By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
October 09, 2023
But
First …
In the
Book of Judges, we read that, facing a ruthless invasion, “the Israelites
prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves, and strongholds.”
There were no bomb shelters then. The Israelites planted their crops, and the
invaders “camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza …
like swarms of locusts.” In our time, the Israelis are people who want peace
and trade but are surrounded by people who want war and the spoils of war, and
who want, above all, the extermination of the Jewish state.
This
column was written before the sneak attack on Israel from Gaza over the
weekend, and I will have more to say about the situation in the coming days.
For now, the thing that is most on my mind is that people who take children as
hostages and then parade them through the streets as spoils of war are not
soldiers and do not deserve to be treated as such. Whatever legitimate
grievances the Palestinians might have had, their cause today is one that is
covered in shame that will never be washed away. For now, courage to our
friends—and with the United States increasingly under the sway of people who do
not know how to take their own side in a fight, Israel is going to need all the
friends she can get.
Jackassobins
I get
why Republicans in the so-called Problem Solvers’ Caucus are big mad at the
Democratic caucus members who did not cross party lines to keep Kevin McCarthy
from being deposed as speaker of the House by self-serving beady-eyed cretin
Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz, as it turned out, had only a handful of Republicans on
his side: Of the 216 votes to give McCarthy the boot, only eight came from
Republicans, while the remaining 200-odd votes came from Democrats—a very
strange way of punishing McCarthy for being too bipartisan, which is what he
notionally stood accused of. Gaetz and his brand of performative nonsense
politics is a problem that could have been, if not solved, then very much
improved by responding to his imbecility with a crushing political rejection.
Instead, Democrats gave him a bare victory, ensuring that the problem gets
worse rather than better.
Some
“problem solvers.”
Not that
there weren’t good reasons for Democrats to vote against McCarthy. For one
thing, there isn’t any pressing reason for Democrats to vote for any Republican
for speaker. For another thing, McCarthy has done more than enough to create
the very perverse political incentives that brought him down. McCarthy’s
individual demerits as speaker—his championing of Donald Trump’s stolen-election
nonsense, his hamstringing the January 6 investigation, his elevation of cranks
and bigots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene—are surely enough that any
self-respecting Republican (if we could imagine the existence of such a
creature) would think twice about voting for him for speaker in normal
circumstances. Kevin McCarthy is not a victim of the destructive and moronized
politics of our era—he is one of the principal architects of those destructive
and moronized politics, a leading destroyer and moronizer. If there had been
some way for both McCarthy and Gaetz to lose at the same time, that would have
been a better outcome—decent people could have just stood on the sideline and
cheered for collateral damage.
But, if
you are going to call yourselves a “Problem Solvers’ Caucus” and talk a good
game about putting pragmatism over partisanship, then you have to do that from
time to time. You cannot promise to put pragmatism over partisanship only when
it doesn’t help the other party.
Republicans
are a special kind of hot mess right now, but Democrats are wading into the
same tainted waters, even if they have not yet sunk quite as deeply into them.
The political incentives for the Democrats are about the same as they are for
the Republicans—politics driven by social media frenzy, cable news hysteria,
and small-dollar donations looks pretty much the same on the left as it does on
the right.
If it
seems that Republicans are a bit worse at the moment—and they are—there are a
few obvious reasons for that fact that are worth understanding and pondering
for a bit: One of them is the particular, unique character of Donald Trump, who
as a genuine celebrity had the power to warp the politics of the right, which
is so starved for celebrity and so keenly aware of its relative paucity of
celebrity advocates that conservatives get just terribly excited by figures
such as Scott Baio and Ted Nugent—and it has been a long time since Superbabies:
Baby Geniuses 2 or Double Live Gonzo! were
top-of-mind. Trump didn’t get into this as a guy who was “Fox News famous” but
as a guy who was actually famous. The second and related
factor that should be understood is that the right-wing populists who have been
drawn to Trump feel shut out of elite institutions and estranged from elite
culture. A lot of that is just kayfabe, of course: Ted Cruz of Princeton,
Harvard Law, and Take Your Spouse to Work Day at Goldman Sachs isn’t some
hay-chewing rustic who spent his youth rasslin’ steers in Amarillo. But some of
it is real—Sen. Cruz’s Big Tex shtick works for a reason.
