,” Reade says, “but because it’s Joe Biden I’ve been silenced or smeared.”

Immediately after her appearance on Halper’s podcast, Reade claims, the Biden campaign dug through her private Instagram account and scoured her years-old online writing, in which she praises Russia and Vladimir Putin, and sent the results to the New York Times in order to cast doubt on her allegation. She also alleges that the campaign used bots to spread the narrative that she was a Russian agent. National Review was unable to confirm either accusation. Much of the ensuing coverage by left-leaning and mainstream publications — the same outlets that credulously accepted Ford’s allegation as fact — has included descriptions of Reade’s past Putin flattery and emphasized her support for Bernie Sanders’s primary candidacy, raising the possibility that Reade had ulterior motives in escalating her allegations against Biden to include sexual assault.

While the Biden campaign’s hostile response to the allegation constituted an understandable damage-control effort from a man on the cusp of the presidency, Reade thought she might at least get a hearing from prominent female Democrats who have championed sexual-assault survivors in the past. Before she went public with the allegation, in an effort to secure a platform to tell her story, Reade sent letters to senators Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Kamala Harris (Calif.) in the fall of last year, laying out the allegation and asking for help in publicizing Biden’s conduct. Warren, who argued on the floor of the Senate that Blasey Ford’s allegation was sufficient to disqualify Brett Kavanaugh, responded with a form letter informing Reade that she couldn’t help because Reade was not a constituent of hers and suggesting that she reach out to her own representatives. Harris, who similarly insisted on the veracity of Blasey Ford’s claim despite the lack of evidence, didn’t respond to Reade’s letter at all.

“Why would you not call me or reach out to me directly? What do you really believe regarding harassment because you say we should stick up for vulnerable people. I was vulnerable, I was just a staff assistant,” Reade said when asked what message she would like to convey to Harris and Warren. “Are they going to allow me to continue being smeared or are they going to stand up for me?”

Since going public on Halper’s podcast, Reade has reached out to the offices of senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). She said she was particularly disappointed with Ocasio-Cortez, given the freshman congresswoman’s past comments about gender disparity in the workplace and the importance of amplifying the voices of sexual-assault survivors.

“I watched AOC give a speech about protecting people being taken advantage of in the workplace,” Reade said. “Where does she stand now? She endorsed Joe Biden. Why are you endorsing my rapist?”

Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Harris all failed to respond to a request for comment by press time. Their fellow Democrats have been similarly mute — save for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who once urged an FBI investigation into Kavanaugh’s conduct. She said she “stands by” Biden when asked Tuesday about Reade’s claim. “He’s devoted his life to supporting women, and he has vehemently denied this allegation,” she told reporters on a conference call.

Reade — who, in addition to working for Biden, worked for Representative Leon Panetta and California state senator Jack O’Connell, both Democrats — says she has left the Democratic Party for good and will never vote for another Democrat at the national level. “I think the DNC is a sham and their silence around what happened to me as a Democratic staffer is unconscionable,” she said. “I was on the job when I got raped. They are complicit in rape.”

How to Counter Chinese Pressure on Hollywood

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

During the filming of the 1939 movie Jesse James, a stuntman and his horse went over a cliff and fell 70 feet into a river. The stuntman was fine; the horse died. This incident is what gave rise to that line at the end of many movies: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” The American Humane Association, which trademarked that saying, worked out a deal with the Screen Actors Guild and the precursor to the Motion Picture Association of America in which filmmakers would vouch that animals were well-treated in movies.

Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) thinks this might be a good model for how the U.S. can push back against China’s global influence.

In the last decade or so, Hollywood has acquiesced to countless demands from China. In the (horrible) 2012 remake of the movie Red Dawn, the plan was to depict American resistance to a Chinese invasion. (In the original it was a Soviet invasion.) After the filming was finished, MGM caved to pressure from China and re-edited the film to turn the invaders into North Koreans for fear of losing access to the Chinese market.

If that were the only example, one might cut the then-cash-strapped studio some slack. But Hollywood does this all the time.

The 2016 film Dr. Strange changed a character from a Tibetan monk to a Celtic woman played by Tilda Swinton. Brad Pitt was banned from China for several years because he starred in Seven Years in Tibet (as were the director and a co-star). Richard Gere’s career took a hit because of his outspoken support for Tibet. Studios often won’t cast him for fear of angering the Chinese Communist Party, which has been inflicting cultural genocide on Tibet for decades. For the upcoming Top Gun sequel, China is assumed to have forced the studio to change Tom Cruise’s flight jacket so that the Taiwan flag no longer appears. (Our ally is not a sovereign country, according to Beijing.)

