There Are No Lost Causes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Syria. Bangladesh. Poland. South African democracy. The Ukrainian defense forces. The Greek economy. If there is a lesson to be learned from the events of 2024, it is this: There are no lost causes.

 

After 50 years of brutal tyranny under the Assads—first Hafez al-Assad, then Bashar—the Syrian people won for themselves a chance at a different and better kind of future, with a remarkable 11-day campaign that saw the old regime, which had seemed to be one of the fixed facts of Levantine life, melt away. Bashar al-Assad is now in exile in Russia. (Where else?) There is good reason to be cautious when it comes to the emerging Syrian leadership, given the jihadist roots of so great a share of the anti-Assad forces. But, as Josh Rogin of the Washington Post argued (with perhaps a slight excess of emotion) during his lively interview with Jamie Weinstein on The Dispatch Podcast, Syria’s future is, as of this moment, unwritten. The West can choose to be engaged in Syria with an eye toward guiding its new leaders in the right direction—and, happily, what’s best for the people of Syria aligns with Western interests and particularly with U.S. interests—or our leaders could take the J.D. Vance approach and pretend that Washington has no interests beyond the price of eggs at Jungle Jim’s. Which is to say, Washington could assume that Syria is a lost cause and thereby create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Syria—which has about the same population as Florida but less than 1 percent of the Sunshine State’s economic output—has nowhere to go but up. It is worth keeping in mind that whatever else they were—murderers, torturers, tyrants—the Assads were socialists. Socialism was the ruling ideology of Syria until quite recently; Hafez al-Assad de-emphasized pan-Arab nationalism and emphasized more orthodox Marxist-Leninist measures; Syria was very much a Soviet satellite for many years. These socialist policies produced the same results socialist policies always produce—misery and stagnation—and Bashar al-Assad made a clumsy attempt at being the Baathist answer to Deng Xiaoping, notionally liberalizing some Syrian economic arrangements and inviting foreign investment. 

 

But Syria, after decades of profoundly corrupt and incompetent rule under a socialist personality cult, did not have the basic public goods (e.g., the rule of law) that would have allowed a free market to function. Unlike the case of China, where the people accepted political serfdom in exchange for material standard-of-living improvements, in Syria the people got the serfdom but not the relative prosperity. (We should not inflate the economic success of China, which still has a per-capita GDP lower than that of Mexico.) Syria also had intractable structural political problems: Brutal dictatorships are bad enough on their own, but brutal dictatorships led by minority groups—the Assads are Alawites, who compose about 10 percent of Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni population—are typically unstable and often are in practice even more vicious and repressive as a result of their tenuous minority position.

 

As every bully, boor, and New York City subway maniac knows, one person or a small group of people can dominate and cow a much larger group of people simply by being willing to ignore rules and social conventions. Figures such as Assad use terror, torture, outrageous cruelty, and theatrical acts of repression as a substitute for the one thing they and their regimes lack: genuine strength. And it is remarkable how far cruelty can carry a political figure or a political movement that has few if any other virtues.

 

(Twice!)

 

But these regimes are almost always brittle, and autocrats typically end up all facing the same problem: While the ruling junta may have all the guns and the money, they never have the numbers. Assad’s 170,000 or so troops were never going to be enough to control 23 million Syrians if those Syrians should have decided not to submit. It is like Mohandas Gandhi supposedly said to the British authorities: There is no way for 100,000 Englishmen to control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate, even if a brute such as Reginald Dyer massacres unarmed protesters.

 

A junta can be brutal, but it can never be brutal enough to achieve its goals. That is not how the world works. Brutality is not the tool for the job when it comes to building a prosperous, powerful, stable society. People may not be naturally courageous in the main, but they’ll fight when they don’t have any other choice or if things just get bad enough. 

 

The fall of the Assad regime was an unintended consequence of two ill-considered military misadventures, neither of which originated in Damascus: One was the attack on Israel by Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and the other was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both Moscow and Tehran woefully miscalculated the desire of their respective targets to live and to continue on as nations. (So did U.S. intelligence.) Putin’s program is no less genocidal than that of the ayatollahs and the other jihadists: If Putin is allowed to have his way, there will be no such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians. And so the Israelis and the Ukrainians fight—and have fought so hard that Iran and Russia were severely diminished in their joint capacity and willingness to support Assad. In that sense, the Syrians and the Israelis and the Ukrainians are all fighting the same fight against the same enemy. 

 

The people of Bangladesh, too. Sheikh Hasina’s government grew more oppressive and autocratic by the day until the July massacre. Sheikh Hasina is now living in exile in Delhi. 

 

How fortunate, by comparison, are the people of Poland! All they had to do to begin to end the creeping Orbánification of their country under nationalist-populist misgovernance was to elect the relatively liberal Donald Tusk, who has worked to make up ground Poland had been losing on democracy and the rule of law. There is much to criticize about Tusk—and the liberators of Syria, and the defenders of Ukraine, and the student-led revolutionists of Bangladesh, etc.—but Poland has been at least partly reoriented in the right direction, which is about all you can ask of mere democracy. As a child of the Cold War, I am accustomed to seeing Poland as a symbol of hope—as a witness to hope, as my friend George Weigel called his biography of the most significant Pole since Copernicus.

 

There are people who feel very much the same way about South Africa, where Nelson Mandela’s ANC squandered its moral legacy and, finally, found itself tossed out of power after three decades ruling the country. Throwing out one bad clique is no guarantee of success—and the country’s challenges are daunting—but prosperity is not generally associated with corrupt, effectively single-party states.

 

At their respective nadirs, I would not have held out much hope for the Greek economy (which still isn’t exactly Texas but has responded to better governance) or Syria or Bangladesh. I had a bit more hope for Poland, in part because I am of the opinion (a minority among conservatives, I think) that the European Union is a good project providing real benefits for its member states, both economic and political. The brief time I spent with the Ukrainians convinced me that they will not stop fighting—something that the Russians have been slowly figuring out even as Gen. Igor Kirillov learned his lesson abruptly.

 

There are no lost causes. 

 

But:

 

Polio. Inflation. A looming trade war.

 

There are no gained causes, either. 

 

And Furthermore … 

 

That T.S. Eliot line about lost causes and gained causes—which you will hear and see quoted around here often—came in the context of an essay about F.H. Bradley (does the name mean anything to anyone anymore?) and (secondarily) Matthew Arnold. In situ:

 

It is not to say that Arnold’s work was vain if we say that it is to be done again; for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

 

If Bradley’s philosophy is today a little out of fashion, we must remark that what has superseded it, what is now in favour, is, for the most part, crude and raw and provincial (though infinitely more technical and scientific) and must perish in its turn. Arnold turned from mid-century Radicalism with the reflection ‘A new power has suddenly appeared.’ There is always a new power; but the new power destined to supersede the philosophy which has superseded Bradley will probably be something at the same time older, more patient, more supple and more wise.

 

Eliot writes about Bradley’s work “in the ’seventies and ‘eighties,” and I had to stop for a second to remind myself that he means the 1870s and 1880s.

 

Words About Words

 

A reader sends in a sample from the sports pages of the Washington Post:

 

Entering Sunday, the Celtics had a league-high four players—Tatum, Brown, Pritchard and White—who averaged at least 15 points, three assists and no more than three turnovers, per Basketball Reference. That doesn’t even include former all-stars Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. The Wizards had no players who met that criteria, but there’s potential for such a roster to develop.

