No, White Supremacy Isn’t to Blame for Tyre Nichols’s Death

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

Q: What do you call it when five black cops brutally beat a black man to death, in violation of their oaths, their duties, and all respect for the sanctity of human life?

 

A: White supremacy.

 

Alas, I am not kidding. In a piece for CNN on Friday, the political commentator Van Jones argued that the killing of Tyre Nichols showed “it’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers Black lives,” and, in particular, time to comprehend that “one of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects.” “At the end of the day,” Jones wrote, “it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

 

In Saturday’s New York Times, Clyde McGrady provided a panoply of quotes in support of this notion. Nichols’s killing, McGrady suggested, has “brought into focus what many Black people have said is frequently lost in police brutality cases involving white officers and Black victims: that problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism.” Putting this case more bluntly, Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D., Fla.) tweeted out: “Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”

 

There is little to be gained from euphemisms at a time like this, so I’ll be as blunt as I can: This is absurd. Take a look at the flow chart that Van Jones, Maxwell Alejandro Frost, and Clyde McGrady’s interviewees have built, and you will note immediately that, under their approach, there is no circumstance in which the killing of a black American will not be deemed the product of white supremacy. If the cops act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops don’t act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops are white, it’s white supremacy. If the cops are not white, it’s white supremacy, too. Whatever the input, whatever the details, the result is always the same: white supremacy. That’s not logic; it’s magic.

 

Worse yet, it’s a theory that treats black Americans as if they are inferior citizens who cannot be judged by the same standards as everyone else. If, as you should, you sincerely believe that all people are equal, then you cannot cast some of them as mere automatons when it is politically convenient to do so. To acknowledge a person’s intrinsic equality is to fully accept his capacity for good and evil without engaging in transparent special pleading, without making vague appeals to “the culture,” and without offering excuses for his conduct when you would condemn a culprit of a different race unequivocally for the same behavior.

 

There is, I’m afraid, not a great deal of substantive difference between the case that Van Jones and Co. are making in (indirect) defense of the five officers in Memphis, and the case that the bigots of the past once made against treating non-whites as full members of society. Certainly, their intent is different. But, at root, both cases rely upon the same ugly implication, which is that the behavior of black American citizens is ultimately beyond those citizens’ control. I do not believe this. The five cops who killed Tyre Nichols did a heinous thing, and it is precisely because I believe in their full and irrevocable equality that I intend to judge them unreservedly for having done it. Those men are my peers, and they should be treated as such.

 

What is the alternative? In fact, there are a couple.

 

The first is that the five cops should be treated in precisely the same way as would a self-professed white supremacist. If, as has been claimed, the actions of the five men were indeed driven by the “pernicious effects” of “anti-Black racism,” then the men presumably ought to be charged with hate crimes, just as a white cop in a similar situation would be. In his column, Jones proposes that “it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.” Well, if we follow that thought to its logical end, we must surely conclude that the victim was explicitly targeted because he was black, and that the cops are therefore guilty of discrimination. And if that’s the case, then why not charge them as such? Naturally, we would not want a situation in which the race of the cop does not matter except for the purposes of his punishment.

 

The second cuts in the opposite direction. If, as the Times’s McGrady submits, our “problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism,” then the cops in this case must be victims, too. And if the cops in this case are victims, too, they must surely be treated leniently by the courts. The purpose of talking about “entrenched cultures” is to diffuse some of the responsibility for specific malfeasance. It would be mightily unfair, would it not, to identify a grand, all-encompassing, overarching conspiracy behind such malfeasance, and then to treat the patsies who bear proximate responsibility for that malfeasance as if they were its sole architects? And if, indeed, “white supremacy” permeates the culture of American policing rather than just motivating the decisions of independent, individual police officers — if that “white supremacy” is the villain no matter what individual cops might be thinking — then surely we must extend the same forbearance to white police officers who end up in the same situation?

 

To my ears, both of these alternatives sound ridiculous and grotesque. With the notable exception of insanity — a condition that can be applied only to individuals, never to groups — our culture and our laws are built atop the supposition that all men are created equal, and that, irrespective of their immutable characteristics, they are all endowed with the same capacity for love, hate, benevolence, greed, altruism, selfishness, ambition, disinterest, bravery, and cowardice. Once we abandon that principle — as far too many people seem tempted to do — we enter a realm of caveats, conditions, mysticism, pseudoscience, sophistry, and caprice, from which there is no escape, and from which nothing good can ever come.

‘Gun Safety’ Isn’t the Issue

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

 

I’m trying to get out of the habit of writing columns that are responses to other people’s columns, but this Nicholas Kristof piece on gun policy—full of sloppiness bordering on intellectual dishonesty—needs a response.

 

Kristof’s argument is that we can use “gun safety measures” to reduce violent crime in the United States. But most guns sold in the U.S. market are not lacking in safety features—the problem is not “gun safety” but the fact that people point perfectly functional, well-designed firearms at other people and then pull the trigger for the purpose of killing them. “Gun safety” is not the issue. Murder is the issue. Suicide is, by the numbers, an even greater issue. 

 

But that’s a view-from-35,000-feet issue. Kristof’s nonsense is worth addressing point-by-point.

 

Kristof writes:

 

Just as some kids will always sneak cigarettes or people will inevitably drive drunk, some criminals will get firearms — but one lesson learned is that if we can’t eliminate a dangerous product, we can reduce the toll by regulating who gets access to it.

 

That can make a huge difference. Consider that American women age 50 or older commit fewer than 100 gun homicides in a typical year. In contrast, men 49 or younger typically kill more than 500 people each year just with their fists and feet; with guns, they kill more than 7,000 each year. In effect, firearms are safer with middle-aged women than fists are with young men.

 

We’re not going to restrict guns to women 50 or older, but we can try to keep firearms from people who are under 21 or who have a record of violent misdemeanors, alcohol abuse, domestic violence or some red flag that they may be a threat to themselves or others.

 

The law already prohibits retailers from selling firearms to people who have most of the “red flags” Kristof mentions: people convicted of felonies, people convicted of serious misdemeanors including nonviolent crimes (“any other crime for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year”), people who have not been convicted of such crimes but are under indictment for them, people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, etc. Federal law already restrict commercial sale of handguns—by far the most common sort of gun used in violent crimes—to people at least 21 years of age. We even prohibit gun sales to many classes of people that don’t make Kristof’s list—people with anything other than an honorable discharge from the military, people under restraining orders, illegal aliens, unlawful marijuana users, etc. This is pretty typical stuff in this debate: Proposing policies that we already have.