It would be wrong and unworkable to ban movie studios from kowtowing to Chinese demands. It’s called show business, not show politics. China is on course to become the biggest single market for film and television, and while it may be cowardly and hypocritical for an industry that wears its idealism on its sleeve to placate a nation that bans free expression and is hauling Uighurs into concentration camps, we shouldn’t follow suit by restricting free expression here at home.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t impose a little truth-in-labeling on the industry. That’s Gallagher’s idea (which he proposed on a recent episode of my podcast, The Remnant). Congress should require American studios to disclose whether a film has been altered in any way to meet the approval of China’s censorious regime. You know how TV networks inform viewers that a film has been altered for television? Why not notify viewers if a film has been changed to conform with Chinese propaganda?

At the beginning or end of a movie, American audiences would have to be informed: “This film has been altered to fit the demands of the Chinese Communist Party.” Obviously, the Chinese wouldn’t allow that disclaimer in their theaters, but at least Americans would know. Hopefully that would apply a little democratic counterpressure to China’s undemocratic pressure.

Gallagher also suggests that American social-media platforms be required to ban officials from nations that ban free speech. Why should authoritarian propagandists be afforded privileges that they won’t grant their own people?

No one wants a war with China. But we already live in a world where China is exerting itself on America. Right now, we impose little to no costs on them to do so, in part because we live in a free country where businesses, including Hollywood studios, are largely free to cut whatever deals fit their own bottom lines. Curtailing such mercenary practices without mimicking China’s command-and-control tactics is difficult. Forcing full disclosure on businesses that play such games — perhaps including those that allow their intellectual property to be stolen in order to maintain access to the Chinese market — strikes me as a brilliant way to counter the trend.

Let American consumers know the full truth. If they don’t care, the studios can carry on. If they do care, make filmmakers pay the price for their pursuit of profit over principle — not by being dragged off in the middle of the night, but at the box office.

A Golden Age for Right-Wing Content on Streaming Services

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

There’s something fitting about the times. While many of us live under a form of house arrest, the Internet is delivering to us the purest vintage right-wing anti-government storytelling available, if you know where to look.

Various on-demand services now have Clint Eastwood’s little masterpiece from last year, Richard Jewell. The title refers to the security guard who foiled the 1996 Centennial Park bombing, then turned into the lead suspect of the FBI’s investigation, and was ultimately proven a wronged man. The script is more complex than some of the initial reviews gave it credit for being, but the message comes through loud and clear. In Richard Jewell, the media and the government are corrupted by their own strongly held, barely justified narratives of good guys and bad guys. And the people in these institutions are perfectly willing to destroy a few good guys to get ahead in their careers, especially if those good guys are strange in any way.

The destructiveness of media and government is a function of their laziness. Over time it is revealed that a cursory examination of the distance between a phone booth and the bombing would have shown that it was physically impossible for Richard Jewell to have committed the crime by himself. And if he didn’t commit it by himself, then the criminological “profile” of a lone wolf and wannabe-hero that was used to make him a suspect no longer applied to him. But for the FBI, one bad theory is just the entry point for embracing another.

And that is more than true on Netflix, which bought the little-noticed Paramount miniseries Waco. This series portrays the horrible standoff between the Branch Davidian cult and the federal government, which ended with the Davidian “Mount Carmel” compound undergoing a gas assault led by tanks. It culminated in a fire that killed the 75 remaining inhabitants, 25 of them children.

While the series does show some skepticism of David Koresh, particularly concerning his practice of assuming the marital rights to the women from all the married men in the compound, overall it takes a maximally anti-government side in all the disputes about what happened in 1993 (spoilers to follow). From the initial raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to the aggressive tactics used by the FBI, the nature of the Davidian cult itself, and the moral responsibility for the deaths in the awful final assault on the compound, my thought at the end was, this could have been written by Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing militia man whose reaction to the events at Waco led him to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. But here it is, with well-cast stars and streaming on the most popular streaming service.

