Why Reaganism Can Beat Trumpism in 2024

By John Hart

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

While most of the attention in the 2024 GOP primary right now is on Donald Trump vs. Ron DeSantis, the battle worth watching is the shadow primary between Trumpism and Reaganism. A key to understanding this comes from Nikki Haley’s top consultant and former deputy at the United Nations, Jon Lerner, who argues, “the fundamentals of campaigns are more the same than they are different over the years.”

 

It’s no coincidence that at Haley’s campaign launch, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman introduced her as “America’s version of Margaret Thatcher.” If Lerner is correct, it’s plausible that a “Reaganesque” candidate can catch fire. 

 

Let’s be clear: Reaganism is not misty-eyed nostalgia about a bygone era or mere reflections about the man and his unique attributes. Instead, it’s more of a shorthand expression for a strategy. Reaganism asserts that balancing factions, channeling populist impulses toward productive ends, and maintaining the three-legged stool of fiscal, foreign policy, and social or cultural conservatism gives conservatives the best chance of success. It’s a formula that has been consistently successful for four decades and resolves tensions on the right that existed long before Reagan and will exist long after 2024. 

 

In a sense, Reaganism is code for “normal” but normal does not mean moderate. Instead of the dark nihilism some in the Trump camp seem to espouse, Reaganism embraces the optimistic belief that America is an idea that is still being born, an imperfect country in pursuit of a perfect ideal in which constitutional conservatives view democratic institutions simultaneously in need of constant protection and renovation.  

 

In 2024, Haley and the rest of the field won’t be trying to carve out their own “lanes” along the conventional moderate-to-conservative spectrum as much as they’ll be trying to rebuild the highway system that Trump and previous GOP nominees neglected and damaged.

 

Those arguing that the fundamentals are more different than similar are an odd alliance between Trump’s most ardent supporters and his loudest critics. In the New York Times, former Romney and Bush adviser Stuart Stevens makes this case in a blistering critique of Haley: 

 

No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley … Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement.

 

Meanwhile, at The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell writes, “Haley would be the frontrunner in a Republican party that no longer exists. … While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party – economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues – remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.”

 

The counterargument begins with confronting how unlikely it is that Donald Trump marks the end of conservative history and the dawn of a permanently and irreversibly authoritarian party. As Matthew Continetti explains in The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, the arguments the Republican Party is having today about trade, immigration, foreign policy, and the administrative state have been going on for a long time. Trump is offering nothing new that conservatives haven’t been debating for a century.

 

American conservatives have long confronted, contained, and moved beyond conspiratorial and destructive populist movements and personalities like the John Birch society, George Wallace, and Joseph McCarthy while elevating figures like Reagan and movements like the Tea Party that channeled populism toward productive ends. 

 

The strange irony of the Trump administration is that his agenda was a bit of a magic trick that illustrated the staying power of Reaganism. Trump covered Reagan’s three-legged stool with a MAGA flag but understood that his success depended on his fidelity to conservative orthodoxy. On the economy, Trump bent the knee to Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Paul Ryan, and Reaganites like Larry Kudlow who passed his tax cuts and helped him clear away regulations. On judges, Trump deferred to Leonard Leo, whose Reagan-era Federalist Society shaped Trump’s judicial picks. On foreign policy, Trump talked like Pat Buchanan but governed like Haley, who channeled Reagan’s idealism tempered with realism as U.N. ambassador. Reaganism wasn’t on life support during the Trump era. It was its lifeblood. But after January 6, and his string of losses, voters may never again trust him to steward that coalition. When Trump goes, the so-called “intellectual” movement around him will retreat into the camps that existed long before him. 

 

It’s only a matter of time before today’s “national conservatives” discover they are advancing ideas America’s founders explicitly rejected when they asserted that rights don’t come from nations, states, tribes, or monarchs but from natural law. National conservatives aren’t wrong when they describe this as a “classically liberal” understanding of rights, but they haven’t come to grips with the reality that their fix is to engineer a government takeover of civil society in which conservative cancel culture can protect tradition. Fortunately, our classical liberal tradition of principled pluralism (i.e. constitutional conservatism) gives them space to discover they haven’t stumbled onto something new. And, besides, does anyone seriously believe Trump spends his time meditating on the nature of rights and will swoop in to resolve this argument in favor of the national conservatives?

 

Exhibit A in this wishful thinking comes from a recent piece in the American Conservative on the train derailment in Ohio. Sohrab Ahmari unintentionally illustrates why Reaganism (and “normal” constitutional conservatism) will be more potent than Trumpism in 2024. In a tweet promoting his piece blaming the train derailment on lax regulation, Ahmari writes: 

 

Complex economies require complex regulations and regulators who are empowered to tame market actors whose gargantuan size would otherwise permit terrible abuses, against which the little guy is defenseless.

 

Populism must be FOR the administrative state.

 

Ahmari is channeling President Obama, who was a pyromaniac in a field of “anti-government” strawmen. Small government Reagan conservatives don’t argue for no government, just government that has a light touch and is not incompetent and hostile to little guy entrepreneurs. Top-down, heavy-handed regulations that erect barriers to innovation (such as the antiquated National Environmental Policy Act) enable cronyism and create suffering for the people Ahmari wants to protect. 

 

Again, a political reality check is in order. What candidate in 2024 is going to turn “FOR the administrative state” into a bumper sticker? Who will say, “Vote for me, because, like you, I know that government is too small?” Or “I’ll make regulations more complex.” Or, “I’ll give regulators the power they have lacked.” No one who wants to win in 2024 will heed Ahmari’s dreamy call for a Leviathan whisperer who will bring us a kinder, gentler administrative state. 

 

Instead, we’ll hear more of what we’re already hearing regarding fiscal conservatism from Haley and now Vivek Ramaswamy, who jumped into the race promising to reduce the size of the administrative state. Expect the rest of the field to sound less like Trump and more like Benjamin Franklin who said, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Or, Thomas Jefferson who said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

 

Neither the Always Trumpers nor the defeatists are reading recent history correctly. The painful truth some Romney and Bush era consultants like Stevens won’t accept is this: Nikki Haley didn’t throw it all away. They did. When Haley says she doesn’t want to go back to the days before Trump, Reagan conservatives know exactly what she means. They hear NOT hypocrisy but insight. Haley is calling out the Bush- and Romney-era Republicans who squandered the Reagan coalition because they were out of touch, especially on spending and immigration. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan lamented in 2007: 

 

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. 

 

As a congressional staffer for Sen. Tom Coburn at the time, I can say it’s impossible to overstate the level of frustration, exasperation, and desperation conservatives in Congress felt. The Tea Party didn’t start with Rick Santelli’s rant; it started with members desperately trying to keep the Reagan coalition from flying apart at a time when a Republican president should have been keeping it together. 

 

One instructive episode from this era came in 2007 when a group of members led by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, and Coburn formed an organization called “Reagan 21” that aspired to reboot happy warrior constitutional conservatism as Reagan had decades earlier. Among staff, the exercise was met with unanimous eye rolls. The nostalgic appeal to Reagan was way too blatant and on the nose, we thought. Sure enough, the effort was panned and went nowhere. Our allies politely said the members’ hearts were in the right place. In hindsight, their hearts and heads were in the right place even if their words weren’t.  

 

Reagan 21 didn’t take off, but the Tea Party’s focus on the fiscal conservative leg of the Reagan stool produced tangible policy and political wins including a Republican blowout victory in 2010, a ban on earmarks, and the first real spending decreases in 60 years. This progress went sideways with Ted Cruz’s postmodern “defund Obamacare” fight. If we “stood firm” and kept the government shut down, Cruz argued, President Obama would be compelled to defund his signature achievement. Trump watched Cruz’s invent-your-own-reality conservatism in action and the rest is history. 

 

Haley watched this unfold and is applying these lessons in real time. She emphasized fiscal conservatism in her launch video and blasted earmarks in her launch speech. In fact, it would be difficult to find anything Haley is saying that doesn’t fit within the Reagan stool of fiscal, foreign policy, and social/cultural conservatism. The other challengers waiting to jump in will be more like the congressional conservatives in 2007 struggling with how to apply Reaganism to today than Trump post 2020. 

 

Voters will decide the future of the Republican Party, but it is not wishful thinking to argue that Reaganism will defeat Trumpism in 2024. Those who argue that the combined early support for Trump and DeSantis means the case closed in favor of Trumpism are making a very big assumption about DeSantis. The campaign may well show that DeSantis is more of a Reagan conservative pretending to be Trumpy than a less Trumpy version of Trump. Moreover, Reaganite candidates like Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin may argue DeSantis could be this cycle’s Rudy Giuliani or Scott Walker, both of whom who peaked early at this stage (in 2007 and 2015 respectively) then faded. 

