Character Is Destiny

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, December 30, 2024

 

“Maybe a year-end wrap-up sort of thing?” my editor said this morning, proposing a topic for the final column of the year.

 

A fine idea. But if you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

 

Biden could not have defeated Trump, probably not even if the infamous debate between them hadn’t happened but certainly not after it did. That the president persists in believing otherwise is pathetic. The story of 2024, the year of the MAGA restoration, is that his embarrassing delusions about his political viability ended up forcing his party into a corner from which it couldn’t escape. Too much inflation, too much immigration, waaaaay too much public anxiety about his health: Had he thrown in the towel on reelection after the 2022 midterms, allowing a proper primary to take place, maybe (maybe) the eventual nominee could have set down enough of Biden’s baggage to eke out a victory.

 

Instead he limped on until nearly August, forcing Democrats to resort to his underwhelming vice president as an emergency substitute and affording her little time to introduce herself to the public. (Much of which she squandered, in fairness.) Knowing now that he and his aides undertook to hide the extent of his infirmity since the beginning of his term, his determination to run again seems that much more outrageous. In hindsight, the Biden 2024 campaign feels less like a case of extreme muleheadedness than an act of almost deliberate party sabotage.

 

The Post excerpt is remarkable for another reason, though. As it circulated online this weekend, everyone but everyone appeared to agree that Trump wouldn’t have merely defeated an unpopular, enfeebled Biden; he would have smoked him. And Never Trumpers were no exception.

 

Which is an extraordinary admission, no?

 

For eight years, people like me have argued that Trump is unfit for the presidency in practically every way that a human can be. Choose any newsletter in my archive at random from the past 18 months and you’ll find some passage raving about coup attempts and insurrections and “retribution” and felony indictments. There’s a lot of material to work with in prosecuting the civic and moral case against him. And Never Trumpers have prosecuted the hell out of it.

 

The jury’s verdict: 312 electoral votes and a clear victory in the national popular vote.

 

Eight years of anti-Trump activism by disillusioned Reaganite conservatives ended with him back in the White House and more popular than he’s ever been. There are political failures, there are major political failures, and then there are “the guy I’ve been calling a mortal threat to the Constitution obviously would have crushed my preferred alternative, Joe Biden” failures.

 

As a tactic of political persuasion, Never Trump failed terribly. But on the merits, as a substantive critique of Donald Trump? Just you wait.

 

Moralizing.

 

Earlier this month New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declared himself “Done with Never Trump.” There’s much to fear and abhor about the president-elect, he conceded, but “is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement—and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse? Yes, please.”

 

That’s a fair cop. Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

 

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

 

It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? Americans love to moralize but hate being moralized to. You will quickly learn to despise a child who’s prone to scolding you for not recognizing something that’s evident to them and should be evident to you—and all the more so if you do recognize it. Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

 

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

 

Never Trump is also what we might call a “luxury ideology.”

 

It shouldn’t be. America’s greatness derives from its liberal traditions; if you value a society that’s prosperous and pluralistic, protecting the constitutional order from postliberalism should be your utmost priority. But it’s easy to say that when you make a good wage and face little foreign competition and less easy when inflation and immigration are directly threatening your ability to feed your family. Chiding voters for not letting abstract civic principles determine their electoral preferences recalls Anatole France’s famous line about the law: Never Trump, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from caring more about the price of eggs than about the Constitution.

 

Also, let’s face it: Never Trump is naive.

 

Or is it just me who’s naive? Either way, when Trump jumped into the 2015 Republican primary, I laughed at the idea of an amoral gossip-sheet goon with nothing to say about reducing government winning over a party of evangelical Christians and “constitutionalists.” I thought conservatism, in which Trump was sorely lacking, was the indispensable component in populist conservatism. Trump thought populism was. I was naive.

 

I was naive again in 2024 when I assumed Americans would find a way to talk themselves out of rolling the dice on a man who had engaged in actual sedition against the duly elected government a few years before. To believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that, however daunting the price of eggs might be, the people of the United States are too proud of their glorious civic heritage to betray it for a vengeful populist lowlife after they’d seen what he was capable of on January 6.

 

I was naive. There are, I’m sure, voters who agonized over supporting him before doing so reluctantly for kitchen-table reasons, but it’s you who’s being naive if you think every new Trump voter was arm-twisted by inflation or immigration into backing him. Many simply liked the demagoguery he’s selling and liked the way he went about selling it. Reducing the election to a false choice between expensive eggs and the Constitution is a form of cope that lets believers in American exceptionalism avoid confronting the fact that their country turned out not to be as exceptional as they thought.

 

And in case that makes me sound like I’m criticizing Americans for disappointing Never Trumpers: If the golden high-top fits, wear it.

 

Irrelevant.

 

Moralizing, naive, a bit too elitist—there’s something to all of that. But some criticisms of Never Trump are overstated or, well, stupid.

 

Take, for instance, its supposed failure as a persuasive tactic. By the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris had traded the cheerful “vibes” of her rhetoric in July and August for dark warnings about looming fascism if Trump were to be reelected. Her closing argument was delivered symbolically at the same spot in front of the White House where he spoke on January 6; she used the moment to warn about protecting democracy. She didn’t just deputize Liz Cheney as a surrogate on the trail, she campaigned with her personally. It was all quite Never-Trump-y by the end.

 

And despite everything—Biden’s baggage, the 11th-hour start to her candidacy, her own dunderheaded handling of the press—Harris nearly won. Trump finished with a hair less than 50 percent in the popular vote, 1.5 points ahead of Harris; the last time America faced a period of high inflation, the in-party’s candidate lost by nearly 9. His margin in each of the three Rust Belt battlegrounds was less than 2 points and he fell short of 50 percent in two of the three. His most impressive gains relative to 2020 came in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey, where Harris didn’t campaign. In the swing states, where she pressed her civic case against him, she was competitive.

 

Would Joe Biden’s vice president have done better by focusing on policy and unconvincingly renouncing everything that he and she did wrong on inflation and immigration? “Maybe” is the best I can do.

 

“Never Trump is unpersuasive” is overstated, but it’s not stupid. “Never Trump is irrelevant” is stupid.

 

It’s not stupid because it’s wrong. Never Trump has been irrelevant since at least February 2021, when Senate Republicans rolled over at Trump’s impeachment trial upon discovering that their base was anti-anti-sedition. There were glimmers of hope this past spring when Nikki Haley began scoring 20 percent in Republican primaries that a meaningful Never Trump vote might emerge for Democrats in November, but Trump once again understood right-wingers better than conservative pundits did. He didn’t bother courting Haley after she dropped out because he assumed her supporters would fall in line in the end. They did.

 

This newsletter is a running chronicle of how little classical liberalism matters to modern right-wing politics. Of course Never Trump is irrelevant.

 

What’s stupid about the criticism is that it’s irrelevant in its own right. Yes, Never Trump is irrelevant. So? What of it? What course of action should we supposedly take to remedy this sad fact beyond doing what we’re doing, advocating for a more liberal right? What should conservatives who favored smaller government have done in the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt ascendant? Become New Dealers?