The initial ATF raid is portrayed as a needless publicity stunt — Koresh could have been arrested on a morning jog. The grounds for the initial warrant are shown to be suspect; the Davidians had fewer weapons per capita at their compound than the population of the state they were in.  Throughout the ordeal, it is pointed out that it is absurd to use tanks on American citizens, that the government misunderstood the religion that the Davidians practiced, and that this led them to miscalculate in a way that cost more human lives. The Davidian cult is portrayed as a millennial religion that believes it will be persecuted, but not a suicidal one along the lines of Jonestown. It’s stated that the gas used to flush out the Davidians from their standoff had been banned by chemical-weapons treaties as weapons of war. And the gas is shown asphyxiating and killing the Davidian children before the fires reached them. The final scenes are partly narrated by a local right-wing talk-radio host, who, taking on the role of the voice of God, essentially accuses the FBI of at-best deliberate negligence with the lives of the Davidian children, or at worst, a positive intention to kill the Davidians and destroy all the evidence of federal wrongdoing.

Still, this doesn’t exhaust all the potentially right-wing content on streaming services. There’s always the Norwegian series Occupied on Netflix, which portrays a future in which a Green Party government abolishes petroleum production in Norway, only to be swiftly subjected to a silk-glove invasion from Russia (more spoilers to come). It turns this with was done with the connivance of greedy European Union officials, who fold at the first confrontation with real power. Much of the Green Party’s establishment is shown as easily corrupted, and the main protagonist has to become a nationalist savior for his people, even organizing his counterassault by becoming a “gamer.” Not everything runs in a right-populist nationalist direction on Occupied, but much more than you’d think possible.

If anything, this little burble of content suggests that no political faction’s stranglehold on storytelling is absolute or unchallengeable. And sometimes what was once the paranoid fantasy version of history turns out to be the truth recorded in history.

The Hypocrisy on Tara Reade Is a National Disgrace

National Review Online

Monday, April 27, 2020

We do not know whether the accusations that Tara Reade has leveled against Joe Biden are true or false. That is a question of evidence and of inquiry that might be answered as time rolls on. We do know, by contrast, that the double standard that has been exhibited by Biden’s campaign and by the political press in tandem is a national disgrace. Both culturally and legally, due process must be habitually applied to nobody or to everyone. If, upon the most frivolous and protean of pretexts, it is routinely accorded to one faction while being denied to another, it is effectively lost.

Though he has not deigned to address it directly, Joe Biden insists that he is innocent of the charge that he digitally penetrated an intern back in 1993. “It is untrue,” his communications director says. “This absolutely did not happen.” If so, we hope that this incident has taught Biden that his previous approach toward accusations of sexual assault was dangerous, illiberal, and ultimately untenable. During the summer of 2018, with Brett Kavanaugh under the national spotlight, Biden was unequivocal in his demand that Americans must believe women as a matter of unwavering reflex. “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally,” Biden argued, “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.”

Biden took a similar line when, as Barack Obama’s vice president, he was tasked with overhauling the manner in which sexual assault cases were evaluated on college campuses. Per the Chronicle of Higher Education, “the sweeping Title IX changes that have transformed higher education would not have happened without Biden’s support.” By “transformed,” the Chronicle means that Biden was responsible for lowering the standard of evidence so drastically — and expanding the definition of sexual misconduct so dramatically — that accused students were left with no realistic chance of clearing their names. Summing up the approach he had taken toward Title IX in a 2017 conversation, Biden put it simply: “I believe you.” Why, we must ask, should his own accuser not be granted the same privilege?

Similar questions must be posed to the media, which have displayed an extraordinary and unjustifiable double standard in this case, and which, despite the best attempts of the New York Times editor Dean Baquet, have failed spectacularly to account for it. Two years ago, when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of teenage sexual misconduct, the press focused breathlessly on the charges, reporting without caveat anything that came across the transom. Nothing was too ridiculous to repeat — including the claim that Justice Kavanaugh had been involved in a “gang-rape” ring — and what little hard evidence was available was willfully supplemented by weaselly “opinion” pieces in which it was insinuated that the experiences of other people confirmed the specific accusations against Kavanaugh himself. Worse still were the presumptions that undergirded the media’s focus. For some writers, the mere fact that Kavanaugh had been accused was sufficient to tank his nomination, given the “cloud” that it would allegedly create around his tenure. For others, the vehemence of his denial was an indication of his guilt and unsuitability. Yet more took the view that there was no need to presume innocence at all, because Kavanaugh was engaged not in a criminal trial but in a “job interview.” The affair represented a nadir of American journalism.