 

The deeper trends of voter attitudes and preferences favor a return to normal, but campaigns are about other fundamentals as well. Message and likability matter immensely as does combat. Candidates live under the cruel and unforgiving reality that they must define themselves and their opponents, or be defined. Haley clearly decided that starting a firefight with Trump would be a political Pickett’s Charge, but she’s setting up sustained attacks on his age, competence, and fiscal irresponsibility. Challengers can be forgiven for being shrewd and patient but if they’re too passive for too long, they’ll be doomed. 

 

For Haley, this is especially true. Trump-friendly voters will forgive Haley for reneging on her promise to not run against Trump, just as they forgave Trump for changing parties five times. Haley will have a harder time convincing informed, Reagan-friendly suburban voters she’ll unambiguously confront Trump’s pathologies and is not merely in the race to be his running mate. To his credit, Ramaswamy has called out Trump for creating a culture of victimization on the right by not conceding that he lost in 2020. Haley and any subsequent challengers should co-opt that argument.

 

For the 2024 field, Trump offers countless contrasts that ought to inspire courage. Trump is a weak frontrunner with many flaws for his opponents to exploit. He is obsessed with “loyalty,” and that may be his Achilles heel. Trump’s challengers don’t have a loyalty problem. He does. Trump has habitually betrayed conservatives by desecrating the Constitution and giving Democrats power over their lives by being a loser in 2020 and by backing losers three elections in a row.

 

Rather than focusing on the follies of the progressive left, the former president has introduced new follies into public life like not conceding elections. He has spent his time out of office not criticizing leftist policy proposals or articulating his own vision but waging a fake fight about stolen elections.

 

Haley and other challengers are well positioned to make the case that they’ll be more loyal to the Trump agenda than Trump. And the challengers should understand it’s not about them, but about defending and rescuing the people who are being abused by Trump’s Stockholm Syndrome-like grip on 30 percent of the base. 

 

And maybe history isn’t shaped by deeper trends as much as by dominant leaders. That’s even more reason for 2024 candidates to step up and take risks. Every challenger is going to run against “the establishment.” Yet, today’s Republican establishment isn’t in Washington, D.C., but Mar-a-Lago, the headquarters of the RINOs (the Rebels in Name Only). That’s where the 2024 fight will have to go.

The Emerging Russia-China Alliance

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

The Biden administration is clearly preparing the American people for some bad news. The only real news about its revelation that the Beijing regime is considering supplying Russia with weapons is that China has not (so far as we know) done so already.

 

“We are watching closely,” Jake Sullivan told ABC. “We know they haven’t taken it off the table. And we are sending a clear message, as are our European allies, that this would be a real mistake because those weapons would be used to bombard cities and kill civilians, and China should want no part of that.”

 

The idea that Beijing’s genocidaires would be moved by the thought of bombed cities and dead civilians is laughable.

 

Russia’s war with Ukraine has been a double win for Beijing. Thanks to sanctions, Russia’s trade with the West has fallen sharply, but it has been able to turn to China for the goods, ranging from cars to electronics, required to keep its consumers content and its industrial base supplied. More important still, in China, Russia has a reliable customer that will be willing to buy increasing amounts of the oil, gas, and other raw materials that it can no longer sell to the West. Russia’s new pipelines will be heading toward China, not Europe. Its economy is doing fine, at least for now.

 

For its part, China has not only found an expanded market for its products in Russia but, critically, now has a “captive” supplier for oil, natural gas, and other raw materials, and one with which it shares a long land border. Given the weight that China, which is rapidly shifting to a quasi-autarkic economic model, attaches to security of supply for those resources it does not already have within its borders, this counts as a major win. Under the circumstances, it has no interest in seeing Russia dissolve into the chaos that defeat might bring, both for economic and geopolitical reasons. A Russian defeat, after all, would be an American victory. If anything, China has an interest in the prolongation of a war that keeps Russia dependent, and the U.S. (expensively) distracted. All this suggests that China will supply Russia with matériel as and when it judges it necessary.

 

When it comes to the combatants, Beijing’s peace plan has nothing of substance to offer. Its main function is to act as a device to allow Xi Jinping to pose as an honest broker. That’s an act designed to play well in the “global south” and reinforce the image of China as a world power. The plan’s most interesting provisions are those designed to ensure that the war does as little damage beyond the battlefield as possible, whether to global trading systems or through the consequences of a nuclear “crisis.” China is a hegemon on the rise, doing well with the world as it is, a world that it wishes to inherit more or less intact.

 

China has ample ability to sell or even give (spoiler: it would be the former) matériel to Russia. China’s production capacity of ground weapons exceeds NATO’s. The U.S. can complain all it wants (and it will), but it won’t find it easy to devise sanctions that it could wield that would have any effect, without hurting the U.S. too. If it could, that wouldn’t bother Beijing too much: The Chinese economy is now managed on the principle that the economic is subordinated to the political. Accepting some knocks goes with that territory. The most effective sanctions might be to put decarbonization — a process that will leave the West dangerously dependent on China for far longer than its politicians are prepared to admit — on hold. But that’s not going to happen.

 

The only positive to come from a more lethal Sino-Russian alignment (which, of course, would complement the arrangements that Russia already has with Iran and North Korea) would be if it put an end once and for all to the pretense that we can be partners with China in some areas (climate, say) and rivals in others. We cannot. And behaving as if we can is more dangerous than a straightforward recognition of a new Cold War. Accepting that reality may be unpleasant, but it is a starting point for navigating our way through it realistically, prudently, and without beguiling illusion.

Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 27, 2023

 

A peculiar phenomenon of our time is the so-called cultural Christian or even “Christian atheist,” by which is meant someone who finds the moral claims and cultural sensibility of Christianity sympathetic but who does not (will not, cannot) accept the fundamental claim of Christianity, i.e. that the Creator of the universe embodied Himself in the form of a first-century Palestinian Jew who was tortured and put to death before rising from the dead to provide a fallen humanity with a path to redemption. 

 

I do not much blame these “cultural Christians,” a breed that is increasingly common in conservative political circles, inasmuch as the supernatural claims of Christianity are—I write this as a believing Christian—positively absurd on first hearing. Also on second and third hearing, and for many more hearings, and sometimes (often, I think) to the committed and convinced Christian. There are lots of true things that sound crazy. The basic physical mechanism by which an airplane flies has been observed for a few thousand years (the Chinese have been flying kites for a long, long time) but if you tried to explain to some Elizabethan sophisticate,  unfamiliar with the technological achievements of our time, that we routinely launch vehicles weighing 1 million pounds (the top flying weight of the 747-400ER freighter is just short of that, and there are much larger aircraft) into the air, under their own power, with very little danger, that one may travel from Baghdad to Athens in one of these in less time than it takes to watch a performance of Hamlet—and that nothing on the exterior of the thing even moves very much, while the whole thing runs on something extracted from the same substance found in that “Pitch Lake” that Walter Raleigh observed in Trinidad—he might think you were pulling his leg. 

 

Of course, Christianity isn’t like that: The man who thinks he would never believe in such a thing as an airplane might be “converted,” easily, by flying on one. Christians, in spite of a whole library full of such boneheaded books as The Case for Christ, do not have evidence of that kind. Jesus performed miracles when it pleased Him to do so, but He wasn’t an entertainer and did not perform party tricks. Some of His followers apparently were able to perform great miracles, too, but Jesus had a different view of persuasion: “If you love each other, then everyone will know that you are my disciples,” He said, and, in light of that, Christians who are being honest with ourselves must not wonder too much that many people doubt our story. 

 

So, why the “cultural Christian”? Where does he come from, and what does he want? 

 

People who take an instrumental and political view of Christianity, however well-meaning (Dennis Prager is an example of this kind), sometimes argue that only “Judeo-Christian religion”—and there is no Judeo-Christian religion, nor are there “Judeo-Christian values” in any meaningful sense—provides a possible basis for a sound moral life, including the moral basis of national political life. This is, of course, what T. S. Eliot called the “dangerous inversion,” i.e., the argument that we should accept the supernatural claims of Christianity because they are useful for fortifying a moral sensibility when we should, instead, derive our moral sensibility from the truth of Christianity, if we believe it to be true, or from something else that we believe to be true rather than merely convenient. In a sense, the non-believer who sympathizes with Christianity is more of an enemy than is the frank atheist who hates Christianity—because the “cultural Christian” trivializes Christianity. The cultural Christian believes that Christianity is false and that this does not matter, while an evangelical atheist such as the late Christopher Hitchens believes that Christianity is false and that this does matter—that it matters a great deal. In that much, I am with Hitchens: Better to have a cruel and unforgiving society founded on the truth than to practice kindness based on a lie. 

