By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 22,
2024
There is a William F. Buckley Jr. line for every
occasion, and the one for Sen. J.D. Vance is: “I won’t insult your intelligence
by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
Vance came to his heartland populism via an education at
Yale Law School, Peter Thiel’s money, Hollywood, and the New York Times bestseller
list. A venture capital man who once
denounced Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency and who currently is so
intimately and uncomfortably attached to Trump that it is impossible to
distinguish him from a hemorrhoid, Vance has decided to be the clown prince of
a very small kingdom: the realm of people who feel very strongly that the U.S.
government should accommodate Vladimir Putin’s imperial project in Ukraine and
beyond. Vance is not stupid, and he has seen how far a clown prince can go in
Washington. He even has some reason to hope that he is 1,659 days away from
being elected president of these United States after serving as Donald Trump’s
vice president and riding that lame duck as far as he will waddle.
It is difficult to feel much other than contempt for what
Vance has become and pity for the way he became it. My own background is
similar to his in the worst ways, and I sympathize when it comes to the
temptation to say to the world, as Vance has, “Tell me what sort of man you
want me to be, and I’ll pretend
to be that sort of man.” I can understand it, and even forgive it.
(Eventually.) But you can never trust a man who has decided to be the Tom
Ripley of American politics.
Vance has set his sights on U.S. foreign aid—aid to
Israel and Ukraine specifically, but foreign aid more generally. U.S.
foreign-aid spending is up a bit in the past couple of years, and currently
sits at about 1 percent
of federal spending—most years, it is a good deal less
than 1 percent of federal spending. Though it doesn’t amount to much, there
are legitimate criticisms of our foreign-aid outlays: There is some variation
year to year, but, typically, about $1 out of every $5 in foreign aid takes the
form of military aid, which is typically offered on the condition that the
money be spent acquiring goods and services from U.S.-based firms—i.e.,
whatever else it achieves, that money is also laundered into a kind of backdoor
corporate-welfare scheme. Even without the strings attached, much of that money
would be spent with U.S. providers—Americans are the world’s finest makers of
arms and excel at the business side of war-making, a fact that embarrasses some
people such as Vance and Ron Paul and professor Noam Chomsky and others of that
ilk—but the conditions create perverse incentives, and Washington doesn’t need
any more of those. Much of our support for Ukraine has consisted of drawing
down existing U.S. military inventory, sending the materiel to Ukraine, and
then using the appropriated funds to replenish our own stocks. That isn’t the
worst way to go about it, though those who worry that increasing presidential
discretion over the drawdown process are right to do so.
Or, at least the few of them acting in good faith are
right to worry. After their performance in the Trump years, Republicans are
hardly in a position to complain about increasing presidential discretion—the
presumptive 2024 Republican nominee argues, let us remind ourselves, that the
president should be exempt from the law in toto, enjoying total
immunity for any criminal acts committed in office. (Do I need to emphasize
that that is insane? Because that is insane.) Politicians have
a way of developing sudden-onset constitutionalism when it suits them. In much
the same way, figures such as Vance have been known to develop sudden-onset
fiscal conservatism. The great majority of federal spending funds a handful of
programs that Republicans and Democrats generally refuse to think about
touching—Social Security, Medicare, etc.—and money is no object when it comes
to programs they favor. But when it comes to things such as foreign aid—or
inconvenient investigations—suddenly, money matters. You know: Mind the
billions and the trillions will take care of themselves.
That is, of course, a cowardly ruse, a way of dressing up
self-serving (and Moscow-serving) political expediency as fiscal discipline.
Rep. Bob Good, current chairman of the so-called Freedom Caucus, relies on that
ruse from time to time. He insists
that the foreign-aid package passed on Saturday would send the country
on a “slide down into the abyss of greater fiscal crisis.” The aid under
consideration for Ukraine amounts to less money than Social
Security will spend in the next 16 days, but Rep. Good et al.
are content to watch trillions go out the door while they nickel-and-dime the
war to turn back Vladimir Putin’s invasion and occupation of a free and
democratic country.