Given that the evidence is stronger in this case than it was in Kavanaugh’s — we know, at least, that the accuser and accused have met — we must ask why the same rules are not being applied in this instance. Joe Biden is hoping to be president of the United States. Might not a “cloud” follow him around, too? Biden has not only denied the charges categorically, but he has demanded that the press “diligently review” and “rigorously vet” them. What, when compared to his “I believe you” mantra, should this tell us about his character? Is a presidential election not a “job interview,” too? And if, as was the case in 2018, the venue of the alleged assault tells us a great deal about the likelihood of its veracity, might we expect to read a slate of pieces outlining what it was like to be a female intern in the Senate in the early 1990s?

We are of the same view today as we were in 2018, and as we were before that. We believe that sexual assault is a hideous crime and that we should punish only people who are guilty of it. It is monstrous when the perpetrators of evil get away with their acts. But it is also monstrous when the innocent lose their good names. Our preference for due process derives from a desire to avoid either outcome.

More practically, we believe that our political system itself benefits strongly from the presumption of innocence. If the mere introduction of an accusation is sufficient to prompt a candidate’s withdrawal, the incentives for false charges will grow legion. Joe Biden is a hypocrite and an opportunist, but that is no reason to treat him any differently than we would treat anybody else. If he has truly changed his mind on this most important of questions, we welcome him into the fold. As Biden now argues, Tara Reade’s accusations should be “respectfully heard” and “rigorously vetted.” And, if the evidence does not rise to the level, the man at whom they are aimed should be assumed not guilty. But we will not get to that point with one side throwing a blanket over the story and muttering, “well, this time he’s one of ours.”

Rashness and Revolt

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt.

— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism,” 1909

For years, I wrote that the American Right has a philosophy, while the American Left has only an enemies list.

The Left’s enemies list has mutated as the socioeconomic center of American progressivism has shifted from labor unions and poor cities to the commanding heights of businesses and culture, from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and “Which Side Are You On?” to the American Bar Association and Fleabag. A generation ago, radical feminists and gay-rights activists were quite frank in their desire to destroy the institution of marriage, the traditional family, and the culture built on top of those arrangements. Contemporary progressives instead have settled into rank and comfort, secure behind the walls of their invisibly gated communities. Defining the limits of respectability is, in fact, the central mode of contemporary progressive politics. Contemporary American progressives do not engage with conservative ideas or nonconforming political opinion — they simply attempt to define those as infra dig and outside of the boundaries of that which polite intellectual society is obliged to consider.

The Right has reciprocated, in its way. And that is a big part of what the Trump phenomenon is all about: so-called nationalists who despise the commanding heights of American culture, politics, and business, along with the institutions associated with them. Hence the bumptious anti-“elitism” of contemporary conservatives whose creed is “American Greatness” but who sneer at the parts of the country where most of the people and the money are, who sing hymns of national glory while abominating the East Coast, the West Coast, the major cities, the Ivy League, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the major cultural institutions (and, indeed, high culture itself as effete and elitist), the political parties, trade associations, broad swathes of the economy (“financialization”), newspapers — even the churches, as conservative American Christians (from Catholic to Evangelical) embrace a new antinomianism based not in religion but in the politics of cultural resentment.

None of this really comports with the facts on the ground in that “Real America” we hear so much about on talk radio. In the real America, rural farmers are part of a very large and complex network of industrial and scientific innovation, international trade, and business innovations made possible by the “financialization” dismissed by populists Right and Left. American farmers rely on scientific work done at elite universities, on technology from Silicon Valley, on high finance, and — horrors! — on international trade, not least trade with China. Some of them employ a fair number of immigrants, too. The American farmer is as much of a “rootless cosmopolitan” as any Connecticut hedge-funder or California code monkey.

If your project actually were “American Greatness,” then these facts would have to be taken into account. (A bit of humility would help, too: Do you really think you know what share of the U.S. work force should be engaged in manufacturing vs. finance vs. everything else? How did you come to know that?) The real world is complex, and it is not neatly fitted to either ideological notions or tribal allegiances. But if your project is takfiri politics — creating an enemies list and casting your antagonists into the outer dark — then all that matters is denigrating Harvard or the New York Times or Facebook or Elon Musk, because what you are involved in is not nation-building but only a status game.

