The Show Trial of Evan Gershkovich

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

In Russia, the trial—“trial”—of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is under way. 

 

The “trial” is being held in secret, though Gershkovich was displayed—locked in a glass box with his head shaved—for the benefit of the press and the amusement of the Russian people. U.S. Embassy personnel have been banned from the proceedings, as have Gershkovich’s supporters, as have reporters, as have all others who are not carefully pre-screened participants in the show-trial pageant being put on by the state security apparatus. Gershkovich is charged with espionage. There is no evidence that Gershkovich was involved in anything other than journalism, but if you are Vladimir Putin, journalism—real, honest journalism—is at least as much of a danger to your regime as is espionage, and probably more of one. 

 

Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations offers a useful analogy: In the era of globalization, rival countries end up being something like estranged spouses who use the things that link them together—the children, the family home—as weapons against one another. We have seen this with trade, with travel, with participation in multinational institutions, and much else. And we have seen it with journalism. The foreign correspondent is as ancient a figure in international relations as the diplomat, and it is an increasingly dangerous occupation. Authoritarians fear journalists, for obvious reasons. The so-called People’s Republic of China is a prolific jailer of domestic journalists—half of them Uyghurs—and Beijing has made a special example out of Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, who is a British national. Like Gershkovich, Lai is accused of espionage: “collusion with foreign forces” and “illegally supplying state secrets overseas.”

 

As George Orwell doesn’t seem to have actually said, news is what they don’t want you to print—the rest is advertising. And those are good, bold, true words, but a tough credo to live up to when the people who don’t want you printing things have a gestapo and a gulag and Polonium-210.

 

The Russian show trial is an established national tradition. It is a feature of whatever we want to call the form of government practiced by Putin. It was a feature of the communist regime that preceded the current era, and it was a feature of the czarist regime that preceded the communists. Russia has had many revolutions of sorts, but wherever it has gone, it has found itself there. As the Economist once put it: “Peter the Great, tsar from 1682 to 1725, set out to modernise a medieval theocracy, and produced a militaristic police state based on slave labour.”

 

Peter the Great would recognize what is being done to Evan Gershkovich, as he, too, constructed special displays for his political enemies: stone pillars with iron prongs radiating out from them, upon which we hung the heads of those who got on the wrong side of the czar. His former brother-in-law was decapitated and his head displayed on such a structure in St. Petersburg for years; there was still some of it left when the deposed governor of Siberia was pinned up next to it. These Russian “spectacles of suffering” were not just manifestations of psychotic cruelty—they were intentional strategies of statecraft. 

 

And so it goes. Russia is not a failed state but a series of failed (and failing) states, with something much more enormously failed behind them.

 

The perversity of the contrast between Russian culture and Russian public life should be held onto as a kind of civilizational memento mori by those of us who have, over the years, made the profound error of investing our hopes in intellect and high culture. Russia has those gifts in excess: in literature, in music, in science, in philosophy—in almost everything except creating the conditions under which ordinary life may be lived decently and securely by ordinary people. It is as though Russian public life knows how to create only geniuses and monsters, along with a few men who were both. 

 

But Americans can no longer allow ourselves to be shocked by that: If we did not learn the lesson of Germany—when the most cultured, urban, and educated elements of Europe’s most intellectually advanced country carried out the Holocaust—then we have our own contemporary example, less monstrous but no less illuminating. Men of culture and intellectual achievement have proven to be easily seduced by the scanty rewards—a little bit of money and some transitory notoriety—that go along with being the house philosophers of the Trump movement. 

 

If not intellect and culture, then what is reliable proof against illiberalism, tyranny, and monstrosity? Catholics could not be tempted for a second to indulge the notion that our religion nurtures the kind of civilizations that are resistant to that sort of thing—cf. Franco, Pinochet, Salazar, Trujillo, Mussolini, etc.—but the heirs of the Reformation can hardly have failed to notice that so many “neutral” Protestant countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) found it relatively easy to establish a modus vivendi with the Third Reich. Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation lasted only two hours, during which time the Danes seem to have inflicted … zero casualties, though they did capture two Germans.

 

So: Not intellect, not high culture, not religion. In what should Americans trust? The Constitution? Maybe. But it is worth noting that the same element in American life that cheers on Putin’s forces in Ukraine is also cheering on the effort to elect as the next president of these United States a man who not long ago insisted that the Constitution must face “termination” if its rules would keep him out of office.

 

I think our best defense is the people in Evan Gershkovich’s business—I mean the actual journalists, not the rodeo clowns who play at journalism. (Putin has suggested he is open to a prisoner swap for Gershkovich; the inconvenient fact is that the best candidate for such a swap, a man who is much more valuable to Putin than he is to us—I mean, of course, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson—is not a prisoner.) Thomas Jefferson thought so: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

 

There is a reason Vladimir Putin cannot abide Evan Gershkovich and those who do that kind of work. God bless and keep them.

Biden Panic Goes Global

By Seth Mandel

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

Under normal circumstances, I would have said that the exclusion from last night’s presidential debate of anti-Semitism was so significant as to merit our full attention. After all, it’s not merely a question of Jews feeling comfortable on campus or elsewhere; it’s a steady stream of violent riots that have taken a can of bear spray to American civic life.

 

And yet, it honestly feels silly even complaining about that—or anything else issue-based, for that matter. The feeling of crisis at this moment is so acute that all issues take a backseat—and that is a crisis all its own.

 

The crisis is international. Maybe even more so than it is domestic. And it’s worth talking about the repercussions and implications of that.

 

The homepage of the UK Telegraph this morning was filled to the brim with headlines like “Biden under pressure to quit after ‘painful’ debate performance”; “Biden is a danger to the world”; “The Free World must have a new leader”; etc. The Russians over at Sputnik were of course having their fun with President Biden’s “Debate Debacle.” Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald: “Democrats have other options after Biden disaster.” The South China Morning Post uses the follow quote as its headline: “Biden might have imploded.”

 

In the United Arab Emirates, The National tells its readers that “Biden faces calls to step aside after poor debate performance.” An opinion piece on the Toronto Star’s homepage puts it colorfully: “Joe Biden reportedly had a cold. After watching him perform, the whole world is feeling sick.”

 

Again, as of late morning Friday these were all on their respective newspapers’ home pages, and they were all headlines—not simply lines in a story. It is not great.

 

The pro-Hamas riot movement and Joe Biden’s poor cognitive performance are reminders of something else: Donald Trump’s presidency was also marked by domestic unrest, but the international arena was noticeably and undeniably quieter than it has been under Biden—which is, I believe, a large part of the global anxiety over last night.

 

That is not to say that there were no crises during Trump’s presidency. But there is a land war in Europe and the Middle East is aflame worse than it’s been arguably since the 1970s, and those two fronts were simmering but subdued during the four years before Biden took over.