 

(I met Hitchens only once—in church, ironically enough. And not just any church, but St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was William F. Buckley’s funeral, and Hitchens, true to form, was drunk at 10 a.m., and balefully eyeing Henry Kissinger across the nave. As it happens, I had ridden the train in from Connecticut that morning with another man headed to St. Patrick’s—not for the funeral but because he was one of the men working on the ceiling, bits of which had been falling down on worshipers for years. I imagined Hitchens and Kissinger running into one another and, in the ensuing explosion of ego and Johnnie Walker fumes, the fragile roof collapsing on the congregation, transporting Hitchens and Kissinger and the rest of us all instantly to the hereafter and to the judgment of what we had better all hope is a truly merciful God—with a sense of humor.) 

 

Some of you will be stuck on the fact that I wrote that there are no Judeo-Christian values in any meaningful sense. I know that this flies in the face of the conservative catechism, but I think it is true. Christianity and Judaism are very different religions, but they have a great deal in common when it comes to moral prescription—but they have this in common not only with one another but with many other religions and with the moralities of many other cultures. With apologies to my learned Christian friends who sometimes insist that it is otherwise, Christianity is not especially radical as a purely moral position. Those Christians who take a view of life based on “natural law”—which really means only that we can use reason to discover how it is we should live—should not be surprised to find that Christianity is not a moral outlier, inasmuch as the ancient Greek philosophers and Hindu sages and Confucian scholars had fully functioning powers of reason, too. It is not that there is nothing at all distinctive about Christianity, but even its most radical moral demand—that we should love our enemies—would not be alien to a pagan Stoic. Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t murder, etc., are as near to moral universals as you will find. Christians may have taken a somehow more demanding view of sexual purity and marital fidelity than did first-century Romans, although the Romans took a narrower view than did the Old Testament patriarchs, for instance in prohibiting polygamy. In his view of marriage, Paul the apostle might have been morally closer to a virtuous Roman such as Antoninus Pius than to Solomon with his 1,000 wives and concubines. What we call the “Judeo-Christian values” are for the most part values commonly shared with many peoples from many nations practicing many religions. For all the talk (often fatuous) of Jesus as a “great moral teacher,” it was His supernatural claims, not His moral advice, that was distinctive: He was not crucified for saying that we should love one another, or for pointing out that the man with lust in his heart is an adulterer in spirit if not in fact, or for saying that we should forgive one another as we hope to be forgiven, or for any of that—He was crucified for claiming to be the Son of God and the Messiah of prophecy. These are religious rather than moral claims. 

 

Of course, the religious claims of Christianity must necessarily transform its moral sensibility. And thank God it does—there is almost nothing in this world as insipid as Christian solicitousness divorced from the brutal facts of Christianity itself. If Christianity is not true, then the Christian sensibility is very little more than niceness inflated to the point of metaphysical comedy—and if it is a matter of choosing your own adventure, then there are lots of other Levantine wine cults to choose from, many of them a lot more fun on a Sunday morning. 

 

When people say they are sympathetic with the Christian sensibility, what they often are saying is that they take a sympathetic view of Western civilization, and that they prefer a traditional (but not too traditional!) approach to culture and community life. Christianity did in a profound sense create Europe—previously only a geographic term—but the two are not synonymous, and Christianity is Christianity everywhere in the world it is practiced. Those who want to use Christianity as a bulwark of national identity are even more wrongheaded—Christendom has always been a thorn in the side of nationalists, who from the time of the Reformation forward felt compelled to build their own national churches precisely to insulate national feeling and defend national power from the competing claims of a multinational religious communion. The Catholic Church was the original European Union in its princelier period—even down to the fact that the English eventually grew so irritated by it that they Brexited their way out of it during the reign of Henry VIII. (Henry II had walked halfway down the same road three centuries and some earlier.) If “cultural Christianity” means that Christians should happily cooperate with American nationalists who wish to use Christianity the way Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses Islam, then “cultural Christianity” must be not only rejected but defeated. 

 

What else is there to this idea? Nostalgia, of course. There is probably something to be learned from the fact that one kind of civilization produces Caravaggio and Chaucer while another kind of civilization produces Twitter and The Bachelorette, but modern Christianity is not going to start producing Renaissance art and literature or anything like it (not much of it, anyway), and that is not what it is there for. 

 

What should we think about this? I asked Michael Kruger, who is the president of the Reformed Theological Seminary campus at Charlotte, who shared some valuable observations. 

 

Because of the history of Christianity in America, many Americans have a certain set of values that come from that Christian history—even if they don’t realize it, or don’t even consider themselves Christians. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.  We are certainly glad that Christianity has had a “preserving” influence on our culture that can still be felt generations later. We should be glad when people behave morally, even if they don’t know why they are doing so. The problem is simply that this state of things won’t last. To believe in Christian morals, without actually believing in Christianity, can only be sustained temporarily. Eventually, something’s got to give. While political actions can perhaps slow the shift, it cannot stop it completely. Morality works best when it flows from a transformed human heart, not when it is merely forced by external laws. That is not to suggest external laws don’t matter. We should still make good laws and enforce such laws.  But the healthiest cultures are the ones where morality flows naturally and internally.  …

 

We should not be content with people simply “playing” Christian for a time, because such an approach will not last in times of resistance and persecution. While it might be nice to have large churches with full pews, it would be better to have smaller churches that were filled with people who genuinely believed and understood the implications of their faith.

 

Christianity, particularly in its more rarefied, intellectual, and high-church forms, enjoys a certain kind of prestige and cultural cachet, but being a believer, as such, does not—in many circles, ordinary orthodox Christian belief is more of a source of intellectual stigma. (If you enjoy stories of callow, youthful vanity, consider that I decided that I might be open to Christianity in part because of my interest in T. S. Eliot, whose beautiful and austere way of writing about his faith made the religion seem, to my foggy young brain, more intellectually respectable than the mush I had been served by Methodist church ladies in Sunday school. The church had enjoyed the services of Augustine and Aquinas, Dante, Cavalcanti, Cervantes—yeah, yeah, but I was the third-smartest senior at Lubbock High School.) Politicians, activists, and culture warriors are very much in the prestige business, because their whole game is status. One Christian-friendly atheist of my acquaintance sometimes worries that his attitude will seem condescending or patronizing, not wanting to suggest that he thinks that a 2,000-year-old institution with a couple billion or so members is just waiting around for him to pat it on the head and offer his approval. Christianity uses prestige, too—it is a very useful advertising tool, hence the robes and the pointy hats and the splendid churches with the Caravaggios in them. And in Rome, they are happy to have the tourists come and look at the pictures and the sculptures and the architecture, hoping that they will absorb the underlying lesson: that there is something serious and real behind this, something that is ineffable, and so we build cathedrals not because these are even a sketch of God’s greatness but simply because this is the best thing we know how to do—you can be the Magi or you can be the little drummer-boy, but, in any case, you bring the best of such gifts as you have.

 

But Notre-Dame de Paris is not a temple to niceness, or even to goodness or good civil order or public morality or “Judeo-Christian values.” St. Sebastian did not take any arrows for the cause of social conservatism. 

 

If by “cultural Christian” we mean an atheist who is pro-life, who prefers a traditional model of marriage and family life, who believes that Western civilization is superior to its competitors, that hedonic consumerism is not the highest good, etc.—in that case, why not leave Christianity out of it altogether? Christians do not believe the same things as Jews, but pro-life Christians work easily with pro-life Jews toward pro-life ends, and they do not have to trivialize either their own religion or the Jewish religion to do so. (For that matter, the community of pro-life Christians contains within it rival religious communions that, if pressed, might not concede that some of the others are in fact Christian at all.) My advice—and my preference—is that the atheists should go and be happy atheists and not worry about being some sort of ersatz “Christian atheists.” 

