Restoring the Conservative Conscience

By Avik Roy

Thursday, January 21, 2021

 

Thirty-one years ago, a mass gathering in front of an important government structure signified the high-water mark of the American conservative movement.

It was November 9, 1989. Harald Jäger, an East German border officer, had watched a confused member of the Politburo announce that the border between West and East Germany was now open. East Berliners, hearing the same news, gathered at the Berlin Wall, demanding permission to go over to the western side. Jäger, unsure of what his superiors wanted him to do, agreed to open the gates. His decision liberated 125 million Eastern Europeans in one peaceful stroke.

 

The triumph of the West over the Soviet Union could not have happened without the post–World War II conservative movement built by William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. The vindication of their principles was so total that a State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, described it in The National Interest as “the end of history as such: . . . Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Bill Clinton dedicated much of his presidency to consolidating the Reagan Revolution, enacting welfare reform, presiding over federal surpluses, and proclaiming in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.

 

But today, as we reflect on the record of the conservative movement after the end of the Cold War, the triumphalism of 1989 seems mystifying.

 

Today, it’s the era of small government that’s over. In 2020, for the first time since World War II, the size of the federal debt exceeded the United States’ annual economic output. Indeed, recent Republican presidents have overseen greater increases in the national debt than have their Democratic counterparts. You have to squint really hard to find the political constituency — in either party — for limited government.

 

Moreover, conservatives have failed to persuade the broader public to return to pre-1960s social mores. While Trump overwhelmingly won the votes of white born-again or Evangelical Christians, 76 percent to 24, he lost the votes of everyone else by a margin of 62 to 36. That second group — the non-Evangelicals — represented 72 percent of the electorate in 2020 and will claim an even larger share in future elections. Thanks to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, pro-lifers may finally get their chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. But what other possible victories for social conservatism lie on the horizon?

 

While everyone focuses on the events of the last three weeks, it’s the last three decades that demand our attention. For if conservatives can’t shrink the size of government, and if conservatives can’t convince young people to live like their grandparents, what is it that conservatives exist to do, other than shake their fists at their televisions?

 

What realistic policy goals should conservatives strive to achieve in the 21st century? Can timeless conservative principles adapt to the way rising generations actually live their lives today, and will live their lives in the future? If so, how? Over the last four years, these deeper questions about the conservative mission have gone unanswered.

 

The end of the Trump presidency is an ideal time to take stock: to refresh our thinking about American self-government, and to expand the coalition that yearns for it.

 

***

 

In 1950, Lionel Trilling famously described conservatism as a set of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was wrong back then. But doesn’t the Capitol mob prove him right today? For years, cable news and social media have fed us a steady diet of PC outrages, while fewer and fewer conservatives take on the unglamorous work of developing policy ideas that can attract broad public support.

 

If you think I’m being uncharitable, ask yourself this. Over the last 25 years, outside of tax cuts, what transformative pieces of pro-liberty legislation has Congress passed and the president signed into law? Bills as impactful as, say, Obamacare or Dodd-Frank?

 

Do you know which reforms conservative politicians will try to enact if they have a chance to run the government in 2025? Your guess is as good as mine. And even if conservatives do get together and develop a policy agenda that you feel you could rally behind, could it gain enough public support to actually become law? To overcome a filibuster? How much would you bet on that outcome?

 

Most important, would that policy agenda make Americans better off? Ronald Reagan succeeded because his policies improved the livelihoods of people in every state. After 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and COVID-19, more and more people are losing confidence in the fairness of our economic system. As Charles Murray documented in Coming Apart, people without a college degree have experienced declines in their relative economic standing and social capital. Tens of millions are one missed paycheck away from insolvency. Tens of millions more lack supportive communities of neighbors, families, and friends.

 

Modern American conservatism is at a dead end because both its intellectual and its political coalitions have unraveled.

 

In the 20th century, conservatives liked to talk about the “three-legged stool” of libertarians, social conservatives, and anti-communists. But the dissolution of the USSR knocked out the most important leg of the stool, the one that persuaded everyone else to subsume their differences to fight the Soviet threat. As George Nash observed in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, attempts at “theoretical harmony” between libertarians and social conservatives after World War II were “immensely assisted by the cement of anti-Communism. . . . Nearly all conservatives were bound together by consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe . . . was an invaluable source of cohesion.” After Harald Jäger unlocked those East Berlin gates in 1989, that cohesion began to weaken.

 

The most dramatic changes in the conservative coalition have taken place among social conservatives. It’s not just that younger voters are more secular and diverse. Social conservatism in the 1950s was itself a fusion of many different types of people: Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, southern Democrats, WASP elites, opera fans, and middle-class readers of The Saturday Evening Post.

 

Today, those would-be readers of The Saturday Evening Post — temperamental conservatives who want to fit in with the mainstream, conventional culture of their peers — identify less and less with the cultural Right. “Popular culture” is, after all, popular, and as more religious conservatives withdraw from the mainstream, that trend only accelerates. We can quantitate this shift by looking at suburban voters, who went overwhelmingly for Reagan in the 1980s but are increasingly a source of Democratic strength.

 

In 1955, when National Review was founded, our economic elites generally shared the cultural worldview of social conservatives. God and Man at Yale caused an outcry precisely because most Yale alumni shared Bill Buckley’s concerns that Yale no longer actively promoted Christianity. Those days, of course, are long gone. Though today’s business leaders often lead their own lives in temperamentally conservative ways, they rarely identify with right-wing culture warriors. This is especially true in Silicon Valley and New York City, the two great citadels of entrepreneurial capitalism.

 

The economic side of the conservative coalition has its share of problems, too. Lyndon Johnson used his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater to enact a massive and politically durable expansion of the welfare state, most notably Medicaid and Medicare. But because so many on the anti-government right insist that there is no legitimate federal role in helping the poor, conservatives have lacked a principled language that can attract public support for a more liberty-oriented approach to government aid.

 

Furthermore, as Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute has found, today’s Republican coalition is not uniformly conservative in the ideological, 20th-century sense of the word. Ekins identifies five core clusters of Trump voters, of which three — American preservationists (20 percent of Trump voters), anti-elites (19 percent), and the disengaged (5 percent) — lean left on economics, according to her polling. Two clusters — staunch conservatives (31 percent) and American preservationists — emphasize restricting immigration over most other issues. Only free-marketeers (25 percent) and staunch conservatives prioritize reducing the size of government.

 

What is the policy agenda that binds these disparate groups?

 

***

 

We can do our best to unite these factions — and build a larger, more welcoming, and more coherent political coalition — by drawing from leading 19th- and 20th-century classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Friedrich Hayek. These thinkers were not libertarian purists, and their departures from purism are precisely the ones we need today.

 

Nineteenth-century liberals differed from their 17th- and 18th-century predecessors by prioritizing equal opportunity alongside limited government. For example, hard-core libertarians oppose public education because it requires taxation and involves government institutions. John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, saw public education as the path to social mobility for the working class. “Defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them” was a proper role for government, according to Mill.

 

Frederick Douglass, of course, took the 18th-century liberal principles and applied them to racial equality, an area where the Founding Fathers had their inconsistencies. Friedrich Hayek, the free-market avatar, understood that government had a legitimate role in regulating monopolies. He even proposed a market-based form of universal health insurance, to protect against the “hazards of life.”