 

Kristof goes on to cite federal regulations of fully automatic weapons as a model.

 

To buy a machine gun made before 1986, you need a background check, a clean record and $200 for a transfer tax — a process that can take several months to complete. Then you must report to the authorities if it is stolen and get approval if you move it to another state. To buy a machine gun made after 1986 is more complicated.

 

None of this is terribly onerous, but these hoops — and stiff enforcement of existing laws — are enough to keep machine guns in responsible hands. In a typical year, these registered machine guns are responsible for approximately zero suicides and zero homicides.

 

The background check you go through to buy a pre-1986 machine gun looks for the same things as the regular background check; all it does is add fingerprints and a photograph to the process, along with several months of waiting for paperwork to be processed. And it is true that firearms sold through this process rarely turn up in crimes: As with the case of New York concealed-carry permits, the people who have used legally owned fully automatic weapons to commit crimes historically have been—almost exclusively—police officers. But, here’s the thing: Firearms sold through the regular retail process are rarely used in crimes, either. From my soon-to-be-updated Dispatch guide to gun questions and gun policy:

 

The problem with the regulatory approach is that it targets licensed dealers and the people who do business with them, who represent a vanishingly small share of criminals: Less than 2 percent of the criminals in custody today who had a gun with them when they committed their crimes acquired that gun from a licensed gun dealer, and only 0.8 percent from one of those gun shows we hear about all the time. Most violent crimes in the United States are committed by people with prior arrests and convictions for serious and often violent crimes, and the majority of murders in our country are committed by people who would not be legally eligible to purchase a firearm under existing law.

 

But it isn’t regulation that keeps people from using weapons from that stock of legally available machine guns to shoot up Chicago street corners. It’s money.

 

Do you know what a pre-1986 AR-15 costs? About thirty grand. Nobody robs a 7-Eleven with a $30,000 AR-15 for the same reason nobody robs a 7-Eleven with a $30,000 Holland & Holland safari magnum. For one thing, you can’t stick it in the waistband of your pants, but—the main thing!—it costs $30,000. Most criminals favor less expensive firearms, because, as one might expect a New York Times columnist to know, most criminals are poor.

 

In fact, as I am obliged to repeat about once a week, semiautomatic rifles account for a tiny share of homicides in the United States—all rifles together account for about 2.6 percent of homicides, meaning only 364 of the 14,000 or so homicides the United States saw in 2021. Kristof cites this fact, too, but doesn’t take the obvious lesson from it. 

 

From my gun-policy guide:

 

Are AR-type rifles especially dangerous? Look at the FBI data: In 2019, there were almost 14,000 homicide victims in the United States. All rifles combined—not just AR-type rifles, but all rifles—accounted for only 364 of those incidents. Even if we assume that all of those rifles were AR-type rifles (and they weren’t), we’d still have four times as many murders with knives, more murders with blunt objects, more murders with fists and feet, etc. For crimes short of murder, rifles are even more scarce: Only 13 show up in robberies in the 2019 FBI statistics, three in burglaries, eight in narcotics cases, and two in domestic-violence cases—in a country of 345 million souls, these are not big numbers.

 

For as long as we have been keeping records, the most common sort of firearm used in violent crimes in the United States is whatever handgun happens to be in widest use at the time: Back when people were robbing stagecoaches, it was the cap-and-ball revolver; back when people wore fedoras, it was the snub-nosed .38; today, it’s the 9mm automatic. All of the murders carried out with, say, an AK-47-pattern rifle in the United States in any given year will amount to a rounding error, but people enjoy pronouncing the syllables “AK-47” because they sound so interesting and authoritative. In reality, exotic weapons are a poor fit for the needs of a typical career criminal in the United States. And even when it comes to mass shootings, many more lives are lost to handguns than to scary-looking black rifles with military-sounding names.

 

At this point, Kristof really goes off the rails, implying that it is more difficult to adopt a dog in Mississippi, or to vote, than it is to buy a firearm. He uses the following two graphics:

He lists the ID-requirement to vote, but not for buying a gun—and, of course, it is required. Not only is a photo-ID required, but, to buy a gun—unlike the case of voting in most jurisdictions—all of the information on the license must be up-to-date. Have you moved since your driver’s license was issued? You can’t buy a gun with that license. (The questionnaire asks for a Social Security number as well, though this is not, strictly speaking, required.) You can “mail or hand deliver” a voting application, as Kristof notes, but you cannot buy a firearm by mailing in your application. You can buy a gun on the Internet, but a licensed dealer will ship it only to another licensed dealer, at which point you’ll have to go through the regular background-check process. You can try to mail somebody a pistol, but that is a federal offense. 

 

As for the dog-adoption stuff, Kristof is citing the practices of one pet-adoption agency as though they were law—which they are not. In fact, Mississippi pet-adoption law is an example of—angels and ministers of grace defend us!—self-regulation. If you adopt a pet and fib to the pet-adoption agency about how big your yard is, you don’t go to federal prison. Lie on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives form and you could. (If the ATF could be bothered to, you know, do its job.) Pet-adoption agencies do not subject you to a federal background check—the FBI is not involved at all! This does not demonstrate the point Kristof thinks it does. 

 

Presenting these situations as though it were in any meaningful way easier to buy a gun from a licensed retailer than it is to adopt a greyhound or vote in Biloxi is deeply and fundamentally dishonest. Kristof should be ashamed of writing this, and the New York Times should be ashamed of publishing it—it is journalistic malpractice.

 

Making things worse, Kristof offers this flourish:

 

Why should it be easier to pick up military-style weapons than to adopt a Chihuahua? And why do states that make it difficult to vote, with waiting periods and identification requirements, let almost anyone walk out of a gun shop with a bundle of military-style rifles?

