The Supreme Court Corrects a Grievous Error

By Robert J. Delahunty and John Yoo

Friday, June 30, 2023

 

In every area of life, the Constitution and federal civil-rights laws forbid the government from using race in making decisions. Government cannot use race to distribute government funds, provide benefits, deploy police, run prisons or hospitals, or even protect the nation’s security through “racial profiling.” But the Court carved out one area from this fundamental colorblind principle. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court created a special exception for admissions to colleges and universities. A majority in Grutter accepted the claim that colleges could use racial diversity as a proxy for intellectual diversity — which relies upon the stereotyping assumption that a student’s mindset depends on his or her race.

 

Yesterday, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court finally cut this cancer out of constitutional law. In a monumental 6–3 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court invalidated the race-linked admissions programs maintained by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The Court affirmed the foundational constitutional principle of equality under the law, regardless of race. If the Court’s decision is respected and enforced, it is unlikely that any race-linked college-admissions program in any public university or federally funded private university would survive. It is quite likely that no faculty hiring or promotion in which race played a part will be legally permissible. The one sector in American society that had been exempt from legal rules banning the use of race — higher education — will be forced to transform itself.

 

Do not expect the universities to comply meekly with the Court’s ruling. Many of them had been planning how to evade the expected decision even before it came down. But even if massive resistance is likely (as it was with the Warren Court’s desegregation orders in the 1950s), litigants will keep up the pressure on the universities to purge their selection procedures of hidden, as well as overt, racial preferences. And the Court has laid out clear and firm guidelines for the lower courts to follow in adjudicating those cases. Racial preferences — and any subterfuges designed to conceal such preferences — are forbidden.

 

Several of the justices in the SFFA majority have long held racial preferences in their crosshairs. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 case denying race-conscious policies in K–12 schools. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The late Justice Antonin Scalia had even harsher words for race-based affirmative action: “Discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society.” And according to the Court’s sharpest critic of racial preferences, Justice Clarence Thomas, “every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”

 

In reaching its stunning conclusion, the Court did not expressly overturn any existing precedent (though it certainly disemboweled Grutter). Rather, it reaffirmed a standard of judicial review — “strict scrutiny” — for racial classifications that traces back to its decisions in the 1940s and that it has ostensibly applied since then. Strict scrutiny permits the use of race only when a) the government has a “compelling” interest and b) nothing other than the use of race provides a means to achieve that objective. Judged by that standard, nearly all governmental reliance on race is invalid. (There might be incidental exceptions, like keeping certain statistics, say, for public-health purposes.) The strict-scrutiny standard, if honestly applied, ensures that our Constitution is color-blind. Throughout the civil-rights era, judges and lawyers would quip that strict scrutiny is strict in theory, but fatal in fact. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, cases like Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher v. University of Texas purportedly applied strict scrutiny, but in fact used a much more lenient standard toward admissions policies. Yesterday, the Court returned to the classic interpretation of strict scrutiny.

 

The colorblindness principle is a keystone of the American Constitution, as the Court’s opinion, and the historic concurring opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, demonstrate at length. That principle found its roots in the Declaration of Independence and the abolitionist movement, triumphed in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction amendments, and overcame legalized segregation with Brown v. Board of Education and the civil-rights movement. “The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a platform broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime,” Frederick Douglass declared in criticizing the infamous Dred Scott decision. As Justice Harlan famously wrote in dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation: “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Or, as Justice Scalia put it pithily in his Adarand Contractors v. Peña concurrence, “in the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”

 

The decision to prohibit the universities’ use of race will, as a matter of constitutional law, mark the end of the Supreme Court’s misbegotten deviation from colorblindness. The Court has steadily banned racial discrimination in every other part of public life. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court began dismantling the pernicious government policy of segregated schools. It recited arguments that pressed the “fundamental contention” that “no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” (Justice Thomas’s opinion repeatedly cites the government’s brief in the Brown case, in which the Eisenhower administration emphatically endorsed the colorblindness principle.) City of Richmond v. Croson made clear that the 14th Amendment’s insistence on colorblindness prohibited state and local governments from considering race when spending money or awarding contracts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion explained that racial preferences present the serious “danger that a racial classification is merely the product of unthinking stereotypes or a form of racial politics.” Then, in Adarand Constructors v. Peña, the Court made it crystal clear that this bar also applied to the federal government.

 

In standing up for the colorblind Constitution yesterday, the Supreme Court has finally closed the book on its own unfortunate history with race. In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the Court’s first effort to solve the nation’s race problem proved a disaster. Chief Justice Roger Taney thought he could head off a looming division between North and South by striking down the Missouri Compromise, holding that blacks could never become U.S. citizens, and forbidding congressional regulation of slavery in the territories. By departing from the Constitution in the name of enlightened elite opinion, Taney only hastened the coming of the Civil War.

 

The Court disgraced itself again in its next major encounter with race, Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy upheld not just the concept of “separate but equal” but also the right of governments to enact policies based on race, thereby ushering in the Jim Crow era. In yet a third case, Korematsu, the Court, despite adopting the strict-scrutiny standard, allowed the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II because the government assumed that their ethnicity indicated disloyalty.

 

The Court sought to restore its reputation in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally put an end to segregation in public schools. It undertook the difficult work of uprooting de jure racism in area after area, from public facilities to employment to government contracts. The elected branches also sought to end official racism, with President Harry Truman desegregating the military, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helping enforce Brown, President John F. Kennedy prohibiting racial discrimination by government contractors, and Congress enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

Unfortunately, however, the pursuit of racial equality and integration has mutated into a new ideology of racial diversity. Both now and in the past, the Court has allowed the use of race to remedy discrimination experienced by identifiable victims. But in the context of higher education, where many minority applicants by the 1990s had neither suffered the direct effects of segregation nor been victims of discrimination themselves, racial diversity became an end in itself.

 

Justice Lewis F. Powell’s 1978 Bakke opinion defended racial diversity as a way of promoting intellectual diversity in classroom discussion — a laudable end aligned with the First-Amendment values of free speech and open inquiry. But anyone familiar with American campuses today can see that free and open debate is getting harder to find. Even liberal academics, like Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman in his The Assault on American Excellence (2019), acknowledge and deplore the corrupting effects of the post-Bakke pursuit of racial diversity for its own sake.

 

The Bakke Court split 4–4 between the justices who would have upheld the constitutionality of a quota for admission to a state medical school and four who would have struck it down. Powell provided the decisive fifth vote, ruling that the school’s racial set-aside was not constitutional but also upholding the “Harvard Plan” as a model of constitutionally permissible racial preferences. Powell’s argument pivoted on distinguishing a numerical “quota” from a “goal”: Race could be considered as a “plus factor” in the admissions process because it would contribute to creating greater “diversity” of opinion in the student body. It was a harmless feature of admissions policy, like upgrading a candidate by a notch for being a saxophone player. Powell erroneously maintained that all this was compatible with strict-scrutiny. In Grutter, a majority of the Court tracked Powell’s Bakke opinion, declared the time-limited use of race in college admissions, and hoped that such preferences would last no more than 25 years.