 

Accusations of “irrelevance” imply that Never Trumpers should abandon a good cause like liberalism and take up a pernicious one like populism because there’s more influence (and money) to be had in the latter. And they hint, unmistakably, that the accuser himself would be willing to make that trade assuming he hasn’t done so already. The most reptilian sellouts in the GOP—J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, Mike Lee, 90 percent of congressional Republicans—forfeited some or all of their liberal values for the sake of “relevance.” If you’re urging a Never Trumper to be more like them when it’s our contempt for their opportunism that helped make us Never Trumpers in the first place, you’ve misunderstood us entirely.

 

It would be too much to say that Never Trumpers are proud of their irrelevance, as a little more relevance on Election Day would have been nice. But if irrelevance is the price of alienating ourselves from a movement as repellent as postliberal populism, we’ll pay it.

 

Vindication.

 

I’ll leave you with this thought as the calendar turns: Trumpers aren’t as relevant, and Never Trumpers aren’t as irrelevant, as either would like to believe.

 

It’s in the nature of populism (well, of any political movement, but populism especially) for its adherents to believe they speak for The People. That’s doubly true for Trump’s movement, which purports to represent Real America. If you want to know what the “silent majority” supposedly thinks, the nearest guy in the red hat will happily educate you.

 

Oftentimes it’s nonsense, though. Trump fans will be thrilled when he starts pardoning January 6 goons next month. Most Americans will not be. Trump fans will exult when he orders the military to round up illegal immigrants and put them in camps. Most Americans won’t. Trump fans will celebrate if he moves to limit highly skilled immigration. Guess how most Americans will feel about that.

 

Trump himself astutely attributed his victory last month to “groceries,” not to the hobby horses of MAGA diehards. His fans should consider that the next time they’re tempted to lecture about their immense relevance.

 

And they should consider this too: Never Trump will be vindicated—again—soon enough.

 

It might take four years or it might take a few months but sooner or later Trump will be Trump. He’s already doing it, in fact. His loathsome Cabinet nominations and autocratic recess-appointment scheme to install them without Senate consent are a warning that he’ll test civic boundaries more aggressively this time than he did in his first term. Why wouldn’t he? He’s term-limited, has a dubious “mandate” by dint of (barely) winning the popular vote, and ran on “retribution” against his enemies. What’s stopping him?

 

There will be a civic crisis, and probably several, because Never Trump’s core critique is and always has been self-evidently true: Trump is illiberal in outlook, predatory by temperament, and too narcissistic to ever place liberal traditions above his own petty interests.

 

I can’t tell you what that crisis will look like any more than I could have predicted the “Stop the Steal” saga that led to January 6 but the crisis will come because, after all, character is destiny. Trump will defy a Supreme Court ruling or he’ll use the military domestically in some grotesque way or he’ll sic federal law enforcement on his critics or he’ll begin inducing cronies and deputies to commit crimes for his benefit with the promise of pardons if they do so.

 

He is who he is, and so I regret to inform Bret Stephens that the “doomsaying” he so dislikes will inevitably bear out. Never Trump can’t be completely irrelevant because Never Trump is correct on the merits and we’ll all learn that lesson the hard way soon, just like we learned it—and then forgot it—once before. Character is destiny.

 

And on that note, happy new year to you and yours.

Jimmy Carter Was No Saint

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

 

I wasn’t a born pundit, but even I could have told you in 1979—when I was 7 years old—that Jimmy Carter was cooked. 

 

I did not know about the annual inflation rate—which was 11.3 percent and would hit 14.6 percent in March of 1980 in the runup to the election, about 1.6 times the rate at the apex of the Joe Biden-COVID spike—and I wasn’t buying gasoline, the average nationwide price of which by Election Day would top $4.60 per gallon in contemporary dollars. But I was sitting in gasoline lines that summer, feeling the heat radiating out of the black vinyl seats of my mother’s “Bahama blue” Volkswagen Beetle, a 1964 model, meaning no air-conditioning, hand-cranked windows, etc. This was West Texas, which meant that we were sweating under the blazing sun while listening to people talk about an oil shortage … in the part of Texas where there’s a pumpjack on the seventh green of the local country club. (The Williamsons were not members, but we did drive past.) Being short of oil there seemed as impossible as being short of dust, heat, or flatness.

 

The bumper-stickers said: “Carter … Kiss My Gas!”

 

The Carter administration had gone to Congress seeking gasoline-rationing authority and had been rejected; the actual rationing programs were implemented state-by-state. The first was in California, with other states soon to follow, including Texas—which had just elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. (Edmund Davis, 1870-1874, had been the only other Republican to serve in the office. George W. Bush was only the third Republican ever to hold the Texas governorship. The South remained Democratic for a long time.) Here’s how the rationing schemes worked: If you had an even-numbered license plate, you could buy gas only on even-numbered days, and there were limits on how much you could buy. People howled. Americans will put up with a lot of nonsense, but not limitations on their mobility. We may not always defend the Bill of Rights with great zeal, but we’ll fight you like hell over high gas prices.

 

(The link between mobility and autonomy is why trains have never caught on here. Progressives love trains, which are centrally planned and tell you where to go; the automobile is libertarian, taking you wherever you want, on whatever schedule you like. If our elections were decided only by people who ride trains to work, there wouldn’t have been a Republican in the White House since Eisenhower.)

 

It wasn’t just the inflation and the gas shortages. It was … everything. Things were so bad that Teddy Kennedy announced in 1979 that he’d challenge the incumbent president of his own party in the primary—and he ended up winning 13 states and almost 40 percent of the vote. A pretty good showing for a gin-addled lefty putz with at least one dead woman on his résumé.

 

But events were not on Carter’s side. Do you know where Nightline came from? It began as a series of special broadcasts titled America Held Hostage, hosted by Ted Koppel, covering the case of the American embassy staff held captive in Iran. Every night, they would solemnly add one to the calendar: “America Held Hostage, Day 322.” (The crisis would last 444 days.) The hostages were released a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated following his 44-state landslide in the Electoral College.

 

I can hear the Carter apologists already: It wasn’t Reagan who got those hostages freed, it was Carter—Reagan merely benefited from suspiciously exquisite timing. Carter didn’t cause that oil crisis—it was the Iran-Iraq War. Inflation had been acting up since the 1960s. A lot of that deregulatory stuff that Reagan gets credit for was Carter’s doing—and it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker, who ultimately would give Reagan the big win over inflation. 

 

There is plenty of truth in all that. Presidents do not dictate world events, and they do not have a magical steering wheel attached to the economy—and “the economy” isn’t even a thing, only a figure of speech by which we attempt to simplify something that is incomprehensibly complex. But even so, Carter was no great shakes when it came to what he could do. He tried to manage the energy crisis by giving Americans hectoring little speeches on obeying the speed limit and turning down their thermostats. His administration’s attempt to rescue the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, was an absolute fiasco, aborted because U.S. forces couldn’t organize a few working helicopters and then crashed one of the few they had in a sandstorm. Volcker wasn’t appointed until 1979, and Carter and his congressional allies did very little—and nothing effective—against inflation on their own. 