 

The answer is: It isn’t. Gun shops have identification requirements, and they most certainly do not “let almost anyone walk out of a gun shop with a bundle of military-style rifles,” unless by “almost anyone” you mean “anyone who is not a felon or under felony indictment, who has not been convicted of a high-level misdemeanor or is under indictment for one, who hasn’t been dishonorably discharged from the military, who hasn’t been ruled mentally unsound by a court of law, who hasn’t been convicted of domestic violence or currently facing such charges, who isn’t the subject of a restraining order, who isn’t an illegal drug user, who isn’t an illegal alien, who isn’t buying the gun for someone else,” etc. I’m open to putting other people on the no-no list: Do we want to mandate a 700 Experian credit score and an eye exam? Fine, let’s have that conversation—but it is, again, fundamentally and obviously dishonest to pretend that we “let almost anyone walk out of a gun shop with a bundle of military-style rifles.”

 

(Set aside the tomfoolery of “military-style rifles” as a construction for the moment, even though the rifles you can buy in most gun shops are not the kind of rifles actually issued by militaries, which generally choose “select-fire” rifles.)

 

Kristof notes that age is a factor here, and suggests that reforms take that into consideration:

 

This may be more politically feasible than some other gun safety measures. Wyoming is one of the most gun-friendly states in America, but it establishes a minimum age of 21 to buy a handgun.

 

This is kind of a funny one: Almost every state in the country has a law prohibiting a gun dealer from selling a handgun to anyone under 21, and all these laws together add up to nothing—because federal law already prohibits gun retailers, all of whom are federally licensed, from selling handguns to people under 21. What varies is possession laws: Can an 18-year-old legally possess a pistol given to him by someone else, one inherited from his granddad, one he is just using during handgun-hunting season, etc.? That gets a little weird at times: Texas had sought to defend its law prohibiting those under 21 from carrying a handgun and recently gave up the effort. (A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that Texas’ “constitutional carry” rule applies an unconstitutional age limit.) It is not clear whether the state legislature will revisit the issue. In reality, even certain rifle parts can’t be sold to those under 21, because they could, in theory, be used to assemble a handgun. 

 

Kristof holds up Massachusetts as an example of good policy:

 

In effect, Massachusetts applies to firearms the sort of system that we routinely use in registering vehicles and licensing drivers to save lives from traffic deaths. Gun registration unfortunately evokes among some gun owners alarm about jackbooted thugs coming to confiscate firearms, which is another reason to work to lower the temperature of the gun policy debate.

 

Massachusetts is kind of an interesting case. As Kristof notes, it has relatively strict gun laws and relatively low gun crime. The neighboring states of New Hampshire and Vermont have very libertarian gun laws—and even lower rates of gun crime. Vermont has been a “constitutional carry” state for as long as there has been a constitution and enjoys quite low rates of violent crime. The people who imagine themselves to be social engineers who can guide the course of 345 million souls have trouble dealing with the fact that public policy, as such, often is a minor factor. There are lots of reasons you don’t worry too much about getting murdered in Vermont in spite of its liberal gun laws. Mobile, Ala., is one of the most dangerous cities in the country when it comes to violent crime; El Paso, Texas, is one of the safest—and the two states have similar, relatively loose gun laws.

 

Kristof plays the hits: “We should reassure gun owners that we’re not going to come after their deer rifles or bird guns,” he writes, ignoring the fact that AR-style rifles are almost certainly the single most common hunting rifle in the United States; he writes about hollowpoint bullets as being especially dangerous without noting that hollowpoints often are chosen precisely because they are in some ways less dangerous than non-expanding bullets, for example, being less likely to pass through the intended target and hit someone else; etc. He then descends into imbecilic fan service, suggesting that we apply shocking “graphic” warning labels to ammunition: “ One proposed ammunition label has a photo of a bloody face and states that a gun increases the risk of someone in a home being killed.” If there is one thing we know about guns and ammunition, it is that the scarier they seem, the better they will sell: The example of Death brand cigarettes, with its skull-and-crossbones packaging, leaps to mind. 

 

And, predictably, he focuses on gun stores and their customers (who commit very few crimes) while ignoring the actual correlations: The majority of U.S. murderers already have a prior felony conviction at the time of the killing for which they are charged. The vast majority of all violent crimes in the United States are committed by people with prior criminal records. The shooters are the problem and always have been. 

 

Violent crime in the United States is largely the work of habitual criminals. The people who can buy guns in gun shops have clean criminal records. The overlap between the people the gun-controllers seek to regulate and the people who commit the violent crimes is very, very small. Pretending that this is not so is foolish and dishonest. 

Memphis Is Not about Racism

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

 

There’s nothing white supremacy can’t do.

 

It is supposedly so pervasive and powerful that it can cause black men to sign up to serve as police officers in a majority-black city and severely beat a black arrestee.

 

It is to the contemporary Left what capital was to Marx, sex was to Freud, and gravity was to Newton.

 

It is the King Charles head of American public life, a matter of obsession that comes up in debates and contexts where it has no possible relevance.

 

An opinion piece at CNN by former Obama official Van Jones was headlined, “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism.”

 

A piece at the New York Times on Memphis related the view that it “is the system and the tactics that foster racism and violence,” not “the specific racial identities of officers.”

 

This argument gets points for novelty but none for plausibility. The Memphis officers who brutalized Tyre Nichols may be guilty of many things — incompetence, malice, criminal wrongdoing — but white supremacy is unlikely to be one of them.

 

Presumably these officers don’t all hate their parents, children, neighbors, and colleagues as unworthy, racially inferior people who deserve no protection under our laws.

 

Maybe it’s only as police officers that these men become unwitting tools of white supremacy? This makes no sense, either. The Atlantic noted in an article last year that FBI data showed Memphis to be the most violent metropolitan jurisdiction in the United States in 2020. According to the New York Times, Memphis had nearly 350 murders in 2021, when New York City — 13 times larger — had about 480.

 

Of course, these murders disproportionately affect young black men. Isn’t this just how a white supremacist would like it — overwhelmingly black neighborhoods under siege as black men kill other black men? Why would white supremacism want to interfere with this dynamic by deploying police units to try to quell the disorder?

 

Indeed, the false consciousness in Memphis must run deep. Cerelyn Davis, the city’s first African-American woman police chief, created the just-disbanded special police unit implicated in the Nichols beating. Understandably, she thought it was very important to get a handle on rising homicides and dangerous reckless driving, but, unbeknownst to her, she was just serving the man.

