By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday,
October 28, 2024
To
no one’s great surprise, the New York Times has endorsed
Kamala Harris for president. The Washington Post isn’t
endorsing anybody. The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times quit
in a snit when her owners told her she couldn’t endorse anybody. (The Los
Angeles Times was going to endorse Harris.) The nice liberals in Hamtramck,
Michigan, are miffed that the thousands of Muslim immigrants they sought to
move to their community have the sort of political and social views one often
finds among Muslim immigrants, and don’t much care for gay pride flags, and
elected a Yemeni immigrant mayor who has just
endorsed Donald Trump.
(J.D.
Vance et al. must be relieved: In Yemen, people don’t eat dogs—dogs eat people.)
I
like endorsements. I like it when newspapers and magazines make endorsements,
though sometimes it is more interesting when they withhold endorsements or when
they play against type. National Review, for example, which was long
edited by people who understood the difference between conservatism and merely
voting Republican, has declined to endorse Republican presidential candidates
more often than you might have expected and often has declined to make an
endorsement in Republican presidential primaries—including in 1980, that
hallmark year. Here at The Dispatch, where we discourage team
spirit as a political force, there won’t be an endorsement for 2024—we do not
publish many editorials in general and maintain a no-endorsement policy.
“Newspapers
make associations, and associations make newspapers,” as Alexis de Tocqueville
observed. In the heyday of print journalism, most newspapers either were
explicitly partisan or had partisan roots—there’s a reason so many American
newspapers had names such as the Sherman Daily
Democrat and the Springfield Republican. Such names have
limitations, of course: Back when it was arguably the nation’s leading
libertarian (and even Libertarian) newspaper, the Orange County Register
kept its neutral-sounding name. The Economist, which calls itself a
newspaper even though it comes in what we would call a “magazine” format, has
its roots in the periodicals published by the Anti-Corn Law League. (If ever I
start a political party, I’m not going to call it Conservative or Whig or Classical
Liberal or anything like that—I’m going to call it the Anti-Corn Law League.
Take that, ethanol bastards.) Parties and factions and associations make
newspapers—for many, many years, they made the best newspapers.
The
idea of the “objective” and dispassionate newspaper is a relatively new one.
You can get one earful of this stuff from me and the other earful from Jonah
Goldberg, but I’ll stick to the short version: Beginning in the 19th
century, science became associated—for good reason—with great prestige,
and figures active in many different fields began to look for ways to grab hold
of some of that prestige and rub it all over themselves and their work. In the
mid-19th century, you get Karl Marx insisting that his ideas result
from applying the principles of science to social affairs. Later in the 19th
century, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management,” first applied to
factories and manufacturing processes, inspired political thinkers to dream up
ways to apply the idea to politics and to society at large, producing the
progressive mania for standardization and empiricism (including erroneous
empiricism) that is still very much with us, along with the progressive
pretense that their movement is beyond ideology and instead advocates only
“what works.”
These
ideas really reached their apex in the United States in the years immediately
after World War II, when the U.S. government’s successful and pride-inspiring
mobilization of the entire nation in a moral crusade—along with the more or
less mythical role of economic theorists in ending the Great Depression—created
a kind of template for managing national and human affairs through a
partnership among dispassionate scientists, rationally managed industrial
works, and capable, public-minded administrators in a system subject to
empirical review and guidance. (That is what corporatism really means.)
Newspaper editors, ever vulnerable to voguish intellectualism, picked up the
scientific pretense, too. The ascendance of television news and the treatment
of the broadcast airwaves as a public trust ensured that aspirations toward
“neutrality” and “objectivity” became a kind of official media ideology, even
as the news was in real life dominated by dotty partisan crackpots such as
Walter Cronkite.
Objectivity
is overrated. There is a lot of journalism out there that aims for objectivity
but that is, in fact, bad and incompetent journalism. This is, or was, true of
many small-town newspapers, which is one reason, among many, there are so few
of them left. The drudgery of reading the absurdly boring (but simultaneously
self-important) prose one encounters on the news pages of the New York Times
and the Washington Post is a product of that same misbegotten pursuit of
scientific-ish objectivity. And, of course, objectivity can be a cover for bias
and advocacy, too: Seven out of every 10 “experts say” stories you’ve ever read
in an American newspaper were carefully constructed to support a predetermined
conclusion. By contrast, one may get more point-of-view from the explicitly
partisan newspapers of the United Kingdom, Europe, or India, but one also gets
a lot more news and information out of them—and a good deal more reading
pleasure, too. The thing to aim for in journalism isn’t a false impression of
science-y “objectivity” but excellence. To take one example: There never
has been much doubt about what kind of politics they have over at Mother
Jones, but, at its peak, the magazine did excellent investigatory work.
