Argue Honesty in the Claudine Gay Affair

By John H. Cochrane

Saturday, December 30, 2023

 

I think Harvard should fire Claudine Gay. But not for the reasons her critics are emphasizing, including Congressional testimony, public statements after October 7, and charges of plagiarism. Come on now, you don’t really think she’s a wonderful president doing a fantastic job, and it’s too bad we have to fire her over copied and pasted sentences in her thesis.

 

The larger goal is to reform the university. Being honest about the reasons for firing her matters to that goal.

 

Harvard faces a historic choice: Is its main mission advocacy for, advancement of, and indoctrination in a particular political and ideological cause, going by names such as “woke,” “social justice” “critical theory” and “diversity equity and inclusion” (a chillingly Orwellian name since it is exactly the opposite)? Or is its main mission the search for objective truth, via excellence, meritocracy, free inquiry, free speech, and critical discussion, bounded by classical norms of argument by logic and evidence; and to advance and pass on that way of thinking? Even though yes, most of those ideas originated from dead white men whose societies had, in retrospect, some unpleasant characteristics? And to get there, given the BS spreading like cancer and the political and ideological monoculture that pervades the university, it needs a top to bottom cleanup.

 

This is a key moment. After October 7, a lot of the larger community of alumni, donors, trustees, parents, government and employers, woke up. What, “decolonization” means kill the Jews? Who knew? Well you would have if you had been paying attention, one is tempted to answer, but ok, you had lives to lead and the Orwellian doublespeak is seductive if you’re not paying much attention. They then look a little harder and suddenly see the politicized rot that has taken over the whole university. Now is the chance to force a change.

 

Only a more honest firing will cure Harvard and her cousins. Forcing Harvard to get rid of her, ostensibly for failings that though real are also clearly a pretext, will not force Harvard to look hard in the mirror and make the choice I and Harvard’s critics want.

 

Gay is exactly what Harvard wanted, and a look-alike is exactly what it will get unless it wants something different.

 

Why do I think Gay should go? Because she persecuted Roland Fryer, the brilliant Black economist who inconveniently found the “wrong” results in a classic study of race and policing. Because she fired Ronald Sullivan, also incidentally Black, who had the temerity to provide legal counsel to Harvey Weinstein, from his faculty dean position. The great defender of free speech and academic freedom before Congress found that the mere act of having provided Weinstein legal counsel made students feel “unsafe.” She forced Carole Hooven to resign, for teaching that sex is “binary and biological” in a biology class. She led efforts to expand “teaching in the broad domain of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration.” (Two Blacks and a woman. If you hadn’t figured it out, this is about politics, not race). I haven’t followed the Ryan Enos (white man, but left wing research) affair carefully, but the charge that she quickly covered it up is out there. Harvard’s announcement of her appointment trumpeted that “She is the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative” and similar efforts. Harvard is dead last in FIRE’s ranking of free speech and academic freedom.

 

But all this happened before she became president. Harvard knew exactly what it was getting, and wanted it.

 

Gay’s academic record, including allegations of plagiarism and quantitative mistakes, was widely discussed long before she became president, as the WSJ documents. That “Harvard said it first learned about allegations of plagiarism against Gay in October” is unserious. Yes, the allegations were aired on anonymous message boards that also included distasteful posts. But in a full year search process, did nobody even think to google “Claudine Gay,” read the results, and then make up their own minds? You don’t have to take EJMRs word for it, you can do a little work. It’s either extreme laziness, or again, Harvard knew exactly what it was getting.

 

And even then, the allegation of plagiarism is mostly that she copied and pasted literature reviews. The allegation of fudging numbers is more serious. But why not talk about the real question: is this work any good anyway? Or, who cares? You don’t have to be a great academic to be a great administrator.

 

Nellie Bowles is as usual hilariously on point

 

I still think Claudine Gay is too big to fail. She is a symbol. And the perfect one for a once-great American institution running on prestige fumes and foreign dollars. Of course her papers are flawed and plagiarized. …Claudine herself has played a major role in smearing several truly great black academics throughout her career. No, the statement Claudine Gay as president of Harvard makes is that politics matter more than anything else….mediocrity, so long as it’s wedded to ideology, is enough. We’ll even call mediocrity genius and give it the most prestigious academic job in the land, so long as you say just the right things about this list of issues. In conclusion, Claudine Gay is the perfect president of Harvard.

 

Harvard selected her and hired her for the former job. She is eminently qualified for that job, and was doing it well. Forced to get rid of her on a pretext, they’ll just pick someone similar.

 

By way of example, Stanford recently unseated its president, ostensibly over research conduct in his pre-presidential career. He was cleared by the official investigation, but ousted nonetheless. As with Gay, I sense that his enemies really didn't care a whit about just how photoshopped photographs appeared in 20 year old articles. A lot of Stanford didn’t like him because he wasn’t left-wing enough. Stanford has plenty of academic freedom horror stories, from censuring Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya for actually following science on covid policy, to the Internet Observatory, specifically named in the Missouri v. Biden decision for politicized internet censorship, a DEI office every bit as pernicious as the one Harvard just scrubbed from its website, the Stanford Hates Fun outbreak and more. We were very lucky that our new interim president had only been in office a few months when Congress called and couldn’t be dragged in for interrogation! Stanford faces the same historic choice, left-wing politics vs. excellence, ideological and political diversity, freedom, and meritocracy.

 

The trustees appointed a 20-person presidential search committee September 14 to find his replacement. “The committee includes faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, a postdoctoral scholar, staff, and trustees, who will seek community input…” Time on hands seems to be a precondition. The faculty co-chair lists her first affiliation as “Senior Associate Dean, Faculty Development and Diversity.” The staff representative is the “Vice Provost for Institutional Equity, Access & Community.” Don’t hold your breath that this process will yield the clear choice and mandate to clean up the mess that you’re hoping for.

 

Gay was excoriated for her Congressional Testimony. The full text of the congressional testimony is revealing. The media soundbite seemed terrible:

 

ELISE STEFANIK: … Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: It can be. Depending on the context….Targeted as an individual, targeted as — at an individual, severe, pervasive….Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation. That is actionable conduct, and we do take action.

 

ELISE STEFANIK: So, the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: Again, it depends on the context.

 

Earlier, she gave a nice speech about free speech on campus:

 

The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built, and safety and well-being are the prerequisites for engagement in our community. Without both of these things, our teaching and research mission founder. …

 

We have reiterated that speech that incites violence threatens safety or violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment is unacceptable. We have made it clear that any behaviors that disrupt our teaching and research efforts will not be tolerated, and where these lines have been crossed, we have taken action.

 

I was, initially, a bit sympathetic. Gay was, technically, right. The written code of conduct, and other policies, do pretty much say that 1st Amendment freedom of speech applies on college campuses. The policies do state that you can say anything, even the most heinous, so long as it does not cross to action.

 

Nellie Bowles explains political theater:

 

like when Republicans asked college presidents whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the student code of conduct. That’s called a gimme. You make a sad face and say: “Yes.” It doesn’t matter what the student handbook actually says. No one cares. You say genocide is so sad, so bad.

 

Now one can be critical, as many were, that the job of university president is not to repeat lawyered up HR boilerplate, make sure you don’t say anything that can get the university sued; university presidents should know to make clear statements and know how to play the gotcha game in Congress. But again, Harvard (and Penn, and MIT) knew exactly what it was getting, and reportedly prepped Gay well for the former, not the latter task.

 

But this isn’t about free speech.

 

“Speech” had already turned in to “conduct” well before the hearing. Harassment of Jews — Jews, not just pro-Israel protesters — was already routine on campus. Interruptions of classes and occupation of library and other spaces was already going on. And Harvard and the others didn’t do anything about it — though you can be sure if similar opinions were being expressed by men in white sheets the reaction would have been swift and brutal.

 

The hypocrisy is evident. Oh now you’re for free speech and academic freedom, yet not for the tiny micro aggressions that had earned disciplinary responses before.