 

The obsession with white supremacy is perverse and insulting on several levels.

 

It implies that if urban neighborhoods are under-policed and dangerous, that is their natural state. But if they are robustly policed to try to make them safer — a worthy project that tends to be supported by people of all races — that is somehow an inherently “white” initiative.

 

It suggests that good African-American, Hispanic, and Asian cops are dupes, puppets on the string of nefarious white people using them to perpetuate white rule.

 

And, finally, if taken seriously, it would vitiate the agency of the cops involved in the abuse of Tyre Nichols. How can they fully take the blame if an ineradicable, unavoidable force was ultimately responsible for their behavior?

 

The explanation for what happened in Memphis is more straightforward than any of this. Police are given considerable authority, and human beings — of all races and creeds, in all times and places — have a natural tendency to abuse authority unless constrained by institutions, norms, and accountability.

 

If you are unwilling to believe that the cops in this case were self-loathing black men, then their behavior becomes a function of poor training and supervision, abysmal decision-making, anger in the moment, free-floating cruelty, or some combination of these things.

 

The Left elevates race above all the other factors that might play into a police encounter gone horribly wrong because the racial interpretation allows it to make a broader critique of American society and force wide-ranging political and social changes.

 

This is a very useful narrative, which is why the Left is loath to give it up even in an incident involving black cops.

What’s Really Happening in Gaza

By Sean Durns

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

 

Last Wednesday, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) drew attention after she chose to fly a flag used by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) outside of her office and, not for the first time, decried Israel as an “apartheid” state. Yet, Tlaib has remained silent amid recent revelations about human-rights abuses perpetrated against Palestinians.

 

Palestinians in Gaza are standing up to Hamas. For nearly two decades, the terrorist group has maintained an iron grip on its coastal enclave. But rumblings of discontent are growing louder, and one American organization is doing its utmost to make sure they’re heard.

 

The Center for Peace Communications (CPC) is a New York-based nonprofit that works to “grow peace between peoples” in the Middle East and North Africa. The NGO has recently launched a project called Whispered in Gaza, which seeks to elevate the voices of everyday Gazans living under Hamas rule.

 

Being a dissident in Gaza is certainly dangerous. In his 2004 book, The Case for Democracy, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician Natan Sharansky argued that there were two types of societies: a “free society” and a “fear society.” He formulated a simple test to discern which category a given society fell into: Can one enter a public square and express any opinion without fear of being arrested? And in Gaza, the answer is tragically clear.

 

Gaza residents who spoke to the CPC for the Whispered in Gaza campaign — a multipart series featuring animated interviews, which use animation and voice-altering technologies to protect the interviewees’ identities — have no illusions about their Hamas rulers. They know the risks of speaking out. But as the CPC’s president, Joseph Braude, has said, they “want these stories to be heard.”

 

Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007, when it seized power there after a brief but bloody internecine war with Fatah, the movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank. Fatah’s well-earned reputation for corruption had helped spur many Palestinians to vote for Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot and Iranian proxy that promised “reform and change,” in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Fatah refused to accept its narrow defeat, leading to a conflict in which Hamas successfully seized Gaza, forever changing both Israel’s security calculus and the lives of everyday Gazans.

 

Almost immediately after taking control of Gaza, Hamas began launching rockets at Israel, which its charter pledges to destroy. The Islamist group’s ambitions subsequently led both Israel and Egypt to initiate a security blockade of Gaza and sparked four wars. In each of those conflicts, Hamas has used civilians as human shields, storing weaponry, munitions, and operations centers at or near schools, United Nations buildings, hospitals, and even international media outlets such as the Associated Press.

 

Hamas has also been caught using foreign aid to fund terrorist operations. It has even used donated construction equipment and cement to build so-called “terror tunnels,” through which Hamas operatives can kidnap and attack Israelis. The network of tunnels, which is estimated to cover 300 miles, is intricate. It is also expensive: According to Israel Defense Forces estimates, some individual tunnels cost as much as $3 million to build.

 

And, as Whispered in Gaza makes clear, Hamas’s commitment to Israel’s destruction also comes at the expense of the people living under its rule.

 

Hamas, one dissident tells the CPC, didn’t bring the promised “reform and change.” Instead, it “brought looting, theft, oppression, humiliation, nepotism, and unemployment.” Hamas, he notes, is more than just a terrorist group. It also operates like a crime syndicate, extorting civilians. “There isn’t a small business — even tobacco stands — that they don’t have their hands in,” he says.

 

Hamas has also “made a profit out of” the numerous wars that it has initiated, while “the people suffered,” according to one CPC interviewee. Another remarks that “only the people bear the burden” of these conflicts. Hamas officials are happy to lie low “in their bunkers, their hideouts” while using everyday Gazans as cannon fodder. And at the war’s conclusion, “they tell us it’s a victory.”

 

Indeed, Hamas’s propaganda is everywhere in Gaza. As one interviewee tells the CPC, “Your own thoughts are taken away from you.” Just walking down the street, he describes encountering drawings and paintings hailing the terrorist group and its leaders, leaving him to wonder if he’s living in “a city or military barracks.” Gaza City has “taken on a vibe of backwardness, inhumanity, and militarism,” he says, and the psychological damage that most Gazans endure due to Hamas rule is “enormous.”

 

Gaza is run by a kleptocracy that is as corrupt as it is brutal. Despair characterizes many of the accounts, with one woman, “Fatima,” recounting how her brother, a street vendor who sold vegetables but refused to pay Hamas bribes, was forced to flee after members of the group repeatedly beat him and imprisoned him on false charges.

 

The Times of Israel, which is working with the CPC on the Whispered in Gaza campaign, has noted that a 2018 poll found that 48 percent of Gazans wanted to emigrate. One can hardly blame them.

 

Those interviewed by the CPC shared their stories with the hope that others will listen. Yet, many who often claim to be “pro-Palestinian” have been noticeably quiet about Hamas’s totalitarian rule.

 

The members of the so-called Squad — Representatives Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), and Cori Bush (D., Mo.) — are all known for their vociferous criticism of the Jewish state, which they claim persecutes Palestinians. Bush, for example, has accused Israel of inflicting “violent oppression and trauma” on Palestinians. Yet none of them have said a word about the Whispered in Gaza campaign.