 

There are a couple of interesting language things in there. One is the issue my correspondent notes: Criteria is plural, so that criteria is wrong—you want that criterion or those criteria, depending on the number of criteria at work. Words borrowed from Greek sometimes bring some tricky singular/plural issues with them from those sunny shores: criterion/criteria, parenthesis/parentheses, etc. Some escapees from Philistia insist that we should just treat those foreign words as though they were more common English words, but you can’t really do that with criteria and use criterion/criterions, because criteria is so much more common than criterion. And who wants to write about parenthesises? 

 

The other issue is: Why is the basketball team the SELL-tics while the languages and tribes are KEL-tic?

 

You can begin to answer the question by noting that no Roman had ever heard of a guy called SEE-zur. In classical Latin, C- at the beginning of a word is pronounced like the K- in English, “hard.” In classical Latin, the imperial name was pronounced more like the modern cognate kaiser than the modern English pronunciation of Caesar, with the S-sounding “soft” C-.

 

That soft C, however, is all over the place in Latin imports: century, centurion, etc. But the rise of the soft-S pronunciations didn’t happen in English—it happened in later Latin, so that by the time the French were borrowing the Latin word to create Celte, they were pronouncing it (as Merriam-Webster reports) like the C- in Cézanne. So the people in Boston (and in Glasgow) are using an older English pronunciation with SELL-tics, not a later corruption. The hard-C pronunciation of KEL-tic was dreamt up by 18^th-century pedants (my people!) who thought the word’s pronunciation should more closely resemble its classical Latin ancestor rather than its medieval Latin and French ancestors. Back to the OG version, as it were. 

 

We could solve this pretty easily by just using Latin like educated Europeans used to do—or we could make like those educated Romans those educated Europeans thought so highly of and use Greek. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

At this point in the fiscal-crisis news cycle, you’ll hear me, and people like me, bitching about something called “regular order.” 

 

What? 

 

You wouldn’t know it to watch Congress in action, but our federal government has a pretty orderly process for spending money—on paper. It’s kind of a two-tier thing: There’s authorization, which establishes (or continues or modifies) agencies or programs; once spending is authorized, the spending authority continues as long as the authorization is in force, whether that is for a year or a period of several years or open-ended. But just because an agency is authorized to spend money doesn’t mean that it has money to spend. Congress has to appropriate that money. And Congress doesn’t have to appropriate the full amount authorized. 

 

Appropriations, which is the nitty-gritty business of putting money into agency coffers where it may be spent, theoretically happens in 12 parts, with 12 subcommittees writing appropriations bills and these then going to the House and Senate appropriations committees. The subcommittees are for the most part relatively capacious slop buckets: Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; etc. Some are more focused, such as Defense—not to be confused with Homeland Security or Military Construction, Veterans’ Affairs, and Related Agencies. 

 

When things are working the way they are supposed to, the appropriations subcommittees spend a lot of time listening to testimony and holding hearings about this or that program and its financial needs, with members of each party negotiating with their own fellow partisans and with those of the other party, doing all the usual horse-trading and favor-swapping and such that constitutes ordinary politics. It is a long, complicated, exasperating, labor-intensive process that, for the average congressional specimen, is not nearly as much fun as getting a hit on Fox News or MSNBC. And so we end up with what Jonah Goldberg calls our “Parliament of Pundits,” where relatively little work is done in the way of the ordinary business of politics (much less the ordinary business of governing!) and, while our lawmakers and bureaucrats angle for television time and hone their own-the-opposition social-media strategies, the actual fiscal process lapses into chaos. Holding off that chaos is what such stop-gap measures as “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus appropriations” and such are all about.

 

It matters how much money Washington spends. It also matters—a great deal!—what it spends that money on. And here I do not mean big broad vague categorical buckets such as “defense” or “education” or whatever, but actual programs. There is some education spending that is excellent and worthwhile and worth expanding, and some education spending that ought to be eliminated entirely, the programs ended, the records burned, the bureaucratic fields sown with salt by libertarian centurions under the command of Nick Gillespie (if only because I think he is likely to own a toga in addition to his 41 black leather jackets). (Rough estimate.) Talking about “how much we spend on education” doesn’t get to the important details.

 

You know what probably could get into those details? Congressional subcommittees doing their g—mned jobs.

 

“Getting spending under control” is only in part about debt and deficits—as important as those factors are. It also is about making sure that the money we do spend, we spend on things that are useful and productive. And that is why it is important to understand that continuing resolutions and budget ad-hocracy isn’t just about avoiding the hard work of intelligent appropriations and oversight—it is about avoiding accountability. If you lump everything together into one big mess and then pass it at the last minute under the shadow of a budget crisis, then you can pretend that you have an excuse for not watching where the money is actually going. And then you can go back to your career as a half-assed cable-news pundit who also happens to serve in Congress.

 

In Conclusion 

 

My triplets have my wife’s eyes and her taste in music, so they’ve been bouncing along to “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes for the past week or so. I don’t know quite how that happened or where that song entered the rotation—Mrs. W. loves Christmas music, so that’s always on this time of year, and my 2-year-old asks her to play “Jingle Bell Rock” about 40 times a day. But when he’s hanging out with Papa in the evenings, he asks for—of all things—“John the Revelator,” which he likes me to sing for him while he’s having his bath. 

 

I am not Son House, but I do take requests at bathtime, and the little man is pleased enough with my renditions. The thing is: I have no idea how he first heard that song. I suppose I must have sung it for him at some point or played a recording. (My usual lullaby for the triplets is “Bankrobber” by the Clash.) 

 

One of the sobering things about having little kids is that, from time to time, you are reminded that you are constantly setting an example and putting things into their heads irrespective of whether you meant to. My 2-year-old son cries for reasons I don’t understand and sometimes stamps his feet like a cartoon toddler when he isn’t getting something he wants, but he also walks guests to the door and tells them “goodnight,” and says “please” and “thank you” and makes observations that I wouldn’t think a 2-year-old would make, and he says that combing his hair makes him “debonair,” which is important to him, and sometimes kisses one of his little brothers on the head if he’s crying, to make him feel better. 

 

A lot of what’s in these babies’ heads I put there, and a lot of what I put there I put there without really doing it on purpose—it’s just how life goes from day to day. And that is equal parts sweet and terrifying.

Is Trump Getting Serious about Ukraine?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Donald Trump seems to have settled on a coherent and consistent message in relation to America’s commitments to Ukraine’s defense amid Russia’s war of territorial conquest — in private, at least.

 

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Trump “plans to continue supplying military aid to Ukraine,” a commitment that is not conditioned on changes in the posture assumed by our European allies. He will, however, also call for NATO member states to increase their defense budgets to 5 percent of GDP.

 

That makes sense. If Russia’s war in Europe represents an existential threat to the post-Cold War geopolitical order, Western Europe’s great powers should mirror the defense commitments to which NATO’s frontline states are already committing themselves. Trump cannot advocate for larger defense budgets to meet growing challenges abroad while also dismissing the threat posed by Russia’s aggressive expansionism — which he has on numerous occasions, including just two weeks ago during a sit-down interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker.