 

As Elijah did not quite put it: If the Lord is God, then follow Him, but if Baal or Ron DeSantis or good public order is what you really care about, then you know what to do. In any case, you should stop fooling yourself—you aren’t fooling anybody else. But if you are an atheist who is pro-life, who prefers a traditional model of marriage and family life, who believes that Western civilization is superior to its competitors, that hedonic consumerism is not the highest good, etc., then you might ask yourself why you believe these things and upon what basis your beliefs stand. Maybe it is because you grew up in a (still barely) Christian civilization, or in something that was one until very recently, and you think that what this has produced is good—which only leads you back to the first question. If your answer is “culture”—culture only, and not one step farther—then you’re looking at turtles all the way down. 

 

Economics … Against English Majors

 

Economics 1, English majors zero. From the Washington Post:

 

Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, would eliminate undergraduate majors in English, history, philosophy and several other subjects under a controversial restructuring plan its trustees are scheduled to consider Friday.

 

Update: The maniacs approved it. 

 

Even the major in theology and religious studies — a staple at many colleges but especially those with Catholic affiliation — would be cut. The plan, which has spurred fierce faculty protest, represents a pivotal moment for a 3,700-student institution in Arlington that describes itself as a “comprehensive Catholic university.”

 

Marymount President Irma Becerra endorsed the cuts in a Feb. 15 letter to the university’s Faculty Council. In all, the plan calls for phasing out nine bachelor’s degree programs. Among other majors that would be eliminated: art, mathematics, secondary education and sociology. For economics, the Bachelor of Arts would be cut, but the Bachelor of Science would remain. Also proposed to be cut: a master’s program in English and humanities.

 

Economics is not a field that simply asks, “What can you sell it for?” It is not as dismal as those who talk about the “dismal science” suggest. Ludwig von Mises called his big, definitive book not Economics or Hurray Free Markets or anything like that—he called it Human Action, and he described his method as praxeology, which is a fancy way of saying “the study of human action.” In economics, “What’s the price?” is an important question, but that question is, in a sense, subordinate to the bigger question: “What is it you are trying to do?” 

 

Being a conservative, I have over the years spent a good deal of time listening to Fox News and talk-radio types—and conservative donors—mocking money-losing magazines and nonprofit institutions. Rush Limbaugh, who grew to be a singularly ungracious man toward the end of his life, mocked National Review on the air for being a money-losing magazine. (Most magazines of that sort do not make money; The Dispatch is a for-profit business supported mainly by subscription revenue, which is why you should subscribe if you haven’t.) Never mind that Limbaugh had filled countless hours of airtime reading National Review articles word-for-word on the air—not infrequently, these were mine, and I will note for future historians that he was not always what you would call scrupulous about attribution. Limbaugh, of course, made lots of money, and, like a lot of people who make a lot of money, he came to believe that this was a mark of excellence, never thinking very much about the fact that there are pornographers against whose earnings those of talk-radio and cable-news superstars are hangnails. Some enterprises are meant to make money, and some aren’t. If your church is turning big profits, you probably should find a new church. If your presidential campaign does not finish the race a good deal to the south of broke, then you didn’t do it right. Harvard enjoys the fruits of a splendid endowment, but it is not there to make money. (Harvard occasionally needs to be reminded of this.) There are many spheres of human action. 

 

A university in which there are no undergraduate studies in literature or history is not a university, and cutting these programs is not evidence that the university is being managed economically—it is evidence that the university is being managed incompetently. (Almost-aptronym alert: One of the critics of this proposal is the director of the school of humanities, Ariane Economos, who is, alas, a professor of philosophy rather than economics.) The first thing in setting an organization’s affairs in order is figuring out what it is the organization is there to do. 

 

And this is not always straightforward: As the Wall Street Journal reports, Stanford now has more staff than students—and seven administrators for every faculty member. Stanford is an excellent university, but most of its resources are not oriented toward teaching. (Stanford is a private school; this is not mostly a question of government spending.) Schools provide a lot of jobs, and not only at the university level. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, likes to boast about how many pay raises for teachers he has approved and how much education funding he has appropriated; it is good to have well-funded schools, but the politics there is not about education—it is about the fact that public school districts are large employers and, in many rural (which is as good as to say “Republican”) areas, they are the largest employer. “Big government?” Sure, but Gov. Abbott is a practicing politician. 

 

If Marymount cannot afford to teach literature or history, then what is it that Marymount is there for? If it is to be a Catholic jobs-training program, then let it call itself that rather than pretend that it is a university. 

 

A Little More Economics … 

 

Perhaps you have seen this interview, in which Tucker Carlson makes the case for banning automated trucks in order to save truck drivers’ jobs. Carlson has a point, of course, but he misses the real enemy: Sure, we could save some jobs by preventing technological progress in transportation, and we could create a lot more jobs in transportation by taking the proactive step of banning trucks and making everybody use donkey carts, but the real problem—the real job-killer!— is, obviously, the wheel. Make people transport goods with bindles like medieval serfs and we’ll have more transportation-sector jobs than we know what to do with. Of course, we’ll have a medieval-serf standard of living, too. 

 

(Some of you are hearing these words in your heads: “Why not use spoons?”)

 

This is nonsense, and I know Carlson doesn’t actually believe this. If he did, he would quit his job. As in transportation, technology has radically increased the financial returns to a successful career in asinine demagoguery, but it also has put a lot of asinine demagogues out of business. There would be a lot more jobs for asinine demagogues if they had to travel around the country—on horses, of course, if not on foot—giving speeches on soapboxes and stumps the way they did in the early 19th century. (“Stump speech” and “on your soapbox” are linguistic survivals from this era.) Of course, Tucker Carlson is not going to propose any such thing. As Robert Conquest famously observed, everybody is a conservative when it comes to his own area of expertise. As Kevin D. Williamson less famously observed: Everything in life is really simple, provided you don’t know a f—–g thing about it. 

 

You know how these so-called nationalists will rarely ever tell you exactly what it is they want as a policy matter? This is why. Their ideas are backwards and stupid, and their backwardness and stupidity is obvious enough that even the Fox News crowd will see it, given enough time. 

 

Words About Words

 

“Useless as teats on a boar hog,” was one of my late father’s best contributions to my verbal catalog, and you had better believe that, with his heavy north Texas accent, it was pronounced tits. 

 

Question: Is “boar hog” redundant? 

 

Maybe, maybe not. If you say “boar” or, especially, “wild boar,” then everybody knows you are talking swine. But there are non-pig species in which the male is known as a boar—bears, famously, but also peccaries, badgers, and racoons. Sex-specific words and seemingly sex-specific words have a way of sometimes being generalized—for example, a lot of people will refer to a flock of peacocks (or, if you prefer, a pride, a muster, or an ostentation of peacocks) rather than to peafowl, the males of which are peacocks and the female peahens. There are competing etymologies, but the word hen probably survives in chicken, and we refer to a clutch of chickens even when both hens and cocks are included in the group. As the terribly heteronormative saying goes: In language as in life, man embraces woman—by which it is meant that such expressions as “May the best man win” are not meant to be sex-specific. 

 

(Please do not say or write gender when you mean sex. Being precise there will save much confusions.)

 

What is undeniable, at least to my ear, is that “Useless as teats on a boar” is only about 20 percent as funny as “Useless as teats on a boar-hog.” That extra syllable—and the fact that the syllable is hog—is a humor multiplier. 

 

I don’t remember my father ever calling me “useless as teats on a boar hog,” though he did once inform me that I would, if left unsupervised, “f— up an anvil.” Also pretty good. 

 

“Teats on a boar hog” is funny because vestigial nipples on males are generally funny. I used to have a friend who had six of them in two rows, like a dog, the lower ones barely visible. (He was one of the craziest people I knew in my youth, but also brilliant; of course, he became a psychiatrist.) But, not to give you whiplash—isn’t there something profound there, too? 

 

I mean this: As you probably know, human males have vestigial nipples because this part of the anatomy develops before the rush of hormones that transforms the unborn child. As they put it over at the National Library of Medicine: “All fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female.” Until they aren’t. In that sense, the part of men that marks us as meant for nurturing new children precedes the parts of men that are involved in making new children—a general parenthood precedent to fatherhood per se. But, of course, fathers do not have the ability to do what mothers do and provide direct sustenance from our bodies to nourish newborns, and so we must find other things to do, or else feel—well, useless as teats on a boar hog. 

 

Hence war and literature and civilization. 

