By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 10, 2023
The subject of a third major political party in the
United States brings out generally predictable reactions: cynicism in cynics,
fantasy in fantasists, partisanship in partisans. But it is worth remembering
that there already has been a very successful third party: the Republican
Party, which skyrocketed to power very shortly after its founding in 1854, with
the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, winning the White House in
1860. By contrast, the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, has topped out at
3.3 percent in presidential elections—and that was in 2016, when the party’s
ticket comprised two moderate Republican former governors (Gary Johnson and
William Weld) running against two corrupt and contemptible New York Democrats,
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The Libertarians have not had much success in
state legislatures or town councils or school boards. The Greens and the other
exotic minor parties are for hobbyists, the political equivalents of people who
build miniature ships in bottles or collect stamps.
The Republican Party emerged from the wreckage of the
Whig Party because the Republicans believed in something and the Whigs did not:
When it came to the most important issue of the day—slavery—the Republicans had
a firm position, if a painfully moderate one, while the Whigs could not quite
figure out what they should think about it. The Republicans were not a radical
abolitionist party but a conservative anti-slavery party that ended up being
the political home of radical abolitionists because the abolitionists had
nowhere else to go. Lincoln’s position on slavery was, in fact, much narrower
than many of those of us who admire him might have wanted from him at the time:
He did not propose to abolish slavery but only to prevent its spread in the
hopes that it would die out on its own; a constitutionalist might concur with
Lincoln’s assertion in his first inaugural address that as president he did not
have the power to interfere with slavery in the southern states, but Frederick
Douglass was not wrong to fault him for going beyond that to add that he would
not be inclined to use such power if he had it. The word politician has
a disreputable odor on it, but Lincoln was a gifted and wily politician, a
politician of the first order, and it was such a politician that the convulsing
republic needed. A saint would have simply denounced slavery as an unbearable
moral evil—which, of course, it was—but it took a politician to work against
that evil while also working to ensure that the United States would remain the
United States, enduring even through the treachery of the slave power and the
brutality of the Civil War. It was Lincoln’s saintliness that failed him and
us, setting the course toward a Reconstruction that was too conciliatory and
insufficiently reformist.
A compromise position is not necessarily a position that
lacks moral clarity—it may be, and often is, a position that recognizes the
limitations of the current political situation and that does not indulge the
adolescent tendency to pine for the impossible. At the same time, a position
that is uncompromising or even extreme often is one that lacks genuine clarity,
moral or political.
The Republican Party in our time is a confused and
debased thing. Trump and Trumpism have made that worse, but the decadence of
the GOP did not begin in 2016. Faced with the great moral question of their
day, the Republicans of Lincoln’s time offered moral firmness tempered by
realism; faced with the great moral questions of our time—abortion, Russia, the
attempted coup d’etat of 2021—Republicans offer moral hysteria
instead of moral firmness, delusion rather than realism. (It does not help that
on two out of three of those big issues, a great many Republicans are on the
wrong side.) But even on abortion, Republicans are now unsteady. In the pre-Dobbs era,
Republicans could organize themselves around the outrage that was Roe
vs. Wade, as naked a piece of judicial usurpation of the lawmaking power as
modern American history has to offer. But with Roe vacated,
Republicans have been made to give up the thing they are good at—opposition—and
instead try to do the one thing that they have shown themselves more or less
incapable of for 30 years or more—governing.
There are edge cases in abortion as in anything else,
hard calls and ethically complex situations, and these should be approached
carefully and compassionately. But such complexity is not a factor in the great
majority of cases when it comes to abortion, which in the United States is
mostly a savage and purely elective form of birth control. But let us
proceed, arguendo, as though there were no complex moral coloration
at issue in abortion—that would not necessarily render the issue more tractable
as a political question. The immorality and viciousness of slavery was
perfectly clear—even to many owners of slaves, such as Thomas Jefferson—but
that did not make it easy or straightforward to handle as a matter of
politics.
It is possible (likely, I think) that the current
backlash against anti-abortion policies is exaggerated or that it will prove
transient. But
it is a real phenomenon, one that cannot simply be ignored as a matter of
political practice.