 

Ironically, Harvard both provided the template for the racial preferences allowed under Bakke and now ruled illegal under SFFA.

 

Nonetheless, history suggests that even the clear holding in SFFA — like Brown nearly 70 years ago — will be, to paraphrase Churchill, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Massive resistance may arise from an entrenched educational bureaucracy that elevates diversity above all other values, including excellence and merit. Here, just as in Brown, parents and students — who overwhelmingly reject racial preferences — will not be able to eliminate the use of skin color in one fell swoop, but only after a series of cases across the nation.

 

Striking down the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC is thus the easy part. Both schools admitted that they use overt racial preferences. And the undisputed factual record in both cases confirmed that racial preferences affected admissions decisions. At Harvard, Asian-American applicants had lower acceptance rates than did white students at every academic decile. An Asian-American applicant at the fourth-lowest decile had less than a 1 percent chance of being admitted, while an African-American applicant in the fourth-lowest decile had a 12.8 percent chance. African Americans in that fourth-lowest decile had the same chance of admission as an Asian-American applicant in the top decile of applicants (12.7 percent). The numbers at UNC were equally striking.

 

The campaign to enforce the colorblindness principle will not end here. Many (though by no means all) universities are as committed to using race in admissions as ever. The history of resistance to Brown suggests that universities will respond to a loss at the Supreme Court not by abandoning their goal of an ideal racial balance but by covertly pursuing the same end through less obvious means. Instead of openly considering skin color in admissions, universities will shift gears to achieve the same racial proportions through facially neutral proxies. Colleges will disguise their use of race behind pretexts such as personality and leadership scores, as Harvard tried to do. At the end of his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts tries to extinguish some of these brush fires before they can start.

 

Racial discrimination has been a deep stain on our country’s history and a betrayal of its Founding principles. But the constitutional solution to overcoming racism is not to perpetuate it under the guise of helping those once harmed. As Justice Thomas concludes in his concurrence, we must share the “enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Decla­ration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

A Victory for Clarence Thomas

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 29, 2023

 

One of the many reasons that I have treated with reflexive contempt the insinuation that Justice Clarence Thomas is in some meaningful sense “corrupt” is that nobody has ever been able to explain to me to my satisfaction what tangible product that corruption is supposed to have yielded. Where, I have asked, is the evidence of inconsistency? In which of Thomas’s opinions can I detect the caprice? What suspicious shift in jurisprudential assumptions has hinted that something is off? I have never received an answer. For better or for worse, Thomas is always Thomas. Come hell or high water, condemnation or praise, momentum or inertia, his approach remains immediately recognizable. He is dismissive of error, unmoved by precedent, and deaf to political guile. There is one of him, and there will not be another any time soon. Day in, day out, he does his thing, and, if you don’t like it, he doesn’t care. He is an ideal candidate for the Supreme Court.

 

All of these qualities are on display throughout Thomas’s concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, a case in which the Supreme Court has held, 6–3, that “Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and, more broadly, that affirmative action is unconstitutional. I will confess that, as a historical matter, I do not know whether Thomas’s long-held interpretation of the 14th Amendment as a bluntly “colorblind” measure is correct. I do know, however, that Thomas believes quite sincerely that he is right, and that he has believed it for years. Had he so wished, Thomas could have signed onto John Roberts’s opinion and left it there. That, I daresay, is what a mere “movement” pawn would have done. Instead, Thomas felt moved to “write separately to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution” to which only he, among his colleagues, put his name.

 

In Thomas’s telling, the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment was that of a tool “affirming that equality and racial discrimination cannot coexist.” “I do not contend,” Thomas concedes, “that all of the individuals who put forth and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment universally believed this to be true.” Nevertheless, he believes that enough of them did that, since it passed in 1868, “all forms of discrimination based on race—including so-called affirmative action” have been “prohibited under the Constitution.” Alas, at various points in American history, this has been massaged, subverted, or even completely ignored. Indeed, the backsliding began pretty quickly. Despite the flurry of legislation passed by the so-called radical Republicans — first, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, then the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and eventually the 14th Amendment — “the promise of the second founding took time to materialize,” and, “seeking to perpetuate a segregationist system in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, proponents urged a ‘separate but equal’ regime” that, to disastrous effect, “met with initial success.” “The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny,” Thomas writes, “and, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments” — a misinterpretation that began as early as the mid 1870s. The latter failure, he laments, “stood in sharp contrast to the Court’s earlier embrace of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equality ideal,” which, though unrealized, was most poignantly outlined by Justice Harlan in his lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

 

In Thomas’s view, this mistake has continued, in one form or another, to the present day, including in the courts’ tolerance of ostensibly benign racial discrimination within America’s government-run and government-funded colleges. Some people, Thomas notes, seem to believe that affirmative action is substantially different from earlier forms of injustice, because, in practice, the “[14th] Amendment forbids only laws that hurt, but not help, blacks.” But, he avers, “such a theory lacks any basis in the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” which declared that “the color of a person’s skin is irrelevant to that individual’s equal status as a citizen of this Nation” and that “to treat him differently on the basis of such a legally irrelevant trait is therefore a deviation from the equality principle and a constitutional injury.” If we are to stay faithful to the law, Thomas submits, “we cannot be guided by those who would desire less in our Constitution, or by those who would desire more.” That those who would opt out are elite colleges instead of segregationists is irrelevant. “Universities’ self-proclaimed righteousness does not afford them license to discriminate on the basis of race,” he affirms. “In fact, it is error for a court to defer to the views of an alleged discriminator while assessing claims of racial discrimination.”

 

Fleshing out this idea, Thomas takes direct aim at the dissent of the newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose focus on “the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth,” and desire “to label all blacks as victims” he considers not just constitutionally irrelevant but culturally malign. Per Thomas, such thinking “locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste” and “is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.” In essence, Thomas’s approach echoes a line written by Chief Justice Roberts in 2007: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

 

That, at long last, Thomas has been able to make his case as part of a successful majority must thrill him to the core. Whether it will catch on more broadly now that the underlying controversy has been resolved remains to be seen.

Gorsuch Highlights the Absurdities of Racial Classification

By Dominic Pino

Thursday, June 29, 2023

 

In the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Neil Gorsuch devoted a portion of his concurrence to skewering the absurdities of classifying humans by race.

 

He notes that college applicants could choose between “American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino; or White” as their race. “Where do these boxes come from?” Gorsuch asks. “Bureaucrats. A federal interagency commission devised this scheme of classifications in the 1970s to facilitate data collection.”

 

There is nothing preordained or scientific about these categories — which the creators of the classification scheme were careful to point out in the 1970s, as Gorsuch notes. But their warnings have been ignored. As a result, absurdities abound.

 

Gorsuch writes:

 

These classifications rest on incoherent stereotypes. Take the “Asian” category. It sweeps into one pile East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), even though together they constitute about 60% of the world’s population. . . . This agglomeration of so many peoples paves over countless differences in “language,” “culture,” and historical experience. . . . It does so even though few would suggest that all such persons share “similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences.”