 

The issue is, how in the world did Harvard university end up accepting, hiring, and promoting, so many people who, given the opportunity to speak freely, do so in defense of murder, rape, and terrorism? How did Harvard become such a monoculture of far left-wing politics?

 

And, it turns out in the full record, the Congresspeople got all that. Selective free speech:

 

TIM WALBERG:…It seems that, perhaps, Harvard’s commitment to free speech is pretty selective. …

 

Tyler J. Van der Wiel was deemed guilty for those crimes, related to his views on marriage and abortion. And then, …Carroll Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, was forced to resign, because she stated that a person’s sex is biological and binary. …

 

And so, President Gay, in what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: Thank you for your question. So from the moment that our students arrive on campus, whether it is to begin their Harvard journey as an undergraduate, or at one of the professional schools, the message to them is clear — that we are an inclusive community but one deeply committed to free expression. And that means that we have expectations that that right is exercised mindfully and with empathy towards others.

 

We reinforce that during their time at Harvard, by helping them build the skills that allow them to engage in constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues. Because what we seek is not simply free expression, but the reasoned dialogue that leads to truth and discovery and that does the work of moving us all forward…

 

TIM WALBERG: But you are professors — — and when they transgress, they’re held accountable. — come under that, as well, don’t they? Your professors come under that as well, don’t they?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: Absolutely.

 

TIM WALBERG: And so, for Professor Van der Weil and Hooven, that didn’t work for them — the free expression of views, at the very least views, whether fact or truth, I guess we’ll leave that to understanding. But nonetheless, they were removed from their positions…

 

It turns out President Gay is superb at not answering questions and going off on a rant of boilerplate.

 

Politcal Diversity:

 

JOE WILSON: …What is the percentage of conservative professors at your institutions? …

 

CLAUDINE GAY: Thank you, Congressman. So, I can’t provide you that statistic because it’s not data that we collect. ..

 

LIZ MAGILL: Representative, I strongly believe in a wide variety of perspectives. We do not track that information, so I can’t give that to you.

 

SALLY KORNBLUTH: We do not document people’s political views, but conservatives are welcome to teach on our campus.

 

JOE WILSON: And I think this is so sadly and shamefully revealing that there is no diversity and inclusion of intellectual thought…. And you might look into that when you get your next government grant.

 

Again, beautiful lawyerly obfuscation. Because numbers are easily available. For example, voter registration data, which shows astounding democrat/republican ratios on campus. And the huge DEI bureaucracy, which collects detailed data on refined racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities, has plenty of time on its hands, could easily collect data on political identity. “Why not?” would be a good question!

 

Stanford’s DEI (“IDEAL”) website statement on the value of diversity, proclaims

 

At Stanford, we strive to ensure that a diversity of cultures, races and ethnicities, genders, political and religious beliefs, physical and learning differences, sexual orientations and identities is thriving on our campus.

 

Nice. But outside this statement, zero effort to even measure the size of the donkey in the room. (The elephant got canceled.)

 

“And you might look into that when you get your next government grant” is a fascinating comment. Right now many granting agencies are requiring diversity statements, diversity programs, some even acknowledging “native ways of knowing,” as part of an “all of government” effort. That could change with the next election. Or with a congressional committee that hauls in heads of agencies to answer the same sorts of questions.

 

The next exchange also focuses on the political monoculture issue,

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: …I’m going to follow up on some of the things Mr. Wilson had to say. … in 2016, they found about 2 percent of the faculty of Harvard … viewed President Trump, I think, is Ok or good. And I think in the 2020 election, the Crimson, your local paper there, found 1 percent of the students voting for Donald Trump, which given that nationwide, it is about 50, 50 was kind of shocking.

 

Does it concern you at all, that you apparently have a great deal, a lack of ideological diversity at Harvard? And you think that atmosphere is maybe one of the reasons why there seems to be such an outbreak of anti-Semitism at your institution?…what are you — what are you going to do about it? Do you think it’s a concern?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: We … strive to have as diverse a faculty as… we can, because we want to make sure that we are sampling from the broadest pool of talent available in the world. That’s how we ensure academic excellence. And then —

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: Wait, wait, wait, wait. ……2 percent of your faculty viewed Donald Trump as something [inaudible] poor. In 2016, and after four years of working for diversity, 1 percent voted for him. Now I know all sorts of good people who don’t like President Trump. But I’m just saying, when you compare the way people think at your campus, compared to America as a whole, if there’s one thing you are — it’s not diverse. Right? Do you consider that a problem…?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: So, Congressman, I can’t speak to the specific data that you are referring to. What I can say is, that at Harvard, we try to create as much space as possible for a wide range of views and perspectives, because we believe that allows for a thriving academic community.

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: Well, how in the world is that even possible, and that that you’re trying to do that? Do you really feel that you’re — that your faculty are ideologically diverse? You came out of a, what was it a, political science background at Stanford?…

 

CLAUDINE GAY: So here’s what I can say on the topic that you’re exploring. And it’s — we want the most brilliant, talented faculty to come to Harvard and to build their careers there. And then —

 

This is a brilliant lesson in obfuscation. Note to self if ever testifying before a hostile committee. Just lie. Over and over bigger and bigger. “ I can’t speak to the specific data that you are referring to.” Of course you can. You’re a quantitative political scientist who reads the newspapers. “We want the most brilliant, talented faculty to come to Harvard and to build their careers there.” “We try to create as much space as possible for a wide range of views and perspectives.” Ha!

 

Gay is great at doing exactly what Harvard wants! Pursue the far left purification agenda, but lawyer and HR up when asked in plain English to account for it. She should be promoted for this effort! But no, Harvard should fire her because the cause is rotten, not the execution. Grothman noticed:

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: Ok, …you’re not going to answer the question, and they only give me five minutes.

 

It turns out he knows about “diversity statements” the new tool used to make sure faculty have the right politics:

 

Is it common at Harvard to ask faculty to submit a diversity statement?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: That’s a practice that varies across schools at Harvard.…

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: Ok. Could a scientist ever get cut from consideration for from a job, because they had the wrong view of diversity?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: What I would say, is that we aim to draw to our faculty, the broadest pool of talent.

 

GLENN GROTHMAN: …when you hear that 1 percent of your faculty voted for a presidential candidate who got about 50 percent of the vote, nationwide, does that concern you, or do you feel you’re not as diverse as you should be?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: What I’m focused on, is making sure that we’re bringing the most academically talented faculty to our campus and that they are effective in the classroom.

 

GLENN GROTHMAN:… Has Harvard ever made a faculty job contingent on a strong diversity statement?

 

CLAUDINE GAY: We look at everything a faculty member will bring to our campus — academic brilliance and excitement and ability to teach a campus community and student community that is diverse —

 

I quote at length because the merry go round of refusing to answer the question and repeatedly asserting a false boilerplate about recruiting is so brilliantly executed.

 

Enough. Yes, Gay must go. But don’t let them say so sorry, you copied and pasted an abstract during the literature review in your thesis, and you fudged some numbers, you were wonderful but we have to let you go for these little transgressions. Don’t let them paper over the murderous anti-semitism and continue the march thorough the institution. Don’t let them continue to undermine the foundations of our best universities, ripping out meritocracy, exams, actual competence, academic freedom, and pursuit of truth. Fire her for doing her job well, but we want someone to do a different job!

 

Yes, I know this is unrealistic, and not how political decisions are made. Still, the larger point remains. Firing Gay over plagiarism and data fudging, and sending Stanford’s 20 person committee to put in a replacement will not bring about the change we need.

 

Update:

 

A correspondent writes to object to my characterization of the Sullivan and Fryer stories, suggesting that less well known facts merited some sanction. Perhaps. But undeniably Harvard in general and Gay in particular left a strong impression that left-wing politics played a role. When students started complaining about feeling “unsafe” because Sullivan provided Weinstein with a legal defense, they could have told students to grow up and handled any other issues separately. When sanctioning a star professor whose research findings directly challenge the Dean’s and the campus orthodoxy, an institution that wants to preserve a reputation for neutrality will go out of its way to act neutrally, and especially in comparison to similar cases from more conforming researchers. The institutional reputation is the issue, and not just right-wing nut-jobs viewed these cases as politically motivated.