 

Trump’s inconsistency raises questions about how much the president-elect has bought into the policy his allies are retailing to America’s European partners. One might even presume that setting defense spending targets at 5 percent — well beyond even America’s budgetary commitments — represents a trigger that Trump can cite whenever he wants to flirt with abandoning Ukraine or even pulling out of NATO (a prospect he also entertained in his interview with Welker). But the FT’s reporting suggests Trump is not being deliberately unrealistic.

 

“One person said they understood that Trump would settle for 3.5 percent,” the report added, “and that he was planning to explicitly link higher defense spending and the offer of more favorable trading terms with the U.S.” One unnamed European official observed that Trump’s ask is essentially what’s already on the table ahead of NATO’s June summit.

 

It’s reasonable to wonder about Trump’s level of commitment to this trial balloon. He has surrounded himself with skeptics of Ukraine’s cause, and his own rhetoric toward the leadership in Kyiv grew more hostile over the course of the campaign. But the view is always different from behind the Resolute Desk, and Trump’s first term saw the United States adopt a confrontational approach toward Moscow that never squared with the president’s rhetoric. A similar dynamic may now be emerging with respect to Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which the president sounds accommodationist but presides over policies that turn the screws on Russia.

 

That’s confusing in undesirable ways. A president should mean what he says, and “peace through strength” only succeeds when America’s adversaries believe the U.S. deterrent is credible. But the FT report is a welcome step toward a consistent American foreign policy that takes its cues not from the excitable discourse on social media but a rational assessment of America’s core strategic interests on the European continent. It’s a Christmas miracle!

The EU: Regulating Its Rescuers Away (and Other Follies)

By Andrew Stuttaford

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

When the flow of “cheap” Russian gas to the EU dried up after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, liquified natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. and Qatar played an important part in making up the shortfall.

 

Now, the EU is turning on Qatar (and not just Qatar).

 

The Financial Times:

 

Qatar has threatened to stop vital gas shipments to the EU if member states strictly enforce new legislation that will penalise companies which fail to meet set criteria on carbon emissions, human and labour rights.

 

Qatari energy minister Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times that if any EU state imposed non-compliance penalties on a scale referenced in the corporate due diligence directive Doha would stop exporting its liquefied natural gas to the bloc.

 

The law requires EU countries to introduce powers to impose fines for non-compliance with an upper limit of at least 5 per cent of the company’s annual global revenue.

 

Note how the fines are calculated by reference not to the percentage of a company’s sales in the EU, but to its sales worldwide. This is in keeping with the EU’s image of itself as a “regulatory superpower,” a global regulator and so on. It’s also in keeping with the way that the bloc is now operating as a kind of genteel pirate cartel, robbing successful companies (particularly, up to now, if they are American and high tech) caught within Brussels’ legal web. And finally, this law (which is due to come into effect in 2027) is a protectionist device, designed to force up costs for certain non-EU companies that have the effrontery to do too much business in the bloc. To repeat a point I have made before with reference to the EU’s looting of American tech companies, the U.S. should retaliate with sanctions if any American enterprises are hit by this law. Beyond that, it should consider whether this legislation amounts to a non-tariff barrier requiring a commensurate response.

 

The FT:

 

The EU adopted the corporate due diligence rules in May this year. They are part of a broader set of reporting requirements aimed at aligning companies with the EU’s ambitious goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

 

These rules apply to any non-EU company with sales of €450 million or more in the bloc and — EU rulemaking being what it is — are extremely onerous. Al-Kaabi complained that they would include carrying out due diligence on the labor practices of all the group’s suppliers, “with a global supply chain that involves “100,000” companies.”

 

Al-Kaabi also said that it would be:

 

impossible for an energy producer like QatarEnergy to align with the EU’s net zero target as the directive stipulates because of the amount of hydrocarbons it produces.

 

The EU directive includes an obligation for large companies to adopt a transition plan for climate change mitigation aligned with the 2050 climate neutrality objective of the Paris Agreement, as well as intermediate targets under the European Climate Law.

 

Kaabi said the legislation would impact all Qatari exports to Europe, including fertilisers and petrochemicals, and could also affect the investment decisions of the Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund.

 

Putin must be laughing.

 

The EU Commission now appears to be getting ready to backtrack, although how far this will (or can) go remains unclear. For their part, U.S. companies should watch this law carefully and prepare themselves to limit the business they do in the EU to less than €450 million. 

The True Scandal of Biden’s Death Row Pardons Is That We Don’t Even Know Who Made the Decision

By Philip Klein

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Andy has a great post going through the corruption surrounding President Biden’s pardon of 37 of 40 death row inmates. Reading through it, I couldn’t help but think about one of the big stories from last week, which was the Wall Street Journal report that Biden’s mental acuity problems, which became undeniable after the June debate, were there from the beginning of his presidency. The article detailed how, as many of us suspected, Biden’s schedule was carefully managed by staff and advisers who limited his interaction with legislators and cabinet officials to avoid revealing the extent of his decline.

 

Under our constitutional system, the president is elected by the American people to oversee the executive branch. The fact that various staffers kept his condition hidden was in effect an end around the Constitution in that it gave a collection of people who were never elected to anything control over the office. Essentially, by hiding his condition from the public, they weren’t protecting the Democratic Party, they were protecting their own ability to influence decisions on issues of substantial importance.

 

That brings us to the president’s pardon power, which is among the most controversial because it allows the president to overrule decisions made in the judicial process. As Andy notes, in making this decision, Biden “has eviscerated the hard work put in by dozens of juries and judges who struggled with the complex law of capital punishment in often grisly murder cases.”

 

While the pardons are bad enough in themselves, it is even a bigger scandal that we don’t know anything about the process that resulted in this grave decision, or to what extent Biden was even cognizant about what he was doing. It’s completely plausible (if not likely) that these pardons were orchestrated by whatever group of progressive activists are running things at the White House right now.

The Joe Biden Cover-Up Was Obviously the ‘Lie of the Year’

By Becket Adams

Sunday, December 22, 2024

 

The only thing worse than a villain is an unrepentant one.

 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for instance, is one such case — not just because of the railroading it gave Richard Jewell when it falsely reported he was the perpetrator behind the 1996 Olympics bombing but also because it refuses to apologize for the role it played in ruining his life.

 

Similarly, what’s worse than PolitiFact’s being a willing participant in the conspiracy to hide President Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline is its sleazy attempt last week to absolve itself of any wrongdoing.

 

I’m referring to PolitiFact’s publication of a 3,500-plus-word article last week, in which it awarded its “lie of the year” to Donald Trump and JD Vance’s claim that migrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats.

 

What a remarkable assertion by the alleged fact-checker, especially considering that 2024 was also the year of “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack.”

 

You won’t catch me defending Trump and Vance on the pets claim. That’s not the aim of this article. Instead, the aim is to approach this matter seriously and objectively. Let’s consider consequences and scope, and let’s assess qualitatively.

 

If we examine the significant, consequential lies of the year, the claim that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” stands out as the most egregious and serious. It ranks among the worst lies of the decade and is arguably one of the worst falsehoods perpetrated by any White House. The assertion that “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack” represented a widespread conspiracy of deception across the media and government. This lie relied on dozens, if not hundreds, of willing participants inside and outside the White House. An army of White House staffers, activists, Biden loyalists, politicos, and legislators participated, along with several journalists, pundits, and commentators, many of whom have exclusive access to the president.