There is much that is in need of reform in American life. But reform is not very much in fashion among populists, who are ensorcelled by the much more exciting prospect of revolution — and destruction. (Conservatives should be suspicious of excitement.) These remixed Jacobins are part of King Henry VIII’s “mass that . . . follows anything that moves.”

(That’s King Henry VIII the character from A Man for All Seasons, not the historical English king.)

And we have seen their kind before, for example in the Italian Futurists. The Italian Futurists were contemptuous of institutions and tradition — and of their ancestors and heritage — eager for epoch-defining conflict, big on he-man “alpha male” posturing (“contempt for women” was one of the virtues listed in the “Manifesto of Futurism”), cultishly nationalistic, partisans of “energy and rashness,” Year Zero thinkers dismissive of all that came before them. The Futurists engaged in sophomoric romantic posturing (“Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost . . .”), celebrated conflict (“We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world”), and pledged to “demolish museums and libraries.” They asked, rhetorically: “Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?”

Familiar stuff, as was their adolescent rhetorical climax: “Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!”

The stars, I cannot help but notice, are still there.

Human progress and American greatness stand on a foundation of much less exciting work: amending a law to make it a little bit more just, improving crop yields a little bit year after year, the monotonous grind of fundraising and committee-sitting for worthwhile things, teaching literature and history to one callow teenager at a time, raising good children, doing jobs that are difficult, thankless, and obscure.

These are things done by grateful people. Revolutions are hatched by the other kind.

The Hospital Crisis of Our Making

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

We had to destroy the hospitals to save them.

You could be forgiven for thinking that’s the upshot of the coronavirus lockdowns that have suspended elective surgeries and generally discouraged people from going to hospitals.

Many hospitals are getting pushed near, or over, the financial edge. At a time when we feared that hospitals would get overwhelmed by a surge of patients, they have instead been emptied out. At a time when we thought medical personnel would be at a premium, they are instead being idled all over the country.

We are experiencing an epidemic that bizarrely — and in part because of the choices of policymakers — has created a surfeit of hospital beds and an excess of doctors and nurses.

Not everywhere, of course. Hospitals in New York City and parts of New Jersey have been tested to their limits. But throughout much of the country, hospitals are drastically underutilized, both because states have banned elective procedures and people have been too afraid to show up.

One reason that we didn’t want hospitals to get overrun by COVID-19 patients is that we didn’t want to crowd out everyone else needing care. But, as a deliberate choice, we’ve ended up crowding out many people needing care — even where COVID-19 surges haven’t happened and probably never will.

Drastic measures were called for when the coronavirus hit our shores and began to spread out of control, especially in urban areas particularly susceptible to the pandemic. It is understandable that we wanted hospitals to prepare for the worst, and to preserve and muster equipment necessary to safely care for infected people. Hospitals themselves can become a vector for spread of COVID-19, so keeping away people who didn’t absolutely need to show up was a reasonable impulse.

But this is a case where the cure may be really worse than the disease — or at least has created its own crisis.

Elective surgeries are a major source of revenue for hospitals, which have taken an enormous hit as they have disappeared, often in response to state orders.

West Tennessee Healthcare, based in Jackson, lost $18 million in March after the state prohibited elective surgeries, and furloughed 1,100 out of a 7,000-person staff, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Summit Healthcare in Arizona expects as much as a 50 percent drop in revenue after the state’s ban on elective surgeries. Philadelphia-based Tower Health, also dealing with a 50 percent drop in revenue, furloughed 1,000 employees out of 14,000.

The examples go on and on and on. Even hospitals in New York State, a center for the virus, are feeling the pinch. Catholic Health and Kaleida Health in Buffalo are furloughing workers. So is Mohawk Valley Health System in Utica, Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, and Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson.

Elective surgeries aren’t necessarily what you think. As a piece in The Atlantic pointed out, they aren’t just knee replacements. They include procedures for serious illnesses such as cancer. A recent New York Times story was headline, “The Pandemic’s Hidden Victims: Sick or Dying, but Not from the Virus.” It led with the story of a Rutgers University professor who couldn’t get treatment for the recurrence of his blood cancer.