There was a time when conservatives read Mother Jones, The Nation,
The New Republic, etc., and when liberals read National
Review or The American Spectator, because there was good
and interesting stuff to read in them.
And
there was no “objectivity” at all.
I
don’t want to write a long history of Where Everything Went Wrong, but there
was a time when partisan journalists cared more about being journalists than
about being partisans, and when the political world, not yet straitened by
neurotic tribalism, made room for complicated figures such as Nat Hentoff and
Joan Didion. But we live in a time of neurotic political tribalism, which leads
journalists to subordinate their professional obligations to their rootin’
interest in one team or another. The era of the honest partisan is, I
fear, behind us, and, instead, we have entered a period in which partisan
journalists act like they are running for Congress, fretting about the
“constituency” they “represent.” I have lost count of how many times I have
been told by somebody who doesn’t understand what I do for a living that I
“don’t speak for anybody.” Of course I don’t. I’m not running for
office. I don’t want your vote. I’m not your friend or your advocate or your
tribune. I speak to,
not for.
At
The Dispatch, we forgo endorsements for reasons related to all
that. I don’t think you can say the same for the Los Angeles Times or
the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times is owned by people who
don’t know what a newspaper is for, and the Washington Post is owned by
Jeff Bezos, every now and then the richest man in the world, who constantly
raises in my mind one question: What is the point in having “F—K YOU!” money if
you’re never willing to actually say “F—K YOU!”? Goodness knows what motivates
Bezos these days—it’s not like he’s going to run out of whatever human-blood
analog he feeds to Audrey
II.
There
are all kinds of people with fat stacks of Silicon Valley gazillionaire money
doing the dilettante thing in the American media. Every reporter who ever has
complained about working for a publisher who only cares about making money has
never worked for the kind who cares about everything except making money—the
social climbers and would-be kingmakers and the bored divorcees of Very High
Tech and all those people who were very good at selling real estate or
computers or something and who think that this makes them equally good at
everything else. You’d think that the kind of publisher who doesn’t have to
worry too much about making money would be the kind who could do courageous and
interesting things. But that isn’t often the case.
That
reminds me of … something! It’s right on the tip of my tongue.
But,
moving on …
And
Furthermore …
I
am not a huge Jeffrey Goldberg fan. I think he’s a punk.
But
I don’t think he makes things up.
Goldberg,
the editor of The Atlantic—who once hired me as a staff writer
and then fired me a few days later (before I’d even done any real work) because
some nobodies you’ve never heard of complained that my words made them feel
“unsafe”—has
a story that, while not exactly a blockbuster, is an embarrassment for
Donald Trump and his campaign. A few of the details: After promising to pay for
a murdered U.S. soldier’s funeral, Trump balked when presented with the bill,
saying “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f—ing Mexican,” and directed his
people to refuse to pay; on another occasion, he complained: “I need the kind
of generals that Hitler had, people who were totally loyal to him, that follow
orders.”
The
first item, I’m willing to believe. But the second item in particular has the
savor of truth about it—because Trump is an ignoramus and, as such, probably
does not know that Adolf Hitler’s senior military officers famously plotted
against him, planning to remove him from power and to kill him if necessary.
Claus von Stauffenberg personally planted a bomb intended to kill Hitler but
failed to get the job done; other major conspirators against Hitler included
Gen. Friedrich Olbricht and Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow; even Field Marshal
Erwin Rommel gave his blessing to killing Hitler, though he did not personally
participate in the assassination plot.
So,
Trump did have military and national-security leaders who had something
in common with Hitler’s generals: They believed him to be a dangerous
incompetent and a threat to the well-being of the country and its people. You
know their names: Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s
chief of staff, says Trump is a “fascist” who “certainly prefers the dictator
approach to government.” Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of
defense, says Trump is a “threat to democracy.” Former Trump National Security
Adviser John Bolton calls Trump “unfit to be president.” Former Vice President
Mike Pence refuses to support Trump in 2024. Mark Milley, who served under
Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Trump is “a fascist to the
core” and “the most dangerous person in this country.” James Mattis, a retired
Marine Corps general who served as secretary of defense under Trump, says he
concurs with Milley’s judgment: “The threat is high,” he says. H.R. McMaster, a
retired Army lieutenant general who served as national security adviser under
Trump, calls Trump a man whose vanity caused him to “abandon his oath to
‘support and defend the Constitution.’” The
list is long—and that’s just what’s been said in public.
Trump
has a well-documented record of personal cowardice and dishonesty. But Trump
and his knee-walking enablers expect us to believe that these career military
men—men with impressive records of service and courage—simply are sore at Trump
because he fired them or wasn’t impressed with their performance. Funny thing:
Trump insists that he is a man with an unmatched eye for talent, for attracting
“the best people.” And he did have some good people serve in his
administration—and the ones who knew him best and worked most closely with him
are out there saying he is a fascist and would-be dictator who has no business
being in the White House.