This
second factor involves two subfactors: One is the obvious resentment that our
so-called nationalists have for almost everything in these United States that
is successful and globally significant (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood,
the Ivy League, etc.), and the second is that this estrangement from elite
institutions ends up giving right-wing counter-institutions power that is
wildly disproportionate to their actual influence and importance. For example,
it is common (and not always wrong) to compare Fox News with MSNBC, and while
both cable channels are full of intellectually dishonest and morally stunted
partisan hacks making a racket that sounds exactly like a truckload of Chinese
opera gongs crashing into a truckload of untuned player pianos, MSNBC does not
have anything like the influence over Democratic politics that Fox News has
had—and still has—over Republican politics. Democrats often say that they want
to build something like the network of right-leaning think tanks, policy shops,
and media outlets that cater to Republican interests, but what they do not seem
to appreciate is that they already have it: It is called Harvard, the New
York Times, the American Bar Association, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the late
shows, NPR, PBS, etc. For years, National Review—a relatively small
magazine with fewer than 200,000 subscribers at the apex of its prominence—had
at least as much influence over right-leaning politics as a behemoth like
the New York Times did over left-leaning politics,
because National Review was pretty much the only outlet
talking to the right as such, while the New York Times had to
compete for influence with the Washington Post, CBS Evening News,
the law faculty at NYU, etc. Fox News has tremendous power over Republican
politics because the second-place contender for doing what Fox News has done is
talk radio, which in the post-Rush Limbaugh era is a fractious collection of
half-bright schemers and grifters who either already have Fox News shows, are
angling to get Fox News shows, or recently lost their Fox News shows.
The
fewer significant variables you have in your system, the more important each of
those individual variables is. It is an easier thing to corrupt one cable news
channel than to corrupt a dozen of them.
If that
reads to you like a long and tortuous disquisition about Republicans’ problems,
know that it is very much to the point of what ails intraparty Democratic
politics as well. Sure, a few Democrats—from the Problem Solvers’ Caucus or
elsewhere—could have crossed over and defeated Rep. Gaetz’s misadventure, even
at the risk of doing something that is good for the Republican Party as a whole
and that redounds to the specific benefit of the graceless and unsympathetic
McCarthy. But you can be sure that if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had
done such a thing, then the Democratic answer to Matt Gaetz—Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez or Cori Bush or whoever—would have tried to do to Jeffries
approximately what Gaetz did to McCarthy. By that I do not mean necessarily to
drive him out of of his leadership position, but instead to play the old
“stabbed in the back” game, telling everybody’s favorite story about how the
good and pure true believers once again got sold out by the collaborators and
insiders and click here to donate to my new super PAC. I’ll confirm this
immediately after I type it, but I am 100 percent confident that there is at
least one headline out there reading, exactly, “Democrats must not save
McCarthy.”
(And …
yes, here’s one.)
Being,
as I often have confessed, basically an Eisenhower Republican (which is no kind
of Republican at all Anno Domini 2023), I am generally much
more enthusiastic about bipartisanship, compromise, and consensus than are
those on the right who define “virtue” as “whatever it is that most annoys the
Democrats.” That group believes any bipartisan consensus is necessarily
tainted—doubly tainted!—by virtue of its being 1. bipartisan and 2. a
consensus. The problem involves that much-abused term, virtue signaling.