 

There were, as the Commentary crew pointed out last night on the post-debate podcast, issue-based frights for the Democrats during the debate as well. Biden’s Medicare blather and his blasé forgetfulness regarding Afghanistan were not ignored in the coverage. But the optics are what will most scare our allies and encourage our foes.

 

Biden’s critics have long compared the president to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who spent his final years in power hidden away from the public. His supporters have preferred to see him as Konrad Adenauer, the aging West German leader who once told Charles de Gaulle that he had “broken the age barrier” when the French leader wondered how Adenauer could possibly seem so spry in 1958. At the time of that conversation, Adenauer was 81—the same age Joe Biden was last night.

 

The lesson there is twofold: first, the Brezhnev comparison has triumphed over the Adenauer comparison, leaving Biden branded as a lost figure clinging to power. Second, the international community remembers well what that means. Cue the Kremlinology that, in a frightful twist, the Kremlin will be playing about the White House.

 

The rest of this election year will take place in a state of heightened public anxiety. Already Biden’s attempts to deter Russia from invading Ukraine and Iran from directly attacking Israel have failed. China looms, as does war in Lebanon. The Biden administration’s slow-rolling of Israel’s war in Gaza once looked foolish; it now appears utterly catastrophic.

 

And so waiting for a question about campus unrest and violent riots outside of synagogues by pro-Hamas thugs felt increasingly vulgar last night, as the debate wore on. And that is not because it is a petty side issue—it isn’t. It is, in fact, a central challenge to American democratic order at the moment. But it seemed insignificant last night, as the world as one became convinced the American ship of state is without a captain.

 

Watching our allies turn a whiter shade of pale at the spectacle of the non-Trump candidate made clear that everyone’s calculations are changing. Buckle up.

In the Pacific, China Isn’t Just Threatening Taiwan

By Mike Coté

Sunday, June 30, 2024

 

Repeated hostile Chinese military incursions into another country’s sovereign territory. CCP claims over this same territory and attempts to exclude the rightful owner. Use of civilian cover to bolster Beijing’s military capacity. Deliberate pushing of international legal boundaries to the limit of outright conflict. Bogus narratives denying this truth and blaming the victim.

 

This malign cycle repeats over and over, always rising in intensity and slowly but surely bringing China’s favored policy outcomes closer to realization.

 

You would be forgiven if you think this story is about Taiwan, but it isn’t. It’s actually about another island archipelago just to its south: the Philippines. And the ever-increasing danger to this Asian nation from Beijing is perhaps even more concerning for the United States than the threats to Taiwan.

 

This trend menacingly accelerated just last week, when eight Chinese Coast Guard vessels attacked a two-boat Philippine naval-resupply mission to the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed atoll firmly within Manila’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). In that brazen assault, Chinese military personnel were armed with various weapons, including axes and knives, while their counterparts were unarmed. The shoal, known as Ayungin in the Philippines and Ren’ai Jiao in China, sits barely above the waterline even at low tide. The extent of the Philippine buildup on the semi-submerged reef is a rusty hulk of a ship intentionally beached in 1999, the BRP Sierra Madre, still technically a commissioned vessel in the country’s navy. Ayungin sits less than 150 miles from the main territory of the Philippines, but more than 700 miles from China’s southernmost primary territory, Hainan. Still, China has claimed the atoll as its inviolable sovereign territory and is willing to push these claims at the point of a bayonet.

 

This is part of a broader Chinese push to violate the sovereignty of the Philippines. For instance, in contrast to the relatively minor Ayungin garrison — if it could even be called that — China has fully reclaimed and militarized various similar shoals in the South China Sea. Mischief Reef, a mere 20 miles away and also within the EEZ of the Philippines, started out as a mirror image of Ayungin; now, it hosts a military runway, a naval harbor, and anti-aircraft batteries, all built in the last decade. China repeatedly, including just last week, sails its warships through the internationally recognized waters of the Philippines, assailing local fishermen with high-pressure water cannons. China’s misleadingly named Coast Guard — in reality, a highly militarized operation on par with neighboring navies — patrols these littorals, intimidating their rightful legal occupants, while government officials promote China’s claim to the whole of the South China Sea.

 

These gray-zone tactics fall just short of constituting outright warfare and are meant, alongside coercive diplomacy, to overwhelm the forces and erode the resolve of China’s smaller, weaker neighbors. They give China a level of plausible deniability in terms of escalation, while still entrenching Chinese hegemony in the region. But they have not gone unnoticed. The Philippines has made sure of that through a relentless publicity campaign. This push, although helpful in bringing attention to the issue, has not altered Chinese behavior. Sunlight may be a great disinfectant, but it is not much of a deterrent. Manila is still being bullied out of its own sovereign territory and being deprived of key economic resources therein.

 

Some may wonder why this is America’s concern at all when there are multiple other international conflicts to worry about, including in neighboring Taiwan. But the United States is not obligated by treaty to come to the defense of Taiwan; it is obligated to defend our allies in Manila, even if the area of their territory being targeted is a tiny outpost. The 1951 U.S.–Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty states that “an armed attack on either of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific or on its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific.” This is clear, binding language that would potentially apply to even minor reefs in the South China Sea.

 

Understandably, both Washington and Manila are hesitant to get into a shooting war with China for such low stakes — something Beijing has taken full advantage of. But China does not want a major conflict either; it is merely betting that our side will be the first to blink in this game of geopolitical chicken. So far, it has been correct, but it need not always be so. There are several steps the United States can take to counter Chinese gray-zone aggression, bolster our bilateral relationship with the Philippines, and show America is a strong deterrent force in this critical region.

 

First, we must begin by leveling the playing field in the South China Sea. Beijing cannot be the only regional power to cement its control of disputed territory through artificial-island construction and maritime-reclamation projects. By aiding Manila in building out its infrastructure on these atolls, we provide the Philippines with a stronger, more permanent security presence. America’s military is adept at logistical support, through which we could greatly improve Manila’s position. We could also supply the Philippine maritime forces with non-lethal weaponry, helping to even the odds. Cross-training opportunities with the U.S. Coast Guard and our navy would transfer knowledge, aiding in tactical wherewithal. All of this could be easily accomplished given our significant military presence in the country.

 

Next, we must work with the Philippines to monitor and publicize Chinese gray-zone activity. America has a geopolitical megaphone; we can use it to great effect here. Promoting the Filipino narrative, disseminating the evidence of Chinese malfeasance, and constantly talking about this issue in the press will bolster the already-successful transparency campaign. At the same time, we must also clearly define the stakes — not just for the South China Sea and the Western Pacific more broadly, but for the entire world. China is acting this way to test its neighbors, but also to test the global system as a whole. The persistence of that system relies on the belief that threats to it will be dealt with. Undermining that belief has knock-on consequences, none of them good.