 

I’ll tell you briefly why this is on my mind, and I write briefly because I do not intend to write very much about my family, this fallen world being full of lunatics. But, as some of you know, I have a little baby boy at home, and he has started to crawl—he is, for the first time, really mobile. And, sometimes, when I leave the room, he follows me. I am used to Pancake following me around from room to room—she wants the pack to be intact and together at all times. But a little baby boy following you around and looking up at you expectantly—between us, that hit me harder than the drive home from the hospital with the little potato strapped into the car seat for the first time. The first few months of a baby’s life are pretty much the motherhood show—6 million years of evolution have set her up pretty well for that, and I was already taking out the trash, more or less regularly, and now there was just more of it. (So much trash. We get so many Amazon deliveries that I feel like we’re raising a kid with a nanny named Jeff Bezos, PBUH.) But we have a little boy who is starting to figure some things out, and the fact is that he is going to follow me around the house and look up to me—literally and figuratively—for at least some part of his life, including the most important first years, and he is going to do this whether I am the sort of man who should be looked up to or not. 

 

You ever have that feeling of the universe tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, dummy—pay attention, now. This is important.” That was one of those. 

Don’t Rewrite Books

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

First, they came for Roald Dahl.

 

Anyone who thought the politically correct rewriting would stop at the irreverent author of such children’s classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr. Fox was, of course, sadly mistaken.

 

The news that hundreds of changes have been made in Dahl’s classics is now followed by word that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, is getting an emergency rewrite as well.

 

This is a very bad idea.

 

For a start, where does it end? There’s no limiting principle that would prevent the editing of nearly every great writer in the Western canon. Homer is a cauldron of toxic masculinity. Chaucer, who has been removed from curricula at various universities, would need extensive reworking — for the offense of relaying 14th-century attitudes toward women, if nothing else. As for Shakespeare, has anyone read Othello?

 

We get the word “bowdlerize” from Thomas Bowdler, who published a version of Shakespeare more appropriate for families in the early 19th century. He meant well, but his name has become synonymous with ham-fisted editing of texts for political or social reasons. The first Bowdler edition of the bard’s works axed about 10 percent of the original, taking out blasphemous language and other unsettling material. The suicide of Ophelia, for instance, became an accidental drowning.

 

Even Bowdler, by the way, wasn’t sure he was able to fix Othello.

 

Then, there’s the matter of the integrity of the record. Great authors use every word in a book for a reason. Changes in the language, even if done with care, change the meaning and the nature of the work. If Roald Dahl used colorful language to describe a character (and he quite often did) and it’s stripped out for fear of offending people, say, with double chins, the character has been changed — without the author’s permission and counter to how he published his work.

 

This is no more defensible than someone deciding Monet’s water lilies should be an ever-so slightly different shade of green, or that Tchaikovsky should have written his “1812 Overture” in D-sharp minor instead of E-flat major.

 

Any such suggestions would be considered cultural vandalism, and the same should apply to the woke rewriting of literature.

 

Relatedly, the edits of enduring works are never, ever going to do anything other than make them worse — less colorful, pointed, and eloquent. If nothing else, this is a basic question of literary talent and flair.

 

To return to the example of Dahl, he’s been edited by an outfit called Inclusive Minds (“passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature”). To put it simply, Dahl was good at writing; Inclusive Minds is good at DEI. If any editor at Inclusive Minds had a fraction of Dahl’s abilities, this remarkable person wouldn’t be working at expurgating someone else’s works but writing his or her own beloved children’s books.

 

Finally, we call classics “timeless” because they are imbued with a quality of genius that transcends the fashions of their time and our own. Trying to constantly rewrite them to keep up with the latest trends, which may well seem idiotic in due course (fingers crossed), is a fool’s errand.

 

It is also inherently sinister. There’s a reason that everyone naturally recoils from Winston Smith’s work in 1984 in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, changing old newspaper articles and photographs to update them in keeping with the dictates of the party. The falsity, the thoroughness, and the need for control, extending all the way to the past, are all disturbing hallmarks of totalitarian politics.

 

Now, it’s not a party that is demanding the reworking of inconvenient texts, but a corrupted part of our culture that can’t abide the idea that offensive, or potentially offensive, terms and descriptions exist in books that have demonstrated astonishing popularity and staying power. There’s no doubt who the giants are here, and who are the small-minded censors.

The Year It All Went Wrong

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 27, 2023

 

It’s not often that the polling industry provides us with data pinpointing the precise year in which American social cohesion began to erode. Gallup pollsters recently published statistics illustrating where it all went wrong — at least concerning race relations in the United States.

 

Every year since 2001, with some exceptions, Gallup has asked American adults to rate the state of relations between white and black residents. In 2015, the number of respondents who told pollsters they believed race relations were either “very” or “somewhat good” fell off a cliff. The public’s perception of race relations never returned to the status quo ante 2015. Indeed, its decline has accelerated in recent years.

 

Gallup declined to test this proposition in 2014, but we can identify it as the year in which the country took a wrong turn through Gallup’s other race-related questions.

 

In 2014, 55 percent of respondents said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the “state of race relations” in America. The following year, just 30 percent agreed. By the summer of 2015, the number of adults saying they were “very dissatisfied” with relations between white and black Americans spiked by ten points from the same time in 2013. Only 17 percent of adults polled by Gallup said they worried a “great deal” about race relations in March 2014, which was in line with prior years. A year later, that number increased by eleven points.

 

So, what the heck happened in the middle of 2014 that radically altered the consensus around race relations in America? The most compelling explanation for this seismic shift surrounds the events that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement. Or, more specifically, the commentary and pedagogy that followed the events that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Mo. Three weeks earlier, an officer in New York City was filmed incapacitating 43-year-old Eric Garner with a chokehold for the offense of selling loose cigarettes on the streets. He died in police custody as a result of his treatment. In both cases, grand juries decided not to pursue charges against the responding officers. Brown’s death was justified by the “physical evidence” presented to the jurors. Garner’s killing, however grotesque, did not violate New York statute (nor, the Justice Department later conceded, did the officer commit a prosecutable violation of Garner’s civil rights).

 

These events triggered months of sometimes violent demonstrations across the country — periodic episodes of looting and vandalism that, in 2014, were sights few had witnessed at such a scale since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. These two arrest-related killings are also responsible for mainstreaming the verbal ticks that have since become the price of admission into elite society. Among them, the notion that American race relations are, in fact, irreparable owing to America’s deep and abiding commitment to the repression of its minority population.

 

It was the year New York City mayor Bill de Blasio indicted the “centuries of racism that have brought us to this day” and revealed that he taught his biracial children to fear the police force under his control. It was the year President Barack Obama indicted racism as a “deeply rooted” feature of American society, even though he conceded that “things are better — not good, in some cases — but better” than they were in the civil-rights era. It was the year New York magazine reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells identified a “tidal shift in the attentions of the post-Occupy American left, away from the subject of economic inequality and towards the problem of race.” It was also the year a concerted effort was made in the press to educate the public out of the view that race relations were all right.

 

On December 30, 2014, NPR looked into not just Gallup’s polling but surveys from the New York Times, Pew Research Center, and CBS News, all of which showed either static or relatively positive trends in the general perception of race relations. This, according to the sources with whom NPR reporters spoke, was a problem that needed fixing. “From a privileged perspective, things are, yes, dramatically different,” Tufts University professor Peniel Joseph said of the difference between 2014 and 1964.

 

What followed was a nearly decade-long campaign to educate Americans out of the belief that racial disparities in America had improved or even could improve. To hold an optimistic view on the subject became, at best, an expression of ignorance. It is impossible to gauge the degree to which Gallup’s respondents honestly believe race relations have worsened since 2015, or whether they know what they’re expected to say. Regardless, at least we have a good idea of when it all started going downhill.

Divorced From Reality

By Chris Stirewalt

Monday, February 27, 2023

 

For such a big nation, America’s politics have gotten very small.

 

The contiguous 48 states of our country have a population density of something like 105 people per square mile. Add in Hawaii and Alaska (which itself is bigger than Texas, California, and Montana combined) and the number drops all the way down to about 91 people for every square mile—about half that of Western Europe.

 

But for purposes of comparison, let’s just stick with the lower 48. Outside of two metro areas on the southwest coast, which hold about two thirds of the state’s population, most of Alaska is wilderness. And that’s not dissimilar to much of the rest of the developed world on the frozen northern tier. It’s the same in the desert nations of the world. Australia has fewer than 9 people for each of its nearly 3 million square miles, one-twelfth of the population density in the contiguous U.S., which is almost the same in area. 

 

But we are no slouches when it comes to elbow room. If you equally divided all of this land—from the Californias to the New York island, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters—there would be about 6 acres for every human being. And unlike other nations so vast, most of the contiguous U.S. is in the temperate climate zone, and other than a few scorched spots in the desert Southwest, all of it is habitable and useful. And even in some of those parched places, we go when we get old and bask like lizards on rocks and feel the sun in our bones.