Oh, but Ukraine has a corrupt government! Michael
Brendan Dougherty will
insist over at National Review. Ukraine does have serious corruption
problems. These will not be improved by putting the entirety of the country
under the boot heel of Vladimir Putin’s mafia state, which is to corruption
what Iowa is to corn—a producer of almost incalculable bounty. One senses that
other famously corrupt regimes would get a more sympathetic hearing from
Dougherty et al.—in the event Putin were to occupy, say, the
Vatican. One could as easily put Hungary in that sentence, and our New New
Right friends are enamored with Hungary, but there would be no more point in
Putin’s occupying Hungary than there would be in Donald Trump’s courting
Vance—why buy the cow when the milk (and the cryptosporidiosis)
is free?
Writing in the New York Times, Vance does a
fair impersonation of Dilbert’s boss—the man who, in possession of one
fact, acts as though this one single fact is dispositive. Here it is:
Consider our ability to produce
155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated
that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million
per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were
available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great
lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled
our capacity and can now produce 360,000
per year—less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s
goal is to get this to 1.2
million—30 percent of what’s needed—by the end of 2025. This would cost the
American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result:
failure abroad.
That is a familiar line of argument: We must fail
in order to avoid failure. Vance is no doubt correct about those 155mm
shells, and about the Patriot air-defense missiles that he also considers. That
is true and important as far as it goes—but 155mm shells are not the only
weapon available. Patriot missiles are not the only way to deal with Russian
missiles and drones. War production often underperforms what war planners say
they need. (Vance is perfectly willing to take the Ukrainian military’s word
for it when it suits him.) We have examples of that close to home: For all the
Rosie-the-Riveter nostalgia about World War II, U.S. war production was a
complicated, at times corrupt, and often deficient enterprise. Even though the
United States was protected from fighting on its own soil, both Germany and the
Soviet Union increased wartime productivity more than the United States did.
The British were obliged to create and produce their own amphibious-landing
vehicles, for example, because the United States could not produce its DUKW
vehicles (the “duck boat”) fast enough. But the war effort, as it happened, did
not turn on the abundance of duck boats.
Not that Vance believes a word of this stuff, of course.
He gives away the game easily and often. From Ian Ward, writing
in Politico:
Vance is deeply skeptical of the
so-called rules-based international order—the system of laws, norms and
multilateral institutions established in the years following the Second World
War to mitigate global conflict and facilitate international economic activity.
As Vance sees it, this system has enriched economic elites while harming
working-class people who are rooted in older industrial economies—all while
failing to deliver on the ultimate goal of liberalizing non-democratic
countries like China and Russia.
From this perspective, Vance does
not see the United States’ decision to defend “the
principles at the heart of the international rules-based order” in
Ukraine as part of some high-minded and honorable policy. Instead, Vance sees
it as a self-interested effort by economic elites to preserve a global order
that advances their interests while screwing over the type of people he
represents in post-industrial Ohio.
As he once put it to me, “I think
you have to rethink the entire project.”
“The really interesting debate
that is happening between the establishment right and the populist right is
[about] challenging the premise … that things are going really well,” Vance
told me. On the one side, establishment Republicans believe that the American
empire is trending in the right direction; populist Republicans believe that
the American empire is on the verge of collapse. The establishment points to
falling poverty rates around the world; the populist right points to falling
birth and life expectancies at home.
“There’s just this desperate
effort to just argue that everything’s gone well,” Vance told me, “and, man, I
just don’t buy it at all.”
There is some evidence that the U.S.-led liberal order
creates opportunity for “the type of people he represents in post-industrial
Ohio.” The career of one J.D. Vance, for example. Vance by his own account here
is willing to break the world because he doesn’t think refrigerator repairmen
in Columbiana County make enough money relative to his old venture capital
buddies in California. Which is to say, the United States may very well end up
allowing Russia to romp across Europe because one rich Silicon Valley douchebag
thinks other rich Silicon Valley douchebags are making too much money.
Vladimir Putin’s ill-considered invasion of Ukraine
handed the United States a once-in-a-generation geopolitical opportunity on the
proverbial silver platter. But Vance et al. turn up their nose at
that silver platter, enraged that someone somewhere may be in possession of a
silver spoon.