Rising Antisemitism Corresponds With a Depressing Amount of Broader Ignorance

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday,  December 20, 2023

 

The good news is the bad news is wrong. The bad news? A Harvard-Harris poll found that 67 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.”

 

One piece of good news: The poll is pretty lousy, as Ilya Somin, author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, explained  for Reason magazine. The poll combines two questions in one, asking people to agree to both the description of “Jews as a class” and how they should be treated, and it uses terms like “oppressor” that are fairly unfamiliar to people not plugged into campus-speak.

 

Even better news: The poll is an outlier. Surveys from respected outfits like the Pew Research Center find that American attitudes toward Jews are pretty favorable.

 

But this is where the supply of good news runs dry. Because even if Harvard’s findings exaggerate the problem, the problem still exists. Actually, there are several problems: rising antisemitism in the U.S., particularly among young people and—not unrelatedly—a depressing amount of both general ignorance and highly cultivated ignorance.

 

Given the horrific headlines since the Hamas attack, it’s not worth rehashing the evidence of antisemitism’s resurgence, both on college campuses and off. In October, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that antisemitism was reaching historic levels, with fully 60 percent of religious hate crimes being committed against 2.4 percent of the population.

 

As for general ignorance, an Economist/YouGov poll finds that 1 in 5 18- to 29-year-olds believe the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30 percent said they don’t know if it is. One way to look at this is to just throw this on the pile with other depressing findings of widespread ignorance about things that have nothing to do with Jews. Half of Americans cannot name the three branches of the U.S. government.

 

Social media surely plays a big role. While it’s true that bad actors, at home and abroad, have been pumping antisemitic sewage onto kids’ screens for a while now, it’s worth keeping in mind that digital iconoclasm—tearing down any established truths—and conspiratorialism are rampant on the internet. (A quarter of Europeans, and twice as many Russians, think the moon landing was faked. Nearly a fifth of young Americans agree.)

 

Still, The Economist found that most older Americans know the Holocaust happened. In other words, young people are a particular problem.

 

Which brings us to the cultivated ignorance, i.e. the deliberate encouragement of anti-Jewish bigotry by various institutions and “influencers.”

 

The right has a well-publicized antisemitism problem. The GOP frontrunner famously dined with antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Various New Right and alt-right gargoyles indulge anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric from their internet perches.

 

That’s all grotesque, but those gargoyles don’t control the commanding heights of the culture the way the left does. The power of  left-aligned academics and activists shouldn’t be underestimated. While groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center and the elite media outlets that rely on them as authoritative sources have covered right-wing antisemitism zealously, they have allowed the intellectual poison  of anti-colonial and anti-oppressor ideology to go unchecked. This ideology takes it as a given that Jews, Zionists, Israelis—pick your label—are indeed “oppressors.” This framing is seductive to young people who want to belong to a righteous, rebellious  cause more than master basic facts.

 

For instance, UC-Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner recently conducted a small survey of college students on issues related to Israel. Most students (86 percent) supported the popular chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But nearly half (47 percent) couldn’t name the river (Jordan) or the sea (Mediterranean) in the chant. Some guessed that the river was the Nile or Euphrates and that the sea was the Atlantic or Caribbean. Ten percent thought Yasser Arafat was the first prime minister of Israel.

 

It’s fine to condemn both sides (I do!). But the shock of decent liberals and progressives at the explosion of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas attack is testament to the delinquency of the left-wing elites running academic and cultural institutions. When professors and students celebrate a pogrom and administrators find themselves tongue-tied about condemning murder or the harassment of Jews on their own campuses, the complacency becomes obvious.

 

One last piece of good news: When Hassner’s researchers explained basic facts to the students who enthusiastically embraced “from the river to the sea,” many of them changed their views. Yes, this survey illustrates the failures of the center-left. It also shows they can remedy them—if they want to.

2023: A Year of (More) Bad Ideas

By Itxu Díaz

Sunday, December 31, 2023

 

Bad ideas have existed since the dawn of time. Eve had a crappy idea when she offered Adam the apple. Mao thought sparrows were a pest, exterminated them, and caused a famine that killed millions of Chinese. The idea that the Titanic was an unsinkable ship was particularly stupid. And Decca Records turning down The Beatles in 1962 was the pop industry’s most notorious shot in the foot.

 

Disastrous ideas have always been there. In over 20 years in the profession, I have been amazed at the amount of terrifying, stupid, illegal, ruinous, wrong, or ridiculous ideas that can emerge within a company in the short space of a couple of days. The year 2023 has been no different. One of the problems with the crazed proliferation of business meetings is that it gives too many opportunities to express an opinion to people whose greatest service to humanity would be to work in silence. Even so, the worst ideas will never cease to exist. What’s really needed is not to extinguish the witless idiots, but to make sure that the people who must ultimately make the decisions are not as half-baked as the ideas that come to their table.

 

Politics is a fertile ground for bad ideas. Communism, for example, is a terrible idea. If, instead of pertaining to the realm of ideologies, communism moved into the realm of science, it would be more out of the question today than the commercialization of Google Glass. If an experiment were to cause more than 100 million deaths, no sensible scientist would repeat it. Raising taxes ruins the real economy, but in the realm of politics, or political economy, there are still plenty of bad managers willing to do it. Passing laws to fund sex changes for minors is an atrocity, an unnatural stupidity, but in the political universe it has its place because there are people willing to vote enthusiastically for the worst possible ideas if they believe them to be genuine ideas, true to their ideological stripe.

 

Multiculturalism, for example, is another big stupidity. It is an invention that only works in the thick sociology textbooks I endured as an undergraduate. In practice, it is as effective as a telephone without a microphone. It is a typical failed product that would not have survived either if its survival depended on the economic laws of a capitalist market. For centuries, academic communities, civil society, and intellectuals have worked to maintain and enhance one’s own culture, protecting it, not diluting it in a magma of cultures. It had a reasonable explanation: Even if we were to take for granted the fallacy that all cultures are equally good (a claim that loses strength in the face of Aztec human sacrifices), the only way for them to survive is for them to be isolated, strengthened, so that someone cares about them.

 

Today, educational establishments, school and university textbooks, and a large part of the media strongly support the idea that multiculturalism is a success. We miss the point of view of those who preceded us centuries ago, when culture consisted of safeguarding the good, the beautiful, the true, the useful, the tried and tested, of each community of individuals.

 

However, political leaders who make stupid decisions do not usually do so by intuition, but often rely on equally idiotic theories or ideological currents with which, if necessary, they can justify their initiatives. That is why these days we find so many socialist leaders justifying trans laws through the queer doctrines and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of Judith Butler. The “intellectual” of gender feminism is probably the most overrated philosopher of the last century. Her theses are full of holes, her assumptions are a load of nonsense, and the practical effects are devastating for society. She who came to save women has ended up eliminating sex, and thus eliminating women. Yet she enjoys incredible popularity because she allows idiot politicians to cling to bad ideas. They do so without needing to understand Butler’s thesis, just by quoting it as if it were the ultimate source of sociological authority. In fact, that is like citing the Beagle Boys as the ideologues of a national plan against theft. Of course, the plan won’t be good at stopping theft, but it won’t be good for the thieves either, because the Beagle Boys were the clumsiest thieves in the history of comics.

 

There are two areas where conservatives, and in general people who prefer truth to ideology, have fared particularly poorly in the last half century: universities and the media. This is a failure by default. Universities, once a beacon of wisdom for the entire West, have been savagely colonized by the Left since the start of the second half of the last century. The media, and the entertainment industry, followed a similar path. They provide ideological sustenance, or a mirage of social approval, to idiot politicians who are willing to rubber-stamp nefarious ideas.