 

Casual observers recognized Biden’s frailty from the start. Yet indignant news organizations insisted these observers were either liars or gullible, the dupes of “cheap fakes.”

 

My colleague Jim Geraghty remembers the headlines and news blurbs:

 

·        NBC News, October 26, 2023: “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot.”

·        The Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2024: “Anyone hoping California Gov. Gavin Newsom or some other Democrat will take Joe Biden’s place on the 2024 presidential ballot is likely to be disappointed. Despite renewed anxiety over the president’s age — 81 — party officials and pollsters say swapping him out is a bad idea, and nearly impossible without his sign-off.”

·        NPR, April 7, 2024:”Yes, Biden is really running in November. But a lot of voters say they doubt it.”

·        The New York Times, July 12, 2024: “For years, far-right commentators have floated a conspiracy theory that Democratic Party elites were secretly plotting to replace President Biden on the ticket — a switcheroo that could give the party an advantage in November.”

 

PolitiFact was no exception; it played a significant role in dismissing video and photographic evidence of Biden’s decline by repeating the White House line that such proof was merely a “cheap fake.”

 

“‘Cheap fakes’: Viral videos keep clipping Biden’s words out of context,” read a PolitiFact headline published on Feb. 14, 2022.

 

A separate PolitiFact “fact-check” published in June 2024 declared, “Donald Trump’s supporters have pushed deceptively edited videos of President Joe Biden to cast doubt on his mental and physical fitness. Now, the two campaigns are putting their own political spin on the definition of ‘cheap fake’ videos.”

 

The article reports, “These videos, called cheap fakes, have become a common tactic to undermine Biden’s fitness for office as the 81-year-old seeks reelection. Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is 78.”

 

As an example of a “cheap fake,” the article specifically mentions a video from a 2024 fundraising event in Los Angeles featuring George Clooney, where Biden needed assistance exiting the stage. The footage depicts Biden freezing up, which prompted former president Barack Obama to guide the current commander-in-chief away from the stage, leading him by the hand as one might do with a child. But don’t worry, PolitiFact reassured readers at the time, the video is merely a “cheap fake.”

 

Clooney later wrote an opinion article revealing that the L.A. fundraising event — the “cheap fake” event — was when he realized Biden was no longer mentally or physically capable of serving in office.

 

The White House and the national press tried to conceal Biden’s decline. They failed only because Biden himself exposed the extent of his infirmities during a disastrous June presidential debate. It’s no thanks to our “Fourth Estate,” including PolitiFact, that the public knows what it knows now about the Biden Potemkin presidency, in which lackeys and stooges propped up a decrepit, frail old man to make it seem as if he were still “sharp,” in charge, and as energetic as ever.

 

And though the lie fell apart, that doesn’t mean it was trivial. On the contrary.

 

The lie led to Biden’s eventual ouster, which came too late and resulted in a Democratic defeat in November, putting Trump back in power. Trump’s reelection will reshape two major global conflicts and dismantle what remains of the Clinton, Obama, and Bush political machines. Trump’s reelection will accelerate the major political realignments in America and abroad. The Biden lie has domestic and international repercussions. It’s a lie that has left the United States effectively leaderless. The leading global nuclear superpower is experiencing something akin to a power vacuum, and world leaders are acutely aware of it. Just ask Israel, which is currently reenacting the Godfather baptism scene throughout the Middle East.

 

These are just the immediate, short-term consequences of the Biden lie. The dogs-and-cats issue? That generated a two-week news cycle (at best) affecting a limited group of people in an Ohio town you’d probably never heard of. Don’t kid yourself.

 

Considering everything else that’s wrong with this industry — such as its willing participation in what is easily the most significant presidential scandal of my lifetime — it’s an insult on top of injury that we also need fact-checkers for our fact-checkers.

Commercial Possibilities

By Luis Parrales

Saturday, December 21, 2024

 

There’s an adage about who wields influence in American life that rings true to committed members of both the left and the right: The left controls the culture, the right controls political power.

 

It makes sense. Republicans have commanded more state government trifectas since the early 2010s, reaped the benefits of our intentionally counter-majoritarian institutions—the Senate and the Electoral College—and, of course, won two of the last three presidential elections. Progressives, meanwhile, have been generally overrepresented in our opinion-and-elite-making institutions, from corporations, nonprofits, and big tech, to the academy, journalism, and Hollywood.

 

We can quibble about the exceptions, but the broad sweep of American life has generally skewed rightward in elections and leftward in the culture—which is why it’s notable that our latest season of cultural artifacts seems to be shifting noticeably to the right.

 

Elite campuses are adopting statements of institutional neutrality and abandoning identitarian requirements. Canceled figures like Woody Allen and J.K. Rowling have gotten a second hearing from contrite detractors and corporate patrons. Disney cut out a subplot about a transgender character from a Pixar original series. And, as I recently discussed on The Skiff with Emma Camp and Christine Emba, the three biggest pop stars of the summer released music that bemoaned the emptiness of casual hook-up culture and even toyed with—or outright extolled—the allure of pregnancy. Not exactly intersectional vanguardism.

 

There’s a subtle and, to my mind, fun aspect of these cultural shifts that has been largely underdiscussed—namely, the changing vibes of major commercials.

 

Consider Bud Light. After incessant backlash for picking Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman, as a corporate spokesperson in early 2023, the beer company subbed in comedian Shane Gillis for its recent batch of ads. The latest one is a hilarious spoof of the bohemian auteur commercials typically trying to sell you some fragrance, but what’s more notable is that arguably the most popular beer in America chose a guy who was canceled from SNL and who fellow comic Louis C.K. once described as a “red state product.” 

 

There was also Apple. Early this year, the tech giant launched an ad for the iPad Pro that would have made Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton wince. It showed a room full of instruments, paintings, statuettes, records, and more being flattened and giving way to an impersonalized iPad screen. Flash forward a few months to the company’s ad for its newest AirPods Pro, and it’s a whole other story. Techno-utopianism is out and the little platoons are in, with a tearjerker of a spot that showcases the commonplace joys of family life as a father replays memories of his daughter growing up. After three weeks, the commercial has more than 40 million views on YouTube.

 

And then there’s Volvo. It’s not uncommon to find blatant dismissals of childbearing in the culture. A decade ago, an issue of TIME magazine explored the benefits of the “child-free life.” Public figures, from the renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum to pop star Miley Cyrus, have openly discouraged having kids given concerns over climate change and “overpopulation.” And yet, the Swedish car manufacturer nevertheless hired Academy Award-winning cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to direct what Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips called “the most moving, pro-family, pro-life car ad of all time.” That might be a bit hyperbolic, but there’s something to it. If you haven’t watched the spot yet, it’s such a genuinely moving exploration of the uncertainties of childbearing and life that you almost forget its main purpose was to sell a luxury car.