Words About Words
Another example of writers
writing bad sentences because they are trying to avoid the use of
perfectly ordinary words.
In March the novelist Percival
Everett published “James,”
a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
from the point of view of Jim, an enslaved runaway.
Not quite. An “enslaved runaway” is a runaway (from
what?) who becomes (how?) enslaved. Jim is a runaway slave. You
need runaway modifying slave in that sentence
to make sense of what it is Jim is running away from. Writers attempting to be
sensitive—attempting to advertise their own exquisite sensitivity—have turned
to the idiotic phrase enslaved person as a substitute
for slave, an evocatively ugly word that is, because of that
evocative ugliness, a useful and true one. We do not need enslaved
person to emphasize the humanity of slaves because human beings are
the only creatures who are, or can be, enslaved. Unless you are some
kind of fruity PETA knucklehead, nobody talks about enslaved donkeys.
There are no enslaved maple trees, no enslaved microbes, no enslaved African
gray parrots.
Of course slaves are people. That is what
makes slavery horrible.
Economics for English Majors
One of the things that made New York City work—that
allowed the city to get by with criminal misgovernment and municipal idiocy and
terrible schools, etc.—was that people and firms at the tops of certain
industries just had to be in New York. If you were in finance, you had to have
a Wall Street office. If you were in media, advertising, publishing, fashion,
art, theater, etc., you had to have a New York address. Every year, that
becomes less and less the case. One of these days, it’s going to be Broadway, which
is all that’s left of what New York used to be. From
the Wall Street Journal:
America’s biggest bank is calling
it quits on the street where American finance was born.
JPMorgan Chase .. closed
its branch Friday at 45 Wall St., ending more than 150 years of physical ties
between the bank and the street that is a catchall term for the global money
business.
Today, a “Wall Street bank” is
defined as a financial institution with trading operations that span the globe
and investment bankers counseling CEOs. An actual location on the street
doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, 23 Wall St. and other
historic buildings are empty shells with vacant storefronts and “for rent”
signs on their facades.
What will New York be in 20 years? What is it now?
Elsewhere …
Things are not going super-well at Tesla just now, or in
the overall EV market:
Tens of billions of dollars
in subsidies
for electric vehicles. Billions more coming to subsidize
charging stations. Endless jibberjabber about “sustainable” this and “Green
New Deal” that. Endless moral preening from the likes of Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. Overbearing corporate arm-twisting.
And the bestselling vehicle in the
United States in 2023 was the Ford
F-150 pickup. No. 2 was the Chevy Silverado pickup. No. 3? Ram
pickup.
Perhaps you are seeing a
trend.
So there’s gold, silver, bronze …
whatever you get for fourth place … and then you come to Elon Musk & Co.
Tesla’s Model Y came in a respectable No. 5, right between the Toyota RAV-4 and
the Honda CRV, two small SUVs beloved by people who cannot afford bigger ones.
Thanks to Uncle Sugar, the Model Y’s sales were goosed a bit in 2023 by the
return of a $7,500 federal handout and state and local giveaways such as the
Bay Area’s Clean Cars 4 All program, which will put up to $9,500 in your pocket
if you swap an older gasoline or diesel vehicle for an electric one. That’s a
lot of money—and a lot of market-distorting economic intervention—to push a
$50,000 status symbol for affluent urbanites into fifth place.
Juicing the markets is
expensive—and it works only up to a point.
More
in the New York Post, America’s newspaper.
In Conclusion
For some reason, it has fallen to me to be the
journalistic scold who complains when people misuse the name of Neville
Chamberlain, an honorable man unjustly maligned by the historically illiterate.
Some people took my “Marjorie
Taylor Greene Is No Neville Chamberlain,” to be a defense of the witless
beady-eyed Facebook troll who for some reason represents some of the people of
Georgia in the House of Representatives. (Seriously: What the hell is wrong
with you people down there in Chattooga County? Are you mad? Wicked?) If you
haven’t read the piece—and more than a few of my correspondents obviously have
not!—you might enjoy it.
Or not.
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