 

This isn’t even crude stereotyping based on skin color. It’s solely based on the continent from which someone’s ancestors came. Asia is the largest continent, accounts for a majority of the world’s people, and contains more cultures and languages than one can count. Chinese and Indians are very different groups of people — as any Chinese or Indian will tell you if prompted — but in our racial-classification system, they are considered the same.

 

Note that we don’t do this with our own continent. North America includes Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean. Imagine a white Francophone Canadian and a black Bahamian. Those two are obviously of different races, you might say: They have different skin colors, speak different languages, and have completely different cultural traditions and histories. But every part of that is just as true of a Bangladeshi and a Korean, yet they are both considered to be of the same race.

 

As Gorsuch notes, when these classifications are modified, it’s not because of better anthropological research:

 

Consider, as well, the development of a separate category for “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It seems federal officials disaggregated these groups from the “Asian” category only in the 1990s and only “in response to political lobbying.” . . .  And even that category contains its curiosities. It appears, for example, that Filipino Americans remain classified as “Asian” rather than “Other Pacific Islander.”

 

Filipinos are a perfect example of the problem with our classification system. It fails to account for the fact that other countries are multicultural and have complex histories and ethnic profiles too. In the choice between “Pacific Islander” and “Asian,” for example, do Filipinos have more in common with Hawaiians (safely “Pacific Islander”) or with Chinese (safely “Asian”)? That’s an absurd question, but it’s the kind of thing you have to ask if you want to check one of the race boxes on a form in this country.

 

Brazilians are another illustrative case. Brazil is the largest country in South America, but its language isn’t Spanish, so Brazilians can’t be “Hispanic.” Brazil is itself a nation of immigrants, with large populations that came from Europe and Asia. A person of Japanese descent, born and raised in Brazil, doesn’t have that much life experience in common with a Japanese person born and raised in Japan. Would both be considered “Asian” upon moving to the U.S.? The question, again, is absurd.

 

Gorsuch picks apart the problems with “Hispanic” as well, writing that it “covers those whose ancestral language is Spanish, Basque, or Catalan — but it also covers individuals of Mayan, Mixtec, or Zapotec descent who do not speak any of those languages and whose ancestry does not trace to the Iberian Peninsula but bears deep ties to the Americas.” It is for this reason that, for example, Mexicans in Mexico do not consider themselves “Hispanic,” but instead separate into categories such as “Mestizo” (Mexicans with Spanish and native ancestry) that do not exist on classification forms in the U.S.

 

“White” in the U.S. doesn’t make any more sense, as Gorsuch points out. It “includes those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or Iranian descent. It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member of the British royal family.” The “Black or African American” classification “covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a typical American suburb,” Gorsuch writes.

 

All of this nonsense gets even crazier when people of different races start families together. Gorsuch writes:

 

If anything, attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time. American families have become increasingly multicultural, a fact that has led to unseemly disputes about whether someone is really a member of a certain racial or ethnic group. There are decisions denying Hispanic status to someone of Italian-Argentine descent . . . as well as someone with one Mexican grandparent. . . . Yet there are also decisions granting Hispanic status to a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors fled Spain centuries ago . . . and bestowing a “sort of Hispanic” status on a person with one Cuban grandparent.

 

Throughout, Gorsuch relies on Classified, the recent book by George Mason University law professor David Bernstein that explores the history of U.S. racial classifications. (You can hear Bernstein talk to John Miller about it on the Bookmonger podcast here.)

 

As Rich Lowry wrote last year about the racial-classification system, “There is a good case for rationalizing and updating all of this, but an even more compelling case for scrapping it altogether.” Gorsuch doesn’t go that far, but that wasn’t the point of this case, and he reasons that using this system as a basis for admissions decisions doesn’t make any sense. He points out that it encourages applicants to game the system by taking advantage of the ambiguities when selecting one’s race. “Paid advisors, in turn, tell high school students of Asian descent to downplay their heritage to maximize their odds of admission,” he writes.

 

It’s all nonsense, and Americans should reject being classified by arbitrary, bureaucratic definitions that were never intended to be so significant.

We Need to Downgrade the Ivies

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, June 30, 2023

 

The emotions around elite college admissions run high for almost every single person writing about politics, almost every politician, and many more who long ago went through the college-application gauntlet. Why?

 

Simple. That college-application gauntlet is a major feature in selecting our political and cultural elite. Look no further than the Supreme Court itself: Eight out of nine went through Harvard or Yale Law School; the only exception is Amy Coney Barrett, who was just summa cum laude at Notre Dame. People are right to believe that a change in the behavior of admissions offices at these universities means a change for our nation in the long run.

 

The Ivy League lost its first monopoly on power in America because the American South had disproportionate political power and because America kept expanding westward. The academic corridor running from New Haven, Conn., to Bowdoin, Maine, became unfit for national leadership. This diminishment was reflected in the similar decline of the Federalists and “Adams men” in American political life. By the 1960s it looked like the California state system might be a threat to it. And yet, as travel became cheaper and top students from around the country could more easily make the trip to the East Coast, the Ivy League managed to reconsolidate and increase its hold over the American elite even as it continued to admit fewer and fewer students relative to the entire American population. This consolidation has consequences, and I suspect one of them is the pervasive level of groupthink among elites.

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The United Kingdom has two top universities, Oxford and Cambridge. But France doesn’t surrender its entire elite to the Sorbonne. Instead, France also has its extensive system of “grandes écoles,” which teach a variety of disciplines important to civic life. Charles de Gaulle came out of the military academy Saint-Cyr. More recently, France has had a run of graduates from a grande école dedicated to political science, known colloquially as Sciences Po. France’s intellectual life remains more diverse and less immediately captured by its political parties.

 

Because the Ivies themselves have stopped growing with the overall population, and now because the law is going to force them to get more creative as they curate and socially engineer the elite, there are opportunities for other institutions to reform and compete. It just would take an injection of ambition and creativity.

 

Our military academies should feature a truly elite academic track, but they currently don’t. Such institutions could have provided a very different formation for the elite than what was available at the Ivies. And nothing is preventing a group of states from co-founding a regional university and then trying to make it competitive with the old schools of New England.

 

Perhaps the greatest pity is that those groups of Americans who felt in the past that the traditional American institutions weren’t welcoming to them stopped short of building institutions that were truly competitive with them in turning out an American elite. Notre Dame University grew and fell somewhat with the influence of Irish-American Catholics. But it became satisfied with a top-tier football program, not with turning out those who would be as desirable as Ivy grads in the top institutions of American national life. The same goes for historically black universities and colleges. These universities still do good work, but their mission would be so much more inspiring if they leveled up to the very top tier.

 

Many of the Ivies started as seminaries for the clergy. So existing seminaries could expand again and try to produce top minds in business, the arts, and sciences. For example, Westminster Theological Seminary broke away from Princeton almost a century ago. Why should the Presbyterian clergy have a near monopoly on the type of Calvinist scholars that Westminster can produce?

 

The stranglehold of the Ivy League on our elite has been bad for everyone. It impedes the circulation of elites that is healthy for a society. It turns the childhoods of our elite into a meritocratic gauntlet. And it produced our presidential leadership from 1993 to 2017, leading to the inevitable backlash in the form of Trump.