 

All of this is a notable cultural change from the consensus of just a short time ago. In 2019, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was touring campuses declaring that the left is “taking over the culture.” Four years later, MSNBC anchor Joy Reid agreed, saying in 2023, “The culture wars are over and the left won.” Unsurprisingly, some on the right have responded enthusiastically to recent shifts, including about each of these three commercials. Some lauded the Bud Light and Volvo ads as long-coming departures from woke culture. As for the Apple ad, none other than right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson remarked, “I’m stunned. Apple just released the single greatest pro-parenting ad in the history of American advertising. The pro-family cultural revolution is here.” (Emphasis added.)

 

From a conservative standpoint, it’s tempting to agree, to simply rah-rah the changing cultural tide. But this type of triumphalism about the present state of the culture fails on two counts. 

 

First, though turning from leftward excess in the culture is welcome, it’s important not to forget it came at a cost. Yes, many corporations and academic pillars have changed course due to public outcry, principled opposition, and, of course, concerns about reputational and financial blowback. Yet certain institutional shifts were also the result of coordinated pressure campaigns from people like Robby Starbuck and Chris Rufo—activists committed to remaking culture through an alternative kulturkampf.

 

Moreover, as the writer Tyler Austin Harper argued in The Atlantic, there’s a good case to be made that for all the talk about left-wing wokeness, we’ve ignored a corollary right-wing snowflakiness in the process. (Notice Elon Musk complaining about “heterophobia” or a Claremont Institute fellow writing a book titled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart and you’ll see what Harper is referring to.)

 

We on the right may welcome the changes in the academy, corporate practices, and even commercials. But we shouldn’t ignore that some of those changes were at times the result of a corrosive process, one that doubled down on a tendency to see political opponents as all-but-enemy combatants. And questionable means can sully even defensible ends.

 

There’s a second reason I’m skeptical of the triumphalism. Conservatives are often fond of repeating Ronald Reagan’s famous observation that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction,” a remarkable piece of rhetoric that reminds us of the fragility of liberal democratic capitalism. That’s largely a good thing, a helpful reminder to be grateful for the institutions we inherited.

 

But rather than gratitude, the sense that, well, everything that’s good and true about America is slipping through our fingers like sand seems to have fueled fears of leftward cultural dominance. That seems to be the attitude of the Starbucks and Rufos of the world. Misapplied, “one generation away” can elevate the stakes of politics and put us on edge that things are really falling apart.

 

So perhaps a better lesson from these moments on the flip side, moments when the cultural winds seem to be blowing in conservatives’ favor, isn’t to read them as a harbinger for the eschaton but as another example of the ebb and flow of American life in our time. As Yuval Levin wrote in his 2016 masterpiece, The Fractured Republic:

 

Life in America is always getting better and worse at the same time. Progress comes at a cost, even if it is often worth that cost. Misery beckons relief, so that our virtues often turn up where our vices have been. Decay and decadence almost always trail behind success, while renewal chases ruin. In a vast society like ours, all of this is always happening at once.

 

Perhaps ours isn’t so much a time for choosing as it is a time to recognize the inescapability of two-way change across our culture—commercials included.

Never Go Full German

By James B. Meigs

Sunday, December 22, 2024

 

‘Dunkelflaute” is one of those lovely German compound words. It means “dark doldrums,” a stretch of cloudy weather with no wind. It doesn’t sound so bad. You might even think, Well, it’s cold and cloudy, but at least there’s no wind! But if you think that way, it’s because you are not in charge of Germany’s increasingly dysfunctional power grid.

 

You see, Germany has spent more than 20 years trying to reinvent how a modern industrial country makes electricity. Partly to burnish their green credentials, and partly due to pressure from the country’s leftist Green Party, German officials have invested about 600 billion euros trying to phase out coal and nuclear power and replace it mostly with wind turbines and solar panels.

 

They tell us it works pretty well—until it doesn’t. On good days, the country gets most of its power from renewable energy. Consumers might pay some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, but at least they know they are pioneering the “energy transition.” But then there’s the Dunkelflaute. A few days of dark doldrums this past November sent electricity prices soaring to their highest level since the start of the Ukraine war. Grid operators rushed to spin up gas- and coal-fired electric plants and even resorted to burning oil (an absurdly expensive fallback). “We were on our last legs,” one energy analyst told reporters.

 

It could have been worse. History shows that every five years or so, northern Europe gets a cloudy, still period that lasts a week or longer. And these tend to fall in cold months, when people also burn more gas to heat their houses. Today, after Germany has shut down all its nuclear and many of its coal and gas plants, such an extended Dunkelflaute could lead to blackouts. There’s just not enough backup power.

 

In short, Germany has put its entire electric grid at risk in pursuit of becoming the world’s climate champion. (Ironically, while the country’s greenhouse emissions have declined, they haven’t fallen as fast as those in the U.S., which has been less aggressive in rolling out renewable energy and which is trying to revive, rather than banish, nuclear power.) Germany is an industrial nation, with thousands of factories turning out everything from sportswear (Adidas) to pharmaceuticals (Bayer) to luxury cars (Mercedes-Benz). And, while this might be news to Germany’s green policymakers, factories run on electricity. Chronically high energy prices are bad for business. The risk of blackouts is worse. The country’s manufacturing sector is struggling.

 

German industrial output is down almost 20 percent since 2017. VW, the country’s largest employer, recently cut worker pay by 10 percent and is planning to close at least three factories. The steel giant Thyssenkrupp plans to cut about 40 percent of its workforce by the end of the decade. And the overall German economy has been shrinking for the past two years.

 

Dark doldrums indeed.

 

We think of Germans as sober, disciplined people. How did they get themselves into this mess? Well, they listened to Green Party radicals, for one thing. Europe’s Green Party movement got its start in the 1970s when activists hit the streets protesting both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. (They didn’t see much of a difference.) Unlike traditional socialists, who profess to care about the kind of people who work in factories, the greens had a fuzzier, crunchier philosophy. They liked organic food and were suspicious of big business, modern medicine, and high technology.

 

This kind of worldview is still popular today. In the U.S., it often goes under the name “climate justice,” a movement that tries to meld concern about global warming with the full panoply of far-left, intersectional causes. The Berkeley, California–based Climate Justice Alliance, for example, proclaims on its website that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” Last year, I wrote a report for the Manhattan Institute about the Biden administration’s sweeping environmental- and climate-justice policies. I discovered that, while Biden ran for the presidency as an old-school moderate, once in office he embraced all sorts of kookiness. To advise his team on environmental justice (EJ) policy, for example, the White House put together a committee that included the Climate Justice Alliance and other radical activists.

 

Like the European greens, these groups offer a warm, misty vision of the kind of post-capitalist world they seek. The Climate Justice Alliance says it supports a “Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies.” They describe a world in which poor neighborhoods become neo-pastoral collectives where food is grown in community gardens, electricity is produced and distributed locally, and wealth is shared. Biden’s EJ advisers also have some strong ideas about what kind of world they don’t want, advising the White House to “sunset investment by 2030 in fossil fuels, plastics, dangerous chemicals and nuclear energy.”

 

I learned that these activists aren’t very concerned about whether their policies actually bring down emissions. For them, the “just transition” doesn’t just mean substituting, say, low-carbon energy for coal. It means a transition from what they see as a harsh, exploitative capitalist system to a gentle, collaborative one. Renewable energy—and solar power in particular—is a big part of this movement. Climate-justice activists see concentrated sources of energy as part of the old oppressive system. They advocate instead for “decentralized energy,” with solar panels sprouting on every rooftop in poor communities and local groups deciding how that power should be distributed. (Never mind that urban rooftop solar is far more expensive per kilowatt-hour produced than big rural solar farms. Efficiency isn’t the real goal for these crusaders; they care about “community empowerment.”)