Bipartisanship, compromise, and consensus are not necessarily good and
desirable on their own: For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
to take one example, the bipartisan, consensus position was to do pretty much
nothing about the civil rights of African Americans, which was the result of a
compromise between the parties (conservative, business-oriented Republicans of
the Coolidge era were notionally in favor of civil-rights
reform but did
not make a top priority of the issue) and a compromise within the Democratic
Party (with northern labor leaders and southern segregationists united against
what Andrew Jackson had called “the money power” and willing to put
African-American interests on the back burner in the interest of economic realpolitik).
There isn’t necessarily any virtue in consensus, as any reading of American
history will show.
Moreover,
nice-sounding words like “compromise” and “bipartisanship” simply do not have
enough content on their own to provide the foundation for a stable political
settlement. Any consensus upon which a big change in national policy is based
will have to be a genuine consensus, one arrived at through argument and
persuasion, not one arrived at because somebody thought “consensus” sounded
like a nice thing to pursue. The need for real consensus is why, for example,
we are going to have decades more abortion politics after Dobbs,
which, far from settling the abortion issue, only marked the beginning of the
effort to achieve a consensus for an eventual legislative settlement (more
precisely, 50 or so legislative settlements). You can have a problem solvers’
caucus that pursues consensus remedies to national problems only where there
is, in fact, a real consensus. The one we probably are nearest to has to do
with the national fiscal situation. You wouldn’t know it to hear the cable
news, talk radio, and campaign-stump wailing, but there is a general, quiet
acknowledgment among responsible people in both parties that our federal fiscal
position is unsustainable and dangerous, that the recent rise in interest rates
has added urgency and immediacy to the issue, and that any meaningful program
of mitigation is going to include both spending reductions (in the form of
reduced future entitlements) and tax increases. That’s a pretty broad
consensus, in a sense, but it also is a very narrow one—it is a vaguely defined
agreement among a relatively small minority of political players. That may not
sound like much, but it is, in fact, a pretty good start.
The
agreement will get broader and deeper, and it will grow better defined, in the
months and years ahead—let us just hope that we reach the point of consensus
and deliberate action before we reach the point of crisis and forced action,
because crisis and forced action leave a bitter aftertaste. How much of our
current political unhappiness really has its roots in the 2007-08 financial
crisis and the bailouts they produced, a dramatic federal intervention that
seemed to change the rules in the middle of the game to the benefit of the most
connected and powerful people and businesses in the country? I happen to think
that what we got (a Ben Bernanke-organized bailout) was better than the most
likely alternative (a Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid-organized bailout), but I
understand why people were shocked and angered by that dramatic departure
from laissez-faire.
The
cheap and urgent partisanship of the here-and-now will almost always trump the
cheap and less urgent desire to present oneself to polite society as a
centrist, moderate, problem solver. Put another way: There is a big difference
between calling yourself a problem solver and actually being one, between
pledging to support hypothetical solutions that fall within your own political
limits—“I’ll support it, if I can support it!”—and doing the work of hammering
out those supportable compromises. That’s the lesson to be learned from
Democrats’ voting—without one exception—to let the Republican agents of chaos
have their way with the House leadership just so that Democrats can spend the
next 13 months or so smugly pointing out that Republicans agents of chaos are …
Republican agents of chaos, which everybody already knows. Politicians are not
going to vote against their political interests—creating new and better
political interests to enable politicians to do the right thing is one of the
tests of real political leadership. So is helping people—including, especially,
rivals—understand when they have miscalculated their own interests. Stamping
your feet and saying, “But I’m the king, damn it!” doesn’t make the guillotine
go away, but a little bit of intelligent compromise has prevented more than a
few revolutions. It is more fun to be a Jacobin, of course, but that’s how you
end up empowering jackasses (jackassobins?) such as Rep. Gaetz.
Self-proclaimed
problem-solvers won’t save you. But solving a few problems might help.
Economics
for English Majors
Why does
it seem like the investor class is so often in the position of rooting against
the U.S. economy? You know the story: “Employment is up, markets are down.”