 

We can apply 19th-century classical liberalism to 21st-century America through three core principles: equal opportunity, personal freedom, and patriotism.

 

Conservatives often say, “We support equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” And yet when the rubber hits the road, the conservative equal-opportunity agenda is thin. Imagine, instead, a conservative movement in which every promising policy idea is filtered through the lens of its impact on lower- and middle-income Americans, whom we might call “kitchen-table voters.” We’d embrace Hayek-style universal health insurance and show how private-sector competition and cost-reducing innovations can eliminate bankruptcies due to medical bills. We’d join with progressives to reform “not-in-my-backyard” zoning laws that restrict the supply of housing in costly coastal cities. And we’d think hard about how to protect public safety while also holding bad police officers accountable when they hide behind union contracts to avoid responsibility for negligent or excessive force.

 

Personal freedom, in the context of the 21st century, requires us to be implacable in the face of cancel culture, so that Americans can speak according to their beliefs and worship according to their traditions. Personal freedom also means standing up for free enterprise, the idea that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other. It has become fashionable in nationalist circles to point to some bad economic statistic — say, the high cost of college — and blame it on “market fundamentalism.” The opposite is true: Government regulations and cronyism conspire to keep prices high, and enrich well-connected institutions, at the expense of ordinary consumers.

 

Conservatives have — and always should — love their country. But there are important differences between patriotism and Steve Bannon–style nationalism. In Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” prose, America is under siege by “Third World foreigners” immigrating to the U.S. with “no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Tell that to Cuban emigrés, without whom Republicans in Florida would be an endangered species. Ronald Reagan was a strong believer in legal immigration. He was fond of calling immigrants “Americans by choice” and understood how fervently patriotic immigrants can be: They know what it’s like to live somewhere that lacks America’s virtues.

 

The value of this new three-legged stool is that it maximizes the size of the coalition that supports self-government. Kitchen-table voters, suburban moderates, libertarians, and pro-market Democrats all want a country in which every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a fair shot at success. Not all of these voters are aligned with conservatives today, but they could be in the future. Just as we have seen with school choice, investing in the success of low-income Americans of all races can attract new voters to our cause and enrich the moral purpose of our work.

 

***

 

Rebuilding the conservative coalition will not be easy. It will take leaders — in particular, people running for president in 2024 — who are willing to challenge powerful economic and political interests. These leaders must recognize that every American citizen, regardless of where his ancestors were born, is a potential recruit to the cause.

 

We considered above the high-water mark of 20th-century conservatism: its defeat of Soviet communism. But we can’t conclude without also addressing conservatism’s low point: not the riots of 2021, but rather conservatism’s absence from the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

 

In the canonical account of the history of the conservative movement, Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign is described as a triumphal moment. “Barry Goldwater lost 44 states, but won the future,” says George Will, because Goldwater inspired the Reagan Revolution.

 

But Goldwater didn’t win the future. He lost it, by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and severing the historic relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party. Whereas Eisenhower had won 39 percent of the black vote in 1956, and Nixon 32 percent in 1960, Goldwater garnered only 6 percent in 1964. As a direct consequence, Goldwater won only six states: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.

 

The 1964 presidential campaign was, unfortunately, not an isolated episode. The blunt truth is that many conservative luminaries in the 1960s opposed federal civil-rights legislation. Two future GOP Supreme Court nominees — William Rehnquist and Robert Bork — had advised Goldwater to oppose the 1964 bill. Indeed, in 1963, Bork wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic arguing that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act represented “a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”

 

In 1960, Goldwater published his celebrated manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, with the help of Bill Buckley’s brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. In chapter four, Goldwater described the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — desegregating public schools — as an “abuse of power by the Court” and an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” He asked Congress to propose a constitutional amendment that would restore states’ rights to segregate their schools. In 1957, Buckley himself argued in National Review that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures,” including disenfranchising black voters, “as are necessary to prevail, . . . because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

 

Buckley and Bork came to regret their earlier views and recanted them. But at the moments when it mattered, conservatives were not on the same side as the people fighting to end Jim Crow and government-enforced segregation. Contrary to conservative rhetoric then and now, it was the federal government that expanded black liberty in the 1960s.

 

The partisan realignment of 1964 went both ways; Republicans lost the black vote but gained the votes of many southern Democrats who saw LBJ’s bill as a betrayal. Even though six decades have passed, the ripple effects of that realignment are still with us. Just as an unfaithful spouse can save a marriage only through honest atonement, conservatives will regain the trust of right-leaning African Americans only by frankly and forcefully acknowledging our movement’s past mistakes.

 

We conservatives like to claim that our principles are timeless and universal. If they are, they don’t apply only to Americans of European descent. They apply also to “Third World foreigners” and the descendants of liberated slaves. We’ve talked a lot about the white working class over the past four years. But it is only when conservatives gain the allegiance of all members of the working class — black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and everyone in between — that we will be able to vindicate the uniquely American experiment in self-government.

How We Lose against China

By Robert D. Kaplan

Thursday, January 21, 2021

 

The Cold War ended not on the battlefield but inside the Soviet Union. There were no tank maneuvers through the Fulda Gap in Germany, nor was there a nuclear armageddon. Instead, one of the two superpowers faced an internal crisis that shattered its society and its European empire. The Cold War was a global struggle, but its end was a matter of domestic politics.

 

This history has profound implications for our new struggle with China, which has been likened to the Cold War. Experts including me have written many books and essays about Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, not to mention cyber and space warfare and, as China advances its Belt and Road initiative across Eurasia, the struggle over trade and trade routes. As with the Cold War, we see the struggle with China as unending. We simply can’t imagine a world beyond it.

 

But what if this new struggle were to end as the Cold War did in 1989: with a domestic evolution in either China or the United States that renders one of the two parties unwilling or unable to continue the competition? If we consider this scenario — a domestic conclusion to a global struggle — we of course assume the fatally weakened party will be China. After all, China is a society of increasing totalitarian dimensions, with a growing and increasingly restive middle class sitting atop a mountain of debt that carries the potential of igniting a domestic crisis. With its blend of communism and capitalism, China may not be truly Marxist anymore, yet it is more and more Leninist as its dictatorship suffocates the public space, leaving only the personal sphere for people to express themselves in. And regimes like that don’t end well, as we know from the examples of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

 

But what if we’re wrong? What if the society that undermines itself first is our own? Why would this come about?

 

***

 

Consider that the United States thrived as a modern mass democracy only in the print-and-typewriter era, which lasted roughly through the end of the 20th century. In communications, that age was defined by major newspapers, which published professionally written and researched articles based on a commonly perceived historical experience. Among major media, objectivity and neutral politics were taken for granted, as public schooling and a military draft enforced a common destiny that pushed people toward the political center and away from extremes. Such centrism was seen on early television as well, with the three network anchors differing in style rather than in politics. Moreover, much of the 20th century was a time when travel overseas was largely the domain of the wealthy and immigrants substantially cut ties with their places of origin: Thus they had no choice but to become, in effect, as the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington put it, honorary Protestants like the rest of us. Despite all our troubles, flaws, and inconsistencies, we were a nation. And this also had much to do with a particular level of technological development that spawned a solid middle-class system, encompassing more than just technology, from one coast to the other. It was this nation that waged the Cold War and did not so much defeat the Soviet Union as outlast it and out-compete it.