 

Sadly, such selective outrage isn’t new. When Hamas slaughtered dozens of protesters in 2019, the Squad was silent. And the press, like the members of Congress that it hypes, has also seemed oddly uninterested in holding the regime that governs Gaza accountable. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major U.S. news organizations have, thus far, been mum about the CPC’s campaign.

 

Hopefully this will soon change and the whispers in Gaza will inspire strident voices of condemnation, from newsrooms to the halls of power. As Tlaib herself once said, silence about human-rights violations is tantamount to “complicity.” On this, at least, she is right.

Chris Christie vs. Trump

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

I found Matt Continetti’s recent column about Donald Trump’s ever-improving chances for 2024 persuasive, particularly his assertion that a kind of complacency was settling over both parties even as the same dynamics that helped Trump win the nomination last time reasserted themselves. Last Friday, Continetti wrote:

 

At this writing, DeSantis presents the biggest obstacle for Trump. He sits atop the field in state-level polls of New Hampshire and South Carolina. He’s a proven winner and fundraiser who knows when to pick high-profile cultural battles that endear him to conservatives and the MAGA crew. His crusade against wokeness is a way to unify the party behind a tough and competent executive who hasn’t alienated suburban independents in his home state. If nominated, he’d represent a rising generation for change against an 81-year-old incumbent who has been in politics for half a century.

 

Naturally, other Republicans have begun to attack DeSantis. That’s to be expected. No one is entitled to a party’s nomination, politics ain’t beanbag, and running for president ought to be, and is, an arduous task. Potential GOP candidates are probing for weaknesses in DeSantis’s stance on abortion, his hardball tactics with big business, his national appeal, and his personal demeanor. Notice, though, whom these Republicans are not criticizing. His initials are DJT.

 

Things changed fast over the weekend. Chris Christie, who has been making the rounds in Republican circles that you’d make if you were planning a presidential run, took to This Week on Sunday and began making a forceful argument against Donald Trump.

 

This is the kind of comment that can draw Trump’s attention and fire.

The Infinite Elasticity of ‘White Supremacy’

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, January 29, 2023

 

It’s a struggle to remain shocked by things that are outrageous but inevitable and routine in our political culture — yet it’s still worth the effort.

 

Falling firmly in that category are the reflexive smears against Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a “white supremacist” for the offense of rejecting a pilot AP course in African-American studies as originally written.

 

Everyone on the right knows that these kinds of attacks are the price of doing business, and DeSantis must have realized that they’d be lodged against him early and often. This doesn’t make them any less poisonous or deranged, though.

 

If it is taken remotely seriously, the charge against DeSantis in the curriculum controversy is a libel, an attack not just on his political beliefs and priorities but his character and his status as a Christian believer.

 

The civility cops who purport to police our discourse should be whistling down this calumny as clearly out of bounds and worse than, say, any of the attack ads aired against Nancy Pelosi. Instead, it is tolerated by polite society as part of the debate and, worse, accepted as having some force and legitimacy.

 

According to the National Urban League, “Gov. DeSantis Has Charted A Course To The White House That Cuts Straight Through The Swamp Of White Supremacy.”

 

Given the governor’s support for the Everglades, it might have been more apt to say that his path cuts through “the subtropical wilderness” of white supremacy, but the wordsmiths at the Urban League can be forgiven for not carefully thinking through their rote defamation of conservative politicians and policies.

 

A column in the Boston Globe maintained, “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to ban an African American studies course from Florida schools carries the stench of white slaveowners who fought to keep those they enslaved from learning to read and write English.”

 

Yes, it’s all but impossible to tell the difference between DeSantis, the governor of a state with high-quality public schools and extensive measures to allow the parents of poor children to choose their school, and, say, Hugh Auld.

 

“Crucial to sustaining white supremacy,” the column continued, “is the erasure not only of Black trauma inflicted by systemic and institutional racism but Black accomplishment, triumph, and contributions.”

 

As with so much of this sort of commentary, there is no effort to show how Florida is erasing black trauma or black accomplishment, besides rejecting a version of a pilot course that isn’t yet permanently part of the curriculum anywhere in the United States.

 

No worries — DeSantis is still deemed “white supremacy’s helicopter parent.”

 

Jennifer Rubin, not to be outdone by anyone hurling tendentious charges born of motivated reasoning and partisan malice, wrote that DeSantis has now “gone full-blown white supremacist.”

 

This is a smear-within-a-smear because nestled within it is the idea that DeSantis already must have been “partially” white supremacist before embracing his inner Lester Maddox by demanding revisions to an AP course.

 

It is also among the DeSantis administration’s “most explicitly racist actions.”

 

The use of “white supremacy” in this context stretches the already-flexible term to a new level of meaninglessness.

 

If it can refer both to the Dred Scott decision and Florida’s decision to reject an AP course as currently written, refer both to the idea that blacks have no rights that the white man is bound to respect and the idea that maybe a curriculum covering Black Queer Studies doesn’t belong in a public high school — well, then, it might as well refer to nothing.

 

The phrase long ago became woke jabberwocky.

 

If there were any doubt about that, the instant attempt to blame the brutal treatment of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black cops on “white supremacy” should remove it.

 

The argument here, if you can call it that, is not particularly intuitive.

 

In fact, we need the politicized African-American studies course to explain how this works:

Of course, the strict meaning of the phrase has never been the point; it is the use that can be made of it as a tool of political and social intimidation and manipulation.

 

That this is an ingrained part of our political debate doesn’t make it any less disgraceful.

How Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign Bounced Back

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, January 28, 2023

 

Donald Trump spent the final months of 2022 reeling from electoral setbacks and media disasters. Many of his high-profile endorsements in the midterm elections flopped. His attacks on popular GOP governors in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Georgia did little damage to their reputations. His 2024 campaign launch was a snooze. His infamous and inexcusable dinner at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile antisemites put him on the political fringe. By the end of last year, Trump appeared to be fading from the national conversation. His chances of winning the Republican nomination seemed to dim.

 

Now those chances are brightening. Trump continues to dominate in polls of Republicans. He’s drawn even with President Biden in head-to-head matchups. He lobbied successfully for Representative Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) to become speaker of the House of Representatives. His loyalists on the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Weaponization of the Federal Government committees will be sure to advance his interests. He’s plotting his return to Facebook, Instagram, and possibly Twitter, and his connection with the Republican base remains strong.