From the Wall Street Journal:
The hiring pickup in September could make Federal Reserve officials less
confident that inflation’s decline this summer will be sustained. Even so,
Friday’s report is unlikely to resolve their debate over whether to raise rates
again. Officials will pay close attention to the September consumer inflation
report to be released next Thursday and to how concerns about stronger growth
are already leading to higher borrowing costs in bond markets.
But,
don’t worry—at least wages aren’t going up!
For the Federal Reserve, the inflationary implications of strong payroll
growth were offset by a relatively benign reading on wages. Total hourly
earnings rose just 0.2% and were up 4.2% from a year earlier. In the last three
months they were up 3.4% annualized, which if sustained, would be compatible
with 2% inflation. This was partly because of outsized growth in low-wage
sectors, but even within those sectors, wages are soft. Leisure and hospitality
earnings were flat for the month and for non-management employees, were up just
0.1%. For private education and healthcare workers, earnings rose just 0.2%.
Basically,
the issue is this: In the long term, the stock market likes strong economic
growth, stable money, and high levels of productivity. In the short term, the
market likes great roaring rivers of cheap money slushing through the economy,
giving investors many opportunities to dip their hands into the rushing stream
and scoop up some cash. In the long term, everybody wants to be fit and
healthy. In the short term, there’s a banana split and a bottle of bourbon
right there for the taking. We’re all Cotton Mather in the long term, and we’re
Hunter Biden in the short term.
Specifically,
here, the markets are worried that if employment, wages, consumption, etc., are
too strong, then inflation will continue to be a nasty and intractable problem,
and the only anti-inflation tool Uncle Stupid has in his toolbox is higher
interest rates. If you have big-ticket items to sell—like houses or new
cars—higher interest rates are your enemy, because they put downward pressure
on prices, which is what they are supposed to do. If you are a business looking
to expand your operations, then higher interest rates are your enemy, because
financing for your new project or new production facility is going to cost you
a lot more—which, again, is exactly how higher interest rates reduce inflation,
i.e., by interfering with economic activity per se. Loan me $1 billion at 1
percent and I’ll take that money and make a pile of money in excess of my debt-service
obligations; loan me $1 billion at 11 percent and I’ll probably pass.
Inflation
is a nasty, disruptive business. We largely avoided it for years and years and
years, but now that we have inflicted it upon ourselves, there is no easy way
out.
Words
about Words
“True equality is embracing
mediocrity,” says
the actress Aparna Nancherla. Of course, she is right—which is another reason
“true equality” is undesirable. Equality under the law? Yes,
of course. Genuine equality and the mediocrity that necessarily goes along with
it? No, thank you. I have cited this passage from Russell Kirk many times before, but it
remains necessary at a time in which the American people seem to be hell-bent
on the “narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems,”
including the ghastly conformist regimentation upon which right-wing radicalism
is constructed:
Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel
affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social
institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity
and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a
healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes,
differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true
forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just
court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social
stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and
institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of
squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.
Ideas
are slippery, but most people can remember a few words, and so we settle on a
handful of words that are stripped of their actual meaning and given an
unspoken new meaning: “that which is desirable.” Among these words are
“equality” and “democracy.” Nobody believes in “true equality” when it comes to
choosing a spouse or selecting a doctor for a sick child—gradations, rankings,
and hierarchies come into play in those situations. Nobody wants “democracy”
when it comes to running a family, a business, or, most of the time, even a
government. We don’t hold a plebiscite to determine whether someone is guilty
of a crime, and, in most cases, the judges who oversee those trials are not
elected. (Elected judges are right up there with elected senators and the
modern primary system as the greatest examples of excessive democracy.) Our
most cherished liberties—freedom of speech, of the press, of religion—are not
subject to approval by voters. The most important things are beyond democracy.
And the
most important things are likewise beyond considerations of “true equality.”