 

That nation exists less and less, and principally because the technological context is no longer the same.

 

It is impossible to imagine that the presidency of Donald Trump, the Capitol insurrection, electronic mobs, cancel culture (and the self-censorship that accompanies it), and demands for rigid ideological conformity registered in such bland yet browbeating slogans as “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “social justice” would have been possible without the influence of social media. The major media have already been conditioned to the new reality. The Manhattan-based trade-book industry, with its need for major-media approval of its products, could be transformed next, in a way that affects what books we buy and consequently what thoughts we think. There is a danger that social media will drive the values and subject matter of book publishing rather than the other way around. The ongoing consolidation of publishing — threatening to crush smaller houses and imprints with distinctive viewpoints — could abet that trend. Such a development would be insidious. It is not a question of this book or that, or this magazine or that. It is just that at some point we might all be fed a brand of soporific groupthink that is different in substance but similar in tone to what obtains in China. And the reaction to such a development will not be reasoned argument, but will express itself in periodic eruptions from the extreme right wing.

 

The process famously began in university liberal-arts departments at the conclusion of the print-and-typewriter era. As ideological conformity continues to degrade the liberal arts, more and more students are gravitating to vocational and other technical subjects, producing a society of what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called “mass men.” They all have a technical skill but are ignorant beyond their narrow slots of existence, allowing their minds to be indoctrinated in Leninist fashion with the dreary utopian tenets of woke culture. That is to say, we are slowly becoming subjects, not citizens. We think we are the masters of our own thoughts, even as our thoughts are prepared by a media-mindset that thinks for us. Whereas the Sixties youth revolt was generally restricted to opposing the Vietnam War, the current upheaval, assisted by major media, aims to destroy the very story (and statuary) of Western civilization, with all of its vicissitudes, on the North American continent.

 

Huntington, channeling the late Cornell University historian Benedict Anderson, observed that a successful nation is an “imagined community” only because it is a “remembered community.” No nation, Huntington explained, can operate well in this world without enshrining common memories of “travails and triumphs” and “enemies and wars” that, however distorted, provide national cohesion. Without such a usable history, our future leaders will ultimately lack the spiritual wherewithal to truly fight for our interests. For they, too, will be products of the forces that are causing our nation to be less and less remembered.

 

***

 

Social media — the key independent variable in this ongoing process — work contrary to the nation-state, writes the British journalist and chronicler of postmodern wars David Patrikarakos. Social media create networks of like-minded people regardless of national identity, and thus serve to weaken national identity. The networks they establish can elevate racial, gender, political, or sexual identity above that of the national community. Social media thus balkanize America while allowing powerful transnational economic and political-interest groups to depart America virtually. It is a commonplace now to recognize that our corporate and policy elites are part of a global class of like-minded colleagues and associates who all care much more about the opinions of one another than about those of poorer compatriots in their home countries.

 

To borrow from the conclusion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem of the Civil War, John Brown’s Body, America has existed in three stages: a North–South nation with a “tropic empire, . . . the last foray of aristocracy,” located in the South; followed by “the great, metallic beast” of the Industrial Revolution, “expanding East and West”; and finally a continental land mass split asunder by globalization, whereby our elites are becoming one with those in Europe and Asia while the left-behind masses inherit the economically depressed nation-state, leading to a lumpen patriotism that was on display on January 6 at the Capitol. It is globalization that constitutes the backdrop to our stark political divisions.

 

Of course, social media and the whole array of digital/cyber inventions also operate in China. But the context there is completely different. China is a Han Chinese blood-and-soil nation that oppresses non-Han subject peoples such as the Tibetans and the Turkic Uyghur Muslims, who tend to live in distinct areas of the southwest and west. China is also increasingly authoritarian, on the verge of being totalitarian. The combination of these factors, plus the high level of technological development achieved by China, allows the regime to use social media as a means of patriotic indoctrination and behavioral control. The electronic mob in China helps unify a prideful nation bordered by enemy ethnic groups and hostile outside forces, whereas the electronic mob in the United States, at least on the left, works against national pride altogether, reducing the American historical experience to genocide against the indigenous inhabitants and to ongoing racism.

 

Obviously, one must beware linear analyses. The trends I have noted, driven by social media, in both China and the United States may not continue, and may take unforeseen twists and turns over the coming years and decades. And China, as noted above, is also fragile. But one should not underestimate the effectiveness of blood-and-soil nationalism and outright repression that are helped rather than hindered by new technology. China is not the old Soviet Union. It is economically advanced and consumer-driven, and it has not made the mistake of liberalizing its political life before liberalizing its economy. Xi Jinping is determined to be the very opposite of Mikhail Gorbachev. Consequently, digital and video technology work in harmony with the Chinese system of control while roiling our own.

 

***

 

We should remember that American democracy still constitutes an experiment. This makes it fragile and perhaps even ephemeral. Rather than blood-and-soil nationalism for hundreds of years, we have had democratic ideals that require constant renewal and thrive in a context of moderation and compromise. Social media gravitate toward the un-fact-checked extremes: That is why the Proud Boys and fringe elements on the left feed on each other. Liberalism admits self-doubt and is therefore leavened by different points of view; the tyranny of social media amplifies the intemperate shouts of the mob.

 

The United States–China rivalry, which will someday come to an end, may take a surprising direction, since at root it is less a contest between two militaries and two economies than between two domestic systems rapidly evolving under the influence of technology joined with globalization. We should not assume that one system is automatically more fragile than the other. The problem is not with liberal democracy; it is with democracy’s ability to remain liberal in an age of postmodern technology. 

 

But we should remember this: It isn’t China that will defeat us. After all, we remain the homeland of Big Tech, of biotech, and of the most dynamic economy and military the world has ever known. Only we can defeat ourselves: because the drift to the political extremes coupled with the hollowing out of public discourse could be analogous to the internal decay of Soviet communism — and thus a pivotal geopolitical event.

Follow the Money

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, January 31, 2021

 

The coronavirus pandemic is a genuine emergency, one of the few occasions when there are things that simply must be done even at very high cost. But even when “What’s this all going to cost?” isn’t the first question, or even the second, it still needs to be about No. 3 or No. 4. Scarcity is real, and reality is not optional.

 

One way of getting some context for the federal government’s financial footprint is cost per household. Here, I’ll rely on pre-pandemic figures, from 2019.

 

The money the federal government raises from the federal income tax is about $28,000 per household — meaning that that is the figure you’d arrive at if you divided the total federal income-tax take evenly among every U.S. household. Because federal income taxes are borne disproportionately by the wealthy — disproportionate not only to their total numbers but to their share of income — the amount that the median family in the middle income quintile pays in federal income tax is a lot less than that, about $9,000. Add in state and local taxes and it’s about $16,000 — you can buy a new Nissan for less money.