 

The population density of Western Europe, which has a similarly wonderful climate, depends on which countries you include and exclude. But even defining the region as carefully as possible, it is five times more crowded than our lower 48. Japan is more than eight times as crowded; India more than 10, Taiwan almost 17 times over, and Hong Kong is a brain-boiling 167 times more crowded than the United States with 17,582 people per square mile.

 

Please pardon the geography refresher, but given the speed of air travel and our long familiarity with instantaneous communication, it is easy to forget how damned big our country is and how few people live in it relative to its size — how far apart from one and other. 

 

Since we have become increasingly dependent on national news and entertainment, we can easily start to think of this big, brawling, beautiful country of ours as Europeans often do and imagine the East Coast, Midwest and West Coast are cozied up to each other. It’s more than 3,000 miles to drive from Plymouth Rock to the Hollywood Sign, about the same distance as the Pilgrims’ voyage in 1620. We may look like a monoculture on TV, but take that drive and you’ll pass through what feels like about six different countries. You’ll be in Nebraska so long that you’ll start sprouting tassels.

 

So what are we doing with all this elbow room? How are we enjoying our 6-acre slices of this land that was made for you and me?

 

Mostly it’s pretty wonderful: prosperous, peaceful, and free. There’s plenty of the heartbreak that comes with the human condition, but from Bario Logan on San Diego Bay to The Colisée in Lewiston, Maine, Americans of every kind and every background imaginable are living good lives in the truest sense and doing so almost entirely unaware of what the folks even a town away are up to. They are born, live, work, play, worship, and die without ever having to worry too much about what goes on outside of their own communities. 

 

So what’s with this talk about “national divorce” that keeps cropping up? 

 

Not to take Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene seriously, but the Georgia Republican is now part of House leadership. And, she is hardly the author of the idea. Race kooks both black and white have long dreamed of separate Americas, and what was the Civil War but that dream manifested in its bloody, brutal reality? It is an old idea that never loses its appeal to those with too much hate in their hearts and too few powers of observation.

 

“Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations would continue,” she wrote. (Gee, thanks.) “However in red states, they could have different rules about store product placement on national store’s shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes.”

 

Again, I hate to bring attention to a political figure so desperate for it, but imagine with a person who is concerned about a plague of marital aids next to the kids’ dental care section. Tickle me Elmo, indeed. Does she imagine that Walmart organizes its stores based on state laws? Worse, imagine a person who wants to regulate store layouts at the state level. 

 

Or try this one from the same thread: “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education. While blue states could have government-controlled gender transition schools.”

 

Is there a lot of drag storytelling in her northwest Georgia district? Are the libraries in Cave Spring and Mount Berry now indistinguishable from La Cage aux Folles? Has Chickamauga Elementary School replaced Old Glory with a picture of Chairman Xi and the gym coach with Eddie Izzard? 

 

Assuming rural Georgia has not become a hotbed of sexual experimentation and Chinese communism since my most recent visit, Greene is not angry about what is happening where she grew up, but what other people in other places are doing, or, more accurately, what she imagines other people are doing based on a steady diet of Facebook posts and Newsmax segments. 

 

Greene says we “need to separate by red states and blue states.” What in the heck does she think we have already done? There’s certainly plenty of people who agree with her call to shrink the federal government, but in terms of most of what she’s talking about, Americans already live the way they want to live, where they want to live. The proximity of sex toys to bubble gum-flavored toothpaste or how sex ed is taught is already different depending on where you are in America, because Americans already have the power to shape markets and local governments. 

 

Greene and the rest of the American divorce crowd aren’t really talking about how they want to live. They’re talking about how they want other Americans to live. And while the right-wing nationalists are certainly correct that there is an equally committed minority on the progressive left trying to cram down rules on far-away strangers, what makes the MAGA set imagine that their own authoritarianism would be any more welcome than that of the wokesters about whom they endlessly obsess?

 

In America, we don’t have to “love it or leave it” because there is somewhere in this vast, continental republic where you can find your people, your way of life, and your future. You can still find your 6 acres—or your 600-square-foot studio apartment—and live the way that suits you. 

 

There is room enough for all of us if we remember to leave civic space for people to find their own versions of the good life.

The Lab-Leak Theory Was a Victim of Left-Wing Culture Wars

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 27, 2023

 

The Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined the FBI in concluding that the virus that exploded out of China in early 2020, inaugurating the worst global public-health crisis in a century and taking millions of lives with it, “most likely” originated in a Chinese virology lab. Other investigatory bodies looking into the virus’s origins don’t yet all agree, and the Energy Department added the caveat that it had “low confidence” in its own assessment. But “low confidence” is more than no confidence. Even this modest dispensation represents an indictment of the expert classes, who wielded all the social pressure at their disposal to cajole the nation into dismissing the lab-leak theory early and with prejudice.

 

Those who lent credence to the theory and were subjected to the dominant culture’s bottomless capacity for condescension as a result will be tempted to take a victory lap. And, you know what? They should! The story of the theory’s rise, fall, and rise again is a story of how too many abused their positions of authority to wage a conflict over cultural values under the guise of dispassionate empiricism. Anathematizing the lab-leak hypothesis was just the latest avenue through which they could impeach political actors they didn’t like.

 

Senator Tom Cotton was among the earliest prominent figures to wonder aloud whether a unique coronavirus conspicuously adapted to infect humans had escaped containment in a country where laboratory leaks that sicken and kill are not unheard of and where “laboratory biosafety” was, until recently, an obscure concept. Cotton’s curiosity was handled by the arbiters of American discourse as a menace more dangerous than the virus itself.

 

Cotton was attacked in the Washington Post for his credulous embrace of a “fringe” “conspiracy theory.” Figures in superficially authoritative positions alleged that his “irresponsible” “fear-mongering” rendered him the functional equivalent of Cold War–era dupes who witlessly propagated the KGB’s falsehoods only to advance their parochial ideological objectives. These brushback pitches were informed by what passed for “the science,” as virologists and public-health experts rallied around the notion that the lab-leak theory impeded global efforts to contain the disease’s spread. What’s more, anyone who lent credence to the theory was labeled an accomplice to the campaign of “online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment” that was somehow licensed by asking the wrong questions.

 

The lab-leak hypothesis was never wholly unsupported by evidence. But as former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. wrote on Medium in early 2021, in discussing the judgment calls his paper and other heavyweight outlets had made when putting their thumbs on the scales against the lab-leak theory, the mainstream consensus ensured that the theory was relegated to the fringes, where it would only be “championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.” Thus, the presumed derangement of the lab-leak theory’s proponents became a self-reinforcing proposition. After all, only the crazies would touch it. You could be forgiven for concluding that was an intended consequence of all this gatekeeping.

 

In May 2021, the Wall Street Journal revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had evidence indicating that the lab-leak theory was no paranoid fantasy. The Journal’s revelations about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s previously undisclosed patient zeros did not, however, compel those who’d bludgeoned into silence anyone questioning China’s inviolable commitment to “laboratory biosafety” to re-examine their priors. Instead, it prompted them to fine-tune their arguments, which subsequently went from being centered on their supreme scientific confidence to being centered on their indisputable cultural sophistication.

 

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

 

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

 

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

 

The Energy Department’s conclusions about the virus’s origins are occasioning even more admissions against the Left’s interest. Author and CNN contributor Jill Filipovic rationalized the conduct of her ideological allies by noting that Donald Trump’s bigotries “put liberals understandably on the defense against any theory that seemed to blame China for Covid.” MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan stated this proposition with even more self-confidence. “The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ theory is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bioweapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies,” he wrote. “Blame the conspiracy theorists.”

 

What Hasan is missing is that he is the conspiracy theorist here. Advocates of the lab-leak theory’s suppression constructed an elaborate narrative in which the propagators of this thesis were actively radicalizing their impressionable audiences. They convinced themselves that even discussing the possibility that the theory might be true had the power to destabilize the global geopolitical environment and produce an army of potentially violent racists. You don’t often see genuine scholars indulge the hyperventilating apoplexy to which those who tried to throttle the nascent lab-leak theory in its crib so often appealed. But you do frequently see those who prosecute the culture wars indulge it — and the prosecution of the culture wars is all this enterprise ever was.

Why Not Censor Shakespeare Next?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, February 28, 2023

 

They started with Roald Dahl. Now they’re after Ian Fleming. May I ask who will be next? William Shakespeare, perhaps?