 

Politics rarely allows for a confrontation of ideas. Our modern parliaments work more with Instagram — sometimes even Tinder — in mind than with intellectual debate. Argentine president Javier Milei has been a happy exception in this respect. His pedagogical offensive has managed to penetrate society — although that society, Argentina, had to reach an extreme point of depravity, corruption, and poverty for someone to begin to listen to the counter-current ideas of the man who is now the president.

 

Bad ideas will continue to surface. What seems crazy today, the Left will make real tomorrow, perhaps as soon as next year. If no one prevents it, the lonely voices clamoring for postpartum abortion, for infanticide, or the trans-species lunatics demanding their right to be recognized as animals, will in 2024 have an idiot politician at the helm unable to detect that these are terrible ideas. The hope lies in the formation of a more ambitious, more intellectual, more didactic, and more courageous political class. And in gradually reconquering the media and the universities, so that at least terrible ideas can be confronted in the academic and media sphere with brilliant ones. I fear that this, too, will be an exclusively conservative undertaking.

 

It’s true that the Left is the driving force of much that ails us. Yet all that we have suffered this year, and are suffering today is also the consequence of several decades in which right-wing politicians repeated parrot-like that the only thing that people really worry about is the economy. They thereby justified their failure to contest seriously in ideological debates. Conservatives who have been too focused on the economy have forgotten to be present in other forums, and have wasted the opportunity to wage cultural war on non-economic ideas also in the academic sphere. Maybe that’s why university chairs of what were once the Humanities are today seeming more like an outing to the zoo. If next year is going to be any better than this one, then conservative politicians can no longer abdicate these debates. A (sad) spoiler for 2024: Bad ideas will continue to be among us. A (happy) wish for 2024: that idiot politicians lose important ideological debates on the streets, in classrooms, and in the media. We should be as insistent with our ideas as environmentalists, although without gluing our hands to the Mona Lisa — which, although it is artistically a little overrated, is not to blame.

New Year’s Kiss-Off

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 29, 2023

 

Let me offer an early Happy New Year! 

 

Now with that out of the way, let me forthrightly declare that New Year’s is the worst “holiday”—and it’s not even close. Say what you will about the most familiar holidays imposed on us by Big Greeting Card, they actually celebrate things worth celebrating. Fathers! Mothers! America! The Star Wars franchise (okay, that’s a close call given Jar Jar Binks and Ahsoka)!

 

What is New Year’s celebrating? The turning of a page on a calendar. We made it another year! Of course, that’s true every day if you start the countdown 365 days ago. Well, that would be arbitrary, you champions of annualized crapulent bacchanalia might say. Look, I’m all in favor of looking for reasons to have a drink. But let’s be honest, it’s a new year everyday just as much as it is always 5 o’clock somewhere.

 

Let me just ask you, strawmen I just invented, what the hell do you think the current date is? I don’t mean to sound like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it’s not like the Bureau of Weights, Measures, and Machines that Authoritatively Ping (they updated their name in 2017) declared that January 1 is the “Go” square on the celestial Monopoly board. Seriously, New Year’s Eve might qualify as the first pseudoevent. 

 

The earliest record of a New Year celebration is from 2000 B.C. in Babylonia, and they celebrated that on the vernal equinox, which back then was on my birthday, March 21 (“March”—and “my birthday”—might not have existed yet, but the equinox certainly did). The Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Persians celebrated on that lesser equinox in the fall. And the Greeks smashed plates and did shots of grappa on the winter solstice. The Romans imposed this January 1 thing at the point of a sword. Look at all of you quislings, bending the knee to Roman settler colonialism! 

 

No other holiday combines the three things I hate most: existentialism, getting bumped in packed bars, spilled beer on my shoes, social pressure for “date nights,” TV specials with the worst people pretending to have a great time, staying up later than I want, waiting in a line to pee, watching performers I’ve never heard of lip sync songs I don’t like, glitter, trying to get reservations at places I don’t want to go to in the first place, forced enthusiasm by very large crowds, and celebrating accomplishments that require no effort.

 

Did I say three? Whatever. Let’s take the first and the last two. While I’m ideologically and philosophically a modernist—i.e., I like science, markets, democracy, reason, inalienable rights, the rule of law, and (if we ever sell The Dispatch for enough money I can afford one) state-of-the-art Japanese toilets—I’m temperamentally and aesthetically a Tolkienist or Chestertonian. I like coziness (Gemütlich), myth, romance, tradition, curses, legends, superstitions, ontological contradictions, forgotten books, richly adorned serif fonts, ancient trees, mysterious scrolls, enchantment, Old Things and other Capitalized Concepts, quirkiness, custom, Cathedrals, unexplainable jokes, cobblestone paths covered with moss, old houses the neighborhood kids are afraid of, and fences no one knows the origins of. I tend to dislike right angles, brutalist and other forms of modern art and architecture, sterility (outside of hospitals, kitchens, and bathrooms), super-efficient sources of heat, eating solely for nutrition, planned communities, and politics as the crow flies. 

 

I think it was perfectly fitting that Evil incarnate in Time Bandits mocked the Supreme Being for the universe he created: “If I were creating the world I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, Day 1!” 

 

Now, again, I don’t want to go back to medieval times (no matter how plentiful the Pepsi was). I like modern dentistry, air conditioning, and antibiotics too much. But Max Weber had a point when he said, “The fate of our times is characterized by intellectualization and rationalization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”

 

The calendar was one of the first great tools of disenchantment. It is a scientific artifact. It helped demystify one of the fundaments of Nature: time itself. 

 

Before the calendar, the passage of time was a profoundly mysterious thing. We may have had a good guess about when the next season was due or how old Uncle Grok was, but it wasn’t anything like an exact science. The calendar imposes rationality and, hence, predictability on the fourth dimension. I’m glad we have calendars, but I don’t worship them. Making the mere passage of time into a celebration is coldly sterile and arbitrarily manufactured to me. You might say, “What about birthdays?” Well, yes, they celebrate the passage of time, but the object of the celebration isn’t a unit of measurement—it’s a real human being. New Year’s clears the field of any meaningful object of affection other than ourselves, and treats sticking around on this planet as an accomplishment all on its own. 

 

Not only is it our most existential holiday, it’s like we crammed it in the middle of real holidays out of some misbegotten desire to give the existentialists their own reason to party. Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, celebrates gratitude and all of the comforts of the Hobbit hole. Christmas celebrates a birthday, but—not to get overly theological—a pretty darn special birthday. Easter celebrates a re-birthday of sorts.

 

I don’t really hate existentialism, because there are important insights to be found in contemplating the possibility that the universe doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us. William F. Buckley used to say, “The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists.” That’s how I feel about existentialism. I don’t mind the philosophy, my disagreements notwithstanding, I just don’t like the existentialists very much. That’s because the most forceful proponents of existentialism in everyday life fall into a category best summarized as “dicks.” 

 

Their dickishness derives from their tendency, like all those proverbial vegans and atheists, to constantly point out that other people’s sources of meaning are in fact meaningless. They take their own rejection of custom, reverence, tradition, and loyalty as an excuse to call you an idiot. Like Will Hunting explaining that meeting for coffee is just as arbitrary as meeting for caramel-eating, they use their arrogant alienation as a way to belittle other people’s commitments. They put the obnoxious LOL in “LOL, nothing matters.”

 

What the existentialists miss is that meaning comes from the things we do together, the commitments we inherit from the past, the causes we care about for the future, and the ideals that come from outside ourselves. I firmly believe the right to pursue happiness is an individual right, but the sources of happiness are mostly found in devotion to others. 

 

In other words, the problem of existentialism is the hyper-individualistic self-absorption. Whether it’s Nietzsche or Camus or the Joker, the emphasis is always on personal authenticity and individual will. It wasn’t enough for Nietzsche to reject God, he had to hector everyone else about it, too. “Life has no meaning a priori,” according to Jean-Paul Sartre. “It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” Camus says “the literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” But Woody Allen said it best: “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.” 