We live in a time in which politics is both tribal and
sacralized: Having abandoned the old faith and the old creeds, Americans (and
not only Americans) have sought out new sources of meaning and identity, and
the majority of us have settled—in a moment of catastrophic national
stupidity—on politics as the substitute for religion, family, and community.
(You can read about why and how this happened, and what it means, in The
Smallest Minority.) It is that cultural tendency and not some
newfound ideological inflexibility that makes bipartisanship, compromise, and
consensus effectively impossible in our time: If those on the other side of the
aisle are not merely Americans who disagree but our enemies, then cooperating
with them in any way represents (so this line of thinking goes) a kind of moral
contagion. That is why both Republicans reject, even in the form of
hypotheticals, compromises in which they get 90 percent of what they want in
exchange for giving the Democrats 10 percent of what they want—and why
Democrats do the same thing.
Naïve partisans, be they Republicans or Democrats, always
tell themselves the same things: The other side fights dirty, and we’d get our
way if only we fought dirty, too; the other side is uncompromising, and we’d
get our way if only we were equally uncompromising; the people are really on
our side, and the other side only wins because the people are misled by
nefarious and powerful forces behind the scenes; if only we would really fight,
then we could do whatever we wanted, and not have to work with the other side.
All of that is delusional, but it is what people think—and it is about 90
percent of what they hear on talk radio, Fox News, MSNBC, etc.
Ironically, Republicans are now at their least
compromising on abortion at precisely the moment when the Republican Party’s
rank-and-file foot-soldiers are less committed to the anti-abortion cause than
they have been in a generation, their numbers having been swelled by
social-media populists, most of them with no particular religious attachment
and having undergone no particular moral formation, who admire Donald
Trump because of his hedonistic porn-star shenanigans,
not in spite of them. These Republicans are socially and
culturally much more like their Democratic opposites than they would care to
admit, and their politics is a politics of grievance-airing and
status-seeking.
There are some Republicans who are pretty good at
articulating what they’d do about abortion nationally if they had uncontested
power, or if they had at the national level the kind of wide political latitude
that Republicans enjoy in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma. Explaining what they
will do in a context in which Democrats get a vote, too—and in which
Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans—they are not so good at. Partly
this is because it is distasteful to engage in moral compromise on a
life-and-death issue such as abortion, but in larger part this is because the
idea of compromise with Democrats about anything is agonizing to them. It is
not what they have organized their party and their individual careers to
do.
The ongoing abortion fight will create some real
challenges for Republicans, beginning with Ron DeSantis. One year ago, the
Florida governor signed a law severely restricting abortion after 15 weeks of
pregnancy; now, the Florida legislature is poised to send him a bill that would
narrow the abortion window to six weeks. The 12-to-15-week window is much
closer to where Americans are on the issue, and it is closer to the norms in
Western Europe—as a political matter, it is easier for Republicans to be able
to point to abortion regulations that they can defensibly characterize as being
no more radical than those of France. In a perfect world, there would be no
abortion at all, but we live in this imperfect one, in which policy proposals
that cannot be realized in the political environment that actually exists are
not, properly speaking, political proposals at all, but are better
characterized as philosophical exercises.
Anti-abortion advocates who want to expand the range of the
politically possible have a big job in front of us, one that does not begin
with electing anti-abortion politicians (we have plenty of those) but with
persuasion and consensus-building. Big, durable social changes require
consensus—as the anti-abortion world knows at least as well as anybody else,
even a brute-force imposition of policy by the Supreme Court, as in Roe,
will eventually fail without genuine widespread social and political buy-in.
That buy-in doesn’t have to be universal—I am writing for adults here—but it
does have to be wide and deep.
The Trump-era Republican Party talks a great deal about
“winning,” but it often behaves like a party that does not want to win—which is
to say, if it were a party that did not want to win, it would
behave in much the way it does. It is an angry party for angry people, it
demands new and invigorating things to be angry about, and taking a source of
anger off of the table by winning—even if it is a limited compromise win—would
be a kind of psychic net loss for today’s Republicans.