 

Most important of all, Trump’s rivals in both the Democratic and Republican parties are repeating the mistakes they made in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Democrats assume that there is no way for Trump to become president, while Republicans believe he will fade from the scene. Their failure to learn from history has made it possible not only for Trump to win the GOP nomination for the third straight time, but to pull another inside straight in the Electoral College and return to the White House. For decades, Trump has said that the political class is corrupt, insular, and incompetent, and that Republican leaders lack guts. Washington is doing its best to prove him right.

 

Trump’s recovery began on January 9, when news broke that classified documents had been found months earlier at a D.C. office President Biden used from 2017 to 2019. Biden, who had called Trump irresponsible and worse when the FBI recovered classified material from Mar-a-Lago last summer, was exposed as a hypocrite. Attorney General Merrick Garland came under intense pressure to appoint a special counsel for Biden, since he already had appointed one to investigate Trump for mishandling classified information and for subverting the last presidential election.

 

Garland relented on January 12 and tapped U.S. Attorney Robert Hur to lead the inquiry. On January 20, the FBI searched Biden’s Wilmington, Del., residence (though not his home in Rehoboth Beach) and unearthed more secret papers. A few days later, former vice president Mike Pence disclosed that classified documents had been found at his house, too.

 

This chaotic and ridiculous situation is a boon for Trump. Politically, there is no way Garland can indict the sole declared candidate for the presidency in 2024 while exonerating Biden, who’s expected to announce his own reelection campaign soon. If Garland were to do so, Trump would portray himself, reasonably, as the victim of a double standard. Biden’s boneheaded handling of the documents also reinforces one of Trump’s core beliefs: Everyone in politics behaves corruptly, but he alone does so without pretense.

 

Trump still must worry about separate inquiries, in D.C. and Atlanta, into his conduct after losing the 2020 election. The fight with the National Archives over his papers is a sideshow. If anything, it’s Biden who ought to be concerned. The president’s changing statements on the subject, and the drip-drip-drip of stories about the material in his possession, raise additional doubts about his honesty and competence.

 

House Republicans plan to scrutinize the Biden family’s influence-peddling business. They are desperate to find a connection between Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell and the government intelligence in Joe Biden’s garage. Democrats with long memories remember how Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information dogged her in 2016. They don’t want to go through that mess again.

 

They may not have a choice. Whether it’s the document drama or the looming presidential campaign, history seems to be following a path it traveled once before. Not only has Trump frozen the GOP field, with potential challengers not expected to announce their candidacies for months, if ever. Trump also benefits from the same dynamics that helped him in 2016: His opponents think he will just disappear, a multi-candidate primary gives him an edge, and no Republican wants to attack him directly.

 

Recently, a few high-profile Republicans have predicted that Trump won’t be the GOP nominee. These prognosticators share certain traits: None of them thought Trump would win in 2016, they said Republicans would win big in 2022 (yes, I did too), and they no longer hold elected office precisely because of the changes Trump made to their party. Trump inspires a form of wishful thinking among certain groups of people, a collective illusion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, someday his behavior will change, and he will be content playing golf. Well, it won’t, and he’s not. The way to thwart Trump is for voters to choose someone else.

 

That outcome is less likely in a multi-candidate race. In 2016, the non-Trump vote divided three ways among Senators Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and then-governor John Kasich (R., Ohio). The fracture allowed Trump to capitalize on the winner-take-all structure of GOP primaries and win significant contests, and eventually the nomination, with a plurality of votes. The same thing is happening in polls today. As Nathaniel Rakich observes at FiveThirtyEight, when pollsters offer Republicans several choices, Trump wins by a huge margin. But, in head-to-head matchups with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump tends to lose.

 

At this writing, DeSantis presents the biggest obstacle for Trump. He sits atop the field in state-level polls of New Hampshire and South Carolina. He’s a proven winner and fundraiser who knows when to pick high-profile cultural battles that endear him to conservatives and the MAGA crew. His crusade against wokeness is a way to unify the party behind a tough and competent executive who hasn’t alienated suburban independents in his home state. If nominated, he’d represent a rising generation for change against an 81-year-old incumbent who has been in politics for half a century.

 

Naturally, other Republicans have begun to attack DeSantis. That’s to be expected. No one is entitled to a party’s nomination, politics ain’t beanbag, and running for president ought to be, and is, an arduous task. Potential GOP candidates are probing for weaknesses in DeSantis’s stance on abortion, his hardball tactics with big business, his national appeal, and his personal demeanor. Notice, though, whom these Republicans are not criticizing. His initials are DJT.

 

As happened seven years ago, Republicans are avoiding Trump either because they believe he will pack up and go home or because they are afraid of incurring his wrath and the animosity of his most devoted supporters. They are falling back into formation as a circular firing squad that hurts everybody but the former president.

 

The presidential campaign is just beginning. No one knows what lies ahead. The Trump rebound may soon pass and not come again. There’s a sleeper candidate or two out there who will make this race interesting.

 

For now, though, Democrats and Republicans are gambling that they can behave in 2024 just like they did in 2016, but produce a different result.

The Persecution of Jack Phillips Should End

National Review Online

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

Jack Phillips never did anybody any harm. We cannot say the same of the government of Colorado.

 

In 2012, before same-sex marriage was even legally recognized in Colorado, Phillips declined to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding, citing his religious objection to endorsing same-sex marriage. That objection was, at the time, in common not just with the law of his state but with the view of the majority of the population of nearly every American state to have voted on the question, as well as with the traditional doctrine of nearly every Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sect going back millennia. But even if his had been an unpopular minority view, this is America: There is supposed to be room for dissenters and for a diversity of thought.

 

Phillips never refused to serve any individual or group, and nobody has ever offered evidence that his simple refusal to participate in same-sex weddings left anyone without options for a wedding cake. In the eleven years since, Phillips has been relentlessly hounded by the government of Colorado, while he has received hundreds of requests for cakes with “offensive messages, many of them with an intent to set him up,” according to his lawyers. One of those was from Autumn Scardina, an attorney who called the cake shop on the day the Supreme Court took Phillips’s case, asking this time for a cake customized to celebrate a gender transition. Phillips would have been willing to bake the same generic pink-and-blue color-schemed cake for the same person, but not to endorse the message — which is exactly what he was asked to do, and why he was asked to do it.