 

The Biden administration listened to these climate-justice advisers and made sure the Inflation Reduction Act included $7 billion in a Solar for All program. That program funds grassroots groups that say they want to “help community members install and use solar power,” as one Austin, Texas, nonprofit puts it. That’s just one of many Biden programs showering billions on leftist green groups.

 

Germany’s Green Party was way ahead of American activists when it came to hijacking climate concerns as a tool for radical change. They also have their own version of the “just transition,” the Energiewende, literally “energy transition,” which calls for phasing out every form of energy the left doesn’t like. And, like the left-wing activists Biden invited into the White House, Germany’s greens managed to convince the country’s supposedly serious political elite to implement their anti-industrialist scheme.

 

Over more than two decades, Angela Merkel and other putatively centrist politicians didn’t only embrace Energiewende, they bragged about it at every Davos meeting. Germany was going to show the world what climate leadership looked like. Even when prices rose and energy shortages loomed, Merkel’s government doubled down, backing expensive offshore wind farms and closing the last of Germany’s clean, safe nuclear plants.

 

Now it’s all falling apart. The European business press talks about the “Energiewende disaster.”

 

Even the government is falling apart. The coalition led by Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, has collapsed, largely due to concerns about the failing economy. I’m not so sure the old greens who got the Energiewende ball rolling think it’s a disaster, though. They never much liked factories, or high technology, or the capitalist system itself. They always thought the modern world was too consumerist, too technology-hungry, too modern. If people have to go back to heating their homes with firewood, that suits the greens just fine.

 

There’s a lesson here for American leaders: Never let people who hate you and your economic system lecture you about policy. And never go full Europe.

The ‘Machinery of Death’ and Its Apologists

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

 

Bashar al-Assad’s fall is leading to the excavations of his regime’s prisons and bunkers. We are only beginning to learn of the extent of his crimes. But Syrians have, unfortunately, known the details for some time—because they were his victims.

 

And they are venting their anger at Assad’s enablers.

 

“Now you show up, after all of this, get the hell out of here… we don’t want you,” a woman in Damascus shouts at a UN vehicle while brandishing her shoe, as seen in a video posted by Joyce Karam. The UN workers were visiting the notorious—and about to become even more notorious—Sednaya prison.

 

“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” U.S. war crimes envoy Stephen Rapp told Reuters. Rapp, who was visiting mass graves, has prosecuted war crimes cases, including some involving Rwanda. “From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing. We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.”

 

Now that Syrians can speak out without fear of being added to the mass graves, information is flooding into the UN, envoys like Rapp, human-rights groups. So far, 150,000 people are considered missing. Reuters points out that by comparison, the Balkan wars of the 1990s saw about 40,000 go missing.

 

The sheer scale of the horror in Syria is going to be almost incomprehensible. And the names of many of the missing will never be known.

 

Organized mass atrocities require enormous bureaucratic systems. “The graves were prepared in an organized manner — the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave,” one farmer told Reuters. He lived near a former Syrian military base and would often see refrigerated trucks full of bodies driving to a nearby cemetery with a full military escort.

 

Digging and then expanding such graves can be decade-long projects, as satellite images showed. And that means the UN is only part of the problem, because the world cannot plausibly feign ignorance. The anti-Western propaganda on campuses and in textbooks and flooding through the discourse of the activist class is being disseminated precisely for the benefit of the regimes digging those mass graves.

 

It may get tiresome to keep hearing questions like “Where were the tentifada protests and the flotillas to Syria?” But the answer is important. The students and activists marching for Gaza are not overlooking the Syrian victims; they are actively on the side of those committing the atrocities. Waving a Hezbollah flag is an act of anti-Israel incitement, yes. But it is not only that. It is also a show of support for the “machinery of death” putting Syrian civilians in the ground.

 

At moments like this we see the activists and protesters who have enabled these crimes for who they are. They aren’t just now finding out what goes on in Sednaya prison and others like it. They did not back a regime that turned out to be evil. They chose to back an evil regime, eyes wide open. The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly a decade and a half. Eleven years ago, the Obama administration announced to the world that, yes, Assad had used poison gas on families trying to hide in their basement:

 

“The situation profoundly changed… on August 21, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: Men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas. Others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath. A father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits — a crime against humanity, and a violation of the laws of war.”

 

The Iranian empire responsible for the barbaric crimes in Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon may be receding, but now is not the time to look away. Now is the time to sear into our memories just how low Tehran’s apologists are capable of sinking.

After the Biden Revelations, of What Value Is the Mainstream Political Media?

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, December 21, 2024

 

When did you first figure out that something was wrong with Joe Biden — seriously wrong, not just in the “bit older, bit slower” way, but in that genuine “oh man, this guy ain’t gonna make it” way? I know many of our readers will be eager to claim the earliest date possible, because we’ve all heartily loathed the man as president for four years, and I doubt any of us liked his vice presidency either. (A tip of the cap to any keen-memoried old-timer who nominates 1987 as the year when Joe Biden actually first truly “lost it.”)

 

For my part, it came as an instantaneous, shuddering revelation when I saw him address the nation on August 16, 2021, as he inattentively slurred through his eagerly awaited Afghanistan withdrawal speech. I’ve already told this story once — in one of the most alarmingly Cassandra-like pieces I will ever write, one I specifically recall being laughed off by many of my more left-leaning acquaintances as “right-wing fever-swamp nonsense.” Permit me an excerpt:

 

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

 

Keep in mind, I wrote the above piece on June 18, 2024 — a week before the presidential debate that ended Biden’s career and a full month before it technically became official. (I’m no psychic; the professional term of art for what I did there is called “great timing.”) But the point is that I knew he was falling apart long ago. You readers probably knew he was falling apart long ago. Jim Geraghty has been pounding the drum about this literally since that fateful day in August of 2021.

 

Joe Biden’s mental decline was no secret to conservatives for the simple reason that each of us had eyes and the ability to use them. You could condescend to us and insult our intelligence all you wanted, jabber about “cheap fakes” and call us crazy — it didn’t matter. We knew what it was that we saw with Biden, and weren’t going to be gaslighted. We were right because of course we were. It was blazingly obvious.

 

So what the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? Where were our sentinels of the republic, our tribunes of truth? How could the Fourth Estate, with its eyes forever upon the world of Washington politics, have missed Biden’s advancing mental and physical decrepitude? Why did so many journalists claim they weren’t even suspicious after it all came crashing down in late June?

 

I have an appealingly simple theory to explain the mystery: They didn’t miss it at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.

 

Do you know how I know this? I know this because back in 2019, when Joe Biden seemed for all the world like a hopelessly boring retread with no chance of winning the 2020 nomination — when Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders were thought to be the main competitors for the Democratic prize — the New York Times was more than happy to report about Biden’s age. Once he captured the nomination and went into a quasi-hibernative “basement campaign” (timed perfectly to conceal his weakening state), however, that was it for any investigations into that topic.