How is that working out? The Republicans lost in 2018, in
2020, and in 2022. And 2023 has seen the victory of the leftwardmost candidate
in the Chicago mayor’s race along with the loss of conservative control of the
state Supreme Court in Wisconsin—in an election that was fought largely on
abortion. Republicans are currently rallying behind a proven election loser who
is laboring under the weight of felony indictments related to his dalliances
with porn stars and Playboy models, and who is likely to soon
be carrying the weight of more indictments related to his dalliances with
coup-plotters and every species of crackpot found in the vast Chalmun’s
Spaceport Cantina of the American Right.
The Whigs couldn’t figure out what to do about the great
issue of their time. The Whigs also were home to a great deal of anti-immigrant
and nativist sentiment associated with what would become known as the
Know-Nothing movement and the short-lived American Party, which ran ex-Whig
Millard Fillmore for president in 1856. Whig bigwig William Seward, who would
go on to serve in the Lincoln administration, put it thus: “Let, then, the Whig
party pass. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it.”
Republicans who don’t believe in third
parties should pause to reflect that they are in one.
Economics for English Majors
Writing in the New York Times (“Putin’s
Energy Offensive Has Failed”) Paul Krugman makes a series of sensible
observations climaxing in a conclusion that is, if not quite preposterous, then
at least non-obvious.
Professor Krugman argues that Vladimir Putin has launched
four main offensives: three of them military assaults on Ukraine and one of
them an energy assault on the European Union and other allies and supporters of
Ukraine, hoping to weaken the ability—and willingness—of European nations to
provide ongoing material support for Ukrainians’ heroic efforts to resist the
Russian invasion of their country.
[T]he big story — a story that
hasn’t received much play in the news media, because it’s hard to report on
things that didn’t happen — is that Europe has weathered the loss of Russian
supplies remarkably well. Euro area unemployment hasn’t
gone up at all; inflation did
surge, but European governments have managed, through a combination of price
controls and financial aid, to limit (but not eliminate) the amount of
personal hardship created by high gas prices.
And Europe has managed to keep
functioning despite the cutoff of most Russian gas. Partly this reflects a turn
to other sources of gas, including liquefied natural gas shipped from the
United States; partly it reflects conservation efforts that have reduced
demand. Some of it reflects a temporary return to coal-fired
electricity generation; much of it reflects the fact that Europe already
gets a large share of its energy from renewables.
Price controls are not words that warm the
libertarian heart. As Krugman notes, there is a notional worldwide market for
natural gas, but, in practice, the gas trade is highly localized, because the
most efficient way to transport it is via pipeline. If those pipelines bringing
gas in from Russia go offline, the Germans and the Poles can’t just magic new
gas and new pipelines into existence. What the Europeans have adopted is what
they euphemistically call a “market correction mechanism”—Krugman’s “price
controls” is more direct—that limits how far European gas prices can diverge
from world market prices. The mechanism relies on one-month, three-month, and
one-year derivative contracts to benchmark gas prices for “market correction.”
The European Council describes the program thus:
“The regulation is a temporary emergency measure which aims to limit
excessively high gas prices that do not reflect world market prices, while
ensuring security of energy supply and the stability of financial markets.”
Along with price controls, the libertarian heart skips a beat at
the words temporary emergency measure, which have a way of being
non-temporary and far outliving the emergency.
But, as Krugman observes, the results have been pretty
good. The EU economy has not been crushed by Moscow’s energy weapon. Krugman again:
Democracies are showing, as they
have many times in the past, that they are much tougher, much harder to
intimidate, than they look.
Finally, modern economies are far
more flexible, far more able to cope with change, than some vested interests
would have us believe.