 

America should also work to create a regional diplomatic structure meant to resolve overlapping claims, operate navigational exercises, and challenge the local maritime supremacy of the Chinese Coast Guard. Promoting peaceful bilateral settlements of territorial disputes in the South China Sea would put diplomatic pressure on Beijing and further unite the other littoral nations against it. There has already been progress on this front between Vietnam and the Philippines, and the U.S. should work to facilitate more. Freedom of Navigation Exercises (FONOPs) are a core competency of the U.S. Navy, allowing us to show the flag abroad, enforce the proper use of territorial and international waters, and deter belligerent action. Running more of these FONOPs, particularly in conjunction with interested regional partners, would help strengthen the resolve of smaller nations and outmatch the Chinese forces in the area.

 

Finally, the U.S. must clearly and directly signal that escalation of Chinese belligerence against the Philippines will result in the activation of the mutual-defense treaty. Laying out the consequences for malign action will ensure that Beijing knows what is at stake, and put the ball in its court. Establishing strong promises of force through repeated rhetorical invocation of the treaty will not only deter China, but reinforce our friendship with Manila. This strong commitment to our ally will boost America’s credibility in the region and further afield in an era in which that credibility is sadly eroding. As such, it will serve a vital purpose for our national interests.

 

It is far beyond time we helped our friends join the fray and fight fire with fire. In doing so, we can deter a much more dangerous conflict and undermine our greatest foe at the same time. To use a phrase Chinese diplomats are overly fond of, that is a win–win for American interests.

Republicans See Odds Improve in the Race for House Control

By Henry Olsen

Sunday, June 30, 2024

 

November’s election looks to be a nail-biter at all levels, but not all close races are created equal. The race for House control could still go either way — but it tilted clearly toward the Republicans before Biden’s debate debacle.

 

That’s the consensus view of the top election analysts, at least. Three I look at the most — Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales, and University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball — each have more seats listed as leaning to safe for the GOP than for the Democrats. Their range isn’t that different either, going from 210 Republican seats (Cook) to 216 (Inside Elections). Each publication gives the GOP between a five- and seven-seat advantage over the Democrats.

 

They also agree regarding the seats in the middle, the proverbial “toss-ups.” Each entity rates an equal number of seats currently held by either party as up for grabs, suggesting that neither side is especially or uniquely vulnerable. That’s not normally the case in potential wave election years like 2010 or 2018, where the weaker party would be defending many more seats than its foe.

 

The combination of these factors means Democrats would have to run the table among toss-ups to have a bare majority. Depending on the rater, they would have to take between two-thirds and 80 percent of the toss-ups to reach 218 seats. That’s very unlikely without a change in the underlying dynamics.

 

The overall partisan trend also slightly but clearly favors Republicans. The GOP leads the RealClearPolitics congressional generic ballot polling average by 0.6 percent and has held a small but steady lead most of the time since last September. That’s not a huge margin, but one must go back to 2016 to find an election in which the party that trailed by this measure in late June came from behind to win.

 

Even the precise districts labeled as toss-ups show a small but unmistakable GOP tilt. All three analysts place seven House seats in this category. Three are held by Democrats, and Biden either lost or won each seat by under two points. The other four are held by Republicans. Biden carried each by double digits, but there are mitigating factors in each. All four are defended by incumbents, and three are in California’s Central Valley or the New York City metropolitan area. Republicans ran much better in those areas in 2022 than in 2020, and polls thus far suggest those trends are sticking.

 

The same can be said of the ten districts that two of the three analysts rate as toss-ups. Seven of these are held by Democrats; Trump carried three of them, and Biden won the others by no more than six points. Only three are held by Republicans, and all are both defended by incumbents and are in either the Central Valley or the New York metro.

 

None of this says that the election is over and the GOP is a lock to keep control. A slight change in the partisan winds toward Democrats would complicate things. A few more GOP-held seats would move into the toss-up range and a couple of Democrat-held ones would likely fall out of it. An improvement in Biden’s job-approval rating would help Team Blue, too. None of these things is impossible; hence the need to hedge one’s bets and avoid taking a premature victory lap.

 

But the same things could happen in the GOP’s direction, too. Say the “double haters” — voters who dislike both Trump and Biden — start to move in Trump’s direction. Some of those on-the-bubble GOP incumbents would look safer, while some Democrats just outside toss-up range would look more vulnerable. Alaska’s Mary Peltola and Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur represent seats where Trump won in 2020 and will surely win again on current polling. Just a slight move toward the GOP would push them from the “lean Democratic” camp into toss-up city.

 

Biden’s globally televised meltdown is just the type of development that could do that. House races have become more partisan over the last decade. Independent voters used to pick and choose among candidates with little regard for party label. Now they tend to decide who they want at the top of the ticket and back the rest of the party ticket down the line. Biden’s clear inability to perform at a minimally competent level will likely hurt the party that has resolutely backed him despite increasing concerns about his acuity.

 

House seat ratings also tend to move late because so little attention is paid to them before October. Most contested Senate races are already inundated with television ads on both sides. That won’t happen in House contests until after Labor Day, and maybe not until late September. A candidate can easily pick up momentum just as the voters who tend to follow politics only right before an election take notice.

 

So, hold on to your hats, the race for the House looks to be going to the wire. But nonetheless, it’s GOP ahead by half a length as the horses go into the back turn. And Biden’s stumble out of the gate may mean the lead will grow a lot on the back stretch.

Remember Who Lied to You

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

Good morning. If I may be permitted, I would like to usher in the new day by spraying some sulfuric acid around.

 

Last night, over the course of about five minutes, the mainstream press and the Democratic Party’s establishment shifted positions on Joe Biden’s fitness for office. And when I say “shifted positions,” I mean shifted hemispheres. One moment we were in Italy, the next we were being whizzed across the Equator to Micronesia. It was as if the Political Gods had changed the channel. Poof!

 

I have been writing for more than a year that Joe Biden is too old to be president right now — let alone until 2029. I’ve written about it here an here and here and here, and in many other places besides. I’ve talked about it on The Editors. I’ve discussed it on the radio. I’ve mentioned it on Twitter. And when I’ve done so, I haven’t hinted at the notion, I’ve conveyed it as bluntly as I know how. Simultaneously, I’ve submitted that Biden’s apologists are lying to us about this, that they know they’re lying to us about this, that we know that they are lying to us about this, and that they know that we know they are lying to us about this, but that they’re lying to us about this anyway, because they don’t think it’s their job to tell the truth.

 

This morning, many of those people have stopped lying to us about this — perhaps because the lie has now become too obvious to deny. But that does not in any way change the fact that they have been lying to us about this. When they complained about “right-wing media,” they were lying to us. When they insisted that worries about Biden’s age were just cynical cover for Donald Trump, they were lying to us. When they suggested that Biden was impressive and sharp behind closed doors, they were lying to us. When they talked about “cheapfakes” and “deceptive editing,” they were lying to us. When they pulled out the “misinformation experts say . . .” garbage, they were lying to us. When they proposed that Robert Hur’s report was “partisan” or “unfair,” they were lying to us. They’re liars, and that they have ceased lying for a moment does not change the fact that they are liars who will lie to you for any political advantage they can gain.