 

We have it in our power to build more avenues to success and influence in America life, to make our elite reflect better the diversity of our regions, religions, and, yes, our races, too. The future of our country should not be processed and evaluated by a handful of insular admissions offices.

Defending Conservatism—From the Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Thursday, June 28, 2023

 

You might have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a philosophical kick of late. There’s a reason for that. 

 

As I’ve said many times, during the Trump years I’ve never felt more politically homeless or more ideologically grounded. I think a lot of people, particularly people who feel the same way, understand what I mean intuitively. But I’ve found a lot of people don’t. Let me explain for a moment. I feel like I’ve been freed from a level of partisanship I never fully appreciated in myself when I thought conservatism and Republican politics were more in sync and their interests more aligned. I’ve lost the sense of obligation or compulsion I once felt to defend Republican positions. I was never a hackish water-carrier for the GOP (opinions differ!) but I confess that sometimes I was too quick to assume that if progressives or Democrats angrily insisted that Republicans were wrong, there’s probably something right about what Republicans were doing. Or, conversely, that if Republicans were angry about something Democrats were doing I should defend that anger. 

 

Donald Trump just makes it so easy to give eleventy billion examples of this. Even if I loved Trump, I’d think the effort to “expunge” his impeachments is at best childish. I think the House’s January 6 committee wasn’t organized optimally and had other flaws, but 95 percent of the GOP criticisms left me cold. The Mar-a-Lago raid was wholly legal and justified. 

 

But I differ from Republicans on policy arguments that are only indirectly about Trump, too. For example, I think the problem with Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine is that it’s been too piecemeal and reactive, and the GOP talk about “blank checks” is mostly nonsense. 

 

Think of it this way: Why on earth should I give, say, Lindsey Graham the benefit of the doubt? I could pick Republican senators I disagree with more often and more intensely—J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville, to name a few—but that’s sort of my point. Graham is very good at sounding smart and truthful, and sometimes he actually is. But he can also sound that way when he’s saying dumb and untruthful things. At any given moment, depending on his political needs, he can be statesmanlike or wildly partisan or an astounding Trump suck-up to a degree that only proctological terminology can capture the extent of it. And, to make things worse, his positions change as the moment suits. That may be fine for an elected official of the Republican Party these days—he does have a very good sense of what he has to do to get elected—but why should I care about that?  

 

I don’t want to speak for my colleagues at The Dispatch, but I think this general worldview captures a big chunk of what we’re trying to do. Say what you will about Kevin Williamson, Nick Catoggio, Steve Hayes, Scott Lincicome, Sarah Isgur, David Drucker, and the rest of our team, but they’re not water-carriers for any party. I’m not trying to cast us as the journalistic equivalent of the Untouchables (everyone knows, I hope, how much I still love and respect my friends at National Review). But as a right-of-center institution founded in the Trump era when conservative criticism of Trump was treated as everything from tactically misguided to treasonous, we just have a different set of foundational and psychological commitments than most other comparable institutions. When you burn bridges you think less about how things are going at home.

 

Anyway, I don’t want to make this ad for The Dispatch.

 

As ideologically grounded as I think I am, I find that the intellectual churn on the right is forcing me—and a lot of people—to revisit ideas and concepts that were once givens on (most of) the right. If you had told me 10 years ago that in 2023 a lot of self-declared conservatives would be attacking the free market, constitutional originalism, limited government, internationalism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the idea that character matters—not to mention broader philosophical underpinnings of the founding—I would have been very skeptical. But that’s precisely where we are. 

 

I have an enormous amount of muscle memory when it comes to defending such concepts against assaults from the left. But the calving of big chunks of the right from the ice sheet of conservative dogma is new in my lifetime. 

 

The last time we saw anything remotely like this was during the Pat Buchanan moment in the early 1990s. But even then, the standard conservative response to Buchanan’s protectionism and populist-tribal “conservatism of the heart” was to point out that operationally it was simply right-wing progressivism. And that usually did the trick. 

 

For instance, Buchanan would often invoke FDR’s line (usually without attribution): “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” You could often brush back that stuff simply by pointing out that he was, in effect, a pro-life New Dealer. Now, there are self-styled conservatives who take such a description as a compliment (and assume that having a problem with New Deal style statism makes you a “libertarian”). 

 

And, I should point out, Buchananism’s fondness for New Deal statism ended at the water’s edge. Say what you will about the New Dealers, they wanted to win World War II without reservation. Pat had reservations, at least in retrospect. 

 

It’s funny, I wrote Suicide of the West in an effort to convince progressives of good will that liberal democratic capitalism was the best system imaginable for their stated priorities. What is politics for? What is the government for? Ask most people of the left and you’ll get an assortment of responses: improving the health, wealth or education of the common man, protecting the rights of minorities, protecting the environment, etc. Suffice to say I think liberal democratic capitalism is the best system possible—over the long term—for these priorities. I don’t think I had huge success in convincing large numbers of people who didn’t already agree—but I tried, in part because I thought I should model what was increasingly lacking on the right: persuasion instead of performance. 

 

The reason I bring this up, though, is that just as I was working on making that good faith argument to good faith progressive readers, a whole bunch of people on the right started rejecting liberal democratic capitalism—in whole or in part. Some just don’t like the liberalism but are okay with the democracy and capitalism. Some think the democracy part is negotiable but we should keep some of the other stuff. Some hate all three and think we’d be happier as serfs. It’s a hodgepodge. 

 

It’s also mostly absurd. And, sometimes, depressing.  

 

I think some questions should simply be settled. Close the books, lock the door, and worry about other things. Liberal democratic capitalism—broadly speaking—is one of them. Obviously, it’s an open question about where to circumscribe the free market. But on the issue of whether the free market is better at generating prosperity, that is a settled question for me. So are all sorts of liberal commitments—fair trials, individual rights (including property rights), freedom of religion, etc.—I think we’d be better off if these weren’t topics for serious debate in sort of the same way serious people don’t debate whether murder or genocide are wrong. And I certainly think these should be settled questions among conservatives. But they’re not. 

 

It really is amazing to witness the damage Trump did to the right. It’s not that defending Trump requires defending serfdom or the imposition of a confessional state. It’s that the project of defending Trump required so many people to tear down so many of the philosophical and theological support beams of conservatism, the structural collapses created openings for opportunists who really don’t care about Trump at all—or conservatism—to make their own little forts out of the rubble. The Littlefingers understand: Chaos is a ladder. 

 

So now, many on the right think we should be revisiting whether the Enlightenment or the Founding were mistakes. They question whether the “procedural” elements of the Constitution deserve respect from the right. Some think it’s fine to cast doubt and anger on the electoral process or even celebrate the violation of the peaceful transfer of power. Or that the rightwing economic planners can do what the leftwing ones never could. 

 

Just last night there was a story about a young New Right guy who apparently thinks “the Jewish Question” is still a thing that needs to be addressed. I resent that I feel the need to explain to people that even raising “the Jewish Question” presupposes that there’s something to be done about the Jews: “When we get in power, what will our answer to the ‘JQ’ be?”