Trump
is, as everybody who pays any attention knows, a serial liar, one whose lies
are echoed and amplified by other serial liars, including by figures such as
Mark Meadows, a dishonorable man in whom the habit of dishonesty is embedded
bone-deep. Meadows, a career Trump sycophant and the last chief of staff of
Trump’s administration, has made quite an impression on a few of my Dispatch
colleagues who have worked with him over the years: “He’s an eager and willing
liar on matters large and small and has been for as long as I’ve known him,”
says Dispatch Editor Steve Hayes. Meadows’ own
publisher sued him over baloney claims about the 2024 election he put in a
book and then denied when questioned under oath—that’s the guy out there saying
Trump never said what he’s quoted as saying.
Carrion-eating
birds of a feather and all that.
This
is the guy Republicans have chosen. And there isn’t anything in The Atlantic
piece that is very hard to believe. Trump and Meadows, on the other hand—how
and why would anybody believe anything they say? Their contempt for the truth
is almost as profound as their contempt for the rubes who give them their votes
and their money.
I
hope I still make Jeffrey Goldberg feel unsafe—he damned well should.
But
I don’t think he makes stuff up.
You
will, from time to time, hear from people who cast doubt on one—or all—of those
accounts. In nine cases out of 10, you will be hearing this from someone who
either expects an appointment or who is no more than one degree of separation
removed from someone expecting an appointment in the next Trump administration,
should there be one. My advice: Don’t trust them. I have my doubts about people
who worked for the Trump administration the last time around—I simply do not
see how I could trust, or think of as honorable, someone who seeks to serve in
a new Trump administration.
I
know I’ll hear from some friends about that last statement. Quod scripsi,
scripsi.
In
fact: Quod scripsi, scribetis. In time.
Words
About Words
Well,
no, not exactly. Headline: “Imprisoned
climate protester speaks out.” Roger Hallam is, indeed, both imprisoned and
a climate protester, but he isn’t imprisoned (in the United Kingdom) for being
a climate protester. He is imprisoned under British public nuisance laws for
disrupting traffic on the M25 motorway for four days. He may be a sous chef,
too, for all I know, but “imprisoned sous chef” wouldn’t tell you what you need
to know.
And,
since I keep getting requests to revisit “begging the question” every couple of
weeks, here’s
this from Slate:
In this fraught political moment, there are
few things more jarring than the experience of watching Saturday Night Live
in a swing state. In commercial breaks swollen with ominous attack ads, the
country teeters on the brink: Liberal Kamala Harris lets killers go free, and
Donald Trump is handing out tax breaks for his billionaire pals. But when the
cameras go live in Studio 8H, the stakes plummet. We’re no longer facing the
most consequential election of our lifetimes, a life-and-death battle where
democracy and the country’s very existence hang in the balance. We’re
watching a spectacle staged for our bemused enjoyment, a contest between
faintly and not-so-faintly ridiculous figures in which the only real casualties
are dignity and sense. It’s not a struggle. It’s a circus.
Emphasis
mine.
We
should consider the possibility that SNL has the more accurate
assessment, that we are not, in fact, facing an existential national
crisis. Former game-show host Donald Trump is a poisonous buffoon and a
would-be dictator, but, though he has the capacity to do a lot of lasting
damage and to cause a lot of chaos, it probably is not the case that “democracy
and the country’s very existence hang in the balance.” Very likely our ailing
republic will limp along on its current path toward combining the
least-attractive features of democracy with the least-useful qualities of soft
authoritarianism. Even if things get very bad, which I think is a real
possibility—e.g., it’s 2027, Trump has been impeached for a third time and
finally convicted but refuses to leave office and is holed up in the White
House surrounded by 15,000 armed J6 types—the country is unlikely to cease
to exist. Words mean things.
And
from Slate, another
piece that, as usual, isn’t quite true:
That case, Garland v. VanDerStok, is
partly a cautionary tale about pride before the fall. Starting around 2017,
online gun companies scaled up a new business model: selling kits directly to
consumers with all the parts needed to assemble a functioning firearm.
Customers could purchase the gun without a background check and put it together
in as little as 20 minutes with the help of a YouTube video; the resulting
firearm would have no serial number, rendering it untraceable by law
enforcement.
Under
U.S. law, selling somebody a complete firearm in parts is the same as selling
them a firearm. That’s the whole question regarding current ATF regulations:
How complete does a particular part (the frame or receiver) have to be before
it counts as a gun? The answer will necessarily be arbitrary, but, whatever it
ends up being, it should not be the ATF making the decision—it should be
Congress. The laws should be made by the lawmakers.
In
Other News …
In
the New York Times, our old friend streitbare Demokratie, or
“militant democracy.”