As with the lockdowns in general, it’s not clear how much of the reduced traffic in the hospitals has been the result of people changing their behavior on their own based on fear of the virus, and how much has been the result of state edicts. But it’s certainly true that the prohibitions on elective surgeries — more than 30 governors had issued some version of them as of late April — were too clumsy and sweeping, and not geographically selective enough.

Governors in some states are now loosening them up, and it’s time for other governors around the country to follow suit, except in true hot spots. In retrospect, the bans fail the cardinal rule of health care: First, do no harm.

If a Tree Falls and Paul Krugman Does Not Hear . . .

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes that he has not “heard any Republican complaints about Trump’s huge bailouts for farmers, whose distress is largely the result of his own policies.”

Perhaps it is the case that Professor Krugman has not heard such complaints.

Is he listening?

From Politico, “The president’s $12 billion farm bailout gets an ugly reception among many Republicans in Congress”:

“This is becoming more and more like a Soviet type of economy here: Commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers, commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “I’m very exasperated. This is serious.”

“Taxpayers are going to be asked to initial checks to farmers in lieu of having a trade policy that actually opens and expands more markets. There isn’t anything about this that anybody should like,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader. He suggested the new spending might need to be offset by cuts in other funding areas.

. . . Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Trump is giving farmers “golden crutches,” while Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said “this bailout compounds bad policy with more bad policy.” Toomey and GOP Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee said their legislation to tie the president’s hands on tariffs should pick up new steam now that the Trump administration is distorting the market.

. . . Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) was unenthused with the bailout because he worries such payments could become permanent, but he said farmers who supported Trump are likely to welcome the aid given the dire straits in the heartland.

I timed myself: Finding those complaints took just under a minute. But it is hard to find such things if you are not looking for them.

What’s worse is that Professor Krugman goes on to criticize the reporting done on deficit politics, even though he does not seem to be very familiar with that reporting.

The New York Times opinion pages continue to exhibit shockingly low intellectual standards, especially in comparison to the often excellent (and often irreplaceable) work done in the rest of the newspaper. An opinion column need not go through something like the peer-review process that one of Professor Krugman’s academic papers would have seen, but putting the word “opinion” at the top of the page does not license a self-respecting writer to ignore questions of fact.

Why We Don’t Build Anymore

By Daniel Tenreiro

Monday, April 27, 2020

Marc Andreessen wants America to build again. In a recent essay, the technology entrepreneur attributes the U.S.’s lackluster coronavirus policy response to insufficient domestic manufacturing capacity. Shortages of cotton swabs, test tubes, and personal protective equipment, Andreessen argues, reflect a general inability to create tangible goods.

Andreessen’s diagnosis fits into the broader thesis of technological stagnation put forward by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel, and Robert Gordon, among others. On that view, sometime in the second half of the 20th century, innovation slowed dramatically, and productivity growth along with it. While the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw a boom in information technology, the Internet and software have done less to spur productivity than innovations such as the airplane that altered our physical world. As Thiel often points out, while the world of bits has transformed over the past 50 years, the world of atoms looks more or less the same.

Slower progress in hardware — or in “building,” as Andreessen puts it — has almost certainly decreased economic growth. Across a variety of metrics, including researcher productivity and patent approval, the rate of scientific progress has slowed, leading to worse economic outcomes, as Cowen and Ben Southwood found in a 2019 paper. Andreessen believes this stagnation is a choice: “The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”

Why don’t we want these things? We used to. After World War II, U.S. corporations were in the business of building. Producing wealth meant producing tangible goods. General Motors and Ford consistently ranked among the world’s most valuable companies, and General Electric transformed American life by making cutting-edge industrial and consumer products — from jet engines to microwave ovens. Thanks in large part to the manufacturing prowess of U.S. corporations, real GDP doubled between 1947 and 1973.

But in the 1970s, businesses turned their eyes from innovation to efficiency. As the post-war boom came to an end and American firms faced increased foreign competition (particularly from Japan), they resorted to cost-cutting and financial engineering in order to stay competitive. Though innovation and efficiency are not mutually exclusive, research and development — especially breakthrough, early-stage research — decreases profit margins in the short term. Firms accordingly deemphasized new product development in favor of streamlining existing businesses.

The rise and fall of GE illustrate this phenomenon. In 1949, GE created the most popular jet engine in history, the J-47. The company went on to produce a slew of appliances that made onerous household chores a thing of the past, at great benefit to consumers as well as GE shareholders. But when Jack Welch took over the company in 1981, process efficiency dislodged product development as the company’s raison d’être.