 

I record this here not to say “I told you so” — although there’s nothing wrong with doing that — but as a reminder that those people will also be lying when the next big topic comes up. This isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not limited to Joe Biden’s age or to this election. It’s endemic. If you’re willing to lie about the president not being senile when everyone can see that the president is senile, then you’re willing to lie about anything to advance your political goals. The people who lied about Biden’s senility will do exactly the same thing next time — tomorrow, probably, if not today — and the rest of us ought to remember that.

Faces of Death

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

Did you miss Thursday night’s debate? Let me catch you up.

You’re caught up.

 

I tuned in feeling offended on Joe Biden’s behalf that Republicans had stooped to accusing him of drug use in order to delegitimize a vigorous performance preemptively. Then, after watching him for 30 seconds, I found myself thinking, “He should do a bump of coke during the first commercial break.”

 

His voice was raspy. His answers were halting and, shall we say, inelegant. He spent much of the evening staring at Trump slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, looking every inch like a man who, well, might have dementia.

 

Half an hour in, I began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to finish. Half an hour later, I hoped he wouldn’t be able to finish, as that would leave Democrats with no choice but to replace him as the nominee.

 

Watching him was so distressing that at one point I felt the urge to turn it off and put on something less unsettling, like Faces of Death.

 

Then it occurred to me that I was already watching Faces of Death, in a manner of speaking.

 

Joe Biden may well have many years of life left in him but, one way or another, he will not be president next year. As former Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri noted afterward, he had one job last night and he failed at it more spectacularly than anyone in the history of this format.

 

He and his team agreed to an early debate with Donald Trump because they assumed it would transform the race into a referendum on the former president. Had everything gone according to plan, Biden would have sounded sharp and commanding while Trump would have lapsed into ranting like a lunatic. Americans would have been jolted into remembering why they dumped one of them for the other.

 

Democrats won’t win if the election is a referendum on Biden’s presidency. But if it’s a referendum on whether an unstable coup enthusiast should get a second crack at power? Sure, they can win that.

 

Biden’s performance has foreclosed that possibility. The race will now be a referendum not just on his first term but on his ability to remain lucid during a second, and there’s no way to undo the impression he left at the debate with respect to that. He can’t win anymore.

 

Against all odds, the Democratic Party has maneuvered itself into placing a disgraced, vindictive authoritarian on a glide path to returning to office. Donald J. Trump, criminal sociopath, will now be seen by swing voters as the less unfit of their two options, God help us. 

 

In 2024, the hour for cope has come early.

 

***

 

Cope takes different forms. For pundits, today is a day to cheer yourself up by trawling through your archives and declaring, “I thought Joe Biden was too old before thinking Joe Biden was too old was cool.”

 

A few weeks ago I covered “the un-message-able problem” of the president’s age. In February I argued that replacing him as the nominee was the least bad option for Democrats. Last November I riffed at length on Politico’s scoop that his staff believes he “simply does not have the capacity” to govern and campaign like his predecessors did. Months before that, in February 2023, I made the case that neither prong of the Biden-Harris ticket seemed fit for office.

 

Heck, worrying about Biden’s age pre-dates my time at The Dispatch. A recurring theme in posts at my old haunt was that perceptions of his mental competence inform perceptions of his governing competence and vice versa. For most presidents, a policy mistake is simply a mistake; for Biden, policy mistakes feel like ever-mounting evidence of an old man losing his marbles and being overmatched by events.

 

Strangely, some Republicans have also resorted to cope in order to process what they saw last night. Most are exultant, but for a conspiratorial movement given to wild theories to explain Trump’s failures, his easy victory over Biden seems … too easy. What if the president’s dismal performance was orchestrated by the establishment somehow to create a pretext for replacing him on the ticket with a stronger candidate?

 

For pundits and right-wingers, coping today is simple. Whereas for Democrats it’s so agonizingly difficult that most haven’t bothered to try.

 

Some have. Look around online and you’ll find a liberal strategist nervously assuring voters that they’re voting for an administration in November, not for a candidate, or that the president’s big problem on Thursday night was that he had a cough. The normally sensible Sen. John Fetterman reminded supporters that he once endured a nightmarish debate and went on to win, as if defeating a blow-dried celebrity quack in his first run for office is equivalent to beating a charismatic former president with his own personality cult.

 

But they’re outliers. To a degree not seen in my lifetime, a consensus formed overnight—literally!—within the commentariat of a presidential nominee’s party that he must be replaced on the ballot.

 

The only near-precedent was the backlash to the Access Hollywood tape in 2016 and that was comparatively easy for Trump apologists to overcome. The recording in that episode was made years before the election and what Trump said on it amounted to a moral failure, not an intellectual one. Those who had already deluded themselves into believing that he could perform the duties of the presidency responsibly had no trouble assimilating the tape into that belief as ancient history and “locker-room talk.”

 

Biden’s debate failure was intellectual. It bore directly on his ability to do the basic tasks of his job for the rest of this year, never mind for four years beyond that. And there’s no way for Democrats to argue that he might improve over time, as someone who’s failed morally might. It’s all downhill for Joe.

 

There’s simply no spinning it so most Democrats aren’t pretending otherwise. “Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” Obama-Biden alumnus Ben Rhodes tweeted afterward. Another veteran of that White House, Jon Favreau, called it “a f—ing disaster. I think it was maybe the worst debate I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” The president’s own former communications director, Kate Bedingfield, pronounced it “really disappointing” and said Biden had failed to prove that he has the energy and stamina to govern.

 

Again, these are people who worked with or for him. For years.

 

Political coverage in the hours after the debate was a frenzy of panicked Democrats texting reporters to say that Something Must Be Done. “This race is effectively over,” one party lawmaker told NBC News. “No Labels and Dean Phillips won this debate,” a former Biden advisor said to Politico, recalling the longshot efforts on the center-left to sound the alarm about the president’s age before it was too late. Reached for comment by The Free Press, Phillips himself replied tersely, “Gandhi said to speak only when it improves upon the silence.”

 

“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or [he] dies,” one adviser to liberal donors said of Biden. “Otherwise we are f—ing dead.”

 

Finding themselves suddenly staring into the face of death, many Democrats and their fellow travelers in the commentariat have begun rallying around the particular Something that Must Be Done. Which brings us to the most ambitious form of cope—that Thursday night’s debacle might be good for the party in the long run.

 

***

 

The logic is simple. Biden is a freakishly weak incumbent who trailed Trump consistently in polling even before the debate. Yet Trump is a widely disliked demagogue who’s never earned as much as 47 percent in the national popular vote. Practically any Democrat except Biden would beat him like a drum. Now, lo and behold, Democrats have been given an ideal excuse to replace the president on the ticket.