 

But the case against Carter is a lot more than that. He was unsteady and inconstant, a blame-shifter who exemplified the opposite of that “the buck stops here” quality associated with Harry Truman. As an executive, he was incompetent. Carter got up one fine morning and fired most of his Cabinet, leaving even his friends (and all of his enemies) publicly wondering if he’d lost his grip. “Official Washington was stunned, some critics questioned Mr. Carter’s sanity,” as one reporter put it at the time. As a politician, he was ruthless and, at times, cruel, “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met,” as Hunter S. Thompson described him.

 

And he was an admirer of the cruel and the power-hungry and the vicious: He praised and coddled Yasser Arafat, pronounced himself “fond” of the monstrous Fidel Castro, affirmed that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” These were not simply bad politicians, but tyrants and murderers and torturers—and Carter loved them all. His attitude toward the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, on the other hand, was indistinguishable from the more refined kind of antisemitism. He posed as a saint and then deployed the moral capital he accrued to slander the Jewish state as the moral equivalent of apartheid-era South Africa—it was Carter who did more than anybody else to popularize the use of “apartheid” to describe Israel’s efforts to defend itself against jihadists bent on murdering men, women, and children at every opportunity.

 

He did not get the chance to do as much damage in office as he might have. Americans gave him the shoe and then smacked down his vice president, Walter Mondale, four years later. In 1984, Ronald Reagan asked Americans the same question every incumbent in his position put to the electorate: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? He won every state except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and nearly 60 percent of the overall vote. That was the answer he was expecting and had good reason to expect. 

 

All this week, we will hear paeans to Jimmy Carter’s supposed goodness and decency, and we will hear stories about how his saintly post-presidential career redeemed his failure in the White House. Don’t believe a word of it. (Some of the reporting has been factually untrue; contra The Economist’s podcast, Carter did not start Habitat for Humanity.) Jimmy Carter was a fool and a bully and a malign influence in the national life of his country, which, in a rare fit of wisdom, rejected him utterly. His reputation will not age like Bordeaux—it will age like Billy Beer.

We Need a Full Accounting of Biden’s Presidential Incapacity

By John Yoo & Robert J. Delahunty

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

 

A major report in the Wall Street Journal has revealed that the White House staff concealed Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental condition, perhaps for the entirety of his presidency. Democratic leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, appear to have enabled this deception with the collaboration of the mainstream media.

 

Congress can begin the task of rebuilding Americans’ faith in the institution of the presidency by investigating and holding hearings on the extent of this cover-up. It should involve inquiry into Biden’s true physical and mental condition during his term in office, the discussions and actions of the White House staff, and their communications with the cabinet, congressional leaders, and party officials.

 

Biden aides will no doubt resist such an investigation. But Congress has more than ample grounds, not just in conducting oversight, but in considering whether to propose changes to the 25th Amendment, which would have made Kamala Harris the “acting president” in the event of Biden’s disability. It would then be up to President Donald Trump whether to waive the right of Biden’s staff to claim executive privilege. If they still refuse to appear before Congress, a Republican Congress could hold Biden’s aides in contempt, and Trump’s Justice Department could prosecute them in federal court.

 

The possibly extreme harm to the nation from Biden’s disability justifies such serious measures. Biden’s declining mental condition may have had dire consequences. It has deprived the country of a fully functioning chief executive and has created a serious risk to national security. In his four years in office, Biden held only nine cabinet meetings (as compared with 25 for Trump). White House aides secretly rescheduled national security briefings if Biden was having a “bad day.” Did the national security staff declare a “bad day” when Biden ordered American troops to beat a disgraceful retreat in Kabul, or when he tried to stop Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran? Despite the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Biden scarcely met Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Last January, special counsel Robert Hur, investigating Biden’s security breaches before he became president, found that he had “willfully” kept classified documents at his Delaware home but declined to charge the president because jurors would view him only as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

 

Even in the face of abundant evidence of Biden’s mental decline, only his performance at his June 2024 debate with Trump forced the Democratic Party — with an assist from the liberal commentariat — to acknowledge his condition and replace him on the national ticket. Ironically, leading Democrats and their media satellites had demanded that Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet remove Trump under the 25th Amendment for his alleged mental instability. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (then Senate minority leader) remained silent for years, however, about Biden’s fitness. Pelosi, along with House Democrat Jamie Raskin, had even proposed a bill to create a bipartisan commission to determine whether a sitting president could no longer carry out his duties.

 

There need to be severe consequences for this concerted effort to suppress the public’s knowledge of Biden’s cognitive deficits. An investigation recognizes the modern stakes for the nation of the office’s holder. The Constitution centralizes all of the federal government’s executive power — primarily protecting the nation’s security and enforcing the law — in the president in order to take advantage of the qualities of a single man. A single president enjoys a unity in his office that allows him to act with “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” in contrast to the paralysis of co-executives or of a committee. But place the presidency in feeble hands, and those positives become negatives. With a passive president, the government will be slow to rise to challenges, to execute the law with justice, and to protect the nation effectively. The new Congress must hold hearings to investigate those who were responsible for concealing a crippling defect at the very heart of the executive branch. An investigation will expose their actions to the American people while Congress can consider whether to propose legal reforms, including a constitutional amendment modifying the 25th Amendment.

 

The 25th Amendment

 

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment provides a constitutional mechanism to replace a president who has become disabled. The section has never been used. There are strong arguments, however, that Vice President Harris, the cabinet, and Congress should have invoked it for Biden.

 

The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967 and serves several purposes. It creates a procedure for transferring the authority of a disabled president to the vice president. Section 4 authorizes the vice president and a majority of the “principal officers of the executive departments” (understood to mean the cabinet) to submit a written declaration to Congress “that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” As an alternative to the cabinet, Congress may “by law” provide that some “other body” can join the vice president in submitting such a declaration. Both procedures require that the vice president agree to the finding of presidential disability.

 

Once the declaration has been submitted, the 25th Amendment declares that “the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” But the replacement remains temporary. The president can unilaterally declare that his disability is ended. He “shall resume” his office unless (a) the vice president and a majority of the cabinet again declare that the president remains disabled, and (b) both the House and Senate affirm the continued disability by two-thirds vote.

 

The original 1787 Constitution included a presidential succession clause — article II, section 1, clause 6 — that had provided that the vice president was to exercise the powers and duties of the president in the event of the latter’s “Removal from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge” his responsibilities. The Constitution, however, failed to define the term “Inability” (elsewhere styled “Disability”) and remained silent on who was to decide. At the Philadelphia Convention, John Dickinson of Delaware asked the drafters of the Constitution: “What is the extent of the term ‘disability’ and who is to be a judge of it?”