 

Which brings me to the celebration-on-the-cheap of it all. I’m no fan of Valentine’s Day, another day of forced enthusiasm and date-panic. But at least it puts the emphasis on precious human interactions—and wildly expensive prix-fixe menus. New Year’s keeps all the worst elements of Valentine’s Day while stripping it of sentiment, affection, and commitment. 

 

It’s a little like my gripe about generational obsessions with demographic cohorts and youth politics. Young people who take undue pride in being born later than the rest of us are shouting to the world they’ve got nothing else going for them to be proud of. I mean, they literally had no say in when they were born. The existentialist underpinnings of New Year’s turn survival into the equivalent of successfully scratching 365 hashmarks on the walls of the prison cell that is existence. Don’t get me wrong, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn literally did that in the gulag, he had every reason to celebrate with an extra crust of moldy bread, provided by a regime that carried the precepts of existentialism to one of its most notorious conclusions. After all, Soviet communism would have been impossible without a rejection of all those capitalized concepts that militate against the unrestrained imposition of will. 

 

Finally, there’s the crowds. I fully confess that this is informed by personal grievance—as opposed to the utterly reasonable and dispassionate analysis above. As longtime readers may recall, I dislike crowds, especially passionate crowds. One could even say I suffer from enochlophobia. I won’t rehash the dangers of false transcendence that come with crowds. I’ll just say that I find the very natural human tendency to find meaning and exhilaration by being part of a really big group off-puttingly atavistic. It’s probably my most remnant-y sentiment. 

 

I’m a New Yorker by birth and affinity. As such, I take a certain amount of pride in my hatred of the New Year’s “party” in Times Square, where thousands of people cram the streets like so many wayward Hebrews awaiting the unveiling of the Golden Calf, or in this case, a sparkly ball that descends maybe 20 or 30 feet at midnight. (At least the mobs in Pamplona risk getting gored by an actual not-so-golden bovine.) The lameness of the ball drop “spectacle” alone elicits a certain unjustified rage in me. In fairness, there are self-described New Yorkers who attend this most pedestrian of bacchanals: We Manhattanites call them “New Jerseyans,” though I’m sure some of them come—via fittingly subterranean bridges and tunnels—from the wilder territories of the outer-boroughs. 

 

I attended just one such “celebration.” Of course, there was a girl involved. She was from Westchester, of course. A lovely and brilliant woman—my first serious girlfriend—she nonetheless thought it would be “fun” if I joined her and her suburban friends in Time Square. And I caved to the pressure. She was wrong. It was colder than the meaningless universe the existentialists fetishize. I was bumped by people demonically possessed by the St. Vitus’ Dance of manufactured excitement. I waited on lines (New Yorkers say “on line” not “in line”) to be overcharged for beers at bars exceeding the occupancy dictated by the fire marshal, and I waited on lines to return the beers after internal processing. I held handbags for girls—the international symbol for men broken of all masculine pride, a sort of code for a failed balls-drop as it were—as they waited on even longer bathroom lines. We had arguments about whether we should go somewhere else. We jumped in place and stamped our feet to chase off the cold in our extremities, made all the more difficult by the spilled beer on our shoes. 

 

And then the ball dropped. 

 

While the people around me cheered because that was the fashionable thing to do, it took no effort for me to contain my excitement. But all that did for me is elicit an arrogant rage at the meaningless of the entire exercise. That’s it? Is that all there is? Why did we bother? 

 

Perhaps this is my real reason for hating New Year’s. It summoned within me the very demon of existentialist dread the crowd was celebrating evading for one more year, like so many Pamplona survivors. My girlfriend went back to Westchester that night, and while I no longer held her purse, I still felt like I was holding the bag, bitterly chuckling the equivalent of LOL, nothing matters. 

 

Ever since, my idea of the perfect New Year’s eve is a nice meal at home, with my lovely wife, our dependable enochlophobic beasts, in our own Hobbit hole, enjoying the fact we’re nowhere near the maddening crowds, and without the slightest concern that, having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, in the morning we’ll be lamenting we missed anything important at all. Happiness doesn’t just start at home, it lives there.

The Maine Misadventure

National Review Online

Saturday, December 30, 2023

 

Theodore Roosevelt’s attorney general once sardonically commented to his impetuous boss, who was on the verge of a headlong decision, “Ah, Mr. President, why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality?”

 

By the same token, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows wasn’t going to allow her decision to strike Donald Trump from the state’s ballot to be marred by any taint of disinterested legal reasoning or nonpartisanship.

 

Acting as judge, jury, and executioner regarding Article 3 of the 14th Amendment banning from office anyone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States government, Bellows held a hearing for several hours a couple of weeks ago before deciding to prohibit Trump from running in Maine. She thus follows in the dubious footsteps of the Colorado supreme court.

 

Even if Bellows has the authority to act in the manner she has — a proposition disputed by numerous scholars — it is a dangerous power that must be exercised with extreme care. Instead, like the Colorado court, she advances a conveniently broad interpretation of insurrection, joined to a conveniently broad interpretation of “engaged,” to get the result presumably most welcome to her as a partisan Democrat and fierce Trump critic.

 

Her act is put into unflattering relief by the nearly simultaneous decision of the California secretary of state to keep Trump on the ballot in the Golden State, where Governor Gavin Newsom has said the right way to defeat Trump is at the ballot box (although that’s easy to say in a state Trump loses by 30 points).

 

In a post-decision interview, Bellows boasted about Maine’s commitment to voting rights and its high levels of voter participation. This obviously sits uneasily with her determination that the primary candidate that most Republicans probably want to vote for in a couple of months can’t be an option. And it is more consequential than the decision in Colorado, because Trump actually won one of Maine’s four electoral votes in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Being denied that could decide the 2024 general election. Indeed, the newfound progressive appreciation for the limits the Constitution puts on the exercise of our democracy is rich coming from people who get the vapors any time someone says, correctly, that we are a constitutional republic not a democracy.

 

The fundamental problem with the Maine and Colorado decisions is that they are mistaken as a matter of law — and not in a merely technical way, but in one that strikes at the heart of self-government. This latest misadventure should provide more incentive for the Supreme Court to rule on the underlying questions at issue, and ensure that these extremely consequential ballot decisions are influenced by much more than a taint of legality.

How Well Does College Prepare a Student for the Workforce?

By George Leef

Thursday, December 28, 2023

 

Increasingly, the answer to that question seems to be “not very well.” Many students emerge from their college years primed to gripe about all the world’s ills, but unable to do useful work. Now that English 101 has been decolonized and the old standards for language have been tossed aside as white hegemony, employers find that college grads aren’t much good at simple tasks involving reading and writing.

 

In today’s Martin Center article, Ashlynn Warta looks at a new survey finding that college isn’t the advantage it used to be.

 

She writes, “A recent survey by eLearning firm Go1 found that employees of varying ages feel that their college degree has not been the most helpful contributor to their workplace preparation. Forty-six percent of respondents said that higher education failed to prepare them for their current jobs; 61 percent of those polled reported that their work experience had offered better preparation. Despite the differing ages and nationalities of the 3,000-plus employees polled, the findings remained fairly consistent across all groups.”

 

Many colleges, coasting on reputations established generations back, have allowed their standards to fall badly and for political zealots to take over teaching and hiring. The consequences of those decisions are going to be felt for years to come.

Farewell to Normalcy

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

 

On Christmas Eve I watched Tucker Carlson interview actor Kevin Spacey, inexplicably in character as the sleazy politician he portrayed on House of Cards.

 

Spacey had no reason to reprise the role, and Carlson—a semi-serious political commentator who may or may not become vice president—seemed to have no reason to offer him a platform. The segment wasn’t even played for obvious laughs, as one would expect if it were a holiday goof. The two appear to have nothing in common apart from the fact that they’ve each faced some, ah, professional hiccups in recent years after being accused of misconduct.

 

It made no sense. Even so, as I watched I thought, “Yeah, that scans.”