 

Phillips is the wronged party in this case. He says that Scardina had been after him for five years, berating him and requesting, among other things, another custom cake that depicted Satan smoking a marijuana joint. Even Scardina’s lawyer says that the purpose of these requests was about “calling someone’s bluff” — hardly a sincere desire to do business with Phillips. The Colorado courts found that Scardina’s phone conversation with Phillips’s wife “was sequenced so that Masterpiece did not learn the purpose for which the cake would be used until after Masterpiece committed to making the cake” — a sequence that was held against Phillips because the call came in on a day when he was too busy to answer the phone himself and immediately recognize an antagonistic lawyer’s laying a trap. Plainly, Scardina’s only interest in Jack Phillips was in taking him to court.

 

Phillips has never had a fair hearing from the progressive Democrats who run Colorado — not in the original Colorado Civil Rights Commission proceeding over the wedding cake, not in the 2021 hearing on the gender-transition cake, and not before the Colorado Court of Appeals panel that ruled on Thursday against his appeal in the Scardina case. In fact, he is being punished for not having had a fair hearing the first time, because the Supreme Court used that as an excuse not to decide, five years ago, whether he had a right to decline to bake a cake if he disagreed with its message. The high court is finally getting around to deciding a related issue this term.

 

In prior cases, Colorado allowed cake bakers to refuse to adorn a cake with Bible verses denouncing homosexual acts. The court’s hairsplitting rationale for why Phillips could not take refuge in the same right against compelled speech is that this particular cake request was framed by Scardina so that the message of the cake would be known to Phillips — thus forcing him to knowingly violate his conscience — but not actually written on the cake to distinguish it from a birthday cake. And yet, as the court acknowledged, asking detailed questions about the “the intended use of the cake” was a customary part of Phillips’s “creative process.” Thus, the court reasoned, hijacking Phillips’s conscience in his creation of an expressive cake is not compelled speech — even though compelling Phillips to endorse Scardina’s message was the entire point of Scardina’s request.

 

Colorado’s executive branch has been run exclusively by Democrats since 2006, and governors John Hickenlooper and Jared Polis appointed not only the leadership of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission but also the judges who ruled against Phillips. While we commend Hickenlooper and Polis for their occasional moderation on other issues, they cannot evade ultimate responsibility for the shameful yearslong persecution of Phillips, which they have openly supported. What a scandalous waste of public resources.

 

The illiberalism of Phillips’s pursuers is displayed not only in their relentless harassment of a simple cake baker, but also in the inconsistency of their standards. When a left-wing dissenter such as Colin Kaepernick seeks the right to protest publicly against a popular orthodoxy, progressives demand that he be permitted without consequence to broadcast his dissent on his employer’s time and property, no matter whom it offends. When the dissent is one they dislike, however, the dissenter must be not only precluded from openly airing it, but must be compelled by force of law to publicly endorse the orthodoxy in order to demonstrate his submission.

 

Likewise, in concluding that rejecting Scardina’s message was tantamount to discriminating against Scardina’s transgender identity, the court rejected “efforts to differentiate between discrimination based on a person’s status and discrimination based on conduct that is inextricably intertwined with such status.” Thus, a person’s homosexual or transgender identity is discriminated against unless others endorse the person’s conduct and views. This was the theory of those who demanded that the National Hockey League’s Ivan Provorov publicly wear a Pride jersey. Yet, the Christian identity of Phillips or Provorov must give way when he seeks to put it into action, words, or even simple silence. The right of Christians to faith-based conduct and expression, or even the right of nonreligious people to remain true to themselves if that means differing in opinion on the nature of gender and sexual orientation, must be forcibly separated from their identity.

 

The liberal promise of anti-discrimination laws is that they secure the same rights to all in a neutral fashion. The illiberal reality of their deployment by progressives in clashes between sex-based identity and faith-based identity is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups. A decent and liberal society would leave Jack Phillips alone. The Colorado government’s pursuit of him has sent a public message that it is neither decent nor liberal.

If the Memphis Cops Were White

By Rich Lowry

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

There were some “mostly peaceful” protests in the wake of the release of video of the police beating of Tyre Nichols, but the violence was pretty limited.

 

The situation would have been entirely different, of course, if a few of the cops who brutalized Nichols had been white, or even if the cop who repeatedly punched him had been white.

 

The race of the cops shouldn’t make a difference. Nothing that happened that night is better because the cops were black instead of white — Nichols is still dead.

 

Unfortunately, though, the accident of the officers’ race matters profoundly in terms of the narrative and the nation’s reaction to the incident.

 

If the cops were white, cities around the country would experience serious violence and people would get hurt and perhaps killed; major institutions around the country would find ways to signal their assent to the proposition that America is fundamentally racist; DEI efforts would get another boost in funding and mainstream appeal; the players in the NFL title games would insist on making some statement before playing on Sunday; and on and on.

 

Just as happened after the killing of George Floyd, there would be a spasm of cultural revolution.

 

Although there are attempts to save the police-racism narrative in Memphis, it simply doesn’t have the same resonance in a case involving cops, all of whom are black, mistreating a black arrestee. Indeed, Memphis should be yet another blow to the simplistic, dishonest idea that it is racial animus that accounts for white police misconduct.

 

If you, for good reason, are unwilling to believe that the black cops in this case are self-loathing black men who hate young black men and wish to harm them for racial reasons, then their behavior becomes a function of poor training and supervision, abysmal decision-making, anger in the moment, enjoyment of their feeling of power, free-floating cruelty, or some combination of these things, or all of them.

 

These are obviously attributes that influence the conduct of white cops, too — they are all cops and, more important, all human beings, who are prone to error of all kinds.

 

If the reductive racial critique were correct, it would mean that white cops never mistreat white arrestees or suspects, and that there’s never police brutality in a black society like, say, Haiti.

 

Both these propositions are, of course, preposterous.

 

The Left has elevated race above all the other factors that might play into a police encounter gone horribly wrong. The racial interpretation allows the Left to make a broader critique of American society and force wide-ranging political and social changes.