 

I know this because in the fall of 2022, during that brief window when it looked like Biden might decide to pass the torch instead of running again, the window to discuss Biden’s age was once again open for the Washington Post: “Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection.” Once Biden chose to run for a second term — a moment of world-historical hubris — the subject went back into storage, verboten in polite commentary of real reporting.

 

I know this because the pressure to not venture the topic was immense, and I saw it come from within the media, not just from the Biden administration. In February of this year Ezra Klein published a piece in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop his reelection bid. Klein pointed not just to his unpopularity but to his obvious decay as well. It was a daring thing for a mainstream liberal columnist to write, and Klein predictably paid the price for his daring, being pilloried up and down the halls of media commentary by the Left so relentlessly that he was forced to write a traumatized apology after Biden’s hectoring State of the Union address a month later, saying, “I’m sorry; he should stay in the race.” Now, of course, he says he never really changed his opinion. He should have stuck to his guns so we wouldn’t have to wonder.

 

The media want to tell us that they didn’t know? If they didn’t know, then why were they so eager to raise the subject when it seemed possible to prevent Joe Biden from winning the nomination, or discourage him from running again, but curiously not afterward? Why then such servile eagerness to act as Karine Jean-Pierre’s water boys near the end of the entire debacle, when the Biden administration was desperately selling the “cheap fakes” PR push in between trying to hand-wave away Hollywood fundraiser gaffes? (The term “cheap fakes” was coined by the media, not by Jean-Pierre.) In fact, what better proof do we need of the media’s purely instrumental interest in Biden’s mental disintegration than the fact that once it became impossible to conceal after the debate, they flooded the zone with coverage to push Biden out of the race, but once he was gone promptly never discussed him again? (This led me to point out in frustration several times during the campaign that a mental invalid was still president of the United States.)

 

Let us take the media professionals at their word, that they really had no idea things were this bad with Joe Biden until the sudden meltdown of the debate. Let us take them at their word that the revelations of the Wall Street Journal‘s piece about his concealed collapse took them by complete surprise. If that is the case, I end with a sincere question: Of what value are these people? If the media professionals really didn’t know — when I could tell, when you could tell, when it was a key concern among voters — if every media organ was so flat-footed, incurious, or flummoxed by White House smoke and mirrors that none of them ever thought to seriously investigate whether the president of the United States might secretly be in the midst of massive mental collapse, then why should we respect them? What would we say it is they do here? What are they bringing to the table when they are missing the biggest story of the last four years, one hiding in plain sight?

 

If the media chose not to explore Biden’s mental decline because of partisan allegiance to the Democrats or dislike of Trump, then they have forfeited their credibility in a devastatingly permanent way. In that case, they would have willingly participated in what I consider to be the single worst scandal in presidential history: a mentally incapacitated president concealed from the public and controlled by his advisers. If they have not done this — if they truly were taken by surprise — then we are in little better a position: We are cursed with the most useless media class in the world, a mass of despairingly hopeless incompetents who failed in the most important duty they were ever asked to perform in their jobs.

 

I’m not sure which verdict they would prefer.

The Fiscal Hawks Never Win

By Rich Lowry

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

It feels like 2013 again.

 

Back then, a beleaguered Republican speaker of the House was forced into a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who considered him insufficiently pure.

 

A revolution in GOP politics has happened since, and yet a beleaguered Republican speaker of the House has been forced to the verge of a government shutdown by firebrands in his caucus who consider him insufficiently pure.

 

The difference is that Mike Johnson — unlike his predecessor, John Boehner — isn’t just dealing with an internal revolt; he also had the most powerful Republican politician on the planet and his extremely influential sidekick blast his handiwork, namely, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, respectively.

 

Johnson did make a misstep with the so-called continuing resolution to keep the government funded past a looming deadline. In negotiations, he let it balloon into a true monstrosity. What was supposed to be a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown became a vehicle to pass new legislation in a last-minute, 1,500-page bill that no one was going to read.

 

The yet-to-be-resolved episode shows that Republican hostility to spending still exists a decade after Tea Party Republicans roiled the establishment — and made Boehner’s life miserable — demanding massive deficit reduction.

 

Now, though, this reflex has taken a new form. It is expressed in fierce opposition to “the swamp” — in this case, business-as-usual logrolling in Congress — and excitement about the prospects for Musk’s DOGE, the new Department of Government Efficiency.

 

The bipartisan agreement in Washington, D.C., to perpetually spend more money is indeed disgraceful, and DOGE could be a welcome force for new thinking. Yet both of these are really beside the point when considering the red ink that one day — probably not tomorrow and maybe not even several years from now — could cause a horrendous fiscal crisis.

 

There are idiotic programs and senseless regulations aplenty, but the money that can be found in the federal couch cushions is relatively minimal. Most federal spending has strong public backing, and so a $6.8 trillion budget that looks like a juicy target is very hard to bring under control.

 

The math is as brutal as ever. Social Security and Medicare, together with veterans’ benefits and other health programs, account for more than half of the budget. One of Trump’s signature promises, of course, is not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Then, interest on the debt and defense spending take up about another $2 trillion.

 

What’s left is, in the scheme of things, a pittance, and even programs in this category have constituencies.

 

If the budget is ever to be put on a more rational basis, there is no substitute for making a public case for a serious reform agenda that includes entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. This is a politically perilous project, which is why the Republican Party abandoned it. How much easier and satisfying it is to tank flagrantly absurd end-of-year spending bills and to put extravagant hopes in DOGE.

 

It is telling what else was happening in Washington while Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution went down in flames. Congress was busy working to pass, on a bipartisan basis, the Social Security Fairness Act at a cost of roughly $200 billion over ten years. It doesn’t matter that the legislation is a poorly designed giveaway to public employees that experts across the spectrum think is a bad idea.

 

DOGE will be hard-pressed just to claw that money back. Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about cutting a swath of federal workers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2022, the federal government employed 2.3 million civilians at a cost of $271 billion. So if you can cut 10 percent of those employees, which would be a stunning accomplishment, you might cover the ten-year cost of the Social Security Fairness Act, but you are still treading fiscal water.

 

This points to another similarity with 2013. All the drama and chaos is unlikely to fundamentally alter our dreadful fiscal trajectory.

Get Us Off This Roller Coaster

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

There’s a riff in the movie Parenthood that I’ve always liked, even though the only way it could be less subtle is if Steve Martin turned straight to camera and shouted, “A metaphor is coming your way!” 

 

Here’s the gist. Steve Martin is a stressed-out dad complaining about the burdens of life to his wife, played by Mary Steenburgen. She says, “What do you want me to do? Give you guarantees? Life is messy.” 

 

Martin replies, “I hate messy. It’s so … messy.” Then suddenly his grandma pops in and tells a story. “You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster.” She explained how much she loved the ups and downs of the whole thing. It’s so much better than the merry-go-round, which is boring and just goes round and round. Steenburgen understands that the story is about life and, duh, parenthood. But it’s lost on Martin until he’s on an actual roller coaster that he really gets it.  

 

(Oh, I guess I should have said “spoiler alert.” But the movie is 35 years old. If I ruined it for you, that’s a you-problem, not a me-problem. By the way, Rosebud is Luke’s father and Darth Vader is a sled. Wait. Strike that, reverse it.) 