Aparna Nancherla was, I suppose, being wry, but the point of view she adopted
is one that is widely and earnestly—and wrongly—held.
People
Always Tell You
Los
Angeles Times: “Feinstein reigns for one last day at
San Francisco memorial.” Here in the United States, no one “reigns.” We do not have that kind
of government—we have a republic. My condolences to the family of Sen.
Feinstein and to the families who raised the editors at the Los Angeles
Times. As it says in Forrest Gump—I mean the much less cheerful
novel, not the treacly film—“being an idiot is no box of
chocolates.”
Speaking
of Squalid Oligarchs …
This essay on the so-called New Right’s
search for a “Red Caesar” is worth consulting if only for the links. An
excerpt:
Thomas Merrill is a political theorist and an associate professor at
American University in Washington DC, who has written critically on the Claremont
Institute, but from a broadly conservative perspective.
“We’re cousins,” he said of Claremont intellectuals in a telephone
conversation, “and sometimes you have to ask your cousin, what the hell are you
doing?”
He said that the authoritarian drift exhibited in work like Anton’s was
an example of “the Claremont guys shooting themselves in the foot.” For
Merrill, while he agrees that the ideas are dangerous, he thinks they have an
air of compensatory fantasy.
“They’re selling a very dark picture of the world to conservative donors
without going out and doing the hard work of democratic politics.”
“Compensatory
fantasy” is pretty much the whole thing, where this is concerned. What’s been
going on in Trump-centered and Trump-adjacent politics all these years isn’t
politics at all, but half-assed group therapy in the form of the world’s most
embarrassing role-playing game.
Now,
That’s Journalism
A real
Muppet News Flash from the Washington Post: “Where do all those Music City or Big Easy or
L.A. musicians come from? For that, our best bet is birthplace.”
Well,
yeah?
And here
is your box of chocolates, Washington Post.
In
Closing
I’ve
been thinking a little about King Charles X of France, the ultra-royalist who
came in after the post-Napoleon restoration of the French monarchy. I kind of
feel like I know the guy—or, at least, I know the type. Charles was forever
lecturing his more moderate brother and predecessor, King Louis XVIII, about
the need to be tough, to take a hard line, to never give an inch, etc. His
brother mostly ignored his advice and did well in doing so. When Charles took
the throne, he tried to follow his own advice, positioning himself as an
unyielding absolutist. Naturally, he weakened the monarchy and ended up being
driven from the kingdom, bringing to a close his branch of the royal line. (He
was succeeded by his cousin, the more liberal—at least in theory—Louis Philippe
I.)
There is
a difference between talking tough and being tough, and a big difference
between insisting that you have power—or even having that power on paper—and
actually being able to wield that power. A weak man who thinks he is a strong
man is a danger to himself and others. But what is so often misunderstood is
that it is the very things the would-be strong man holds in
contempt—compromise, self-restraint, flexibility—that makes leaders and
institutions strong, while it is the very things that the would-be strong man
holds dear—self-aggrandizement, worship of the iron fist, inflexibility—that
makes leaders and institutions weak. If you think about the U.S. presidents who
were certified tough guys—I mean men with body counts—they weren’t strutting
gladiators: They were men such as Ulysses Grant, Harry Truman, George H.W.
Bush, and, of course, George Washington, who had the strength of character to
let go of power when he could have held onto it and, in doing so, became
probably the greatest man of his time.
All of
us guys are supposed to be thinking about the Roman empire all of the time, and there is
a whole great American cottage industry of books and essays drawing parallels
between the American scene and the Roman one. Others will insist that this
moment is something like pre-revolutionary France or Russia, that the master
key is reading War and Peace or Coriolanus, or
watching Glengarry Glen Ross or The Empire Strikes
Back. Which scenario should we look to? All of them, of course.
Nothing ever changes, because people never change. And if they do change, they
do not change very much or very quickly. Charles X is long gone, but he’s still
right here.
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