Welch obsessively squeezed performance out of the business, firing the bottom 10 percent of employees every year and cutting inventories to the maximum extent possible. The company’s theretofore sleepy financing arm — GE Capital — became a profit center in the ’80s and ’90s. GE Capital spurred topline growth by underwriting the company’s sales and lending to a wide array of customers outside GE’s traditional businesses. At the company’s zenith, the financing business generated more than half of its profits. Welch’s process, mimicked by CEOs across the U.S., generated massive returns for shareholders. (Welch himself produced more value than any CEO in history.) Later on, during the 2008 financial crisis, the foray into finance would bring GE to the brink of bankruptcy. In effect, General Electric became a bank that just so happened to produce jet engines, leaving it extremely vulnerable to a financial downturn. The financialization of U.S. corporations also came at the expense of innovation, as financial engineering replaced kinetic engineering.

The production of wealth through streamlining — eliminating redundancies and offshoring — was powered in large part by globalization. In the economy of yore, physical and political constraints limited the extent to which businesses could grow through cutting costs and expanding their customer base. With the elimination of those constraints after World War II came access to labor and consumers around the world, providing a surefire way to grow revenue. (World Bank economist Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging market” the same year that Welch began his tenure at GE.) Foreign competition increased the need to cut costs just as liberalized trade introduced an attractive alternative to toilsome R&D.

High-skilled workers flocked to the sectors that benefited from globalization. From 1980 to 1992, the financial sector’s share of corporate profits tripled, from 10 percent to 30 percent. Physicists who might have built aircraft in the pre-global economy went to Wall Street to build trading algorithms instead. In a self-reinforcing cycle, the international financial system underwrote an expansion of trade, which fed more money into banks. It helped that the end of the gold standard in 1971 allowed previously unsustainable debt levels to paper over declining technological progress: Household and corporate balance sheets ballooned from the 1970s to 2008, allowing GDP growth to outpace productivity.

Where innovation did take place, it was in areas that benefited from globalization. Internet businesses could access the world’s billions of customers for almost zero marginal cost, so tech talent flocked to the IT sector. As Andreessen put it himself in his widely read essay “Why Software Is Eating The World” (2011), “all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale” (emphasis mine). The latter point — the rapid scalability of software — explains why a globally integrated economy benefits digital business the most. Larger markets can boost revenues in hardware, but they can expand margins only in asset-light businesses. Engineers have followed the money — to the detriment of productivity growth.

Supersonic aircraft, flying cars, and delivery drones seem like no-brainers. The economic incentives are in place: Consumers would pay for great new products. In the long run, growth depends on technology. Businesses that boost productivity by, say, increasing travel speeds could command astronomical valuations, but structural changes to the economy have reduced the relative returns of physical innovation.

Of course, the intrepid entrepreneur can still build: Elon Musk is a case in point. But I’d bet that Musk could have made a handsome fortune in consumer software without exerting (or embarrassing) himself nearly as much. For understandable reasons, his less obsessive counterparts build apps instead of rockets.

The twin forces of financialization and globalization have allowed us to put off the difficult work of building infrastructure and technology in favor of spreading “best practices” and shrewd accounting methods. Not only does this reduce long-term growth, but it leaves us more vulnerable to economic shocks. As the pandemic disrupts supply chains and financial flows, the wobbly foundation of the U.S. economy emerges. It isn’t pretty.

How Does a Harvard Professor Think It’s ‘Authoritarian’ to Allow Parents to Teach Their Kids?

By Katherine Timpf

Friday, April 24, 2020

A Harvard University law professor has called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling — claiming that the freedom to do so under our current laws is “authoritarian.”

“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Elizabeth Bartholet said in an interview with Harvard Magazine.

“I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

Bartholet stated that there is “an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” with “very few requirements that parents do anything.”

“[P]eople can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves,” she said.

Bartholet also stated that homeschooling can make it easier for parents to get away with abusing their children and/or indoctrinating them with white supremacy and misogyny:

[I]t’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.

I do not, of course, want to minimize the absolute horror of child abuse. It’s disgusting; it’s heartbreaking; and anyone who isn’t a sociopath agrees that it’s necessary to protect our children.