 

I think that’s a nice lesson about family life and, well, the facts of life generally (as the song says, “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life”). Was it Plato or Judd Nelson who said, “Such are the perils of existence in the metaxy. Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.”

 

I often tell new parents that two things can be true at once. Parenthood is perhaps the most stressful, frustrating, messy, complicated, expensive, and exhausting thing you can go through. And it’s totally worth it. Long years, short days, and all that. That’s why I loved that new Volvo ad. Who says industrial capitalism can’t support bourgeois values? 

 

Anyway, even though this is a pretty good setup for a schmalzy meditation on family stuff, I’m going to make a point about politics. But because I feel honor-bound to segue with a forced transition I’m going to stick with this family stuff for a while longer. 

 

Longtime readers will recall how much I like the metaphor of the English garden to describe the proper role of the state in the Anglo-American tradition. Basically, the idea is that while the state is there to protect residents of the garden from external and internal threats, it should otherwise let them grow freely into the best versions of themselves. The gardener isn’t a libertarian, but he’s not that much more than a minarchist. (Shame on Microsoft Word, by the way, for insisting that I spelled “monarchist” wrong. There’s another metaphor in there somewhere.) 

 

Last March, I discovered that psychologist Alison Gopnik has a similar philosophy about child-raising. A lot of parents see themselves as carpenters, she explains. They take that crooked timber of humanity and try to work it into perfectly constructed lives that conform to some predetermined blueprint. “Messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.” This, by the way, is how Steve Martin sees parenthood before his roller coaster epiphany. Messiness is so messy. Gopnik explains that:

 

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys. … We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

 

Now, I don’t subscribe to this entirely. I think we can do a little shaping of our children’s minds because the mind is, and should be, constrained by character and I think parents can play a meaningful role in shaping character. But one needs to be truly humble about such efforts. One also needs to understand that frontal assaults on the minds of children tend to backfire. My dad tried to force me to love pickled herring and opera (though not at the same time). He failed utterly, to his great disappointment. Where he was more successful was in inculcating in me a desire and will to find the answers to questions. When I’d ask him a question he didn’t know the answer to, his invariable reply was, “We can look it up.” He’d put down his cigarette or cigar or newspaper and get up in search of the answer. This caused endless eye-rolling from me, as this was back in the day when looking it up meant searching for and finding an actual book and then scouring it for an answer. But it had a lasting effect on me. I have the habit now. 

 

It drives me crazy that when my daughter asks me a question about something I don’t know, and I say, “We can look it up,” I often get the same eye rolls—even though looking it up means simply typing a question into a phone. But I hope the habit sticks with her. 

 

My only point is that parenting is less about forcing and more about nudging, hinting, encouraging, and nurturing habits of the mind and heart more than anything resembling carpentry. But it’s also about providing a sense of stability, a foundation, a safe harbor—a garden.  

 

Okay now, for the politics. 

 

As is often the case, I let what was supposed to be a brief allusion—“Hey, remember that bit from Parenthood?”—pull me down a rabbit hole like the housing inspector for Watership Down. 

 

All I originally intended to do was make a point about how the political roller coaster of the last 72 hours—or eight years—is not how things are supposed to work. Politics can have some roller coaster curves and excitement, but government is supposed to be more like a merry-go-round: boring because it’s predictable. I don’t mean to say that it should just go in circles. Government is supposed to do things, but it’s only supposed to do things it’s supposed to do. It’s not supposed to be a source of excitement. A government that deliberately provides scary thrills is doing it wrong. 

 

I’m actually sympathetic to Donald Trump’s desire to do away with the debt limit, though not necessarily for the reasons he does. He doesn’t want any limits to his desire to spend lots of money (which, ironically, is the opposite agenda of Elon Musk). But threatening constant debt crises to force Congress to curb spending is a really stupid way to guard the fiscal health of the country. We benefit enormously from being the world’s reserve currency and having debt instruments people are willing to buy. Threatening potential default is like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own head and saying “The next man makes a move, the [deleted] gets it!” Blowing up a spending bill (that you supported) the week before Christmas because Elon Musk wants to wreak havoc isn’t quite as suicidal, but it’s also needlessly chaotic. 

 

I’m also deeply sympathetic to Musk’s stated desire to curb spending. My problem with his antics is that he thinks the skills of being a Silicon Valley disruptor are transferable not just to politics (a defensible belief) but to government. He’s making a 21^st century version of a 20^th century category error. In the 20^th century, lots of people believed that a businessman or engineer could run the government like a business or a public works project. Musk thinks he can just blow stuff up and redesign the government like it’s amenable to start-up tactics and social media political antics. And Musk knows how to do that stuff. He’s good at spotting the Chesterton’s fences in companies. He’s good at fomenting social media mobs. But, just going by his tweets, it’s obvious he doesn’t actually understand how government works—if he did know, he wouldn’t need to lie so much about what government does—and he thinks you can change government with social media the same way you can change politics. If Matt Gaetz believed that “governing” was done from Fox News studios, Musk thinks you can govern via doomscrolling. 

 

The trouble with insurmountable arrogance is that you think your skills transfer to everything else. 

 

There’s much more room for drama, entertainment, and excitement in campaigns and TV studios. Ultimately, though, government is supposed to operate differently than politics. But government cannot be safe, stable, and predictable indefinitely if our politics are bottomlessly crazy. If you have become addicted to politics as a form of entertainment, eventually you’ll treat government as a form of entertainment, too. 

 

People like roller coasters and merry-go-rounds, not to mention haunted houses, moon bounces, etc., because they take it on faith that they are safe. The engineers and architects who create amusement parks can curate a feeling of childlike joy—fun for children of all ages!—precisely because people trust that everything works the way it’s supposed to. They take it for granted that the garden-like—and wildly overpriced—microcosm of the amusement park is stable, safe, and sturdy. You wouldn’t get on a ride if you thought it was designed by the stoned teenagers or sugar-high children in line with you. Nor would you be reassured if you were told the sketchy dude in the Goofy costume was also in charge of maintaining the brakes on the Matterhorn. 

 

But when it comes to our federal government right now, too many people are behaving like the system is stable and safe enough that they can afford to be clowns in the parade. Or to risk another whiplash-inducing change in metaphors, too few people in a position of power want to be Police Chief Brody insisting that the beach be closed because of a shark in the water. They all want to be Mayor Vaughn insisting that the good times continue to roll because there’s no way a shark would dare ruin everyone’s Fourth of July. 

 

The thing is there really are sharks all over the place. The national debt is a shark (and cutting foreign aid won’t kill it). Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are sharks. And everybody is splashing in the surf like they’re somebody else’s problem. 

 

The weird thing is it’s not like people aren’t amped-up about supposed threats. Heck, they’re addicted to threats. They just want to be amped up about the wrong threats. It’s like they want to be frightened by animatronic dinosaurs and robot pirates on the flume ride precisely because they know these fake threats can’t actually hurt them. Let’s go into the Deep State haunted house or the Washington swamp safari ride! Let’s play whack-a-mole with wrong pronouns! Give me my three throws at the dunk tank, I want to see the dude from the Bud Light ad get soaked! 

 

But nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom. Everyone wants to stay on the roller coaster—including the people we pay to make sure the roller coaster is safe.