 

“That won’t happen!” I hear you cry. Well, why not? Certainly, Shakespeare’s work is extraordinarily widely known. But so is Dahl’s. And so is Fleming’s. And besides: It is the very fact that our society is familiar with a given set of works that makes the totalitarian want to bowdlerize those works in the first place. About our literary “sensitivity readers” there is more than a touch of the evangelical — ultimately, they believe themselves to be saving souls — and the broader the readership, the more souls there are to be saved. Like Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl was targeted because his books remain popular. People read them, they remember them, they are changed by them. In a world in which words are deemed to be violence, this will not do.

 

So I’ll ask again: Why not do Shakespeare next?

 

Unlike Dahl and Fleming, Shakespeare is out of copyright, which means that anyone can publish his work in as redacted or unredacted a form as they wish. But it would be naïve to assume that this will alter the obscurantists’ desire. Nowhere has the long march through our institutions been more successful than in the arts and in education, and if, as at both Puffin and at Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., the powers that be determine that Shakespeare’s catalogue could do with an Approved Edition, that Approved Edition will soon become the ruthlessly enforced norm in our universities, theaters, credential-houses, and beyond. The last time this was tried, it failed. Next time — when the full weight of the progressive establishment is put squarely behind the vandals — it will not.

 

It is often said that Shakespeare has a character for everyone, and, alas, this also holds true for our caviling arbiters of taste. The Tempest’s Caliban is described in the play’s dramatis personae as “a savage and deformed slave,” and in the play as both a “moon calf” and a figure who was “not honour’d with a human shape.” Is that acceptable? Othello includes all manner of racial slurs: Iago tells Brabantio that “now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe,” warns him that “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse,” and proposes that there is something “most rank” and “unnatural” about Desdemona’s lack of interest in marrying a man “of her own clime, complexion, and degree,” while Brabantio believes that his daughter must have been “enchanted” with “foul charms” to, “in spite of nature,” have consented to “fall in love with what she feared to look on!” Is this “sensitivity”-compliant language? And what about The Merchant of Venice, which is built around a Jewish character named Shylock, who not only plies his trade lending money on the most unpleasant terms, but who is converted to Christianity at the end of the play. Is Caliban misunderstood by modern audiences? Perhaps. Are the aspersions against Othello included descriptively, as in Huckleberry Finn? Maybe. Was Shakespeare in fact sympathetic to Shylock, as might be suggested by his seminal inquiry, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Conceivably, yes. Has any of that tended to matter once the moral panic has begun? It has not.

 

One finds “non-inclusive” material throughout Shakespeare’s canon. Henry IV is bursting with fat jokes that make the one removed from Dahl’s Matilda seem positively innocuous. There’s, “How long is’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?” and “These lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain” and “This bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh” and:

 

Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in Years?”

 

Seen from a particular perspective, Macbeth advances the misogynistic trope that behind every guilty-seeming man, there is a woman (in this case, not only Lady Macbeth, the “fiend-like queen,” but the three witches, too) who has manipulated him into carrying out her dastardly schemes. Richard III rewrites the history of England to advance an “ableist” caricature of malevolence. Julius Caesar lionizes and justifies political violence. I could go on.

 

If this all sounds rather ridiculous to you, rest assured that I wholeheartedly agree. I merely ask this question in the hope of being told where the line is. If one assumes what our self-appointed “sensitivity readers” assume, I can discern no principled reason why Shakespeare should be spared the treatment that has been administered to Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. The new version of The Twits removes a reference to a “double chin”; the new edition of James and the Giant Peach changes “one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled” to “A face that looked like a great soggy overboiled cabbage”; and the word “fat” has been excised from every single one of his books. Why, pray, is that beyond the pale where “stuffed cloak-bag of guts” is not?

 

The same goes for race. All of Dahl’s references to “black” and “white” have been removed — the BFG’s cloak is no longer black, and characters no longer turn “white with fear” — while many of Ian Fleming’s archaic descriptions of minorities have been expunged. Is Shakespeare different somehow? In Othello, the title character obsesses over his wife’s white skin (“Yet I’ll not shed her blood / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster”), consciously associates his own murderous behavior with darkness (“Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!”), and then hears this fed back to him by Emilia once the deed is done (“O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil!”) Are we to believe that these ideas destroy readers’ enjoyment of Dahl and Fleming, but not of Shakespeare? And, if so, why?

 

That, as someone famous once wrote, is the question.

On the Childishness of the ‘Woke’

By George Leef

Saturday, February 25, 2023

 

In this AIER article, Professor Don Boudreaux reflects on the childish characteristics of the people who insist that they are “woke.”

 

One example he gives is the way they are so obsessed with “bad” language. Boudreaux writes:

 

Ever-vigilant against the use of naughty words, the woke are just as immature as were my prissy grade-school classmates. And the woke are also just as ignorant of the meaning of words – as was revealed several years ago when an aide to then-DC-Mayor Anthony Williams was forced to resign after being accused of uttering a racial smear when he used the word “niggardly” in a conversation about funding.

 

Actually, the woke are worse than even my most hyper-sensitive schoolmates. Unlike my schoolmates, who I don’t recall ever consciously manufacturing pretenses to be offended by language, the woke are master craftsmen – sorry, master craftspeople – of such pretenses. For evidence look no further than the recent tweet from the AP’s Stylebook that “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated.’”

 

To Boudreaux’s examples, I’d add the inability to contemplate unintended secondary consequences of actions. All they think about is the present — what Thomas Sowell calls “Stage One” thinking.

Cocaine Bear

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, February 24, 2023

 

On Thursday critic David Sims published his review in The Atlantic of Hollywood’s newest monster movie, a film he didn’t much like. One problem, he wrote, is that he couldn’t find any useful metaphors in a story about a bear in the woods that becomes intoxicated and sets off on a rampage, killing everyone in sight.

 

Really? I can think of one.

 

A year on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most arresting fact about the war remains that it was caused by a single man’s intoxication. The Financial Times alleged this week that practically everyone in Vladimir Putin’s orbit, up to and including his own foreign minister, didn’t believe he would give the order to attack until the order was given. Maybe that’s a case of the Times’ Russian sources rewriting history to remove their own fingerprints from a project gone disastrously wrong, but the details about Putin getting lethally high on his own supply of propaganda jibe with years of Western analysis about what motivates him.

 

Why, listen to this promising, clear-eyed young Republican congressman assess the threat in 2017.

 

The FT piece bears out his analysis about Putin wanting to reconstitute Russia’s imperial glory. Despite warnings from aides in the days before the invasion that the army in its present state wasn’t fit to reconquer Ukraine, the czar pressed ahead. Reportedly he had spent months during the pandemic holed up with nationalist cronies who kept whispering in his ear that it was his destiny to remake Russia’s borders.

 

After the decision to invade was announced, one frightened Russian oligarch asked the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, how Putin could have planned a major war with so few people—Lavrov included—in the know. “He has three advisers,” Lavrov replied, according to the FT. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

 

Opinions may differ, but I’d rather have a fascist with a nuclear arsenal getting high on cocaine than on revanchist grandeur. 

 

Russia’s war has cost Ukraine tens of thousands of human lives and trillions of dollars in damage and lost economic output. But on the first anniversary of the invasion, I find myself thinking of the moral damage Putin has done to his own allies, foreign and domestic. In the end, his inebriation will have wrecked more than one country.

 

***

 

If you need reminding of how wanton the destruction of Ukraine has been and continues to be, log into social media at any time and wait. Something will scroll by in short order that knocks you sideways.

 

We’re many months removed from Putin executing anything resembling a strategic plan to unseat Zelensky’s government. Lately the conflict has devolved into pointless battles aimed at nothing more than proving that Russia can still gain ground, at horrendous cost, and indiscriminate attacks on cities and infrastructure designed to make life as painful and terrifying for Ukrainians as possible.

 

Even the fantasist in the Kremlin has probably faced the reality by now that he won’t pacify Ukraine long-term. In Putin’s realistic best-case scenario, the West throws in the towel on providing weapons and the Russian army slowly grinds its way through Ukraine’s undersupplied forces. After hundreds of thousands more casualties on both sides, Putin finally extinguishes what’s left of a formal military opponent. At that point, to avert an insurgency against his depleted occupation force, he’ll need to somehow convince Ukrainians to get excited about being absorbed into a country that’s spent years killing its sons and raping its daughters.

 

He’ll have his work cut out for him.