There are four other strategies for fending
off authoritarian threats from within. One of these is a far more muscular
approach, known as militant or defensive democracy. Born in West Germany as a
response to Europe’s democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy
approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against
antidemocratic forces. Haunted by the experience of Hitler’s rise to power via
the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and
administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw
“anti-constitutional” speech, groups and parties. In the 1950s, these tools
were used to ban both a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party. Today,
German authorities are investigating the far-right Alternative for Germany, or
AfD.
Obviously, there are significant drawbacks
and risks to empowering public officials to bar candidates or parties from
elections. Candidate disqualification distorts electoral competition and
restricts voter choice. Worse, the tools of militant democracy are easily
abused by politicians seeking to sideline their rivals, as has occurred with
some frequency in Latin America.
Nevertheless, most contemporary democracies
employ elements of militant democracy. In South Korea, the Constitutional Court
banned the Unified Progressive Party in 2014 because it deemed the party’s
pro-North Korean views to be antidemocratic. In Brazil, the Supreme Electoral
Court has the authority to bar politicians convicted of corruption and other
crimes from running for office, and a 2021 democracy protection law made it a
crime — punishable by up to 12 years in prison — to attempt to overthrow a democratic
government. Last year a former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who, like Mr. Trump,
tried to discredit and then overturn an election, was
barred from public office for eight years.
I
would not like to emulate the German system, but I understand why they employ
it.
The
United States already places real limits on democracy per se: The Bill of
Rights, for instance, is a list of settled questions, “America’s Brief List of
Very Important Things You Idiots Don’t Really Get to Vote On.” Federalism is
another check on overweening government—and more federalism would be better.
Anti-majoritarian features of our constitutional order—the Senate, the
Electoral College, etc.—also limit democracy. American practice puts limits on
what the state can do, even when a majority supports a particular policy.
American
practice is different from, say, German practice and the more general European
practice, in important ways: For one thing, one of the limits on democracy we
employ is liberalism, with non-negotiable freedoms. In much of Europe,
the liberties themselves are up for grabs. In Austria, for example, the
government can ban political books and put nonconforming booksellers in prison
for dealing in verboten texts. Germany from time to time bans political
parties and prohibits would-be candidates from standing for office. An
important difference is that in the United States, the limits on democracy are
constitutional and general, whereas in European practice often involves
bureaucrats or jurists making case-by-case decisions about particular books,
parties, or candidates. American practice limits the power of the state and its
functionaries; European practice enlarges the power of the state and its
functionaries.
And
maybe that works well enough if you have the political culture of Switzerland
or Sweden or Denmark. In the United States, creating new powers to exclude
candidates and parties simply means loading up a gun without much thought as to
who is going to be holding that gun in four years or eight.
The
genius of the traditional American system is that it uses reliable human
factors—such as ambition, jealousy, and competitiveness—as part of a system
designed to police itself without the need for some committee somewhere to
decide whether a man with bad ideas has ideas so bad that he should be
prohibited from putting himself in front of the voters. (We did once have
political parties to do some of that sort of thing, and that gatekeeping
function is sorely missed.) The American political tradition hopes with John
Adams for a virtuous and religious people but plans with James Madison for the
ordinary kind.
“Militant
democracy” is a very dangerous idea in the current American context, which has
a number of destructive features—partisan tribalism, political antinomianism,
procedural maximalism—that would tend to make what works for many European
countries into a political weapon that simply could not be wielded responsibly
by American officeholders. The very instruments meant to keep out dangerous
demagogues such as Donald Trump would end up being cudgels in the hands of
dangerous demagogues such as Donald Trump.
Economics
for English Majors
This
Wall Street Journal report on pensions for presidents and vice
presidents is, as far as I know, entirely accurate and entirely beside the
point.
In
other economics news: Behold, the “Trump trade.” Short on Treasury bonds, long
and leveraged on equities.
[Trump’s] policies have drawn higher
estimates of government debt from economists. One nonpartisan group, for
instance, has projected that Mr. Trump’s platform would lead
to an additional $7.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt issuance over a decade
— more than twice its estimate for Ms. Harris’s policies.
“Trump wins, you short bonds”—bet that their
value will fall and yields will rise further—and “lever up” on stocks, said
David Cervantes, the founder of Pinebrook Capital, an asset management firm. He
is a believer in what has come to be called the “Trump trade” in finance: a bet
that Mr. Trump’s assuming power would boost inflation and interest rates but
might also juice corporate earnings in the near term.
The
“Trump trade” is based on the assumption that Donald Trump will prove to be
even more fiscally irresponsible than Kamala Harris and that he might even
succeed in putting some of his irresponsibility into policy. The man who once
called himself “the
king of debt” does indeed love debt, almost
as much as he loves the idea of being a king. Picture lots of spending and
tax cuts designed to boost short-term economic activity, with the bill coming
due … well, the man would be 82 years old at the end of a second term.
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