I’ll spare you my full lecture on this for the moment,
but keep this in mind: It is a myth, and a libel, that free and open societies
are weak, and especially that they are weak in comparison to autocracies such
as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Free and open societies end up being strong and
rich because they are free and open—not the other way around—and they are
resilient (even antifragile)
because they have lots of redundancy and duplication of effort rather than
highly vulnerable single points of failure, while their institutions (economic
and other) are refined and tested by competition. There is a lot of nonsense
and tomfoolery that goes on at Harvard and Princeton, Google and Apple, the
Pentagon and NASA, etc., but they remain the best in the world at what they do
in no small part because these institutions exist in a society in which the
competition for resources is constant and dynamic. That is true in the European
Union, too. We get a lot of man-on-horseback posturing (sometimes literal) from
the likes of Putin, while the archetypal European leader is a bland bureaucrat
such as Ursula von der Leyen. I am at least 83 percent sure that Vladimir Putin
would have bested Angela Merkel in an arm-wrestling contest even at Mutti’s
prime, and I won’t argue with you if you say that Olaf Scholz reminds you of a
guy who might be managing a hotel in Winklmoosalm-Steinplatte if he weren’t the
German chancellor, but it has been 30 years since Germany and Russia were
anything like evenly matched powers, and it is all the boring stuff that has
made Germany powerful: trade, property rights, rule of law, democracy,
reasonably effective public administration, alliances, etc. The people who want
to tell you that liberal democracy is yesterday’s news and that the future is
Viktor Orbán’s Hungary are full of it.
Where I depart from Krugman is here:
For as long as I can remember,
fossil-fuel lobbyists and their political supporters have insisted that any
attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be disastrous for jobs and
economic growth. But what we’re seeing now is Europe making an energy transition
under the worst possible circumstances — sudden, unexpected and drastic — and
handling it pretty well. This suggests that a gradual, planned green energy
transition would be far easier than pessimists imagine.
As Professor Krugman himself notes earlier in the column,
what has filled in the gaps in the European energy supply is
hydrocarbons—liquified natural gas from the United States and elsewhere, as
well as that great staple of the 19th century, coal. That is
how you end up with Germany cutting its energy consumption by almost 5 percent
while its greenhouse-gas emissions remain unchanged.
Renewables are great—it is good to have access to lots of different
fuels and power sources, and it is better still if they come with environmental
benefits—but if you really want to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from
electricity production, the only real viable solution that is technologically
and economically viable right now is nuclear power. And Germany’s struggles
would have been even less painful than they were if the Germans hadn’t
sidelined so much nuclear power—a mistake that the French and others have
managed to avoid. Instead, the Germans had to arrange emergency hydrocarbon
imports and fire up coal plants. What the failure of Putin’s
energy war really demonstrates is that you want to have lots of choices—and
lots of trading partners—when it comes to energy, and that taking nuclear power
offline for no good reason leaves you more vulnerable to energy shocks than you
have to be.
Words About Words
First: Plebeian, not plebian.
Next: A New York Times headline: “I
Lied To My Father Who Had Dementia.” Unless this is one of those modern
two-dads things, you want a comma in there. “Paul Simon, who used to perform
with Art Garfunkel, has the same name as a former senator.” vs. “The Paul Simon
I’m calling for is the Paul Simon who used to perform with Art
Garfunkel.”
And more: I have been corresponding with my friend Jay
Nordlinger about underway and under way. The two
often are used interchangeably now, but I think there is a distinction there
worth preserving.
If you have been to Rome or New Delhi, or many cities
with surface trains, as in the Philadelphia suburbs, then you have encountered
a pedestrian underpass, usually stairs to a little tunnel that goes under a
busy street or a train track. This is an underway, a sort of
reverse overpass.
(And you can appreciate around Passover why you’d want to
preserve overpass. Different words for different things!)
Jay notes of a former National Review editor
and underway: “The late Julie Crane used to insist on this.” So did the
Associated Press Style Book, once upon a time. So did most dictionaries, though
the distinction mostly is lost.
Under way was originally a nautical term,
describing a ship that had begun its journey. This marine usage found in
English back to the 17th century, while the more modern sense,
referring to any work in progress, is seen only from the 20th century.
Why under way and not on the way? One
possible explanation is that the English was influenced by the Dutch
version, onterweg, which predates the English by some
time.
Well, If You Put It That Way …
“State
violence should look like what it is: violent.”
Elsewhere
A Czech man faces criminal charges for wearing forbidden
symbols at an anti-government protest. If you need a reminder of why we need
the First Amendment, here is one. More in the New York Post.
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