 

On Christmas Day I was tooling around online when the presumptive Republican nominee for president posted his yuletide greetings on Truth Social. If ever there were a moment for a candidate for office to play it safe and stick to basic well wishes, Christmas is it. Flashing some Christian bona fides by reminding readers of the reason for the season would also be sensible, knowing how religious voters might appreciate it.

 

Instead he used the occasion to hope that his enemies “rot in hell.” And as I read that I thought, “Yeah, that scans.”

Trump’s message and Tucker’s interview were fitting ways to wind down 2023, the year America finally gave up on normal politics.

 

In both cases, flouting expectations of normalcy was the point. Trump felt no need to feign normal emotions like piety or goodwill with his Christmas message because he knows he’ll pay no price among his admirers for failing to do so. “Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.

 

Carlson’s video, trivial though it is, was also designed to challenge what we regard as normal. That’s been his political project for years. Tucker understands that illiberalism won’t go mainstream in America unless Americans learn to distrust “the system” more than they do those who have run afoul of it, which is why he’s forever trying to normalize the latter. Russia isn’t evil, the January 6 defendants are innocent, manosphere influencer and accused rapist Andrew Tate is worth listening to: Rehabbing Kevin Spacey after the film industry ostracized him and prosecutors came after him (although, in fairness, without convicting him) is another small nudge in that direction. If the Joker were a real person, Carlson would have interviewed him respectfully half a dozen times already and treated him like some countercultural sage because that’s what an all-out (and I do mean all-out) assault on received wisdom requires.

 

We’d all better get used to it, though. The lesson of 2023 is that abnormality is here to stay.

 

***

 

On Tuesday pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson flagged a great irony of the coming presidential campaign. The guy who’s been cracked up to be a dictator in the making is, arguably, the “normalcy candidate” in the race.

 

I’ve noticed that irony before myself.

 

Trump got elected in 2016 because he promised chaos, Anderson pointed out, a candidate so far outside the political norm that he’d necessarily change the way government functioned once in office. (Which turned out to be sort of true!) If he wins in 2024 he’ll do so by promising order, returned to power by an electorate desperate to address crises that seem beyond the Biden White House’s control.

 

This year has been the one in which Americans truly gave up on the incumbent president’s ability to restore the sense of normalcy his election in 2020 promised.

 

The year he took office—2021—began auspiciously just two weeks after January 6 and with news from the CDC about the new vaccines potentially snuffing out COVID. But that turned out to be fool’s gold; another terrible wave of the disease arrived that summer, then another that winter. In August, Biden’s old-pro reputation for competence was shattered when he ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan and that country’s government promptly collapsed. By fall, supply-chain issues and exorbitant COVID relief spending had triggered the worst inflation in 40 years.

 

Still, he’d only been in office for one year. The next, 2022, would be his chance to right the ship—but inflation, which had been dismissed at first as “transitory,” persisted. In February Russia attacked Ukraine, touching off the biggest war in Europe since World War II. The Federal Reserve began raising interest rates aggressively to try to cool off rising prices, making mortgages too burdensome for many aspiring home-buyers.

 

In 2023 inflation slowed down. Dark forecasts of a recession caused by interest-rate hikes began to brighten; the economy continued to grow. As the year ends, the so-called “misery index” has dropped to its lowest point since the start of the pandemic. Yet the sense of Biden having lost control lingers. A new war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas will soon enter its third month. Encounters between migrants and U.S. agents at the southern border, which had eased earlier this year, have lately reached new monthly highs.

 

Mingled throughout all of this chaos is the inescapable fact that Joe Biden is the oldest person to hold the office of president, a record he sets anew each day. Within his own party, 69 percent say he’s too old to serve another term effectively. In September, fully two-thirds of Democrats and “leaners” said they’d prefer someone else as their presidential nominee. Despite the good economic news, his net job approval in the RealClearPolitics average over the past month has been among the worst of his tenure. He now trails Trump routinely in head-to-head polling.

 

Put all of that together and I fear 2023 was the year the country swallowed the hard reality that normalcy isn’t coming back on Grandpa Joe’s watch. Either he lacks the political acumen to make it happen or he lacks the physical and mental wherewithal needed to stay on top of events. Anderson writes:

 

Whatever advantage Mr. Biden held over Mr. Trump on the issue of who would be more likely to bring about order, stability and calm, it has surely been erased at this point. Indeed, many voters have begun to look back longingly at the Trump era. While, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters said by a 30-point margin that Mr. Biden’s policies have hurt them personally more than helped, by a 12-point margin, the same voters were more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies helped them. …

 

This is why, already, Trump is beginning to work to portray himself as the safer, more stable pick and to go to great — even misleading — lengths to claim that Mr. Biden actually wants chaos and has created a world filled with more terror. He has already produced ads suggesting that Mr. Biden’s inability to lead is directly responsible for the global disorder that threatens American security, and it is a message voters have begun to echo in polling.

 

This has also been the year that Democrats, and American voters generally, confronted the startling fact that this very old and unpopular politician not only intended to run for another term but that he would face no serious opposition from within his own party in doing so. Never in my life (and I’m pretty old!) has a party nominated a candidate for president so reluctantly, with so many misgivings about his ability to do the job. In a democracy, where voters are supposed to have their way, that’s as abnormal as abnormal gets.

 

The good news for Democrats is that, one way or another, in 2028 their nominating process should look far more normal. But for the next five years, they and we will need to endure the bizarre spectacle of a man in his mid-80s trying to simply get through the day while doing the most important job in the world.

 

And that’s the best-case scenario for the outcome of the coming election. There’s another.

 

***

 

I have a theory that Nikki Haley’s modestly rising support in the Republican primary is based mainly on nostalgia. Which is ironic, as there’s never been a candidate whose agenda is more blatantly nostalgic than the guy running on a platform of making America great again.

 

There’s more to Haley’s support, of course. Traditional conservatives prefer a candidate who hopes to shrink government at home and exercise American power abroad. They like her on the policy merits.

 

But it really can’t be said enough: Nikki Haley is a disciplined politician. And discipline is a far less common trait among Republican candidates in 2023 than it used to be.

 

The frontrunner in the GOP primary must be the single most undisciplined national figure in the history of the party. “Chaos follows him,” Haley likes to say of Trump, ever so carefully. But chaos follows a lot of Republicans nowadays. Trump’s most formidable rival successor, Ron DeSantis, blew through more than $100 million in fundraising in this year’s race (partly because he couldn’t shake his fondness for flying on private jets), recently saw his super PAC implode, and somehow ended up employing people who thought it’d be a good idea to stick white-supremacist iconography into promotional videos.

 

In a very abnormal party, Haley’s an abnormally normal candidate. Many of us are nostalgic for that. 

 

Many, but not enough. Despite her admirable discipline, she’s about to get smoked in most of the early states and will likely be out of the race before Super Tuesday.

 

That’s because 2023 will be remembered as the year Republican voters leaned into abnormalcy to a degree unprecedented in American history. It marks the completion of the GOP’s transformation from a party, which concerns itself primarily with policy, to a vessel dominated by a personality cult.

 

I don’t need to tell that story at length because I tell it in one form or another in this newsletter every day. Having absorbed a coup plot, an insurrection at the Capitol, two impeachments, and 91 criminal counts in federal and state courts, the American right has decided that the figure at the center of all of that abnormality is the person they want for president again in 2024.

 

Overwhelmingly, too. Even during his best period of polling, DeSantis was never within 10 points of Trump in the national average. As I write this, he’s 51 points behind.

 

There’s no way to view Trump’s runaway victory this year except as enthusiastic collective ratification of his misconduct, civic and otherwise. This is the year that his famous statement about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing a vote proved to be an understatement. Given how his polling rose following his first indictment, it’d be more accurate to say that shooting someone on Fifth Avenue would gain him votes within the Republican Party.