 

But the federal income tax is not the only federal tax you pay. You also pay the payroll tax, which is an income tax that sometimes in the past has pretended to be an insurance premium or a “contribution” to Social Security. (When men with guns come to collect the money, it is not a “contribution.”) The payroll tax adds about another $10,000 in expense per year per household. That’s a little less than a year’s rent on the average apartment in cheap and sunny Las Vegas or Fresno — or Columbus, Ohio, or Arlington, Texas.

 

You may think you don’t pay the corporate income tax, but you do — you pay it in the form of lower wages and higher prices, and in other indirect ways. It is a relatively light burden compared to the income tax and payroll tax, only $1,870 per household per year.

 

Other federal taxes (excise taxes, estate taxes, etc.) come to about $2,300 per household per year.

 

Altogether — and not counting state and local taxes — that comes to about $42,000 and change per household per year. That’s the basic cost of maintaining the federal government as is — not counting public-health emergency measures or the Brobdingnagian expansion of the federal government dreamt of by Joe Biden et al.

 

Where does the money go?

 

On a per-household basis, federal spending comprises, among other things: about $400 to operate the State Department, $900 to fund scientific research, $2,000 for veterans’ care, and $150 on farm subsidies. The big-ticket items are: $7,500 for the military, $8,000 for Social Security, another $8,000 for various welfare programs (SNAP, TANF, Pell grants, Section 8, LIHEAP, etc.), and, topping the list, some $11,000 for Medicare and Medicaid.

 

Taxes aren’t spread evenly across all households, of course, and neither is income. But the lines are not as sharply drawn as you might imagine. As alluded to earlier, what the economists call “tax incidence” is complicated. For example, the payroll tax is split into an “employee share” and an “employer share,” but most economists believe that, in reality, employees pay most or all of the tax, with the “employer share” being recouped through reduced wages. Some businesses can pass costs along to their customers, but some can’t, especially when it comes to businesses such as Walmart or McDonald’s, which operate in very price-sensitive environments. But those businesses can still pass along tax costs to employees, contractors, business partners, vendors, landlords, etc. The thing to keep in mind is this: Theoretical tax burdens are set by law, but actual tax burdens are determined by markets.

 

Put another way: We all pay taxes together. Like it or not. Any time a politician tells you he is going to raise taxes but only on other people, he is selling snake oil. The truth is, politicians don’t know where taxes actually land. Nobody really does — and nobody but nobody knows in advance how that will shake out. When Senator Bernie Sanders talks about raising taxes on “the rich,” he is talking about raising taxes on everybody, whether he understands that or not. When Donald Trump promised that his tariffs — which are a sales tax — would be paid by the Chinese, he could not have been more wrong: Those costs were born by U.S. consumers and U.S. manufacturers, who were made to pay higher prices for their inputs.

 

You may not think you are paying 42 grand per annum for what Washington does, because that isn’t what it says on your 1040. But you are paying that, through higher prices, lower wages, lost opportunity, investments that never happen, and innovation that is never funded.

 

It matters how much government spends. But it also matters what it spends it on. Coronavirus response? Yes, of course. Military? As much as is needed, but no more. But windmill subsidies? Loan forgiveness for young M&A lawyers who went to Harvard? The myriad irreplaceable activities of the Small Business Administration?

 

I’d rather have the Nissan.

Biden’s Got a Berlin Problem Brewing

By Dalibor Rohac & Ivana Stradner

Sunday, January 31, 2021

 

Those who expect President Joe Biden to singlehandedly fix the transatlantic relationship are in for a disappointment. Although the new administration in Washington takes a far more sympathetic view of Europe than its predecessor did, it is not clear that the sentiment will be reciprocated — especially in Berlin.

 

Following nearly two decades of Angela Merkel’s leadership, Armin Laschet, premier of Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen, was elected on January 16 as the new leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Barring large swings in polls before the parliamentary election in September, Laschet is on track to become Germany’s next chancellor.

 

That is bad news for efforts to repair the U.S.–EU relationship. The presence of Laschet at the helm of Europe’s largest economy would give a boost for those in Europe who are reluctant to take their obligations within NATO seriously and would risk tethering the EU closer to both China and Russia.

 

Much as Biden and Laschet are likely to see eye-to-eye on climate change and other “multilateral” issues, the presumptive German chancellor is a man of little patience with those who see the promotion of democratic values as integral to foreign policy. As such, he is likely to frustrate U.S.-led efforts to hold Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators accountable for their domestic and international practices.

 

For one, Laschet has a long record of pandering to Putin, or “Putin-Verstehen” as the German neologism goes. Unlike Merkel and other European figures, Laschet hesitated to condemn the recent arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. More broadly, he believes that “while drawing attention to violations of human rights or developments in democracy that we regard as undesirable, we should refrain from itemizing what is going on in Russia and passing didactic judgment on each individual item.” The reason? “We need Russia for many issues in the world” — not least climate change since a Paris Accord without Russia would be only “worth half as much.”

 

It gets worse. When the Russian strongman annexed Crimea in 2014, Laschet’s main concern was with fashionable “anti-Putin populism” emerging in the West. A year later, he disputed the evidence of Russia’s election meddling and disinformation campaigns in Germany. In 2018, Laschet questioned Russian involvement in the Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K. Amid a chorus of U.S. and European critics of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Laschet reiterated his support for the project earlier this month.

 

There was much to criticize about President Obama’s half-hearted response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, which happened at the hands of the country’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Yet curiously, in Laschet’s view, the U.S. administration’s main sin lay in its effort to “weaken Assad,” a supposed bulwark against ISIS-sponsored terrorism. Never mind that it was Assad’s atrocities, backed by Russia and Iran, that set in motion the largest refugee wave that Europe had seen since the end of the Second World War.

 

Unsurprisingly, Laschet opposed a ban on Huawei championed by other voices within the CDU, most notably Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign-affairs committee and Laschets’s competitor for the party’s leadership. In Laschet’s view, “German business lives from international exports, also those to China.”

 

Laschet would not be the first German chancellor with questionable foreign-policy views. Gerhard Schröder, who served between 1998–2005, was subject to a barrage of well-deserved criticism after transitioning from the German chancellorship to high-ranking board positions in Russian energy companies. Merkel’s own geopolitical record is a mixed bag. On the one hand, she deserves credit for ensuring a united European front in maintaining the post–2014 sanctions regime against Russia. On the other, she has stood firmly with German business against Europe’s broader strategic interests, whether in the case of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline or, more recently, on the EU–China investment treaty.

 

All of this bodes well for Russia and China, who seek to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe and undermine Western influence in the Balkans, post-Soviet countries, or in the Middle East.

 

While Laschet’s business-like approach to geopolitics has a long tradition in German foreign-policy thinking, the single-minded pursuit of profitable economic opportunities at the expense of broader strategic interests and values is a luxury belonging firmly to an era in which others — namely the United States — could be relied on to keep Europe safe and secure.

 

But Germans and Europeans should not fool themselves. Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s promise of a return to normalcy and to American leadership in the world, the benign old days are not coming back. And in the world that will likely greet a future chancellor Laschet, his seemingly level-headed economic pragmatism risks being proven hopelessly naïve and short-sighted.

China’s Terrifying Return to Maoism

By Doug Bandow

Saturday, January 30, 2021

 

One of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned back toward Maoism. Xi Jinping’s regime is committed to eradicating the merest possibility that someone might have an independent thought.