 

“If Joe Biden were not the candidate, if there was another candidate, I think Donald Trump would be in deep trouble,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Thursday as the smoke cleared. Chatter about that possibility has begun in earnest within the party, apparently, with allies of potential nominees being lobbied privately by friends. Republicans are worried about the prospect too, with one source telling The Dispatch that “Trump loses” if there’s an 11th-hour switcheroo on the Democratic ticket.

 

Is that so?

 

Consider this: The American left is about to embark on the sort of recriminations that normally follow an electoral fiasco four months before Election Day.

 

I can’t remember that happening in any other presidential race. There were previous elections that devolved early into foregone conclusions, such as in 1984 and 1996, but those defeats were viewed as products of “political gravity.” An incumbent was on the ballot and the economy was looking up, ergo the challenger was doomed through no fault of his own. Walter Mondale and Bob Dole were seen less as hapless incompetents who’d bungled winnable races than as sacrificial lambs.

 

That’s not the situation this year. The Democratic Party understood from the jump that it had an enormous problem with the president. The president understood it too, even if he was too proud and pig-headed to admit it. Voters have expressed their alarm about his age and condition in too many polls to mention here, by margins rarely seen in modern American politics. Biden and his party did nothing.

 

Now, before we’ve even reached July, the Republican candidate looks poised to jog to victory. And not just any candidate but a cretin who plausibly might threaten the entire constitutional order.

 

If Democratic denialism ushers in a menagerie of fascists who might have been stopped by any non-demented nominee, it’ll be the most egregious case of political malpractice in American history. Some Biden voters are beside themselves about it today, understandably. Others will follow suit if the polls next week start to move in the direction we all expect. The left has paid a steep price over the last 15 years for its officials overstaying their time in office; as the bill now comes fully due, Democratic voters have four months to somehow shunt aside their rage about it and get motivated to vote for a man whom many have now no doubt concluded is unfit for office.

 

How are they supposed to do that when they’re furious at him and his campaign for having lied to them about his condition while he foolishly went about seeking another term? He’s gone from Trump-conquering hero to Trump-enabling villain in the span of a day.

 

“That’s why they need a brokered convention and a new nominee,” you might say. Oh? What makes you think Biden will make it easy for the party by standing aside for someone else?

 

Does this sound like a man who’s preparing to withdraw? Does this sound like a party establishment that’s preparing to pressure him to do so?

 

Apparently his campaign called an all-staff meeting on Friday afternoon to discuss The Situation. I expect that the president strode in there, told them all to buck up, and vowed that together they’d defeat Ronald Reagan this fall.

 

He’s not going to be replaced at the convention unless he allows himself to be. Democratic delegates won’t risk a catastrophic party split two months out from Election Day by dragging an incumbent president kicking and screaming off the ballot. If they choose someone else over his objections and that substitute loses to Trump, they’ll be scapegoated by the party rank-and-file for not having stuck with Biden. (Of course, if they do stick with Biden and he loses, they’ll be scapegoated for not having chosen someone else.)

 

That explains why Democratic lawmakers have so far declined to publicly call for him to bow out of the race post-debate. To say something like that would be to make an enemy of the president and of many voters who believe that he’s still their best option, warts and all. It would be seen as disloyal and demoralizing, teeing them up to be blamed for undermining faith in Biden if he goes on to lose. And if he goes on to win, the White House will never forget which fickle party leaders abandoned him in his hour of need.

 

You don’t move against the king unless you’re sure he’ll be deposed. And Biden won’t be deposed unless he wants to be.

 

There’s a very realistic possibility that he stupidly refuses to quit, his polls gradually degrade as numerous shaken Democratic voters peel off for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and far-left candidates, and his party finds itself relegated to also-ran status by October against … Donald Trump. Perhaps the looming certainty of a second Trump term would rally voters behind Democrats down ballot, at least, in hopes of providing a congressional check on his power. But it’s easy to imagine it going the other way: Demoralized liberals might end up staying home on Election Day, engineering a Republican wave in the House and Senate.

 

What if cooler heads prevail upon the president to stand aside and we get that brokered convention after all, though? That’s when the Axelrod plan comes into its own, right?

 

Again, I’m skeptical.

 

***

 

I’m trying to picture what an open convention would look like in the heat of August, in Chicago, with Hamasnik fanatics outside the building spoiling for a fight and tempers flaring inside the building as the game of thrones to succeed Biden turns cutthroat. There might be an actual body count. 

 

But lay that aside. Who’s the replacement if the president bows out? Kamala Harris?

 

We’ve been through that. Her favorability remains lower than Trump’s and Biden’s. If Democrats passed her over for someone who isn’t also black and a woman, it would be seen as an insult to one or both of those two important constituencies. And if they don’t pass her over because they fear offending those constituencies, they’ll almost certainly lose to Trump—possibly by a wider margin than Biden would.

 

“A vote for Biden is just a vote for the vice president,” said one Arizona debate-watcher who supported the president in 2020 to the Wall Street Journal last night. He did not say it enthusiastically.

 

Who else, then? Michelle Obama? She hates politics and has resisted grassroots pleas ad nauseam to rescue the party.

 

Gavin Newsom? A smug, unctuous progressive governor synonymous in the public imagination with California’s decline is not the Democratic savior.

 

Josh Shapiro? He’s been governor of Pennsylvania for less than 18 months. Ditto for Maryland’s Wes Moore.

 

Almost by default, you’re left with Gretchen Whitmer, who would at least probably deliver her home state of Michigan. (No small thing in this election.) Maybe pairing her with an African American running mate would blunt the racial politics of denying Harris the nomination.

 

But I question whether even she would be able to win at this point.

 

It’s a matter of expectations. Americans will spend most of the next two months coming to grips with the suddenly overwhelming likelihood that Donald Trump will be president again. Nearly half of them have already come to grips with it; Biden’s debate calamity will give an additional number of undecideds an opportunity to talk themselves into believing that, when you really think about it, Trump isn’t so bad. 

 

By the time a new Democratic nominee is chosen at the convention, a majority of voters will have rationalized preferring Trump. There’s no reason to think they’ll be easily moved off of that preference by a new candidate like Whitmer, of whom most will know next to nothing. Why would they abandon a known quantity like the former president at that point for an enigma being foisted on them by a party whose first choice turned out to be demented?

 

It’s not as if Whitmer is a world-beating charismatic retail phenomenon who’ll dazzle them on the stump. In fact, I suspect many voters would bear her and Democrats a grudge for the bait-and-switch the party pulled by swapping her in for Biden at the last second. They wouldn’t want to reward left-wing dirty pool with four more years of the presidency. And the irregularity with which Democrats chose their nominee might cement in their minds the perception that Donald J. Trump, authoritarian extraordinaire, is actually “the normalcy candidate” in this election.