 

This whole line of thought is so grotesque—no matter how playfully or trollishly entertained—it represents a cancerous rot on the right (as do many of the defenses of this poor misunderstood lad betrayed by his former MAGA compadres). 

 

Anyway, it’s this new push—or putsch—on the right that has me wanting to revisit, relearn, or repeat some of the most basic tenets of conservative, liberal and Western thought. Or just my own thought. So when you send me an angry email asking why I wrote about, I dunno, the Peace of Westphalia instead of the controversy of the day at MSNBC or Fox, I’ll refer you to this note.

McCarthy Accidentally Exposes the Trump Campaign’s Nervousness

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed an unforgivable sin this week: He told the truth. He may never live down the shame of it.

 

The unforgivable offense occurred during a recent interview with CNBC host Joe Kernen, who asked the speaker if it would be “good thing for the Republican Party if Donald Trump is the nominee” given the candidate’s criminal indictments. McCarthy played the role of phalanx dutifully. He said that former president Trump “can beat Biden.” He insisted that Trump’s policy preferences were better for the country than Biden’s. In regard to the criminal liabilities Trump faces, McCarthy said that they had “complicated” the equation, but Trump can still “win that election.” All the trouble followed when McCarthy expressed the faintest hint of uncertainty in his own predictions.

 

“The question is, is he the strongest to win the election?” the speaker asked rhetorically. “I don’t know that answer, but can anybody beat Biden? Yeah, anybody can beat Biden.” That momentary doubt — this barely perceptible crack in the hollow bombast to which Trump’s courtiers are prone — was enough to send the president’s enforcers into fits.

 

“Trump world flipped out,” Politico reporter Rachael Bade revealed. “Some called McCarthy a ‘moron,’” she continued. “McCarthy, they feel, has taken advantage of the former president when it benefits him and failed to show unflinching loyalty in return.” Bade’s dispatch asserts that, “In every conceivable way, the House speaker owes his gavel to Trump,” and it implies that Trump can take back what he has so beneficently bestowed. McCarthy appeared to agree with that assessment because he performed an immediate about-face and turned in one of the more obsequious performances we’ve seen from him in days, if not weeks.

 

“Mr. McCarthy also called Mr. Trump Tuesday, according to three people familiar with the exchange, two of whom characterized the conversation as an apology,” New York Times journalist Annie Karni reported. It wasn’t enough. McCarthy ran to Breitbart News — a venue increasingly dedicated to prosecuting the turf war among the very-online capos loyal to the Right’s competing cults of personality — to revise the record.

 

By reporting his remarks verbatim, which were delivered on camera and broadcast in real time, “the media is attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans,” McCarthy said with utter disregard for the strain his remarks place on your rolling eyeballs. “Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016,” McCarthy continued. “The only reason Biden is using his weaponized federal government to go after President Trump is because he is Biden’s strongest political opponent, as polling continues to show.”

 

But that is not what the polls show. The latest NBC News survey of registered voters ahead of the 2024 general election finds Trump losing to Biden nationally by four points, while the race between Ron DeSantis and Biden is tied at 47 percent apiece. A recent Yahoo!/YouGov poll also shows Trump underperforming DeSantis in head-to-head matchups against Biden.

 

Not every recent poll of the national political environment has been unfriendly to Trump. A mid-June Harvard/Harris poll showed DeSantis edging out Biden by one point while Trump bests the president by a six-point margin. But if you look under that poll’s hood, it contains some eyebrow-raising assertions. The survey found Trump defeating the incumbent Democratic president among women by eight points. It shows Trump winning the youth vote over Biden. It finds Trump securing a full quarter of the African-American vote while Biden struggles along with the support of a bare majority of black voters. Among anyone with a passing familiarity with American political dynamics, doubt is the only rational response to results like these.

 

Since there is no such thing as a national presidential election, nor is the national popular vote a metric of any value beyond rhetorical point-scoring, the place to really test the proposition that Trump is the strongest candidate Republicans can put up against Biden is at the state level. There, polling has shown for some time that the former president is in no way better positioned than his most viable GOP opponent to beat Biden next November.

 

As of mid May, DeSantis regularly outperformed Trump in polls of general-election matchups in several key swing states. A Public Opinion Strategies poll found Biden leading Trump but trailing DeSantis in Arizona and Georgia. A subsequent POS survey of Pennsylvania showed DeSantis carrying Pennsylvania and Trump losing it. Surveys have shown DeSantis running competitive races in Nevada and Virginia — two states Republican presidential candidates haven’t won since 2004. Complementary polling has also shown that a DeSantis nomination would boost the prospects of the GOP’s candidates farther down the ballot in races for state and federal offices. By contrast, a Trump nomination would impose a drag on GOP candidates across the board.

 

The Republican nominating contest is still in its early stages. Most voters haven’t tuned into the race yet, and they are likely basing their still unformed views of the candidates’ relative strengths and weaknesses on the assessments rendered by sources they trust who are more plugged into the data — sources like Kevin McCarthy. That likelihood renders the speaker’s sycophancy not just humiliating but irresponsible, too.

 

It’s not hard to understand why Trump and his allies would enforce information blackouts around DeSantis’s obvious polling advantages with the kind of zeal evocative of the Chinese Communist Party. McCarthy isn’t obligated to participate in that deceptive project, and he could come to regret it. Indeed, by voluntarily setting fire to his credibility, McCarthy hasn’t actually done Trump any favors.

 

The Trump camp’s sensitivity to something as harmless as an expression of doubt about the unknowable trajectory of the 2024 election exposes deep insecurities inside the former president’s campaign and Trump’s vulnerability to the “electability” question. They’re worried. We didn’t know just how worried until they put the screws to McCarthy. And we didn’t know how serious the threat to Trump really was until McCarthy caved.

Sotomayor’s Fake America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, June 29, 2023

 

In her dissent in the affirmative action cases, Justice Sotomayor writes:

 

Notwithstanding this Court’s actions, however, society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted. Diversity is now a fundamental American value, housed in our varied and multicultural American community that only continues to grow. The pursuit of racial diversity will go on. Although the Court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education. Despite the Court’s unjustified exercise of power, the opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.

 

Which “society” would that be, exactly? Who believes that “diversity” as achieved by affirmative action is a “fundamental American value”? What is this “face of an America whose cries for equality resound”? To read Sotomayor, you’d assume that racial discrimination in higher education was popular. But it’s not. It’s extremely unpopular. Here’s the New York Times‘s breakdown of public opinion in this area:

Resounding? Yeah — in the other direction.

A Key Provision in the Affirmative Action Decision

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, June 29, 2023

 

Yesterday, I wrote:

 

I am aware that, even if it does, colleges that want to keep discriminating will probably find a way. Certainly, Congress can prevent universities from asking applicants their race, or from instituting quotas, or from publicly admitting that they favor candidates from one group over another. But it cannot stop admissions offices from signaling that they will consider the “applicant as a whole,” and from making it abundantly obvious that an aspirant who begins a cover letter with “as an immigrant from Ghana” or “as the descendent of slaves” or “as a poor woman from Appalachia” will benefit from having done so. We are, I suspect, about to see an onslaught of clandestine resistance from our universities.