 

At least two presidents — James Garfield and Woodrow Wilson — have been incapacitated for long periods and unable to perform their duties. Nevertheless, these original flaws remained until 1967. The atomic age demonstrated the need for a mechanism to address presidential disability. President Dwight Eisenhower’s heart condition had required him to hand off his duties temporarily to Vice President Richard Nixon. While pragmatic, these improvised arrangements were of constitutional questionability. The assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963 provided a further catalyst to action. The result was the ratification of the 25th Amendment in 1967.

 

Section 4 makes the vice president the indispensable actor in transferring power from a disabled president. Congress and the states agreed on the vice presidential role despite the apparent conflict of interest she might have in succeeding to the presidency. There are, however, several features of the vice presidency that were thought to mitigate that conflict. The vice president typically has a close working and even personal relationship with the president and can observe him often and closely. They are members of the same political party. While the vice president may be likely to be that party’s nominee after the current president, the requirement of support from the cabinet — presidential appointees and, likely, loyalists — can check an unjustified move to oust a sitting president.

 

Potential Flaws in Current Arrangements

 

Although Congress carefully debated the proposed 25th Amendment in the 1960s and balanced the competing concerns judiciously, the country’s experience with the Biden presidency suggests that the procedure may be flawed. The staff and cabinet members surrounding a president had an incentive to conceal obvious and worsening cognitive capacities. Those who observed him regularly and controlled access to him engaged in secret efforts to keep the president in office for too long. Congress should hold hearings to determine whether to employ its existing power under Section 4 to create a Disability Review Board or even whether to modify Section 4 with a new constitutional amendment.

 

Like the original Constitution, Section 4 leaves presidential “inability” undefined. The ratification history of Section 4 suggests that the standard is very high — so high that it might well not have applied even to Biden. The leading architect of Section 4, Senator Birch Bayh, explained that the relevant terms “which refer to an impairment of the President’s faculties, mean that he is unable either to make or communicate his decisions of his own competency to execute the powers and duties of his office.” A leading framer of the amendment in the House, Representative Richard Poff, cited two cases in which Section 4 would apply: The first was one when “the President by reason of some physical ailment or some accident is unconscious or paralyzed,” and the second “is the case when the President, by reason of mental debility, is unable or unwilling to make any rational decision, including particularly the decision to stand aside.” The new Congress should consider adding a definition of disability, with special focus on mental decline or emotional instability.

 

Another arguable flaw — which could be addressed by congressional action without need for a new constitutional amendment — arises from the role of the cabinet. If a president senses a mutiny brewing among his cabinet officers, he could summarily fire the suspected mutineers and thus abort the plan to oust him. Another flaw, highlighted by the Biden experience, is that an ailing president may be secluded by his staff and thus meet with his cabinet infrequently or not at all. Without the opportunity to observe the president in action, cabinet officials may be reluctant to join any effort to declare him unable to serve.

 

Congressional Hearings Are Needed

 

If Congress, after holding hearings, determines that reliance on the cabinet in this sensitive situation is bad policy, it could invoke its existing power under Section 4 to create a Disability Review Board. The section provides that this may be done by an Act of Congress, rather than by the mere action of one or both Houses. Congress could consider whether to pursue that course, and how to structure such a body. One danger to be considered is that Congress might exercise its power in a way that disturbs traditional separation-of-powers principles by, for example, staffing the board with its own members or giving them a dominant role in its decision-making.

 

Hearings would create the necessary record to judge the conduct of Biden’s aides — and, by contrast, those of Trump in his first term. Starting with Vice President Harris and Biden’s cabinet, and then proceeding through his White House advisers, Congress should find “what they knew and when they knew it.” Congress can discover why they chose to conceal the facts or lie about them. Once out of office, Biden could no longer claim “executive privilege” to bar their testimony: Under a D.C. Circuit precedent that Biden himself sought (and that the Supreme Court declined to review) a former president cannot assert executive privilege to bar a demand for information by Congress. Trump therefore could override any executive privilege sought by Biden. Trump could also offer his own cabinet members from the first term to testify as to why they — along with then-vice president Pence — did not invoke Section 4 when Pelosi, Schumer, and Raskin were demanding it.

 

Such hearings would have a profoundly educational effect. The American people would learn the names and purposes of those who misled them for four years and even continued the deception this year. They would also learn the potential inadequacies of our existing legal and constitutional arrangements for transferring power from a president who was no longer able to exercise it, and to develop better procedures in their place. Most important, the American people could begin the process of repairing a dangerous flaw in the office of the presidency and our constitutional order.

Farewell, President Stimulus

By Matt Weidinger

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

 

When it comes to stimulus, President Joe Biden has carved out a signature spot in American history. From his role as “sheriff” overseeing Democrats’ massive 2009 stimulus law to signing an even bigger stimulus bill as president in 2021, Biden is more closely associated with partisan stimulus policy than any other politician. And the disastrous political consequences of his stimulus-law failures may prove to be Biden’s most enduring legacy.

 

In the aftermath of the 2008 election, as the severity of the Great Recession became more apparent, President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden worked with Democratic congressional leaders to craft what became the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Enacted just weeks into their new administration, the 2009 law directed a then-record $800 billion to an array of stimulus policies: large stimulus checks, increased unemployment and food stamp benefits, state aid, green-energy subsidies, and more. Obama dubbed Biden the “sheriff” overseeing the law’s implementation, crediting him with “seeing shovels hit the ground” just two weeks after its signing.

 

The marketing for the Obama-Biden stimulus law preceded its enactment. A report authored by the incoming administration’s senior economists predicted the still-draft legislation would keep unemployment under 8 percent while creating 3.7 million new jobs. Reality proved far different. After the law’s signing, unemployment soared to 10 percent, remaining well above the administration’s forecasts — with or without it. Employment fell to nearly 7 million positions short of administration predictions.

 

As job losses mounted, the Obama-Biden administration pivoted from suggesting the law would create millions of jobs to wanly suggesting it had instead saved millions of others from being lost. Few were convinced. On the law’s first anniversary, more Americans believed Elvis was alive (even though he died in 1977) than that the stimulus had created jobs. Obama eventually admitted “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” and jobs even evaporated during what Biden dubbed “recovery summer.”

 

The political consequences were severe. In the 2010 midterm elections, voters delivered what Obama dubbed a “shellacking,” with House Republicans gaining 63 seats and sweeping into the majority. Obama and Biden were subsequently reelected in 2012, but they had to negotiate with Republicans on phasing down stimulus benefits for the remainder of their administration.

 

Looking back on that experience, Democrats blame the slow recovery from the Great Recession on too little stimulus. Joe Biden built that lesson into his Covid response playbook. At nearly $1.9 trillion, Biden’s own stimulus law — the March 2021 American Rescue Plan — was roughly twice as large as Obama’s 2009 law. And within weeks of its signing, Biden promised trillions of dollars in additional benefit expansions and other spending as part of his massive Build Back Better agenda. There also would be no repeat of 2009’s missed administration job-creation promises: Those predictions were outsourced to private-sector allies.