 

I wouldn’t assume at this point that Democrats will succeed in replacing Biden even if the entire party, starting with the president, supports the idea. Republicans will use every legal means available to keep the wounded incumbent on the ballot. They might even succeed.

 

The long and short of it is this: I need a Canadian green card. (Call me, Justin.)

 

But it’s also this: Barring another campaign-upending event, a Trump victory might now be fully baked in.

 

Maybe not. Perhaps, if Biden is replaced in August, Democrats will collectively be so relieved and grateful for a new lease on political life that they’ll unite behind Whitmer or whoever. Staring into the face of death and surviving is a heck of a morale booster.

 

But things could still get worse for them. The president’s polls might slip enough to wound him badly yet not quite so much as to leave him a dead man walking, denying party leaders the excuse they need to find a new nominee. Picture a 49-42 Trump lead in national polling next week. Many liberals could rationalize how a Biden comeback maybe possibly conceivably might happen in a race like that. And many would. 

 

Or, to get darker than usual, a foreign malefactor who watched last night’s debate might take Biden’s condition as an invitation to behave aggressively. “Weakness” is an evergreen Republican critique of Democratic foreign policy but it’ll have special resonance for voters going forward if China, say, does something wacky before November. America isn’t going to reelect a man whose health is already a major national security risk.

 

As July 4 approaches, we find ourselves in a world in which Trump’s odds of reclaiming the presidency are higher than they’ve ever been while the Vichyists abroad are poised to make historic gains at the polls. 2024 isn’t the beginning of the end for post-liberalism, it’s the end of the beginning.

It’s Worse Than That

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

The near-universal horror that Joe Biden’s debate performance inspired among political observers has revolved primarily around his obvious decrepitude evinced by his senior moments, exhausted voice, and feeble body language. But, with apologies to my former Commentary colleague Abe Greenwald for borrowing his catchphrase, it’s worse than that. The optics of this spectacle were only as bad as its more substantive movements. Even Biden’s rare flashes of cogency were no less bewildering than his stammering forgetfulness or the stupefied expression the president wore in periods of reprieve.

 

“The truth is, I’m the only president this century — this decade — that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did,” the president insisted with all apparent sincerity. That is not “the truth.” It is, at best, an egregious memory lapse, although that is in no way exculpatory.

 

Thirteen U.S. service personnel were killed in the attack on Abbey Gate at the Kabul Airport due, in no small measure, to the slapdash manner in which U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was conceived and executed. In January of this year, two Navy SEALs were lost off the coast of Somalia, interdicting a shipment of Iranian-made weapons to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. That, too, was a mission necessitated by the president’s bizarre tolerance for Houthi attacks on commercial shipping and allied naval traffic in the region. Later that month, three American troops were killed and scores more wounded in a Shiite militia attack on a U.S. outpost in Jordan. It was the most successful attack in an Iran-backed campaign of region-wide violence targeting U.S. forces that did not produce a kinetic response from the president until American lives were lost.

 

Joe Biden gave the orders that resulted in the deaths of these troops — orders that are certainly justifiable but for which the president is obliged to take responsibility. Indeed, in some instances, Biden himself received the caskets of these fallen soldiers when they returned to U.S. soil. Does the president remember that? We cannot be sure he does.

 

Biden’s faulty memory notwithstanding, the disrespect his assertion showed the families of those troops, to say nothing of every other service member, past and present, their families, and patriotic Americans writ large, is inexcusable. The president and the White House are obligated to apologetically correct the record.

 

That wasn’t Biden’s only gaffe. When CNN’s moderators lobbed him a layup question on abortion — a subject so central to the Democratic Party’s messaging that Biden should have been able to stuff it in the hoop without breaking a sweat — the president somehow managed to indict his own administration’s lethargy. The blizzard of half-coherent thoughts that Biden let loose in his response to that question defies transcription, but CNN made an admirable attempt:

 

Look, there’s so many young women who have been — including a young woman who just was murdered and he — he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a — by — by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their — by their in-laws, by their — by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by — just — it’s just — it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.

 

In answering a question designed to highlight one of the Democratic Party’s strongest issues with the prospective voting population, the future of abortion rights in the post-Dobbs environment, Biden pivoted without solicitation to one of the Democratic Party’s biggest liabilities: illegal immigration.

 

Indeed, he appeared to make the case that America needs a lax abortion regime because there are so many undocumented rapists about. That menace is compounded by the fact that American women are routinely threatened with sexual assault by their spouses, their spouses’ families, and their siblings. They can even become forcibly impregnated by their “sisters,” although we would need a gender-studies major to explain to us how.

 

Speaking of immigration, did you know that Biden had somehow “changed the law,” assuming extraconstitutional legislative powers in the process? That was the president’s claim, anyway. “I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally,” Biden insisted. “And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the — the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”

 

That was Biden’s attempt to wield the compromise legislation negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford, which failed due to Donald Trump’s opposition to the measure, as a cudgel against the GOP. When it comes to Biden’s reckless border policies, deflecting the issue onto the Republicans and alleging that they prefer the problem to its solution is the only arrow in the Democratic Party’s quiver. And Biden blew it.

 

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said one comically timed beat after Biden concluded his thought. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.” Tough but fair.

 

A number of factors contributed to the outburst of Democratic panic over Biden’s obvious infirmities at the conclusion of last night’s debate, not the least of which was their pent-up frustration over having to suppress their instincts for fear of offending the White House. The permission provided by the spectacle we all witnessed partly explains the sudden outbreak of Democratic candor. But that reaction is also likely attributable to the fact that down-ballot Democrats cannot run successfully in competitive states and districts if the top of the ticket cannot stick the landing on the issues.

 

From the easy stuff (abortion) to thornier matters (Biden’s failed experiment in American retrenchment), the president appears at sea. And when he opens his mouth, he makes life for down-ballot Democrats more difficult. Given those circumstances, you’d be panicking, too.

The Administrative State Is Put Back in Its Constitutional Place

National Review Online

Saturday, June 29, 2024

 

Scarcely anything was more central to the people who framed our Constitution than the separation of powers. John Adams, in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, wrote that it was designed “to the end it may be a government of laws, and not of men.” It was a topic upon which the men who gathered at Philadelphia in 1787 were effectively unanimous, having already incorporated it in the constitutions of their several states. Even more so than federalism, individual rights, or enumerated and limited powers, it was the separation of lawmaking, law-enforcing, and law-interpreting powers that they saw as the safeguard against the erosion of all the other elements of the constitutional system. And at the tip of the spear of the law, they placed the jury system, giving a share of the judicial power to ordinary citizens.

 

This system has always had its critics. The framers of the Confederate constitution of 1861 watered it down in their own version. Woodrow Wilson and other Prussian-inspired intellectuals thought it was old-fashioned, inefficient, and an obstacle to rule by modern experts. Wilson’s heirs to this day defend the bureaucratic administrative state, which interprets its own laws, runs its own courts, and is insulated from removal by the executive.