 

The economy remains a socialist-market hybrid, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made little effort to limit personal autonomy except where politics intrudes. However, just a hint of ideological disobedience now brings down the full weight of a vast domestic-security regime that spends more money than the People’s Liberation Army.

 

There are no easy policy answers for Washington. Repression is an essential part of today’s Chinese political system. It’s how current officials, starting at the top with Xi Jinping, retain their power, perquisites, wealth, status, and everything else that sets them apart from normal people. If there is an existential interest for the Chinese state, it is maintaining repression. The regime isn’t going to yield, irrespective of sanction, since its elites prefer power to anything else.

 

Violations of human rights are the norm in the PRC. In practice, civil liberties, free speech, and political freedom simply don’t exist there. China has essentially returned to the era of Mao Zedong, one of the CCP’s founders, who emerged atop the party after unceasingly brutal power struggles that shaped the party’s evolution.

 

The rungs on the CCP ladder were slippery indeed, as many once-dominant figures missed a step, plunging into the political netherworld below. Even Mao’s rise was sometimes interrupted. But he mixed determination, skill, and ruthlessness and ultimately outshone his rivals. He famously announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and was responsible for virtually every brutal step taken by the CCP in its early years.

 

Mao’s most famous murderous episodes were the misnamed Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is impossible to know how many people died owing to his misrule — estimates range out to 100 million, but 35 to 65 million is probably closer to the truth. The terror felt even by his close colleagues, many of whom were exiled, imprisoned, or killed during the Cultural Revolution, did not end until his death in 1976.

 

Associates cowed by the Great Helmsman, as he was known, quickly moved against his widow and other radical associates, and summoned Deng Xiaoping back from exile to the capital. As Deng rose to preeminence, he freed an economy that once took socialism seriously. Equally important but less noted at the time, the CCP loosened controls over personal life. People gained power over their own lives.

 

There also was strong support for political liberalization, including from CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. However, he opposed the bloody 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and ended up under house arrest for the rest of his life. China’s hope for democratic reform faded, but otherwise the Chinese people remained far freer than before. The system, though authoritarian, was loose. So long as one did not challenge Communist rule, a certain amount of debate was allowed. There were independent journalists who reported primarily on provincial misdeeds and human-rights lawyers who fought repression in court. Foreign academic exchanges were common. Nongovernmental organizations could carefully critique government policies.

 

All of this began to change a decade ago and repression accelerated under Xi Jinping, chosen as party General Secretary in 2012. He focused on strengthening personal and party authority, and then on expanding state control over virtually every aspect of Chinese political life. Intellectual freedom has essentially disappeared.

 

The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party recently addressed this state of affairs in its Human Rights Commission (HRC) report on the full-scale, wide-ranging assault against individual liberty in almost all of its aspects. Explained the U.K. HRC: “The Chinese Communist Party regime has intensified an assault on all human rights throughout China — not only the atrocity crimes perpetrated against the Uyghurs and Tibetans, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, but violations [of] all human rights affecting every group and individual throughout the country.”

 

The breadth of the assault detailed by the report is extraordinary:

 

·         Fear of Muslim Uyghurs has led to the incarceration of a million or more people, mostly Uyghurs but some other nationalities too, in reeducation camps. Whether the term genocide rightly applies — the regime is essentially killing a culture, not a people — the hardship suffered is immense.

 

·         “Repression in Tibet has intensified” as well. Occupied in 1950 by the PRC, Beijing has sought to restrict the practice of Buddhism, crush separatist sentiments, and control the Buddhist hierarchy. That means “arrests of Tibetan activists, monks and nuns, and severe restrictions on freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief and other human rights.”

 

·         Hong Kong’s travails have been in the news over the last couple of years. After slowly expanding Beijing’s authority in the former British colony in recent years, the PRC last year imposed a brutal national-security law “containing severe restrictions on basic freedoms” on the roughly 7.5 million Hong Kongers. The result was to dismantle in surprisingly short order “Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, human rights, the rule of law and autonomy.” Censorship is fast descending upon what formally remains an autonomous special administrative region.

 

·         “Torture is endemic, widespread, systematic and conducted with impunity.” Brutal imprisonment is common around the world but has extra impact when practiced in the world’s most populous state.

 

·         “Forced televised confessions are now commonplace.” They are procured through threats of harsher punishment and maltreatment of relatives. The practice has been used to discredit Westerners who are ultimately released.

 

·         “The Chinese Communist Party regime’s silencing of ‘whistleblowers,’ especially doctors and citizen journalists, at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in serious human rights violations and the spread of the virus.”

 

·         “Freedom of religion or belief in China is under the most severe crackdown since the Cultural Revolution.” Only a few years ago, in many provinces, churches were left alone if they avoided politics; in Beijing I snapped a picture of a car with a Christian “fish” on its bumper. Today, ministers are arrested, churches are closed or destroyed, members are barred from bringing their children and forced to display communist agitprop, and the CCP even wants to rewrite Scripture. Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism are also under sustained attack.

 

·         The CCP is above the law. The regime emphasizes rule by law and rejects rule of law as in the West.

 

·         “Arbitrary arrests and disappearances are commonplace.” During the early stages of the coronavirus spread, citizen journalists reporting on the pandemic were detained or even quarantined.

 

·         “The China Tribunal concluded ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience is perpetrated in China and amounts to a crime against humanity.”

 

·         Forced labor is widely used, and not just in Xinjiang. At least 83 Western brands may include such products in their supply chains.

 

·         “The Chinese Communist Party regime is building an all-encompassing surveillance state, and Chinese technology companies such as Huawei are at the heart of this operation.”

 

The report offers individual chapters filled with excruciating details on these and other examples of the CCP’s broad offensive against independent thought and action. Nothing on this list is new, though many of the problems are worsening. Moreover, the list is not exhaustive. For instance, Beijing has essentially destroyed the human-rights bar, once made up disproportionately of Christian attorneys. Most have been dispersed, disbarred, and/or imprisoned.

 

Independent NGOs such as the Unirule Institute have been shut down. Unirule was established in 1993. It advocated market-oriented economic reform, publishing articles full of Ph.D.-speak and holding conferences filled with academics and policy nerds, like me, while carefully avoiding the red line of challenging CCP rule. When I met with the staff in July 2019, their office had been closed, their executive director had been prohibited from traveling to America, their books had been banned from publication, and they were a month away from having their business license pulled. Such was the fear of the great and powerful Xi Jinping of any ideas about freedom being discussed by anyone anywhere in China.

 

Even noncontroversial academic cooperation is carefully scrutinized, and speaking invitations must be approved by Beijing. I discovered this when I showed up in Shanghai two years ago to speak at a maritime conference, only to be told that the organizers had neglected the final step, which had not been previously required. I spent the weekend playing tourist rather than discussing American policy toward the Indo-Pacific.

 

The so-called social-credit system monitors behavior and punishes those who do not faithfully follow regime dictates, including political dissenters. Beijing has sought to export this system. The PRC’s pressure has been growing on Taiwan, which China wants to turn into another subservient territory like Hong Kong.

 

For those interested in addressing the Chinese challenge, there is both good and bad news. The latter is simple: There is very little that the U.S. and West can do to force the PRC to change its internal policies. Maintaining control is an existential interest of the CCP, which will resolutely resist outside interference.