 

But if failed job creation was the original sin of the 2009 stimulus, historic inflation fueled by excessive spending proved the undoing of the 2021 stimulus law. Former Obama treasury secretary Larry Summers warned that the legislation was too large and could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner seconded that warning about the “risk of igniting high inflation” and called for scaling back the legislation’s vast deficit spending. Both were ignored, with Biden and his allies later arguing that any inflation would prove transitory. When inflation reached 40-year highs, the administration admitted it had a problem by dubbing a second stimulus law the “Inflation Reduction Act.” But as with 2009’s “saved” jobs, voters were unpersuaded. Republicans reclaimed the House majority in 2022 and, with inflation still a top concern, voters reelected Donald Trump in a Republican sweep.

 

Since the election, Biden has been largely silent, except for a Rose Garden address in which he praised his “historic presidency.” Without mentioning stimulus laws by name, he touted “work we’ve done” that “is already being felt by the American people.” Naturally he made no mention of how, as Charles Cooke put it, “the Biden-Harris administration will be remembered for spending its way into the worst inflation in 40 years, and then pretending that it had done no such thing.”

Pramila Jayapal Makes No Sense

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

 

There must be currency in the nonsensical pieties that glut social media, which serve only to signal the individual’s tribal affinities. But like so many of the financial products that enthuse America’s investor classes, it is a currency that lacks any intrinsic value.

 

Take, by way of example, House Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal’s latest thought bubble:

Good news, representative! It’s not.

 

You don’t need to apply for a permit to purchase concert tickets. You don’t need to seek out reputable references or familiarize yourself with your state’s particular regulations to do so, either. You are highly unlikely to be prosecuted for providing Ticketmaster with erroneous personal information. Rejoice! Our long national nightmare is over.

 

It’s unclear who non-sequiturs like these are for, save those whose ignorance is matched only by the anger their ignorance inspires. Perhaps Jayapal is resurrecting a failed Biden administration effort to render concert ticket purveyors the latest black hat — an example of corporate America’s avarice. That campaign failed because the Democratic Party’s populist outrages are limited to their ability to access high-end luxury services — Beyoncé to Taylor Swift tickets, airfare, the annoying noises lawncare crews make when they’re prettying up your lawn. These are exclusive comforts reserved for those of relative means. Beating your chest over that exclusivity is an odd way to foment a mob.

 

But even this logic risks lending Jayapal too much credit. The simplest explanation is that Jayapal succumbed to one of her regular bouts of bad judgment.

 

Among the many reasons to mourn Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, according to Jayapal, was the pressure Moscow’s actions had placed on Western governments to increase their defense commitments. “We had thought with the ending of the war in Afghanistan, we could push for a real reduction in the defense budget, and there will be another opportunity,” she mused. Why in the world would Jayapal have been operating under the delusion that the Afghan withdrawal would provide the U.S. with a peace dividend when there was no peace to be found?

 

There would be a “huge backlash” not just in politics but “in the streets” if Congress passed and the White House signed into law spending cuts in 2023 to accommodate raising the debt ceiling, the representative recklessly opined at the time. Even when she issued these remarks, poll after poll found that the public sided with the GOP’s view that an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit should be paired with spending cuts, and that was the deal to which Joe Biden agreed. Either the representative badly misread the political landscape, or her speculation about street action was a thought fathered by a darkly perverse wish.

 

Indeed, Jayapal’s penchant for blundering extends to tactics, too. She was one of the architects of a bizarre and all but forgotten episode in October 2022 in which 30 House progressives signed an open letter to the White House calling on Biden to negotiate with Moscow and avert “World War III.” How? By paring back America’s commitments to Europe giving Moscow the security assurances it insists it needs, all while preserving a “free and independent Ukraine.” See? Simple. Indeed, the only “alternative to diplomacy is protracted war,” the letter read, with all its “catastrophic and unknowable risks.”

 

The letter was so humiliatingly naïve — such a backhanded swipe against Democratic leadership — that the president’s party was described as “furious” with House progressives. The backlash was so severe that Jayapal withdrew the letter and insisted that it had not been properly vetted before its release by some unnamed staffers.

 

All this is to say that Jayapal has made a habit of embarrassing herself and her allies. Her latest senseless posts on social media are of a piece with that tendency. It’s a testament to the progressive caucus’s low expectations for its leadership that none of her colleagues seem to mind.

Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President

By Philip Klein

Sunday, December 29, 2024

 

A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.

 

Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

 

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

 

Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was not up to the job.

 

When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later. Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.

 

On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,” and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for the last 444 days of his presidency.

 

It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

 

It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489 electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7 percent.

 

Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.

 

The two most egregious examples of this came in his efforts to stop the first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.

 

In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.

 

Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.

 

But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted, making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”

 

As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S., undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.

 

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.

 

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton administration.

 

Without telling the Clinton administration, however, Carter flew to North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the fact, with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce the deal. This infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to Brinkley’s account, one cabinet member called the former president a “treasonous prick.” To make matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner invitation from Kim, at which point Carter claimed on camera that the U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at the U.N., which was untrue. Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to announce all this, Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to accept the deal and abandon sanction efforts.

 

Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter to take the heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing to enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in 2002 after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North Korea had built a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance diplomacy, in addition to advancing a foreign policy at odds with the administration, squandered a crucial window to stop North Korea from going nuclear.

 

When it came to unrealized ambitions, nothing frustrated Carter more than the Middle East. He was convinced that, had he been reelected, he would have been able to build on the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — even though there were significant differences between the two conflicts. In 2003, he boasted to the New York Times, “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It was quite a choice of words.

 

During the pro-Israel Reagan administration, Carter saw little opportunity to advance his agenda, but he perceived an opening when Bush took over. In 1990, he befriended PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, and, Brinkley writes, “Carter began coaching Arafat on how to not frighten democracies by using inflammatory rhetoric: it was a strategy that would eventually lead to the Oslo Agreements of September 1993.”

 

Throughout the 1990s, Arafat pursued a strategy of talking peace to the world at large while working behind the scenes to continue terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. He was infamous for appearing moderate when speaking in English while fuming radically and inciting violence in Arabic. Throughout this time, he was being mentored by Carter, who not only advised him but even personally wrote a sample speech for him suggesting language to use that would allow him to more effectively gain sympathy from Western audiences. At one point, he went on a Saudi fundraising mission for the PLO at Arafat’s behest. Of course, Arafat had no interest in peace, which became crystal clear in 2000 when he rejected an offer of Palestinian statehood and launched a campaign of terror known as the Second Intifada instead.

 

Carter’s friendship with Arafat was part of a pattern in which he would chastise Israel in the most extreme terms while ignoring or minimizing the actions of terrorists and dictators whose enemies happened to be Israel. On a Middle East trip in 1990, he visited Syria to meet with Hafez al-Assad and had nothing to say about the brutal dictator’s violations of human rights, but then he went to Israel and blasted its human rights record as it was trying to form a government. Carter met with and embraced Hamas and, in 2015, the year after thousands of rockets were fired indiscriminately at Israel civilians, claimed that the group, which in its charter calls for the extermination of Israel, was the party actually committed to peace and that Israel was not.