 

I didn’t see it coming. As cynical as I am, I couldn’t conceive that GOP voters would reward him for the trouble he’s brought America when they had a perfectly satisfactory Trumpy replacement available in DeSantis. Last year’s midterms cemented that conviction: After Trump’s candidates underperformed while DeSantis overperformed (wildly), it seemed like sheer electability would tip the balance between them. Normal political logic—voting for the most right-wing and non-insane candidate who can win a general election—would reassert itself at last.

 

It did not. It turns out that quite literally nothing could have torn them away from Trump. In lieu of normal political logic, Republican voters soon will have chosen to put themselves and the country through a series of destabilizing civic crises that could have been averted simply by choosing a different nominee.

 

Crisis: Either Trump, with his autocratic pretensions, will be back in power in 14 months or we’ll endure the trauma of another “rigged election” propaganda campaign next fall. (Or next month, even.) States may struggle to agree on matters as basic as how many electoral votes each candidate won. If he loses, his supporters will insist that his defeat was unfair because of the lawfare that hobbled him during the campaign. Whatever happens, America will be on a knife’s edge.

 

Crisis: Trump is unlikely to be acquitted of all 91 criminal charges against him before the election, which means he’ll either be a convicted felon on Election Day or he’ll short-circuit the pending prosecutions against him once he returns to office. (Or both, perhaps.) Whichever it is, respect for the law will crumble. The spectacle of electing an accused or actual criminal will disillusion many millions of Americans about their country allegedly being the greatest in the world. 

 

Crisis: Either Trump will be reinstated on Colorado’s presidential ballot or he’ll be disqualified as a candidate by a majority of nine unelected justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Denying the people their right to elect him would be the heaviest blow to democratic legitimacy in the history of the United States. Reinstating him on the ballot would reek of a political outcome engineered by a court that leans his way ideologically. Whichever it is, esteem for the court as an institution will sink.

 

If any of these crises are met with violence, that’ll be a crisis in itself.

 

We are plunging into something terrible and are doing so voluntarily, despite the fact that the terrible things to come are foreseeable and avoidable. I don’t think there’s been a civic catastrophe of that scale in my lifetime. The character of the people has changed; national elections are now a matter not of excitement or suspense but dread.

 

The year 2020 was the same way. One might call it a new normal.

 

***

 

In 2024 we’ll find out how many Americans are comfortable with that new normal.

 

The last great irony of this campaign is how heavily Trump, the avatar of abnormality, will end up depending on swing voters who prefer him for traditionally normal reasons. They’re the people Anderson has in mind when she writes of “exhausted” America, the ones who have it in their heads that reelecting him will somehow push prices back down to what they were in 2019 and magically intimidate the planet’s malefactors into not starting any new wars. He’s counting on them to set aside the prospects of domestic upheaval if he’s reelected as fanciful or grossly overstated.

 

Most of Nikki Haley’s voters will end up backing him in the general election for an even more anodyne “normal” reason: They’re Republicans, and Republicans vote for Republicans, period.

 

If America rewards him with another term in spite of everything, the GOP will have no electoral incentive in 2028 and beyond to prefer less destabilizing nominees. On the contrary, Trump’s authoritarian politics will be read as an asset in hindsight, helping him appeal to voters exasperated with the more familiar forms of chaos the country experienced during Biden’s presidency. Once that happens, Democrats might themselves conclude that there’s less electoral risk than they thought in nominating radicals. In 2020 their voters rallied behind Joe Biden after Bernie Sanders won several early primaries, believing that nominating a more “normal” liberal would give them an advantage against Trump. And it did …

 

… but if Trump, thoroughly disgraced, ends up defeating Biden in 2024, what’s left of that alleged advantage? If you’re a Democrat, why not be bold with your choice of nominee the way Republicans have?

 

It could be many years before American politics is “normal” again, I fear. This year has raised the possibility; the outcome in 2024 could cinch it. Perpetual dread is not a good advertisement for democracy.

The Left’s Whackjob Problem—and Ours

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

 

While trying to figure out what to write about today, I found an interesting Christmas Day tweet in my bookmarks folder (When discussing Twitter, FYI, the X is silent):

 

There should be a name for people like Taylor Lorenz and Shaun King where right-wingers figure out they’re crazy really early on, liberals get negatively polarized into defending them, and then they start acting so insane that the libs have to admit the conservatives were right.

 

The author of this observation, Swann Marcus, makes a useful point, which strikes glancing blows at several others. 

 

Lorenz and King are good examples of what he’s primarily talking about. I’m not going to dwell on either of them. But Lorenz was the subject of much scorn recently because of a little Covid-related tirade she went on about the “social murder of disabled people just because it’s ‘the holidays.’” Lorenz says she’s immunocompromised and I have no desire to criticize her frustrations, real or imagined, that come with her condition. I do think dunking on your family about it on Twitter is a debatable judgment call. Shaun King is also a piece of work, most recently garnering attention for falsely claiming that he’s been working behind the scenes to free Israeli hostages while simultaneously cheerleading for Hamas. 

 

There are other leftwing figures who fit this category. Rebekah Jones was obviously a fabulist from very early on. My friend Charlie Cooke was sort of a reverse Jack McGee on this beat. McGee was the character from the old Incredible Hulk TV series who was obsessed with proving the green behemoth was real. Meanwhile Charlie was determined to demonstrate that Jones was a fake. The mainstream media disregarded Charlie’s warnings, citing her as an expert, a whistleblower, and champion of “science,” long after it was obvious on the right that she was a hyperpartisan and paranoid crank. (When her son was taken into custody for threatening to shoot up a school, Jones insisted that the family had been targeted by Ron DeSantis as political retaliation). 

 

This could actually be a fun parlor game (feel free to add your own in the comments). Name a nutjob, grifter, or craven opportunist spotted early by the right that the left either embraced from the get-go, or doubled-down on precisely because the right criticized them. Michael Avenatti, Jussie Smollett, Scott Ritter, and Naomi Wolf come immediately to mind.

 

Fish recognizing they’re wet. 

 

But I wonder if there are several biases at work in this game. The first is recency. We tend to put a lot of emphasis on the folks we remember. Once the left finally abandons these people, they kind of fade away because no one is propping them up. Also, social media and cable news make it much easier to become instant celebrities, and therefore almost as instantaneous has-beens. 

 

In the old days, the time-lag between becoming famous and getting debunked could last long enough to live quite well. Herbert Matthews, the New York Times reporter who did so much to make Fidel Castro into a likable democratic freedom fighter, probably wasn’t a fraud so much as a dupe. He bought the spin from the Communists in Spain and Cuba alike (he also had a brief man-crush on Mussolini, when that was acceptable on the left). Still, he died with his legend largely intact outside the pages of National Review. Walter Duranty, likewise, was such an accomplished stenographer for the Bolsheviks that he made a list compiled by George Orwell of journalists not to be trusted by the British government because he believed they were either paid agents of Moscow or simply acted like it pro bono. His whitewashing of genocide is still not enough for the Times to give back his Pulitzer.

 

There’s also the fact that sometimes a little fraud is enough to break into the business and then you can play by the rules, at least for a while. “Fake it till you make it,” is a time-honored strategy, and was much easier before Google existed. If the allegations against Claudine Gay are true, she’d be good proof of that. Likewise, I firmly believe that Dan Rather got his big break in journalism as a faker, but once he had a profile, he had a very good run, until, well, the end.

 

Now, I could do this stuff all day, because I was raised by a father who clung to his historical anti-Communist receipts like it was a collection of Fabergé eggs. Spending my entire adult life in conservative world only intensified my passion for this kind of thing. I mean, don’t get me started on Alger Hiss!

 

The right’s whackjob problem.

 

Which brings me to the most obvious bias. The right has its own problem with this kind of thing. “Love me, love my whackjobs” is a human problem. I mean, just look around. There are still rightwingers inclined to circle the wagons, to one degree or another, around Mike Lindell, Mike Flynn, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Andrew Tate, Jack Posobiec, even the artist formerly known as Kanye West.