 

Specific targeted measures — barring suppliers from using forced labor, for instance, and insisting upon reciprocal press access — can achieve some positive results. Sanctioning specific Chinese officials delivers emotional satisfaction but doesn’t change policy. For instance, Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam, a CCP puppet, has had trouble finding a bank after Washington threatened financial penalties against any institution doing business with her. But the destruction of Hong Kong liberties continues apace.

 

On the positive side, China is a vulnerable not-yet superpower. Its weaknesses are manifold: hidden but pronounced political division, profusion of inefficient state enterprises, growing political interference with the economy, a rapidly aging population with a decided and destabilizing male imbalance, massive income gaps between coastal/trading centers and interior provinces, minimal soft power, absence of friends and allies, growing third-world resentment of Chinese commercial practices, and a vulnerable geographic position. It remains important not to underestimate the PRC’s potential. However, it would be foolish to bet against America and other free societies.

 

Most important may be the simple fact that what is will not ever be. That is, today’s rapid race to totalitarianism is a product of one man, Xi Jinping. At age 67, and with many enemies, he will not rule forever. And when he is gone, “Xi Jinping thought” might disappear as rapidly as Maoism dissipated after the Great Helmsman’s death. The Chinese couldn’t wait to dump overboard the reality of the mad Red Emperor’s rule even while preserving his image as the nation’s founder. Xi serves no similar foundational national role, and therefore could be almost instantly consigned to obscurity.

 

The U.S. and West should play the long game by focusing on expanding access to information in the PRC and appealing to rising generations. This is one reason it is important, despite security concerns, to keep American high schools and universities open to Chinese students. Young Chinese like their personal freedoms but are nationalistic. They aren’t interested in being told what to do or think, especially by the U.S. government. (I feel the same way!) Frankly, the ostentatiously maladroit and sanctimonious Mike Pompeo was no asset in this fight.

 

The PRC poses the greatest current international challenge to U.S. policy. It is vital to get America’s response right. The nature of the U.S.–China relationship will affect the rest of the world for years and potentially decades to come. The last previous great-power transitions — the rise of Germany and the Soviet Union — had catastrophic consequences. A prolonged violent struggle between America and the PRC could, in an unimaginable worst case, be even more costly.

 

Finding the right strategy is not just important for America. It also is important for the Chinese people.  Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. Set aside today’s totalitarian challenge for a moment: It is an extraordinary civilization and fascinating country. Once the PRC is free, it will be an even better place. Ultimately, only the Chinese people can transform the system that controls them and limits their future.

Biden’s Blue-State Clawback

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, January 30, 2021

 

No one can accuse President Biden of easing into office. His first days have been a blizzard of executive orders, presidential memorandums, and official proclamations. He says he wants to overturn the worst policies of the previous administration, and to restore a sense of national unity and institutional integrity. What gets lost in the details of all these initiatives is Biden’s partisan goal.

 

It’s not just that the new president wants to resume the trajectory America was on when Barack Obama left office in 2017. He also wants to claw back the gains red states made over blue states during the last four years. He wants to shift federal resources to Democratic constituencies, and to save the blue states from the true cost of their misguided policies. And if red America has to pay a price in lost jobs and tax revenue, well, that’s too bad.

 

Leave aside, for the purposes of this discussion, the relative merits of Biden’s executive actions. (I disagree with almost all of them.) Focus instead on their distributional effects, not on individuals but on sectors of the economy, on regions of the country, and on the donor bases of the two parties. The image that comes to mind is of swarms of dollars changing course mid flight: a mass migration of subsidies, spending, and incentives from the GOP coalition to the Democratic one.

 

Start with energy. Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline at a cost of 1,000 jobs and diplomatic goodwill with Canada. He banned fracking on federal lands and paused oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. According to a White House fact sheet, he told federal agencies to “accelerate clean energy and transmission projects.” He is sure to bestow federal largesse on the sons of Solyndra.

 

The alternative energy sector overwhelmingly favors Democrats. Its political investments have paid off. The old-style extractive industries, mainly based in GOP strongholds, will suffer. In some cases they are targeted for extinction. The knock-on effects are serious. “Wyoming state superintendent Jillian Balow notes that her state depends on some $150 million a year in oil and gas federal royalties to fund K-12 schools,” says the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

 

Other Biden measures resumed the flow of government aid to the special interests behind his campaign. The second Catholic president has jumpstarted federal funding of Planned Parenthood almost two years after President Trump cut off the nation’s largest abortion provider. Biden also reversed President Trump’s ban on money for “sanctuary cities” that choose not to enforce federal immigration law. That decision will help boost the budgets of progressive municipalities eager to pass off the costs of illegal immigration. Biden’s codification of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, which made gender identity protected under civil rights law, and his lifting of the ban on trans soldiers is sure to please a class of donors essential to Democratic Party finances.

 

Biden’s proposed American Rescue Plan best captures the new administration’s intermingling of public policy and greasy-pole gamesmanship. Take, for example, the $130 billion that Biden wants to spend on K–12 schools. That number is on top of the $67 billion Congress already has committed to reopening elementary and secondary schools.

 

The additional cash is a handout to the teachers’ unions, who have opposed a return to in-person instruction at every opportunity, and who are among Biden’s closest allies. Biden has adopted the unions’ rhetoric, saying that schools cannot open until they have been renovated. He’s wrong, of course — measures such as masks, hygiene, and social distancing are enough to stop the spread, especially among the elementary schoolers who need in-person classes the most and whose transmission rates are low. But science doesn’t matter. The unions must get paid.

 

One year after COVID-19 appeared in America, it is more than evident that arbitrary, statewide lockdowns are a disaster for small businesses, which happen to be a key part of the Republican coalition. The states that have done the most to reopen have best weathered the economic storm. And these same states tend to be low-tax, low-minimum-wage, and have a business-friendly regulatory environment, as well as a warmer climate. The Wall Street Journal reports that the South is leading America’s recovery. But, in the heavily Democratic northeast, “The recovery of jobs has lagged behind.”

 

What does Biden want? His solution is to make Florida and Texas more like New York and California. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Paul H. Kupiec, calculates that the nationwide $15 minimum wage contained in the American Rescue Plan would “shift business formation, growth, and employment from red states to blue, as the higher minimum wage erodes red states’ labor cost advantage in many job categories.” What’s best for Cuomo, however, is not what’s best for the country.

 

A steep minimum-wage hike in the middle of an economic crisis that disproportionately affects small business is the exact opposite of what you want to do to spur full employment. But it does make sense if you are using the crisis to gain leverage for unions and government over free labor and the private sector.

 

Blue America began to claw back red America’s earnings last week. And the next four years (at least) will see the Biden coalition press its advantage.

 

Ah, normalcy.

Andrew Cuomo’s Shame

National Review Online

Friday, January 29, 2021

 

‘We were ambushed like no other state,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo contended to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on January 26. “Again, it was from federal incompetence. They thought the virus was in China, it left China, it had left China, it had gone to Europe and it came here for three months before they ever knew. Incompetent government kills people.”