 

In 2007, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which was not only one-sided in its attacks on Israel but was filled with inaccuracies and distortions. At one point in the book, he invoked the story of Jesus to liken Israeli authorities to the Pharisees. In the first edition, he included a line in which he asserted that terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians were justified until Israel submits to demands: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.” While he claimed this line was a mistake, he defended the rest of his work and dismissed legitimate criticism as merely coming from Jews.

 

“Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish American organizations,” Carter said in an interview with Al Jazeera, in which he also claimed that Palestinian rocket attacks on Israelis were not acts of terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he further advanced old tropes of nefarious Jewish control. He complained that the pro-Israel lobby made it “almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine” and lamented that “book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations.” This wasn’t true, and, further, it means that he described all Jewish writers (such as Jeffrey Goldberg, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post) as representing “Jewish organizations.”

 

In a speech at George Washington University on the same book tour, he argued that the obstacle to peace was “a minority of the more conservative [Israeli] leaders who have intruded into Palestine and who are unfortunately supported by AIPAC and most of the vocal American Jewish communities.”

 

At the event, one student asked about the fact that 14 members of the Carter Center’s advisory board had resigned over the book, and Carter had a familiar response: “They all happen to be Jewish Americans; I understand the tremendous pressures on them.”

 

One of the members to resign was a close associate, Ken Stein, an Emory University professor who had spent decades at the center — as its first permanent director, and then as the Middle East fellow, during which time he traveled with Carter and took notes on their meetings with foreign leaders. In a blistering review for the Middle East Quarterly, Stein wrote, “While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and provoke debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and Israel’s supporters. It contains egregious errors of both commission and omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines facts, and exaggerates conclusions.”

 

Among the examples he gives is an account of a meeting Carter had with Hafez al-Assad, in which Stein was the notetaker. Even though Stein shared his notes from the meeting, Carter’s account of the same meeting in the book was manipulated to make Assad seem more flexible than he actually was.

 

Stein also included the revelation that “Carter’s distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs deep.” Stein recalled an interview he once conducted for his 1991 book in which Carter bitterly told him:

 

[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn’t support me during the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money. . . . Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson — Scoop Jackson was their spokesman . . . their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien challenger to their own candidate. You know, I don’t mean unanimously but . . . overwhelmingly. So I didn’t feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so forth. Fritz . . . was committed to Israel. . . . It was an act just like breathing to him — it wasn’t like breathing to me. So I was willing to break the shell more than he was.

 

It probably didn’t help Carter’s mood that, in 1980, he received a lower share of the Jewish vote than any Democratic candidate since 1920.

 

In the coming days and weeks, there will be an effort to rewrite history and claim that the 39th president was underappreciated and that people have been too harsh on him. But the truth is that historians have not been harsh enough. One of the few silver linings that can be offered about Jimmy Carter is that, thankfully, he was too politically inept to be given the opportunity do even more damage.

In Defense of Speaking Ill of Jimmy Carter

By Philip Klein

Monday, December 30, 2024

 

I have a piece on the main site that is a harsh critique of Jimmy Carter’s legacy. Some readers objected to posting it so soon after his death, citing the old maxim “don’t speak ill of the dead.” While I think that expression can often be a good rule of thumb, I don’t think it applies in every case, particularly not here.

 

Carter wasn’t some random public figure, he served as president of the United States and influenced world affairs for decades after leaving office. He didn’t die in a shocking or sudden manner (like an assassination or terrible car accident in his 50s) – he died at 100, after spending nearly two years in hospice.

 

Plenty of other people will give Carter his due. His memorial services will stretch for eight days, with events in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. He will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda and have a funeral at the National Cathedral, where he will be eulogized by the sitting president and surrounded by former presidents as well as dignitaries from around the world.

 

In the meantime, the corporate media is treating us to nonstop fawning coverage of Carter that whitewashes his true record. It’s unclear to me why I should feel the need to wait days, or weeks, to deliver an accurate assessment of his disastrous legacy that corrects this prevailing narrative.

 

I have always striven to write the truth, and there is no way I could have written about Carter without reminding people, in detail, that he was a terrible president and an even worse former president.

The Season of Generosity

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 30, 2024

 

This is the season of generosity. 

 

Generosity is slippery. 

 

If you’ve lived a certain kind of New York life, then you’ve heard a certain kind of New York man complain about how much money he is expected to hand out this time of year in tips to his doormen and that sort of thing. Rich New York guys hate having to tip their doormen—except that they love having to tip their doormen, because it gives them a chance to complain about how much they spend tipping their doormen, which is one of the few remaining socially acceptable ways of bragging about how much money you make. (The others are being a rapper or a social-media influencer or a Republican presidential candidate.)

 

The money all spends the same for the doormen, but that kind of generosity isn’t exactly the real thing: It is a matter of social convention, of course, but also part of the price you pay for being a relatively high-income Upper East Side type. (I myself lived downtown, where I had a doorman, and, before that, in the South Bronx, where I didn’t have a doorman but where one of my neighbors was a doorman. One of the things that makes New York City interesting is the way the landscape of class that normally is pretty spread out in an American city is geographically compressed, especially in Manhattan and in the affluent parts of Brooklyn. There are some real upsides to population density, i.e., people, in addition to the obvious downsides, i.e. people.) And there are variations on that conversational gambit that allow non-New Yorkers to get into the game: California people who complain very loudly and publicly about how much they have to pay in tax, Washington people who complain about the outrageous tuitions at their children’s private schools, Florida people who complain about the HOA fees in their carefully manicured rich-guy enclaves, etc. 

 

I don’t mind all that very much, if only because silly rich people are usually more fun at lunch than the terribly earnest ones, and they say amusing things: “Gstaad in summer? There’s nothing there except cow shit and Russians.” (It was to be understood that the Russians were the slightly less desirable of the two presences.) A friend tells the story of running into someone at a five-star resort in Playa del Carmen she’d first met in Gstaad and last run into at Pastis in Manhattan, who upon their unexpected reunion exclaimed: “It’s a small world when you’re rich and white!”

 

Very wealthy people can be very damned peculiar when it comes to money and giving it away. There are wealthy people I know who are absolute skinflints in their private lives, and in particular when it comes to their families, but who at the same time are happy to give away millions upon millions of dollars to charitable causes or universities. Some of them are the vulgar kind who like to put their names on everything, but many of them are that better, quieter kind of philanthropist. 

 

I know that when it comes to children, some of that financial reserve is meant to be character-building: Give them too little, and they’ll grow up resentful and insecure; but give them too much, and they’ll grow up lazy and entitled. But some of it goes way beyond that. I get the sense from some wealthy fathers—it’s almost never mothers—that they envy the advantages their children grew up with, and that envy can turn vindictive and sadistic. It is worse for the self-made man, though I do know carefree people who inherited their money and treat their working adult children as though they were trust-fund loafers. Very strange. I always preferred William Weld’s self-deprecating attitude, saying things like, “My money was earned—my great-great-grandfather worked hard for that money,” or “The Welds arrived in 1630 with only the shirts on their backs … and 2,000 pounds of gold.” Blue-blazered WASP, sure, but I’ll bet he has tipped well enough over the years to send his bartenders’ children to Princeton. (They might prefer Harvard, where they could do some of their work at Weld Hall … or the other Weld building; the Welds have a long history at Harvard, which expelled one of them in 1644.)