That same poll found Ukrainians’ faith in their country’s institutions soaring from pre-war levels and, amazingly, found their interest in emigrating declining despite the hardships of war. Putin’s casus belli last year alleged that Russians and Ukrainians are culturally one people and should rightly be reunited, by force if necessary. A year later, he’s made ardent Ukrainian patriots out of nearly all of his victims.

 

And he’s transformed Russia in the process.

 

It feels strange to think that Russian civil society might be growing more depraved—when is it not?—but the pace of it since the war began has been dramatic. Recently the New York Times described the country’s devolution from a soft fascist state that pays lip service to certain liberal ideals to a harder fascist version that revels in militarism and illiberalism. 

 

Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, their antiwar performers and artists expunged. New exhibits put on by the state have titles like “NATOzism” — a play on “Nazism” that seeks to cast the Western military alliance as posing a threat as existential as the Nazis of World War II.

 

…

 

“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultraconservative business tycoon, bragged in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”

 

…

 

National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, dropped entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were directed to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; the police hunted down people for offenses like antiwar Facebook posts, helping to push hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.

 

“Society in general has gone off the rails,” a worried high school administrator told the Times. “They’ve flipped the ideas of good and evil.” He’s not exaggerating: Everywhere you look, you’ll find Russian civil and cultural institutions normalizing depravity toward Ukrainians and their allies.

 

For instance: Traditional depravity in war is bombing the enemy’s cities to rubble. Next-level depravity is kidnapping children who lived in those cities and showing them off as war trophies at fascist rallies back home.

 

Traditional depravity in war is insisting that God is on your side, no matter how cruelly your forces behave. Next-level depravity is having the head of your church compare your soldiers to Jesus and proclaim that their sins will be forgiven if they die while trying to liquidate Ukraine. Or having your media house organs extol death as an optimal state: “Life is highly overrated. Why fear what is inevitable? Especially when we’re going to heaven. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another.”

 

Traditional depravity in war is punishing your returning POWs for letting themselves be captured instead of fighting to the death. Next-level depravity is executing those POWs on video by bashing their skulls in with sledgehammers and having the videos prove so popular among war supporters that the sledgehammer becomes a sort of national totem of glorious ruthlessness in pursuit of victory.

 

Traditional depravity in war is conscripting men who are physically or psychologically unfit and thrusting them into the conflict. Next-level depravity is throwing incarcerated prisoners into the fight and then rewarding them by releasing them back into society once they’ve served their tour of duty—even if they were convicted of murder or rape. “These are psychologically broken people who are returning with a sense of righteousness, a belief that they have killed to defend the Motherland,” one lawyer told the Times of the get-out-of-jail-free card. “These can be very dangerous people.”

 

As Russia has degraded morally, it’s also begun to degrade in more measurable ways. Western markets for its chief export, energy, have collapsed and may never recover. The country’s demographic tailspin has been made worse by tens of thousands of young men dying in battle and many more going into exile to avoid conscription. Basic infrastructure is suffering because of Western sanctions and domestic resources being diverted toward Ukraine.

 

When the war began, Ukraine’s allies hoped that civil discontent would grow and ultimately topple Putin. Instead Russian society is being remade, morally and otherwise, to accommodate his intoxicated illusion about empire. The cognitive dissonance between “the war is obviously evil and self-destructive” and “we must be good patriots and support the war” has been resolved: Actually, being evil and self-destructive is patriotic.

 

The Russian state may or may not survive the forces Putin has unleashed on it. But however and whenever the war ends, Russians will have lost vastly more than they end up gaining. I can’t think of a better definition of “strategic disaster.”

 

***

 

The country’s descent into inebriated manic depravity has also corrupted its Western apologists—to a point. Unlike in Russia, in America you can’t chortle at videos of Ukrainians getting blown up at train stations or POWs having their heads sledgehammered into paste and expect to participate in mainstream media. Even Fox News primetime wouldn’t condone that. I think.

 

The immorality of attacking Ukraine was and is so clear, in fact, that most Russia simps in the U.S. didn’t bother trying to justify it in the run-up to war last year. They spent their time insisting that White House warnings of an impending invasion were alarmist nonsense designed to spook the world about Russian belligerence. A “cocaine bear”? Why, the very idea is preposterous.

 

They’ve spent every day since regretting their naivete and flogging Russia mercilessly for its ongoing crimes against the Ukrainian people. No, I kid: They’ve spent every day since repositioning themselves as “anti-war” even though they’re aligned with the side in the conflict that could stop the war instantly and unilaterally by withdrawing—yet chooses not to. In that context, bleats about a “peace deal” are little more than doublespeak aimed at pressuring Ukraine to offer territorial concessions that will let Putin save face and finally make withdrawal worth his while. 

 

What unites all variants of the “anti-war” argument is the notion that the war is something that’s being done to Russia rather than something Russia is doing to someone else. Just last night, for example, this secessionist turned up on (where else?) Fox News primetime to lament bipartisan support in the United States “for this war against Russia in Ukraine.”

 

I’m tempted to ask her if she would have opposed “the war against Germany in Poland” during World War II but I fear what the answer might be.

 

Other “anti-war” populists have cried crocodile tears about Ukraine’s hardships while implying that the United States is contributing to them rather than alleviating them. “A lot of Americans are asking, ‘How much more money? How much more time? How much more human suffering?’” Fox host Lisa Boothe complained recently. She meant to suggest that Ukrainians might suffer less if Joe Biden and his warmongering party stopped thrusting weapons into their hands and goading them to defend themselves, never mind what happened earlier in the war in places where the locals found themselves at the mercy of Russian soldiers. Or that majorities in every region of Ukraine believe the country should keep fighting until it wins.

 

Every day for the past year, the Ukrainian government has begged the United States for more, and more sophisticated, munitions. To ignore that and insist that the policy that will produce the least “human suffering” involves Ukraine being disarmed, you need to be awfully committed to populist authoritarianism.

 

Lately, some “anti-war” types have pivoted away from claiming that the weapons aren’t wanted and/or necessary and toward more basic “America First” argle-bargle.

 

There’s no reason it can’t be the party of both, as there’s no shortage of wasteful spending in the federal budget that Republicans might cut to pay for aid to East Palestine. (Start with some of those bloated “woke programs” I keep hearing so much about.) Most of Hawley’s Republican colleagues in Congress would say that the GOP is the party of both, I suspect, although the ones who need to worry about their next primary might say it off the record. Hawley is presenting a false choice not because he worries that East Palestine will be given short shrift by the feds but because he’s a post-liberal isolationist who resents seeing the United States take sides with the wrong team in Russia’s war. “East Palestine, not Ukraine” is a pretext to weaken the military vanguard of Western liberalism on pseudo-patriotic grounds.

 

These people like to call themselves “realists.” But in all three examples of populist apologetics here, fantasy begets fantasy.

 

Putin’s intoxication about restoring Russia’s empire has crashed strategically, morally, and militarily. His army can’t take Ukraine; even if it could, wars of conquest are broadly condemned in the 21st century; even if they weren’t, the brutal Russian way of war would bleed international support for his campaign. All of that leaves Western excuse-makers unable to defend his war forthrightly, so they’re stuck inventing unpersuasive fantasies of their own (“we’re prolonging the suffering!”) to justify their anti-anti-Russia position.

 

I’ve made this point elsewhere but it bears repeating: Not one person who has objected to aid to Ukraine on “America First” grounds would change their basic rooting interest in the war if the United States cut provisions to the Ukrainians tomorrow. Sending HIMARS to East Palestine instead of Kyiv won’t lead Tucker Carlson to start earnestly covering reports of Russian atrocities. It won’t lead Josh Hawley to spearhead private charitable efforts to raise money for suffering Ukrainians. They’ll simply retreat into stupider illiberal fantasies, like how a “national divorce” might be in everyone’s best interest.

 

Seriously, if you think “America Firsters” dislike Ukraine, wait until you hear them talk about America.

 

A year to the day after Russia invaded, we’re left with a war in which the outcome has grown fuzzier over time while the moral stakes have grown clearer. That’s the point isolationists should be hammering if they want to pull the plug on Ukraine, that the fight has become a “frozen conflict” destined for stalemate and therefore the U.S. should cut bait rather than continue to throw resources down a sinkhole. But because Putin and his country are blissed out on depravity, refusing to abandon the “Russian way of war,” his allies in the West keep butting up against the wider public’s ongoing righteous outrage at Russian cruelty. Even when it’s obviously in Russia’s strategic interest to refrain from targeting civilians in Ukraine and fighting a “cleaner” war, they can’t. They’re addicted, high as a kite on ruthless expansionist cruelty. Keep making them suffer for it.