 

Two days later Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, who is a liberal Democrat like Cuomo and who enjoyed Cuomo’s backing when she sought her current office, released a cautiously worded yet infuriating 76-page report suggesting that Cuomo’s incompetence cost lives.

 

Extrapolating from a survey of about 10 percent of state nursing homes, James estimated that the actual number of COVID deaths related to such facilities was about 50 percent higher than the official figure, which was about 8,700. Within hours, the state Department of Health scrambled to add to its nursing-home total 3,800 souls who had died in hospitals after becoming infected in nursing homes, bringing the official number up to 12,473.

 

As New York City mayor Bill de Blasio put it with uncharacteristic eloquence, “These are our loved ones we lost, you know, it’s someone’s grandma, someone’s mother or father, aunts or uncles, this is families missing someone dear to them.”

 

The coronavirus has represented a once-in-a-hundred-years public-health crisis that has not discriminated between red and blue states. Everyone should have some humility about criticizing anyone in authority during the pandemic, when many decisions were made with imperfect information and when most choices had agonizing trade-offs. Yet Cuomo’s Department of Health’s March 25 order directing nursing homes to accept incoming residents known to have the coronavirus, an order he did not rescind until May 10, stands out as foolish and disastrous — especially because New York was warned of the danger. Cuomo still refuses to say whose idea the order was.

 

So more than 12 percent of New York nursing-home residents have succumbed to the virus. In New Jersey, where a policy similar to Cuomo’s was enacted, the death toll was similar: 12 percent of nursing-home residents felled by the virus. In Florida, where nursing homes were forbidden to accept people with coronavirus, that figure is 1.6 percent.

 

Neutral observers, as opposed to Cuomo’s many unpaid publicists in the news media, were unsurprised by the new development, widely if mistakenly labeled “shocking” in the press. New York, which has suffered by far the worst COVID death toll of any state and is among the hardest-hit regions on the planet, has lost 34,742 to the disease, or 43,093 if you include suspected as well as confirmed cases, as does the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

 

Throughout this crisis the media have praised Cuomo’s supposed forthrightness and respect for facts. Last summer the New York Post, one of the few media outlets to show any interest in finding the true nursing-home figures, began calling for an independent investigation. Cuomo called that paper’s questions partisan attacks and invited New Yorkers to direct their anger toward President Trump; the rest of the media largely shrugged. Cuomo also resisted inquiries from fellow Democratic members of the state legislature and the U.S. Congress, insisting there was no need for anyone to check his numbers.

 

On March 2, the day after the first New Yorker tested positive for the novel coronavirus, when, as we now know, the virus was tearing through the Empire State, Cuomo explained at length why New Yorkers need not be worried, via empty slogans and macho posturing: “The facts defeat fear.” “The reality is reassuring.” “It is deep breath time.” “This is not our first rodeo.” He averred, “We should relax because that’s what’s dictated by the reality of the situation.” Incompetent government kills people indeed. More to the point, Cuomo said correctly on March 29, “Coronavirus in a nursing home is like fire in dry grass.” His mistakes played a role in fanning the flames.

Against Ad-Hocracy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

 

Politics is supposed to be a means of solving problems that do not have their origins in politics but instead arise from what Hobbes called the “state of nature.” How do we go about protecting ourselves from marauding bandits? How do we prevent our crops from being stolen by the people across the river? How can we solve disputes about property or injuries without resorting to vendettas and blood feuds? If we build a wall around our village to protect us, how should the expense be borne? These are the original problems of politics.

 

Eventually, politics reaches a point of sufficient entrenchment where it begins to create severe problems of its own, which is where we find ourselves at the moment.

 

Politics sometimes is thought of as a kind of lid that sits atop the boiling pot of society. That is one assessment of modern liberalism, cynically (or pragmatically) understood as a system in which the well-to-do and the powerful share just enough of their wealth and power to keep the peasantry from rising up in arms against them. You heard a lot about that over the summer, in those ancient days when our friends on the left still were lionizing mobs and armed militias that destroyed life and property for political ends and worked toward the overthrow of government. Riots, they lectured us, are the weapons of the powerless, and justly wielded. That is what is meant by the slogan, “No justice, no peace.”

 

But if justice is to mean anything other than the state in which those most willing to engage in political violence are given what they demand, then justice must be defined — which is another way of saying we must put limits on it. (Defined comes from the Latin definire, meaning to impose limits.) The need for such definition is the reason we write down our laws rather than putting every dispute and controversy to a plebiscite, and it is why we have constitutions — which is to say, it is why we have limited government.

 

Limited government is not some libertarian concoction — if you prefer to keep the Bill of Rights, then you believe in limited government. If you prefer unlimited government, then history and a few unhappy corners of the modern world offer many examples.

 

The long project of making the king subordinate to the law was the great achievement of British political thinking, and it laid the philosophical foundation for the American founding, in which British subjects in North America did away with kings altogether and substituted a different model of political life. It is that model of politics that American conservatives seek to conserve — not necessarily in its every jot and tittle (we did away with the Articles of Confederation, slavery, and much else, and it has been a good while since the U.S. government has issued letters of marque and reprisal) but in its principles, its philosophy, its intellectual structure, and, especially, its constitutional architecture. And here it is regrettably necessary to distinguish between conservatives per se and the Right more broadly, many of whose current leading lights and ascendant radical factions take a distinctly kingly view of presidential power and understand the law as just another instrument of domination.

 

Some of our political disagreements are about ends, but most of them are about means. Most of us desire widespread prosperity, physical security, social mobility, peace, a clean environment, well-administered courts of law, the happiness of minority groups, etc. But how do we achieve those ends? Conservatives believe that peace and prosperity come from organic social development enabled by a foundation comprising individual rights, including, especially, property rights; the rule of law, with legislatures acting within the bounds of well-defined constitutional limits and independent courts committed to the law itself rather than a freelance socio-political agenda; prudent and thrifty public administration; a thriving civil society and religious life that provide the things government cannot, such as community and moral orientation; entrepreneurship, free enterprise, and trade; and the distillation of ancient human experience that we call tradition.

 

When Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes to effect a soft takeover of American corporations, dictating to them everything from the composition of their boards to the range of their political activism, conservatives object — not because we are worried that Microsoft’s shareholders will get a raw deal, but because Senator Warren’s proposal represents a fundamental change to the property-rights regime upon which American economic prosperity is founded, a fundamental change in the relationship between citizen and state. Conservatives who object to “cancel culture” are mindful of the legal distinction between private corporate action and state censorship, but are also mindful of the fact that civil society can be made into a cat’s-paw of politics, and recognize that what is proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al. would constitute a kind of soft Jim Crow for political minorities. Our solicitousness of the undemocratic character of many of our institutions — the Senate, the Bill of Rights, the Electoral College — is rooted in an understanding that there is more to peace and justice than majority rule.

 

Against this, the progressives offer ad-hocracy, willy-nilly social engineering in response to whatever the demand of the second is. That is why we went from “Nobody is talking about gay marriage!” to “Gay marriage is a constitutional mandate!” to “We’re going to put you in jail if you won’t bake a cake for a gay wedding!” in about ten years. The times, they are a-changin’: Planned Parenthood was founded by a dedicated eugenicist who claimed to abhor abortion and has become an organization of dedicated abortionists who claim, somewhat dubiously, to abhor eugenics — and both positions were considered, in their respective times, the incontrovertibly rational position of scientific progressivism. Self-evident truths freshly minted yesterday and bolstered by a Vox article headlined “Study says . . .” are not good enough on their own, because we have seen them come and go.