 

But, in today’s decision striking down affirmative action, the Court made it clear that it would not accept that:

 

But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat can- not be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.

 

I don’t know if this will be enforceable, but it looks as if the Court is going to try.

Russia After Rebellion

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Friday, June 29, 2023

 

The spectacle of a brief, bizarre mutiny in Russia is over. Yet its ramifications for Vladimir Putin’s reign remain unclear, and the U.S. should be doing everything possible to exploit the Russian military’s disorder to benefit Ukraine.

 

Over the weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of the mercenary Wagner Group, led thousands of his troops as they took control of a strategic Russian city and came within 120 miles of Moscow. He called off the rebellion after brokering a deal through Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko. But Prigozhin’s statements undermining the Russian military leadership in general—and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in particular—remain for all to see. 

 

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine were not going to attack Russia with the NATO bloc. The Russian Defense Ministry is deceiving the public and the president,” Prigozhin said, undermining the official basis for Putin’s war ahead of the rebellion. He also warned of punishment for those responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian men in Ukraine. While much remains unknown, that shouldn’t stop the U.S. and its allies from amplifying Prigozhin’s statements so that they reverberate in every Russian household.

 

The Wagner rebellion highlights how Putin has been grossly flippant with the lives of Russians—tens of thousands of Russians have died on the battlefield in the past 16 months—and the Russian people have noticed. When Wagner rolled through Russian streets, the people were supportive. Clearly there is a sizable chunk of the Russian population that understands the war isn’t going Russia’s way and sympathizes with Prigozhin’s criticism of the military brass.

 

The more the Kremlin feels domestic opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the better, and there is much more Washington can do on that front. But most important is bolstering Ukrainian forces on the battlefield itself, and President Biden’s risk aversion and unwillingness to think clearly about the strategic aims of the United States and NATO for the outcome of the Ukraine war continues to be a problem.

 

Biden apologists will point to the billions of dollars the U.S. has poured into Ukraine’s defense, but that misses the most important point. Biden remains unwilling to permit deliveries of categories of weapons Ukraine could use to finally score battlefield wins over Russia. And when allies want to deliver more capable weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. harms Ukraine and itself when it uses export controls as a pretext to stop them.

 

The U.S. can make a material difference on the battlefield by providing (or allowing allies to provide) several different weapons platforms, including ATACMs, bigger more powerful drones like the MQ-9 Reaper, and without a doubt the DPICM cluster munitions, which would greatly enable Ukraine to make up for Russia’s numerical advantage in soldiers and artillery rounds. 

 

Ukraine wants these categories of weapons to win, but the Biden administration is following a familiar pattern as they did with other systems. First, they decline to provide them. Eventually, under pressure by Kyiv, allies and Congress, the administration relents. Precious time and Ukrainian lives are lost in the meantime. But this time can be different: It is an opportunity to rush greater capabilities to Ukraine so that it can exploit the Russian disorder and pressure Putin to contrive an offramp.

 

Perhaps the most shocking part of the short-lived mutiny was how easy it was for Prigozhin’s forces to move through Russian territory. That does not bode well for the Russian state security apparatus. But whatever happens internally, now is not the time for the West to hit the brakes. Let’s hit the gas. 

Eccentricity Isn’t a Political Agenda

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 26, 2023

 

A classical liberal arts education is not useless, but it is better to approach such learning as though it were—yes, a good education might make you a better worker or a better citizen, but the purpose of education is not to make you a more useful instrument for the Fortune 500 or for the state, or to make you a tool at all. (Though, goodness knows, our schools have produced some real tools over the years.) Education may be understood as selfish (it is better to be cultivated than to remain ignorant, and education opens one up to pleasures that are not available to the uneducated) or as an act of devotion (God did not make us for complacency and idleness). Yet once you start judging it primarily on the criterion of usefulness, you have lost the essence of education and have descended into mere training. Whenever I hear somebody say that we should care about Mozart because babies made to listen to Mozart in the crib go on to score 25 points higher on the SAT, the bad part of me thinks that person should have his ears cut off, because they are not doing him any good.              

 

(My little one prefers Thomas Tallis, anyway, even if these guys never gave good ol’ English a second thought.) 

 

None of that should be read as an invitation to turn up one’s nose at the practical arts, which are, after all, the things that keep us from starving to death or dying from smallpox or in general suffering under the material conditions of the early 13^th century, as much as a troll over at the Daily Wire seem to like the idea of living in 1220. (Presumably, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro is slightly less sanguine about the prospects of living, if it were possible, in medieval Europe.) One of the practical arts is politics, which is less intellectually demanding than agriculture and less noble than medicine but which is, unhappily, still difficult to do without entirely. There have been many useful statements of the practical nature of politics, from Bismarck’s famous proverb (“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next-best”) to the misunderstood and often misrepresented thought of Machiavelli, who argued, long before English had the term “political science,” that students of politics should take a scientific approach to the issue—that the problem of politics is not the pursuit of ideals or idealism but understanding how the world actually works and using that understanding toward practical ends in behalf of one’s own people, prince, or republic. The author of The Prince was, indeed, a republican in his own heart, but he wrote his most famous work with a direction toward monarchy because, in his time and place, and in the context of his project—the political unification of Italy—monarchy was what he had to work with. If you have not read James Burnham’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, it is a very illuminating book for our time. 

 

It is interesting to set Burnham and his Machiavellians alongside such contemporary political writers as Patrick Deneen, whose latest book has received a great deal of attention from friends and colleagues of mine such as Jonah Goldberg and Stephanie Slade, or alongside other so-called New Right (really, New New New New Right, since we get a New Right every 15 years or so) figures as Sohrab Ahmari, in part because of how the underlying allegiances have changed—Burnham assumed that conservatives would be “defenders of freedom,” while Deneen and Ahmari and their kind think we have too much freedom—but also because doing so illustrates the fundamental, inescapable problem of that so-called New Right: its lack of intellectual seriousness. 

 

You don’t always get intellectual seriousness from a serious intellectual. Professor Deneen, currently on the faculty of Notre Dame and previously at Princeton and Georgetown, is an actual academic in a milieu that attracts a lot of phony intellectuals such as “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka. As such, he has a lot of interesting things to say about Polybius and Aristotle and even about his intellectual enemies, who include such arch-villains of philosophical history as … Adam Smith. But ask him his favorite question from Lenin—“What is to be done?” and you won’t get much of an answer. As Slade and Goldberg note, Deneen is vague and contradictory when it comes to actual questions of policy, or even questions of practical politics. Polybius? Lots to say. Entitlement reform? Well, you know. 

 

This is the case across most of the so-called New Right. They know who their enemies are, and they know in whose behalf they have appointed themselves to speak—generally without consulting the supposed beneficiaries of their grace—but they don’t know what they want to do. And, to the extent that they do know, it is preposterous and trivial. Sohrab Ahmari, who bounced around between religious and political orientations before settling into being kind of newfangled right-wing Catholic (think William F. Buckley without the charm or the chops) proposes reviving the “blue laws,” which were intended to protect the sanctity of the Sabbath—and which were, it is worth emphasizing here, championed by Puritans who would have burned Sohrab Ahmari at the stake. 