 

Americans in many walks of life have found themselves ensnared in these institutions, which are frequently immune to elections and unconstrained by written law. That includes the fishermen in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, who found themselves saddled with the cost of regulatory monitors traveling on their fishing boats — even though Congress never passed a law making them pay that cost.

 

The Supreme Court has struck a series of powerful blows against this system. In SEC v. Jarkesy, it ruled that the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial in civil cases cannot be evaded in cases brought by a government agency simply by the expedient of assigning them to an administrative law judge employed by the same agency. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, it struck down the Chevron doctrine, which allowed agencies not only to interpret ambiguities in their own statutes but to demand that courts defer to those interpretations.

 

Ending Chevron has been a long-term project of constitutionalists. The doctrine, minted only in the mid 1980s, never sat comfortably with the traditional power of the judiciary to, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, “say what the law is.” Nor was it consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946, which provided that a court reviewing agency action must “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret” the relevant “statutory provisions.”

 

Neither of these decisions prevented the agencies from exercising powers explicitly granted by Congress, or from pursuing cases that could stand up in court. So the alarms about crippling administrative power are overstated. Nor were these decisions, as the Court’s liberals would have it, a judicial “power grab.” Jarkesy requires judges to share power with juries, and Loper Bright restores the proper primacy of Congress. And the Court has taken this course while ruling, in Erlinger v. United States, that criminal sentencing judges must also yield to juries the power to find facts that increase a sentence.

 

The Court also brushed back an overweening Environmental Protection Agency rule, in Ohio v. EPA, that ran roughshod over a congressional design to share responsibility for air quality between the EPA and the states. And it has one further case left, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, that could give regulated parties more time to bring challenges to unlawful rules.

 

All of this is not only good but necessary and healthy for a democratic and constitutional system. If it provokes in Congress the habit of writing laws, and in agencies the habit of obeying them, all the better. Agencies are but creatures of law, and law is but a creature of the sovereign people’s right to self-government — a government of laws, and not of men.

The Bubble Bursts

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

I’m pretty pissed. 

 

Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have been talking a great deal about “our democracy” and Donald Trump’s threat to it.

 

I agree with some, not all, of it (though I despise the phrase “our democracy”). Or to be more specific, I think it’s correct to be concerned about the damage Donald Trump might do to America’s democratic character and institutions. But I don’t necessarily agree with their versions of that argument or the scenarios they think might be most likely. 

 

But who cares? My view of the threat isn’t relevant. Joe Biden, his team, his most ardent supporters are convinced—and quite self-righteous about it—that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. But that conviction does not extend to doing everything they can to beat Donald Trump. 

 

How do I know this? Because of what we saw last night.  They knew Biden was like this. Maybe not all the time. I’m sure Biden has greater moments of lucidity and vigor. But they knew he’s like this often. And they proceeded with this debacle anyway. 

 

Look, I get how life works with this kind of stuff. Personal loyalty, inertia, misplaced optimism, love of power and the sense of entitlement that comes with it, the confusion of what is with what ought to be, and old-fashioned denialism all played obvious roles here. I can lay out the explanations all day long. None of them amount to excuses. 

 

Either you mean it when you say something is an existential threat or you don’t. If we were at war with China—or alien lizard people—and you saw that man last night, you wouldn’t say “let’s roll the dice” with him. Well, preventing a war with China is important, too. And, if Democrats are to be believed, saving democracy is important as well. And that requires explaining to Joe Biden—and Kamala Harris—that their egos and interests are not as important as what’s at stake. I’m not arguing for coups, or any other destroy-the-village-to-save-it measures. I’m asking for the requisite patriotism, republican stewardship, and seriousness the times require. 

 

I have a fairly limitless supply of anger and contempt for the Republicans who have happily paved the way for Donald Trump. But the one thing you can’t really say about the vast majority of them is that they think Trump is an existential threat to democracy. Some may think—cynically and unforgivably—that he’s merely a possible threat to democracy. Some may think that he’ll bruise the peach of democracy, but it will still be edible after he’s gone. Some may believe there’s only a 5 percent chance he’ll behave like a dictator, and they’re willing to roll the dice on that, if doing otherwise means losing a primary or a TV gig. But most think all of this democracy stuff is overblown or partisan fakery. 

 

The Democrats don’t. So, while we can blame Republicans for making Donald Trump a problem, that doesn’t let Democrats off the hook for failing to take the problem—as they see it!—seriously.

 

Yesterday (before the debate), my American Enterprise Institute colleague Ruy Teixeira—who has been the Democratic Party’s equivalent of the dude screaming, “To serve man! It’s a cookbook!” for a while—had an excellent piece titled “No, Democracy is *Not* on the Ballot.” After running through how the “Vote Biden to Save Democracy” messaging has failed utterly, according to a slew of polls, he writes:

 

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden and his campaign are unduly influenced by what they believe should be true rather than what is true. They see Trump as an unspeakably evil man who is an existential threat to democracy and can’t imagine why that view wouldn’t be everybody’s and drive their vote inexorably toward Biden. But it isn’t and the sooner they realize that, the better their chances of actually beating the Bad Orange Man.

 

The Biden campaign has been like the ugly American who thinks foreigners will understand English if he just speaks it louder. Again, I’m open to that argument. But the voters Biden needs to win just aren’t. So if they actually believed what they were saying, they would run a campaign—and a candidate—who is up to the job and can win. 

 

When the reality of Joe Biden’s unfitness is pointed out to them, the response has been, until last night, to deny it and to attack the people who say what Biden’s defenders already know. They get caught up in a tautology of their own making. Biden has to run because Trump must be defeated. Trump has to be defeated, so Biden has to run. It’s a bit like saying we have to put out the fire, but all we have is gasoline to douse it. Point out that gas doesn’t put out fires and you get called pro-fire. 

 

Readers know—and are probably tired of hearing it from me—that I think the parties are too weak. So I get that the Democratic Party lacks the mechanisms, never mind the will, to do what is in its own best interests and the country’s. The Republican Party has the same problems. But you would think that if they actually believed this stuff, they’d work the problem rather than just glide along on autopilot, hawking dog food the dogs won’t eat. 

 

Now, I think part of the problem, as I’ve written countless times now, is that progressives live in a bubble. Because they don’t know anyone who disagrees with their arguments—at least not anyone they don’t think is a deplorable Neanderthal—the voters must be like them too. The problem with this is there is just a mountain of data—from polls, election returns, etc.—responsible party leaders and campaign professionals have plenty of access to, that says otherwise. But if we just shout “democracy” louder that will change.

 

Trumpists have lived in a similar bubble, but that doesn’t mean anything right now because they’re winning. 

 

I’ve spent a lot of time writing in eggheady terms about the nature of democracy and autocracy, the problems of “post-liberalism” on the left and the right. I like that stuff. More importantly, I think our problems are serious enough to write seriously about such things. The response from many readers has been disappointment with me that I don’t bring the funny and irreverent stuff anymore. What happened to “Fun Jonah?” “Why so serious?” And all that. 