 

Financial generosity ought to be the easiest thing in the world if you have a lot of money, but, as it turns out, there is a catch: The sort of personality that tends to go with making a lot of money is not the sort of personality that goes along with giving away a lot of money. A few heirs and lottery winners aside, one does not become a billionaire by accident. The nickel-and-dime mentality is tedious, but it is the only way to manage a profitable bank or grocery store. 

 

And—pity the rich this much!—it must be exhausting for those who are known to be wealthy to be asked for money all the time. I have a friend who started a business that is today a household name, and I have seen people who just met him ask him for a few tens of thousands of dollars—to get them out of credit-card debt or to catch up on their child support payments or whatever. Another wealthy friend occasionally gets letters from people asking him for money—in one case, a very specifically annotated plea for a modest few million dollars. Both men are generous when it comes to charity, but tend to be programmatic and institution-focused in their giving—at least, they do not write checks to everybody who tells them a sad story. (As far as I know.) I suppose there must be some kind of golden mean between Ebeneezer Scrooge and MC Hammer, who made millions of dollars the year he went broke. The easiest thing, I suppose, is to plan to give what you’re going to give and just say no to anybody who asks. 

 

(Charles Dickens, being a genius, absolutely ruined the name Ebeneezer, which is no more usable now than is Adolf. The name means, roughly, “stone of help,” after the victory monument Samuel raised to the God of Israel. “Thus far the Lord has helped us,” he said, and I have always liked the ambiguity of that statement: “Has the Lord helped you?” the skeptic asks. “So far,” the prophet answers.)

 

Ours is a fabulously wealthy society, and so the merely economic kind of generosity should come more easily. But there are other kinds of generosity, the different generosities of spirit. 

 

Readers do not like it when I write unflattering things about my mother—it seems ungentlemanly, and she isn’t here to defend herself—and generosity of spirit never has been my strongest suit. But I don’t think she’d much mind my citing her here as one of the least generous spirits I ever knew.

 

Part of that was character, but a lot of it was poverty. And her meanness had very strange ways of asserting itself. Some of it was the obvious stuff you see among poor Americans everywhere, including imperiousness and cruelty toward people who were her social or economic inferiors, even if that inferiority was temporary and purely situational: Because we lived in a college town, many of the people who checked her out at the grocery store or took her order at the Brittany (a strange little hamburger place at the mall; you sat down at a table in a dimly lit room that looked sort of like a steakhouse and then called in your order to the kitchen on a red telephone, one of which was installed at every table) were college students, as were a lot of the people who mowed the grass and washed the cars and that sort of thing. If one of these service workers screwed up something, my mother was volcanic and unforgiving.

 

There was an element of opportunism there—she did not get a lot of chances to boss other people around or to feel superior—and part of it was, I now believe, another manifestation of insecurity, suspecting that she was getting poor service because she was seen as an unimportant person. She worked at the local university, where her superiors treated her with extraordinary courtesy and eventually gave her responsibilities far in excess of her education or formal qualifications, but she never stopped feeling judged, condescended to, and excluded. Her relatively low socioeconomic status and her physical disfigurement (she was badly scarred and partly disabled after a series of skin grafts and partial paralysis of her right arm following an infection caused by a scratch from her poodle) left her curdled, veering between self-pity and cruelty, from pathos to sadism. 

 

One of the things she hated most in life was good sportsmanship. 

 

There is much that is destructive in the culture of West Texas high-school football (you can learn all about it in Friday Night Lights—the book, not the movie or the soap opera), but it also has its glories, including some very involved rituals of good sportsmanship. When I was playing, it was customary—in fact, obligatory—to help another player up if you knocked him down, to take a knee when a player on the opposite team was injured, to applaud him when (if) he got up and limped off the field, that sort of thing. My mother despised these as contemptible displays of weakness. But it was more than that: She did not see such courtesies as only a sucker’s failure to take maximum advantage of an opportunity, but also as a kind of betrayal of the competitive spirit of the game itself—which is to say, she considered displays of good sportsmanship to be poor sportsmanship.

 

She couldn’t understand why our coach didn’t simply send some benchwarmer into the game in the first quarter to commit some outrageous foul to injure the star quarterback of the other team, sacrificing a negligible player to neutralize a more significant opponent. She raged when a player would extend his hand to help up an opponent he’d knocked on his ass—her creed definitely involved kicking them when they were down. There was a kind of theology to this, too: This being West Texas in the 20^th century, she took it for granted that God was involved in deciding the outcome of the game, and, apparently, He wanted us to play dirty. It surely did not help things that I went to an academic magnet school, which had a hell of a chess club but was literally the losingest 5A football team in Texas at that time. We were everybody’s homecoming game. 

 

My mother was terrible with money, of course: Retired too early with too little, bought a Cadillac with a credit card and paid goodness knows how outrageously usurious interest on it. I once tried to help her rationalize her finances and was surprised (and, I will confess, a little annoyed) to discover that she and her fourth husband, an illiterate retired municipal water-utility worker and former pimp, were earning a little more in retirement in Lubbock than I was earning working as a newspaper editor in Philadelphia at the time, once everything was accounted for. (It was not very difficult to outearn me at the time.) That said, they were still broke, always having some kind of money trouble. 

 

She wasn’t neurotically cheap, either, at least not all of the time. She clipped coupons and complained every time gasoline went up a nickel, for example, but once gave one of her stepdaughters a house. (The house was, of course, encumbered with a home-equity loan shortly thereafter and eventually sold in foreclosure.) Such generosity was sporadic, and of a very traditional nature, encompassing only a relatively small circle of family. 

 

One might take an evolutionary view of such generosity: that it is not generosity at all, properly understood, but simply investing in family in the service of one’s ultimate self-interest. I don’t know much about that kind of evolutionary psychology and don’t know how such calculations are affected by the messiness of life as it is lived at that level: Very few of us were genetically related to one another, after all. My oldest son is the first person I ever met to whom I am, in fact, biologically related.

 

There is something about seeing your face on another person that complicates, or has for me at least, unexamined assumptions about adoptive families, stepfamilies, and similar arrangements. Often, these families embody the very heart of generosity, and it is not very hard to think of adoptive families and stepfamilies that are obviously more loving and generous than their natural counterparts. Who better embodies the (human) generosity of the Christmas story than Joseph? But there are limitations there, too. I resist acknowledging that, because I would prefer to have a more generous kind of spirit rather than a smaller kind of spirit, and because I dislike many of the implications of that narrow circle, that coldhearted blood-and-kin calculation.