 

Swann, the guy who sent me down this rabbit hole with that tweet, has a theory about the asymmetry between left and right. “Right-wingers are different because the median right-winger is far crazier than the median liberal so there is almost no limit to how nuts a conservative can be and still have a following.” He adds that “there are GOP primaries Tate could win with a Trump endorsement.”

 

I think there’s some merit to this as a broad generalization, but I could spend another thousand words on caveats and context. But I have to be honest, it would be much, much, easier for me to say this is unfair about the median rightwinger, if the median rightwing voter wasn’t currently sitting on the buckboard of a wagon doing lazy concentric circles around a candidate who says his talk about immigrants poisoning our blood couldn’t be Hitlerian because he never read Mein Kampf. It’s a strange defense to insist that you came to your Hitlerian rhetoric honestly. I’m waiting for Trump to go with the new Ivy League Defense®: “I didn’t plagiarize Adolf Hitler, I just used duplicative language!”

 

Regardless, I think the asymmetry between right and left is worth dwelling on. We don’t need to get into the weeds on the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions (a term Gramsci didn’t coin, by the way). As I’ve written too many times now, institutions are supposed to filter out bad actors, free radicals, opportunists, corner-cutters, frauds, and hotheads. The army is supposed to be on the lookout for recruits who enjoy killing too much, newspapers are supposed to be on guard for whippersnappers who seem too good at getting fantastic anonymous quotes, universities have procedures to catch data that is too good to check, and so on. 

 

Many on the left are put out by the—by my lights obvious—observation that they control most elite institutions. Heck, take out Fox News and a few other (much smaller) avowedly rightwing media outlets, I’m hard pressed to even justify the qualifier “most.” This imbalance has real sociological consequences. All of which are amplified in the new media climate. 

 

I don’t mean to sound unduly arrogant—just perhaps duly grateful—but because I grew up professionally at National Review and AEI, I benefited from an institutional emphasis on drawing distinctions between responsible and irresponsible rightwingery, between genuine intellectual conservatism and angry populist contrarianism for its own sake (I’m proud of the fact I had the number of people like Milo Yianopolous, Charlie Kirk, and yes, Donald Trump, from the outset. Fat lot of good that did me). Still, I’m not claiming to have never crossed that line between responsible and irresponsible, but when people persuasively pointed out to me that I had, I took it to heart (having my dad kibbitz over nearly everything I wrote, albeit after publication, until he died helped as well). 

 

William F. Buckley took seriously the idea that a policy of “no enemies on the right” would undermine the conservative project.  That’s why some—admittedly often brilliant—NR writers had to be shown the door from time to time.  That’s also why Buckley found it necessary to break with the Birchers and other nominal “allies” on the right. 

 

You know who else was involved with the defenestration of the Birchers? Barry Goldwater. Because he understood the danger they posed to the anti-Communist cause, but also to another fledgling conservative institution—the Republican Party (the GOP was old, but its conservatism then was still fresh). 

 

Anyway, you should get the point: Such institutional stewardship is impossible in an era when the GOP frontrunner can claim that the likes of Chip Roy is a “RINO.” The right is in a post-institutional stewardship era. I’m not saying there are no would-be stewards; I’m saying the tools just aren’t there for them to exert much control over the broader right in the attention-economy. I think NR, AEI, and a few other right-of-center institutions are good at maintaining quality control over their own products and staff, but their ability to steer the broader rightwing “market” of consumers and voters away from craziness is profoundly limited (hey, we’re trying at The Dispatch). And that’s if they even want to try. 

 

For instance, the religious right was once a coalition of institutions that served to weed out candidates of questionable moral character. The few that still try are vilified for even raising the issue of character. As I noted in my most recent column, Donald Trump is in the process of sidelining the most successful conservative institution of the last generation, the Federalist Society.

 

When catching the car isn’t good enough.

 

But let’s get back to the left. The problem with the left’s long march through the institutions is the marchers didn’t want to stop marching. I’ve long argued that America has a kind of autoimmune disorder. The mostly noble effort to purge America of racism, sexism, this-ism, and that-ism achieved most of its achievable goals a long time ago. But the zeal for their project didn’t go away. So the left intensified its efforts, going after the last vestiges of the stuff it hates—or creating new monsters to destroy to justify keeping the revolution going. All of that “critical” race, legal, and gender theory stuff and the Howard Zinn historiography project can best be understood as an attempt to carry the revolution backward in time. You can tell the anti-racism cause has reached immune-disorder territory when statues of abolitionists are getting torn down. 

 

Every revolution, small and large, is prone to rejecting victory. Without responsible stewards to stop them, the revolutionaries launch hunts for internal heretics and the less-than-pure. Jacobins start hunting Girondists, because all the monarchists are long gone. Bolsheviks start liquidating Mesheviks, and eventually, other Bolsheviks. 

 

Even being a moderate liberal starts to count as the new rightwing in these bubbles. Look at the Biden White House: The kids signing “open letters” think Biden is a conservative. 

 

This auto-immune ideology dominates many institutions. They’re aided and abetted by mutually validating foundations and journalists who’ve grown up entirely in a leftwing monoculture that thinks it’s the job of these institutions to keep marching, even though they caught the car. 

 

One result of this mindset, and the monopoly that engenders it, is that the products of all of these institutions are simply assumed to be authoritative. “How can you question the NIH? Harvard? The New York Times? Don’t you understand that these are authoritative institutions?”

 

But these institutions have jettisoned much of their authority precisely because they have cleansed themselves of dissenting points of view. Dan Rather was undone in part by his own asininity, but that asininity was enabled by the lack of anyone in the newsroom who didn’t want his bogus story about George W. Bush to be true just as much as he did. Hate crime and rape hoaxes—and there have been plenty—almost always get identified by rightwingers, because leftwingers are ideologically primed to assume they must be true (unless, of course, you have ample evidence the rapist or anti-Semite was a member of Hamas). 

 

Actual Marxism gets too much credit as an influence of the average leftwinger, but the vulgar Marxist tendency to dismiss contrary evidence or arguments based upon the interests or motives of the messenger thrives in the left’s monoculture. “Oh some rightwinger at National Review says Rebecka Jones is lying? Who cares? She was just quoted in the New York Times! They wouldn’t do that if she was untrustworthy.” 

 

Of course they would—and did.

 

The result is that crackpots and fraudsters of the left—Naomi Wolf, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., et al.—can go years exploiting the good will and unearned status of elite institutions. Indeed, sometimes, as with the case of Wolf and Kennedy, the only thing that will get the left to admit they are embarrassments is when they start playing footsie with the right. 

 

The reason I think things will get worse before they get better is that the dysfunctions of the left fuel the dysfunctions of the right, and vice versa. In an environment where each side picks the worst excesses of the other and holds them up as representative, it’s impossible to avoid political warfare with each side holding up the most damning totems of the other side. It’s even harder in an environment when responsible stewards from your own side are so easy to dismiss as corrupt members of some horrible “establishment.” 

 

I don’t know how you unwind this problem. I don’t think the dysfunction of the right can be solved until Donald Trump is no longer in the picture. The incentives to defend your own side, no matter what, are just too strong. And so long as so many on the right defend literally anything Trump says and does, the broader left will never trust anything else the right says. 

 

But I do think a lot of elite progressive institutions could start a long march to sanity by hiring a lot more sane conservatives committed to the fundamental missions that define education, journalism, and even entertainment. Large institutions need internal intellectual and ideological diversity because groupthink is a universal human problem, not just a problem of the left or the right. The diversity mania of identity politics leads to institutions that all “look” alike, but think the same way. Harvard’s Claudine Gay should go not because she’s a black woman, but because she’s fallen short of Harvard’s own standards. Keeping her on isn’t just a problem for Harvard, or higher education: She’s a problem for the identity politics worldview of Harvard’s own brahmins. You can see a parallel of it in microcosm at Fox, which has a wide assortment of female and minority apologists for Trump or Trumpism. But few serious progressives are capable of, and few conservatives are willing to, meaningfully push back on any of it.