 

So of course we conservatives are always repeating ourselves. History repeats itself. We must always begin, and begin again, at the beginning.

The American Left’s Love Affair with FARC & Friends

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 29, 2021

 

A special court has been convened in Colombia to try eight leaders of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist outfit known as FARC — Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. Perhaps justice will be done upon these eight — will it ever be done for their enablers in the United States and elsewhere?

 

FARC is one of the many murderous offshoots of that “real socialism” that our leftist friends always insist “has never been tried.” Like the Taliban, it is part political movement and part drug cartel; like Hamas, it has sought legitimacy by repackaging itself as a political party, now known as Comunes.

 

FARC never enjoyed quite the celebrity status of, say, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the communist militia that enjoyed the support of, among others, Bill de Blasio, who returned from a visit to the war-ravaged country in his late 20s with “a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government,” in the words of the New York Times. (And how are you enjoying it, New York?) The Sandinistas got a Clash triple-album named after them, whereas FARC was always more an enthusiasm of cloistered academic Marxists and left-wing activists with a commitment to worldwide revolutionary movements. They were trained by IRA bomb-makers, and their interests were advanced in the U.S. Congress by elected Democrats, with American activists acting as back-channel go-betweens. Left-wing activists have long agitated for the release of FARC terrorists held in U.S. prisons.

 

If FARC has always had friends in the United States, friends of FARC abroad have had even more friends in the United States. The late Venezuelan socialist dictator, Hugo Chávez, was a longtime sponsor of the Marxist-Leninist-narco-terrorist outfit next door, going so far as to allow them to operate from Venezuelan safe havens. Chávez was the American Left’s second-favorite Latin American dictator, behind Fidel Castro, enjoying the support not only of Hollywood’s champagne radicals but also that of congressional Democrats, including Chaka Fattah and Barney Frank. Those two were not exactly paragons of good judgment: Fattah went down on 23 felony counts comprising racketeering conspiracy, bribery, bank fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering, while Barney Frank at one point had a bisexual prostitution ring being run out of his home but was never charged with any crime.

 

(My main objection to Representative Frank’s taking the gavel as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee was that he had somehow managed to lose money hosting a whorehouse in Washington.)

 

Representative Fattah was an eager dupe for Chávez in the heady days when Venezuela was buoyed by rising oil prices — Boss Hugo sent discounted heating oil to Representative Fattah’s constituents in chilly Philadelphia. He also kidnapped, tortured, and murdered political opponents. But the Left has no enemies to the left.

 

The Left’s love affair with FARC in Colombia and Chávez in Venezuela was an echo of its ongoing romance, now post-mortem, with Fidel Castro. Celebrity progressives such as Danny Glover, Robert Redford, and Oliver Stone made the trip to Havana to sit at the feet of Fidel Castro. Celebrity journalists such as Andrea Mitchell talked up Castro’s achievements in health care even as Cubans were deprived of simple antibiotics and basic medical services. Upon the great tyrant’s death, Barack Obama spoke of “the countless ways in which he altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” which is one way to describe the career of a mass-murdering dictator who ran a garrison state so cruel that its subjects set out to sea on tire tubes in hopes of floating off to a better life.

 

And so it goes and has gone: Jane Fonda made her pilgrimage to Hanoi, and, more consequentially, Bernie Sanders, who nearly won the Democratic nomination twice, made his pilgrimage to Moscow and Leningrad, where he spent his time “extolling the virtues of Soviet life and culture,” notwithstanding that Soviet life and culture had included a gigantic gulag state whose outrages included, among many other crimes against humanity, starving 4 million people to death to make a political point. Even Pol Pot had his apologists in the United States, with left-wing radicals such as Noam Chomsky dismissing the Cambodian genocide as exaggerated or wholly invented “propaganda.”

 

The worldwide communist enterprise murdered 100 million people in the 20th century. Eight men will be tried in Colombia. Sales of Che Guevara T-shirts remain brisk.

Congress Bows to the Pen and the Phone

By Rich Lowry

Friday, January 29, 2021

 

President Joe Biden has proved that, if nothing else, he has a pen and a phone.

 

According to The Economist, he signed more executive orders in his first two days than President Donald Trump signed in nearly his first two months.

 

And he was just getting started.

 

Republicans have no standing to complain about Biden’s spate of unilateral measures, given they were fine with Trump using exactly the same means. But that presidents of both parties govern this way doesn’t make it better — it makes it worse.

 

Some executive actions starkly usurp congressional authority, while others are firmly within the executive’s ambit. Yet the sheer amount of activity that presidents undertake on their own isn’t in keeping with the spirit of our constitutional system.

 

The presidency has overawed a legislative branch that is only too willing to sign over power and responsibility. Congress has been an eager participant in its own neutering.

 

James Madison thought the legislature would be insatiable, steadily accumulating power. Instead, it is the least self-respecting branch, led by people who identify with the interests of presidents and their own parties over and above the interests of their own institution.

 

This means that Congress is essentially cut out of the action on important questions of national policy.

 

Obama blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump blessed it, and Biden blocked it again.

 

Obama took us into the Paris climate accord, Trump took us out, and Biden is taking us back in.

 

Consider what Biden did on his own the other day. He directed the Interior Department to stop new oil and gas leases on federal land and to identify steps to double renewable-energy production by 2030.

 

He created a special presidential envoy for climate, as well as a White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, a National Climate Task Force, a Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, an Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, a White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council, and a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

 

On top of this, he established a Justice Initiative to steer 40 percent of relevant federal investments to disadvantaged communities.

 

And on the seventh day, Biden rested (after tucking his pen back in his pocket).

 

If Congress had passed a bill doing all this, it’d be considered a pretty active day. Instead, Congress stood on the sidelines . . . and commented.

 

“I’m proud that President Biden is announcing a slew of executive actions on climate,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer tweeted.

 

Schumer’s only complaint is that Biden isn’t doing more on his own authority.

 

This is the same Chuck Schumer who has been a legislator since 1975 when he took a seat in the New York State Assembly, who has been in Congress since 1981 and the Senate since 1999, and who ascended to majority leader about a week ago, representing the apex of a national legislative career.

 

And yet Schumer has urged Biden to declare a national climate emergency because it would allow him to do things “without legislation.”

 

This would be like Chief Justice John Roberts giving Biden advice on how to pack the Supreme Court — except it’s unimaginable that a Supreme Court justice would be so openly disdainful of the legitimacy and prerogatives of his or her own institution.

 

This is a particular congressional disease. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in an essay for Commentary magazine, Congress has been delegating its authority to the executive branch for some time. What’s new is that partisanship has created a loyalty for members of Congress that transcends their attachment to Congress itself, while more and more members consider their office merely a platform to get attention.

 

“Congress is weak and dysfunctional because that suits its members,” Levin writes. “It could renew itself only if its members wanted such renewal.”

 

All indications are that, no, it is perfectly content to be supplanted by the pen and phone.