Unfortunately, however, it’s also true that abuse is hardly something that can occur only in a child’s home. In fact, as Harvard grad and homeschooler Kerry McDonald pointed out in a letter to Harvard Magazine in response to its article, “many parents choose to homeschool their children to remove them from abuse at school, whether it’s widespread bullying by peers or, tragically, rampant abuse by teachers and school administrators themselves.”

“Banning homeschooling, or adding burdensome regulations on homeschooling families, who in many instances are fleeing a system of education that they find harmful to their children, are unnecessary attacks on law-abiding families,” McDonald continues.

What’s more, another of Bartholet’s suggestions — that the freedom to homeschool equals masses of children being painfully undereducated by illiterate parents — is as offensive as it is inaccurate. In fact, many, many children don’t simply receive an adequate education through homeschooling but an exemplary one that sets them up for greater success than any traditional school could have. As McDonald pointed out in her letter, although “there may always be outliers and more research is needed, most peer-reviewed studies on homeschooling outcomes find that homeschoolers generally outperform their schooled peers academically, and have positive life experiences.”

In any case, and even apart from all of this, Bartholet’s characterization of the freedom to homeschool as “authoritarian” is nothing short of absurd. A government allowing its citizens the freedom to educate their own children is not only not authoritarian, it is also the exact opposite of authoritarian. That’s a fact, and you don’t even need to know the first thing about homeschooling to understand that — really, you just need to know what the word means.

In terms of knowing about homeschooling, though, I can also say that I personally do know more than the average person. I was homeschooled for fourth and fifth grade, and can confidently say that the two years I spent with my father as my teacher were responsible for countless positive outcomes in my life — ones that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. For example: Before I was homeschooled, I was struggling to learn math the way that the public school had been teaching it, and getting the chance to learn some fundamentals in a way that worked for my own particular brain was instrumental in making the subject much easier for me in the future.

But that wasn’t all. See, unlike math, I loved reading and writing. Those subjects had always come easily to me, and I enjoyed them. Homeschooling provided an advantage for me in this area, too. It allowed me to learn advanced aspects of grammar. I had the liberty to read works of literature that I wouldn’t have studied in a traditional school because they would have been “above” the designated level for my classroom. I wrote poetry and short stories about subjects of my own choosing. When I returned to public school in the sixth grade, the English lessons were things that I’d already learned — but fortunately, having had the opportunity to develop a love of writing and curiosity about books is something that kept me reading and writing what I wanted in my own time. Hell, I’m still doing it now.

Finally, it’s also patently ignorant how Bartholet aims to use the fact that children must be exposed to varying viewpoints and people while they’re growing up as some kind of argument against homeschooling. McDonald states that “research on homeschoolers finds that they are tightly connected with their larger community and may have more community involvement and participation in extracurricular and volunteer activities than schooled children due to their more flexible schedules and interaction with a wide assortment of community members,” and I’m not surprised. In fact, this was my experience exactly.

I mean, does Bartholet think not attending a traditional school somehow means that I never left the house at all? Because honestly, that couldn’t have been less true. I was quite active in my community, even participating in activities such as Girl Scouts with my friends from public school. I didn’t miss out on any of that.

In fact, I was actually exposed to far more experiences and perspectives specifically because I was homeschooled. I was able to act in community theater plays at multiple venues, interacting with all kinds of interesting people from various walks of life, without having to worry that a late-night dress rehearsal would make me too exhausted to learn in the morning because my schedule revolved around me. For the same reason, my family was able to take a random trip to New York City to see my father’s friend’s play — and within hours of arrival, I decided I was definitely going to move here when I grew up and work either on a stage, in front of a camera, or both. I had the luxury of learning from truly transformative, unique experiences, ones that I certainly wouldn’t have had if I’d been forced to spend that time square dancing in a gymnasium.

Harvard Magazine points out that “rapidly increasing” numbers of Americans are choosing to homeschool their children. (By “choosing,” by the way, I mean that this was true before coronavirus essentially forced this lifestyle on everyone.) Bartholet apparently sees this as some kind of tragedy that will lead to a future generation full of sexist Nazis who don’t know how to read, but this simply isn’t fair. No, homeschooling isn’t perfect for everyone, but it can and has worked uniquely well for many people, myself included. We shouldn’t be taking that option away, and certainly not in the name of stopping authoritarianism. It isn’t hard to see how completely a**-backwards that “logic” is — after all, even a former homeschooler like me was able to figure it out.