 

It isn’t very satisfying or consequential to say that a majority-black city with a black police chief has a police unit that was running out of control or that maybe just had some bad cops, certainly not compared with saying that America has been corrupt since 1619 and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up on equity and “anti-racist” principles — have at it, Ibram X. Kendi.

 

The former is what we’ll mostly hear after Memphis, but only because the cops happened to be black.

 

That this is the difference between relative peace and the pavement stones getting ripped up and used as projectile weapons in cities across America is another symptom of the perversity of our debate on policing in particular and race in general.

The Dual Promise of the American Dream — and Why It’s Worth Defending

By Scott Winship

Sunday, January 29, 2023

 

The American Dream is a dual promise — that life should be better for each generation, and that everyone should have a chance to achieve their aspirations if they work hard and play by the rules. But the way that too many of today’s progressives and conservatives talk about opportunity ends up hopelessly confusing our policy debates.

 

Is American life better today than it was for past generations? The answer depends on whether our yardstick measures economic progress or social conditions. Consider economics first. Rising populism on both the left and the right has spread the declensionist view that the typical American is worse off economically than in previous generations.

 

This view is simply wrong. Whether the metric is the hourly or annual earnings of men or women (see Figures 7, 10, and 11), household income (see Exhibits 3 and 18), or adult or child poverty, things have never been better in the United States. Assessing wealth trends is complicated by several factors, but recent generations are on track to accumulate as much wealth as earlier ones. The share of Americans who make more than their parents did has declined, but that was almost inevitable, given that the starting point compares parents in the Depression to grown children in the postwar boom. And even as it has declined, it remains high (see Figure 4), has fallen less than initially believed (see pages 34–41), and seems to be rising again (see Figure 1).

 

How the War on Poverty Is Going: Material vs. Social Deprivation

Notes: Poverty estimates from Burkhauser, Corinth, Elwell, and Larrimore (2021), Figure 9, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26532/w26532.pdf. Child living arrangement estimates are unpublished but from analyses in Winship (2022), https:/

Economic problems do exist, but they are often poorly understood. While the pay of everyday men and women has been rising healthily for nearly 30 years, productivity growth — the engine of wage growth over time — remains lower than it was during the mid 20th century. Greater technological innovation — more computers and robots — would help, not worsen, the problem. Men’s employment has fallen, but about three-quarters of the decline has occurred among men who say they do not want a job (see Figures 13 and 15). Rather than trade or low wages driving this trend, the increasing accessibility and generosity of federal disability benefits is implicated.

 

Consider next the other aspect of the American Dream’s health: Is social life better today than it was in the past? Does anyone believe so?

 

Family disruption has become the norm for children, but family connections have weakened in other ways as well. By most measurements of “associational life” — what we do together — the U.S. has seen a deterioration over the past half century. We do less with our neighbors, we’re less civically engaged, we spend less time with coworkers outside of work, we are less involved in religious activities, and our trust and confidence in a variety of institutions is lower. Technology has given us new ways to maintain relationships remotely and create communities with people we’ve never met. But it has also made our personal relationships more remote and encouraged incivility toward people we’ve never met.

 

Not only do we tend to neglect social-capital disparities and declines versus economic challenges; we also blame economic challenges for our rising social poverty and inequality. This does not square with the economic facts. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that our social problems stem from the rising affluence of the nation. This has afforded us the freedom to need others less, to abandon pro-social norms and bourgeois morality, to prioritize professional and material pursuits while neglecting our communitarian needs, and to weave a poorly designed safety net that discourages upward mobility.

 

Where the American Dream is ailing — or, simply continues to be out of reach for too many people — is in regards to its second promise: the ability to achieve one’s aspirations. The United States continues to have a general problem with upward mobility out of poverty and a specific problem of persistently large black–white social-mobility gaps. If a person is born at the bottom, they should be able to transcend their origins so they are not still at the bottom in adulthood. For black Americans there is the added challenge of avoiding falling to the bottom if one starts in the middle. The golden promise of the American Dream is tarnished by the embarrassing fact that these problems have persisted for a half-century or more.

 

A less confused politics would worry far more about upward intergenerational mobility out of poverty and about social poverty than about what this year’s poverty rate is. That would require liberals to abandon their current emphasis on simply giving people cash and to trust more in the American economy to deliver prosperity. It would require conservatives to devote far more time and attention to the problems of the most disadvantaged Americans and to prioritize finding ways for government — including the federal government — to help poor kids so they are ready to forge their own opportunities on reaching adulthood.

 

“Artificial Weights”: Early Disadvantage Persists

Note: “Most-Disadvantaged” means either (1) children entering kindergarten in fall, 2010 whose parents were in the bottom fifth of a socioeconomic status measure based on education, occupation, and income or (2) children whose parents were in the bottom

Earlier this month, the American Enterprise Institute launched the American Dream Initiative, an organization-wide effort to strengthen the Dream and increase opportunity throughout the nation. For my part, I’ll be running the new Center for Opportunity and Social Mobility alongside Kevin Corinth, the Center’s new deputy director — producing work on intergenerational mobility, poverty, and social capital. It will also be a home for new research and policy projects focused on opportunity.

 

We hope to bring a conviction to policy debates that the American economy is strong, but we need more dynamism and smarter public investment to raise living standards and increase mobility. Helping the disadvantaged requires attention to the ways that policies affect the social influences and social resources of poor kids. It requires worrying about unintended consequences and incentives. And it requires well-delineated roles for federal, state, and local government and civil society.

 

Policymakers should balance fiscal responsibility and the recognition that investments — real investments rather than transfers dressed up as investments — can save money in the long run. They should emphasize personal agency but acknowledge structural and historical barriers to upward mobility. They should not let the failures of Head Start justify defeatism about closing the large socioeconomic gaps in school readiness that exist when kids enter kindergarten.

 

The American Dream is nothing if not optimistic. Our politics have become hostage not only to polarization but also to pessimism. A reform conservatism can revive the promise of the Dream for those kids facing long odds who deserve our help (which is to say, all of them). Helping the “lost Einsteins” and others who never come near their potential will promote values of self-reliance and independence (we don’t expect children to be either), strengthen the economy, renew optimism in the Dream, and create a more just society.

 

Abraham Lincoln, on the first Fourth of July of the Civil War, asserted in an address to Congress that “the leading object” of the federal government was “to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” Let that be the credo of a new reform conservatism.