 

I have explanations for all that, starting with—again—the seriousness of the problems we face. 

 

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe mockery, juvenile jocularity, and unserious language is best suited for these unserious times?

 

To that end, let’s talk about Benjamin Franklin. Serious Jonah might invoke Franklin’s famous response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” 

 

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

 

Franklin’s hedge was historically literate. Republics had a miserable record of failure going back to Ancient Rome, Serious Jonah might note and then explore why, say, the Republic of Venice collapsed. 

 

But maybe we should instead talk about Ben Franklin’s less well-known epigram, “Fart Proudly.” Also known as his “A Letter to a Royal Academy about farting,”  Franklin made a Swiftian case for the Royal Academy of Brussels to study how changes in diet could improve the odor of flatulence. A famously practical man, he was mocking the pretentiousness of scholars and experts. 

 

So, as Mel Brooks probably said to his team when writing Blazing Saddles, let’s stay on farts. When Trump’s hand-picked candidates got shellacked in the midterms—in 2018 and 2022—I would joke that the right’s bubble problem was the result of too many conservative pundits and Republican politicians getting high on Fox News greenroom farts.  There’s a similar phenomenon at MSNBC, where all day long they have panels of people in violent agreement about what Americans ought to care about, not realizing how few people share, or care about, their opinions. 

 

So much of our political discourse these days amounts to a kind of farting from people who’ve gone nose-blind to it. The MAGA crowd talks endlessly about the threat of “woke-communism,” “critical race theory,” and other scary-sounding intellectual terms and the need to pursue “nationalism” to beat back the Marxist menace. The hard progressive left passes similar wind about “white supremacy,” “Christian nationalism,” and “authoritarianism.” 

 

Now I think all of these things can be very serious things requiring very serious responses. But most of the people cutting this cheese have no serious grasp of any of it. All they know is that their enemies are serious and that justifies mimicking their tactics in the other direction. They steal elections, so we need to steal the election to stop them from stealing the election. They “weaponize” the justice system so we should weaponize it to stop them—and punish them. They lie, so we should lie. They overlook the unfitness and dangers of their candidates, so we have to do likewise. They pretend to be outraged so we should pretend to be outraged, too.  Everyone is shrieking that if you smelt it, you dealt it. It’s like an artillery war of flatuosity. 

 

This pungent discourse creates a malodorous fog that repels most normal people. The din of the thunderous trouser trumpets leads people to tune out the windy debate. The air becomes so saturated with this rhetorical methane, many people lose sight of the fact that some people will actually believe this gaseous ejecta is real. Working on such assumptions can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and one spark can ignite it. 

 

The problem with farting for a living is that eventually you will force the issue to the point where you issue something more than hot air.  Live by the fart, die by the leaky balloon knot. That is what is happening to our politics. Rather than do right, the right way, our leaders—and their followers—just keep saying “pull my finger” until they collectively sh-t the bed of “our democracy.” 

 

I apologize that this is not in fact all that funny. But then again, none of this is actually very funny. 

We Told You So, You Fools

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

Allow me to share with you a well-known (albeit semi-apocryphal) story about the great Soviet historian Robert Conquest. His work The Great Terror — a thoroughly well-documented chronicle of the vast and horrific extent of the Stalinist purges of the mid 1930s — hit like a lightning bolt when it was first published in 1968.

 

That year witnessed the peak of radical political protest in Europe and America alike, all tinged rather uncoincidentally with a pro-Soviet and Marxist slant, so Conquest’s book — revealing Soviet Russia’s heretofore concealed slaughter of millions for purposes of political control — was roundly denounced in all the politically fashionable quarters of academia; he himself was subjected to reams of professional scorn by bien-pensants.

 

In 1990, as he prepared an updated version — thoroughly revised with new data emerging from the collapse of East Germany and from the thawing (and soon to be defunct) Soviet archives — he wondered if he should give it a new subtitle to indicate the updated state of historical knowledge. His good friend, the author Kingsley Amis, offered a suggestion: “I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”

 

Which is pretty much how I and everyone else here at National Review feel right now when it comes to the issue of Joe Biden’s age and accelerating decrepitude. We told you so. I’m not talking about you the reader, I’m speaking to those in the media (who knew better, as insiders) as well as the Democratic partisans who have happily gaslighted us all whenever someone deigned to point out that Biden was a mouldering remnant of what he once was in the 1990s. (This abruptly ended in late 2023, when polling data made it clear that all their attempts to suppress discussion about Biden’s age had failed to prevent voters from rating it among their highest concerns.) From that point onward, the Democratic strategy was pure “prevent defense” — keep Biden out of sight and angrily work the refs in the corridors of elite media who dare to notice.

 

How’s that working out for them now? To be honest, I don’t know what amuses me more: watching Democrats vomit up bricks while panickedly exploring whether they can replace Biden, or imagining that plummeting feeling in every Democrat politician’s gut when it finally sinks in that Joe Biden will not allow himself to be replaced. Remember the entire “cheap fakes” PR push from media partisans for Biden? Remember how vigorously the White House pushed it as a counter to voter concerns about Biden’s decay? I sure do because that, my friends, was only ten days ago. Spare a moment’s professional pity for the luckless partisans who sweated so hard to craft such a focused media initiative, attempting to answer fears about Biden’s senility by dismissing them as cheap and fake . . . only to see Biden immediately chime in with the most costly and authentic public-speaking disaster in modern presidential history.

 

But of course Biden’s slippage has been obvious for years — as noted in the piece above, I concluded as far back as summer 2021 that Biden was obviously too senile to run a second time, only to be told I was a fool. So if you thought I would pass up the opportunity to take a bitterly poisonous victory lap about all this, then you must not realize how capable my heart is of pure spite. The rest of us here might not be quite so angry, but I sure am, and I want to point out that we’ve been sounding the alarm — a genuine alarm, not merely the surly bray of partisanship — for years now, and with increasing frequency in recent months as his slide (or is it merely his forced visibility?) has increased. Here I am nearly a year ago, pointing out that Joe Biden’s mental frailty made it very possible for Trump to win. Why, poor Charlie Cooke nearly had an aneurysm about it this morning all over the page, and he’s still so apopleptic that we’re considering paying for an on-site EMT as a preventative measure.

 

And why not? Ladies and gentlemen, we are trapped. Perhaps you think Trump will make a fine commander in chief — I envy your optimism, if nothing else — but whether you do or not, the entire world now knows that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the job. I joked with my wife last night that this would be a great time for China to invade Taiwan, and it was the blackest sort of “knock on wood” humor — a ward against dark things. Because regardless of whether Joe Biden (God forbid) is elected to another four-year term as president and then dies in office (with Kamala Harris living out Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s post-Seinfeld acting career), he is still our president for the next half a year regardless.