 

No doubt Ahmari would point out that Constantine had Sabbath laws before the Puritans did, but our nation wasn’t founded by Constantine. In fact, the Catholic character of the “integralist” tendency in right-wing politics is—and I write this as a Catholic—positively hilarious. If you believe that in a country in which only a minority of Catholics take Catholic social teaching very seriously—a minority of a minority—the electorate is going to take up Pope John Paul II and his “Theology of the Body” as a ruling political assumption, you are higher than Hunter Biden pretending to be Hunter Thompson. 

 

Put another way: The belief that the basis of a meaningful program of political reform in these United States in 2023 is going to be found in 13^th-century Christian practice or in a neo-Puritan regime that would require banning NBC Sunday Night Football on penalty of death, then you are not actually engaged in politics at all. What you are engaged in is eccentricity, a hobby, like building model ships in bottles or trying to prove who really wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. (Answer: William Shakespeare.) I don’t think there necessarily is a lot of harm in it. I probably won’t read the new Deneen book, because I do not think he is intellectually honest and, for that reason, do not judge that he is worth the investment of my time, but I do sometimes enjoy reading things along those lines. I recently read Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot by Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, which is crazy-bananas but also a great read, and, in spite of its being more than three decades old, probably more relevant to contemporary politics than much of what is being written right now. By all means, study Aristotle—but don’t tell me you have magically pulled a 2024 Republican platform out of his Posterior Analytics. 

 

There is a kind of political and intellectual gulf on the so-called New Right: On one end, there are the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, who do not have any real program but who are very, very sure that Polybius would have disapproved of how the Harvard Management Company administers its endowment. (That is one of those issues that these “real Americans” we hear about from time to time apparently are just passionately interested in.) On the other end are the simple will-to-power types, also without much of a real agenda, or at least without a real agenda that extends more than 15 minutes into the future. These are the J. D. Vances of the world, the Steve Bannons and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Andrew Anglins, whose program is only this:

 

Many of us have student loans on degrees that are worthless.

 

Many of us fought in wars for Jews.

 

Many of us have struggled with substance abuse.

 

Many of us are out of shape.

 

We feel emasculated.

 

Many of us feel we have never had power.

 

We crave power.

 

We lust after power. We want to be part of a group, which will give us power. A group that will confirm our worth as men.

 

We do not have identities.

 

We want identities.

 

We want to be productive. All men want to be productive. We want to build things. We want to build, we want to create, we want to be needed.

 

We have problems with women. All of us do. We lie to each other and claim that we don’t.

 

We are a generation of throwaways, which (((those who write history before it happens))) have slated to be the last generation of Heterosexual White Men.

 

We are angry.

 

There is an atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over.

 

There is a craving to return to an age of violence.

 

We want a war.

 

That’s from Anglin. Take out the antisemitic stuff and tell me which part you couldn’t read in the New Right outlet of your choice. Take out the antisemitic stuff (or maybe don’t take it out) and (maybe) the three-cheers-for-violence stuff, and tell me which part you couldn’t find a Fox News mouth-hole to make excuses for—or a writer for one of the more excitable conservative magazines, for that matter.

 

And, really, what is to be done? What are we going to do? Tell the socially maladjusted incels of Rumble to study Polybius?

 

Professor Deneen et al. would tell you that their beef is with liberalism. In fact, their beef is with modernity. But, in either case, their indictments are like complaining about the weather. This is the world we live in and, if your political program entails living in a different world, then it isn’t really politics. It isn’t political philosophy, either. It is, by the most charitable account, literature, albeit a bargain-basement genre of literature: right-wing Catholic fan-fic. And if the talk-radio callers and the comments-section rage-monkeys are anything to go by, what these people need isn’t a political program, but therapy. Indeed, there is a reason so much of our modern political discourse, which isn’t really political discourse, has the feel of a group-therapy session. 

 

During the runup to the 2016 presidential election—and, especially, in the aftermath of that election—we read a great deal about the rage and alienation of downwardly mobile, white, exurban-to-rural voters, who saw in Donald Trump a hammer with which to smash institutions they hate, or at least a nettle with which to irritate people they hate. What was never adequately explained—or even seriously considered, at least in public—was why the concerns and demands of that particular demographic subset should play so prominent a role in our politics. Why not be extra solicitous, when it comes to economic policy, toward the economically vibrant places and the most productive industries? Why should national policy be oriented toward the declining parts of the country, the moribund firms, the stagnant industries? Deneen argues that we should have elites who are more aligned with “the many”—meaning the people he thinks should count more politically—but nobody in that camp ever really says what they think that should mean. Donald Trump claimed to speak for the poor gormless benighted denizens of middle America—and then proceeded to absolutely hose many of the most important industries in rural America, e.g., absolutely screwing soybean farmers in the course of accomplishing something—remind me: What did he accomplish?—vis-à-vis China. J. D. Vance was going to make a big splash helping his former patrons in the venture-capital world connect with economically ailing parts of Ohio. That hasn’t borne much fruit, and neither did Vance’s attempt at nonprofit work. All that big talk, and what did he do? He took the same job Sherrod Brown has. 

 

¡Viva la revolución! I guess.

 

(NB: All of this progressive talk about how “blue states subsidize red states” is economically illiterate, intellectually dishonest, and morally kind of gross. It also misstates the real politics: Mississippi (which had precisely one Republican governor in the whole of the 20^th century and was run by Democrats until 2010, following 131 years of interrupted Democratic control of the state legislature, but never mind that for now, it’s a “red state”) and Oregon have exactly the same poverty rate among non-Hispanic whites, but Mississippi has a much higher overall poverty rate, mostly driven by the fact that Mississippi is 38 percent African-American, while Oregon has fewer black people than a Bernie Sanders rally, with a smaller African-American population share than Alaska or West Virginia. African-Americans have a higher poverty rate than whites basically everywhere in the United States. Hispanics, too. Do you really want to make the argument that “red states” are horrible because there are too many poor people—and, in particular, too many poor black and Hispanic people, and probably too many old people—living in them? And do you think that Mississippi’s recent Electoral College votes are driven by the preferences of the poor black voters in that state? Don’t talk to me about “red states” and “blue states”—talk to me about ZIP codes.)

 

What we have is angry populists looking for power or at least paychecks, and similarly angry academic eggheads offering no kind of intellectual leadership to the movement they purport to be championing, partly because they don’t have a real product to sell, and partly because there wouldn’t be any market for such a product if they did. And so you end up with Victor Davis Hanson, who is happy to explain to you why this moment in our politics—or any other episode that comes to mind—is reminiscent of the Peloponnesian War, writing for the same outlet as Julie Kelly, who claims January 6 was a hoax staged with the aid of “crisis actors.” The Thucydides guy and the Q-Anon kooks, all singing from the same hymnal, all doing the same hokey-pokey, all feeding at the same trough, at least until the Mercer money runs out. 

 

But, you know, Polybius.