 

I am not a nickel-and-dime kind of man, which is one reason I have fewer nickels and dimes than I might have otherwise had. And I never worried about that very much until I had children. That all makes sense, of course, but there’s something at the bottom of it that still isn’t quite right: How should it be that the generous love we feel toward our children should make us smaller or meaner or more grasping when it comes to everybody else? Of course, one prioritizes one’s own—that is a matter of ordinary responsibility as much as anything else, and those who provide for themselves and their families are providing a social good, too: The first thing to do in relieving the burdens of others is to avoid being burdens ourselves. Charity really does begin at home, as the cliché insists. 

 

Tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve, and the new year always puts me in a brumal mood. That comes (too) naturally to me. Who had a better 2024 than I did? I did some good work (though I have unfinished books on my desk), accomplished some personal goals, and (New Year’s resolutions!) lost a good bit of weight—and, much more important, welcomed three more boys into the world who are, along with their big brother, four of the most beautiful and charming little men you’ll ever meet. Christmas with crawlers is something special, and my 2-year-old son recently told his mother that his career plan is to grow up to be Santa Claus and give presents to good boys and girls. Generosity comes more naturally to him than to his father, whose heart remains divided between the part that wishes my mother and father could have known my children and the prevailing part that knows it is probably better for everyone that they didn’t.

 

As I said, I wish I had a more generous sort of spirit, but God created us all different for a reason, I suppose, and the hardhearted have our purposes, too. But you don’t want too many of us. Personality is at the root of a great deal of politics (much more than ideology or even experience), and it has always seemed to me that high-caste managerial progressives—take Barack Obama as a good example—are almost all mired in the same error: the belief that what the world needs is more people like them.

 

You can see how you’d fall into that: If you are a Barack Obama or an Ezra Klein or a Dick Durbin, it must be tempting to think: “The decisions I made turned out pretty well for me, so it must follow that others would have similarly happy and productive lives if they made the same decisions I did, if they imitated my example.” That’s how college-educated policy wonks end up assuming, evidence and experience be damned, that the best thing to do for workers and the economy is to send everybody to college, why lawyers believe against all evidence that the best place to develop the human mind is law school, why columnists so often write and speak as though we could write and speak our way out of our problems.

 

I don’t suffer from that exemplary delusion. Things have turned out pretty well for me, as it happens, but mine is not a plan of life I’d advise anybody to follow. I sometimes feel a little like Mickey at the end of Hurlyburly, who, when accused by a colleague of having no feelings, responds: “I just don’t have your feelings.” 

 

I’ll make some New Year’s resolutions, of course, and one of them will be to try to cultivate a more generous spirit. It is that time of year, I have become a big believer in going through the motions, and it is not as though there is no room for improvement. Some people say, “I have no regrets,” and they say it like they are proud of it, presumably because they do not understand that the only kinds of people who have no regrets are those who never have done anything interesting in their lives and those who are too stupid to know what it is they should regret. The first time I went to confession, I was already an adult in my 20s, one with plenty of regrets, and I brought a list. The priest was amused. “Everybody thinks they’re special,” he said. “I guarantee you that this will not be even the third-most-interesting confession I hear this week.”

 

My problem is that I am enough of a believer that I am afraid to ask God to help me to cultivate any virtues. I have read the Bible, and I know how He goes about doing that; my reading of scripture is that, from the purely earthly point of view, one of the worst things that can happen in your life is for the Almighty to take an especial interest in your case. I know that comfortable stasis is an addiction and a delusion, too, but, damn it all, I am happy right now, and my secret resolution—just between us—is to do my best to be like Ted Hughes’ hawk in his nest: “I am going to keep things like this.”

 

Words About Words

 

Sheesh. Journalists. 

 

About the latest Christmas-market massacre in Germany, the Associated Press writes: “Car drives into group of people at Christmas market in Germany.”

 

Hey, dummies: Unless this was one of those self-driving cars gone rogue, somebody was at the wheel. And that somebody probably ought to make the headline. AP is literally changing the subject, as though the car were in charge of things—as though these acts of terror just happen. 

 

And The Economist, normally so careful, reflects on its podcast about the death of Dr. Ruth Westheimer earlier this year. Westheimer, a German Jew and “an orphan of the Holocaust,” as she called herself, traveled to Mandatory Palestine after the war and underwent paramilitary training. She was trained as a sniper, which, according to The Economist, “meant she could assemble and dismantle a submachinegun.”

 

No, it didn’t. Submachineguns are pistol-caliber, short-range weapons that are generally less accurate than their rifle-caliber counterparts, and there isn’t a military on this Earth that uses submachineguns as sniper weapons—you’d probably be better off giving them revolvers. (The useful range of a Thompson submachine gun, for example, is about 80 yards.)

 

Submachinegun is, I suspect, a little like epicenter and semiautomatic—that prefix at the beginning is interpreted as an intensifier rather than as a distinguisher. The epicenter is not the center—it is a spot over the center. A semiautomatic weapon is not an automatic weapon, a submachinegun is a smaller fully automatic weapon, not something you’d give a sniper. (Automatic fire is not very useful to snipers, which is why so many of them are issued bolt-action rifles that in many cases are mechanically identical to common hunting rifles.) It is possible that Dr. Ruth, as she was universally known, was both trained as a sniper and learned how to field strip a submachinegun, but these would have been independent capabilities. 

 

It is remarkable that, from the Washington Post to The Economist to the Pulitzer committee, ignorance about firearms is treated as entirely acceptable, if not virtuous, when it comes to journalistic writing about firearms. I cannot think of another subject in which such a high level of imprecision and outright falsehood would be treated as anything other than a journalistic scandal.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

I’m already running a bit long this week, but: Do read the Wall Street Journal on Janet Yellen and the debt ceiling. 

 

Furthermore …

 

I’ll start cultivating that more generous spirit tomorrow. Today, I want to murder these people. 

 

If security lines, flight delays and long layovers weren’t enough, there’s a new scourge facing holiday travelers: a surprising number of people who think it’s totally OK to have phone conversations on speaker, or watch movies and shows without headphones.

 

… 

 

The boarding gate at San Francisco International Airport is a virtual boardroom, said Sasha Sinclair, 32, who flies monthly for her biotech job. She watches in awe as tech bros pace back and forth taking business calls without any auditory buffer, sometimes broadcasting potential Silicon Valley secrets all the way through the jet bridge. “It’s definitely a little alarming,” she said. 

 

The headphones-optional attitude isn’t limited to air travel. Podcasts and sports games blare in open-plan offices. You can catch snippets of conversations on the sidewalk, some phones held aloft for video calls. Transit authorities in big cities have struggled to get passengers to keep their music to themselves on subways and commuter trains.

 

Don’t make me intervene, people. 

 

In Conclusion 

 

Some people in the Donald Trump camp are worried that the president-elect’s inner circle will make him soft on H-1B visas and on immigration in general. I recommend that they forward their complaints to Elon Musk of South Africa or to Vivek Ramaswamy of the Mayflower Ramaswamys, or maybe to that nice Slovenian lady.