 

At the Trump rallies, you can hear the real chant, if you have the right kind of ears: “We want power!” Okay, so you want power, what for? To make sure movie theaters are closed on Sundays? I would have written, “to make America one vast Chick-fil-A,” but, as I understand it, Chick-fil-A is now too “woke” for the right kind of people. Charlie Kirk apparently is going through his fridge trying to figure out whether his ketchup is “woke.” Totally normal people in totally normal times, these. 

 

The thing about eccentrics is, they aren’t all interesting. Some of them are just hideously tedious. 

 

And Furthermore . . . 

 

To repeat: I haven’t read the Deneen book and don’t expect to. But as I know from Stephanie Slade’s review, Deneen writes that he would prefer a system in which conservative views are “the price of admission to elite status itself.” For a Polybius man—though maybe not a thoroughgoing Polybius man—Roman precedent is always of interest. Cicero, a provincial who wasn’t a proper Roman, became the most conventional of Romans, the most Roman of Romans, among the most conservative and orthodox. Conservatism may not have been a condition to admission to the Roman elite for everybody, but it surely was a condition for such a man as Cicero, a novus homo—a “new man,” not a man from a family of senators and consuls. (There was a time when mere money wasn’t enough.) Cicero’s ally, Cato the Younger, had a reputation as being no friend to the common man but was, technically, a pleb. He was famously orthodox in religious matters—but also adopted Stoicism, which his famous ancestor, Cato the Elder, had opposed as a noxious foreign cult. (The Romans used to talk about the Greeks the way conservatives circa 2001 talked about the French—as weaklings who wouldn’t take their own side in a fight and, in the Roman indictment, “effeminate.”) Julius Caesar, the great populist, was himself a patrician from an ancient lineage. Everything old is new: Geert Wilders, the Dutch rightist of partly Indonesian ancestry, bleaches and dyes his hair to look more classically Dutch. Donald Trump was—not long ago!—a peddler of pride-flag merchandise who made cameos in porn films. People aren’t always what they seem, or what life seems to have fitted them to be. And they certainly aren’t always what they claim to be.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Nostalgia isn’t economics. 

 

On the Oren Cass vs. Scott Winship throwdown, the numbers seem pretty clear to be on Winship’s side. But, by all means, dig in yourself and see what you can make of it. 

 

Or, to take another approach, ask yourself: “Who you gonna believe? Angry populists or your lyin’ eyes?”

 

Ain’t nobody you know wants a 1980s standard of living—much less a standard of living from the 1950s, the purported postwar golden age of the American worker. I know this because I know you can have that standard of living, right now, if you want it—cheap. But nobody does that. You can go get yourself a house more or less identical to the one my middle-class grandparents lived in from the 1950s through the 1980s, only a few miles away from the company town where they actually lived, for less than the price of a Toyota GR Corolla. Yeah, it needs some work—so did a lot of people’s houses in that era. A car built to 1982 specs would be pretty cheap today—if you could legally sell it, which you couldn’t. Adjusted for inflation, you could almost buy two Mac Studios for what one Atari 800 personal computer cost when it first hit the market in 1981—and that computer didn’t have the computing power of a modern smartwatch. 

 

People were poor in the 1950s—and radically richer than they had been only a few decades before. All this wealth we have is really, really new. As Brad DeLong put it: “In what matters most, in the warp and woof of everyday life, our counterparts in the industrial core of the world economy around 1900 still had more in common in their styles of life with their predecessors of 1600 or 1700 than with us today.”

 

Of course people compete for material goods. One of the interesting features of the rich world in the past few decades is that everybody has started to rediscover the fact that while businesses compete for consumers, consumers compete with one another, too. (Watching people learn can be a hoot.) For practically every product or experience, there is a super-expensive version of it: That’s because we live in a connected world with a lot of rich people in it. (I like Momofuku, but with memories of collegiate poverty still very much with me, it took some time to come around to $21 ramen.) There’s a reason “limited edition” stuff has got so big in recent years. There’s a reason everybody is talking about how hard life is in our time while Rolex dealers can’t keep product in stock. 

 

But that reason isn’t really what you might think: When a society reaches a certain level of raw material prosperity, people’s energy shifts away from the competition for necessities or even quotidian luxuries and toward competition for status. Nobody in these United States is murdering anybody over a pair of sneakers because his feet are cold. Nobody is going to commit an armed robbery and take a watch because he needs to know what time it is.  

 

(Flava Flav knows what time it is.)

 

I’ve been meaning to dig into this for a while, and I promise I will at some point, but, here’s the thing: What has changed in the past few decades isn’t that it sucks to be poor—it has always sucked to be poor—or that the middle class has grown poorer—it hasn’t—but that the lives of the very, very wealthy—your Silicon Valley billionaire types—have become radically different from those of ordinary people, even ordinary rich people. Do you know what Howard Hughes drove? He drove a Buick—a really nice, tricked-out, customized Buick. But a Buick nonetheless. Jeff Bezos has a spaceship and a yacht that would have made Thurston Howell III himself retch at the vulgar display of wealth.  

 

You’ll notice that our self-appointed class-war generals do not talk very much about the poor—they talk almost exclusively about the rich, the “allah-garks” of Bernie Sanders’s imbecilic rhetoric, and how unfair it is that they are so rich. They would like you to believe that the poor are poor because the rich are rich—and, more important, that you splendidly numerous middle-class voters are unhappy because the rich are rich. The rich may be powerful but, as voters, they are not splendidly numerous. The class-war guys aren’t counting money—they are counting votes. That “1-percent” stuff is evil, but it is clever. 

 

I’m not an economist, and I don’t pretend to have all the solutions to making our already wondrously prosperous country even more prosperous. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that eating the seed corn is not a great long-term strategy. 

 

Words about Words

 

Joe Biden, as everybody knows, talks literal nonsense. Whoever writes his Twitter does, too. Example: “Juneteenth as a federal holiday is meant to breathe new life into the essence of America.” This is an example of a sentence that is grammatical in form but nonsensical in content. Noam Chomsky, the Paul Krugman of linguistics (a giant in his academic field, an idjit at politics), composed the textbook example: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” (If you have a French textbook, it may be: “Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite.”) Every word in the sentence means something, and the sentence has the form of a grammatical English sentence, but it is nonsense. Biden’s nonsense is nonsense with a bias toward that which superficially wounds uplifting—“new life” and “essence”—but it is nonsense nonetheless. 

 

Literally meaningless sentences are common enough in political rhetoric, and there is much political rhetoric that doesn’t seem to mean very much if you think about it too hard. Consider the ubiquitous cri de cœur: “We’re gonna take our country back!” From whom? The United States of America is governed by—for our sins—Americans. If there is a thought attached to that sentence, it is a thought that few people would be willing to speak aloud: “The United States should be, effectively, a single-party state, because, in our view, the government is not legitimate if the other party is in power.” Taking their country back is what the Indians did in 1947. How strange that so many of the people who shout “We’re gonna take our country back!” have so little sympathy for people who are actually trying to do that—the Ukrainians, for example. 

 

One of the “tricks”—and it isn’t really a trick—I used to share with my writing students is to read a sentence aloud and think of the literal meaning of the sentence and each of its constituent parts. You’d be amazed how that little bit of mental focus improves the prose of struggling writers.