By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, January 13, 2025
Regular readers of this column will know how much I love
David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, a near-future,
science-fiction-ish, semi-dystopian work that is, in the words of its late
author, “a very sad story about the pursuit of happiness.” Wallace got a lot of
the details of his near-future wrong (there was no presidential election
pitting Hillary Rodham Clinton against Rush Limbaugh—in fact, Mrs. Clinton ran
against an entirely different portly, golf-addicted, Palm Beach
populist blowhard with no friends) but he got a lot of the big ideas right:
the centrality of online networks to our lives and the atomizing effects of
screens, for one, and his titular plot device—a piece of video entertainment so
entertaining that it is literally lethal is being unleashed on the United
States as a weapon of mass destruction deployed by a Quebecois-separatist
terrorist cell—is a wry literalization of Neil Postman’s
Amusing Ourselves To Death. Infinite Jest has the
Organization of North American Nations; we have One America News Network—but
whether it’s ONAN or OANN, the wankers are pretty much all the same.
I am still waiting on the experialism.
Imperialism you know—all real Americans do. Experialism,
in Wallace’s imaginary future, is a kind of corollary political tendency: Parts
of the United States have become so hopelessly polluted, so unbearably toxic
and radioactive, that our clean-freak president (the fictional one, I mean, not
the
once-and-future germophobe in chief) has used nuclear blackmail to bully
Canada into annexing the land, thereby liberating us real Americans from the
befouled territory. The Quebecois separatists were already miffed, but that
turned out to be a Gordie Howe International Bridge too far.
(There is a certain kind of woman out there rolling her
eyes and saying to herself, “Infinite Jest, of course, I know the type.”
And these ladies are … not wrong.)
I would be very, very surprised if Donald Trump could
point to Greenland or Panama on an unlabeled map, and I’d bet $10,000 he could
not lay a finger on Denmark without advice and assistance. But Trump has
decided that it is of paramount importance to the United States to wrest
control of the Panama Canal away from Panama and to wrest control of Greenland,
a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, from Denmark.
Why Greenland?
Greenland is strategically located between the United
States and Russia. So, there’s that. Of course, there are a lot of places
strategically located between the United States and Russia:
Iceland,
Norway,
Sweden … the
United Kingdom,
Germany, Spain
… Ukraine. Most, but not all, of those countries have something in common with
Greenland: There is already a U.S. military base there or formal U.S. access to
local military installations. In fact, there are about 31 countries located
somewhere roughly between the United States and Russia. Harry S. Truman and
Dean Acheson had the good sense to organize a dozen or so of those countries
with an interest in the North Atlantic into a treaty organization, which they
imaginatively named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO, the bulwark of
the free world against Russia and aligned enemies, which Donald Trump has spent
pretty much his entire political career micturating on from a great height. We
don’t have to twist any Danish arms into getting them to help us against
threats from Moscow—they’ve been doing their part since 1949.
Trump, Trumpism, and Trumpists are fundamentally unserious.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. You’ve all encountered men who
were drunk, angry, and stupid, who were not serious but may have been
dangerous. Trump doesn’t drink, but these guys are the equivalent of that
drunk, angry, stupid guy: dangerous, but not serious. You can see this in the so-called policy
debates. You can see it in J.D. Vance’s imbecilic
trolling. You can see it in the
appointments: Fox News grotesques such as Pete Hegseth and Kimberly
Guilfoyle, the game-show
producer who is going to be “special envoy” to the United Kingdom, Robert
Kennedy Jr. and other conspiracy kooks. The plan to annex Greenland—or to take
back control of the Panama Canal—is unlikely to get anywhere past tweets and
cable-news goofballery.
If the Trump administration were serious about Greenland
and the strategic issues associated with it—which are real—Trump himself would
be doing the opposite of what he has been doing since … forever … and work to
fortify U.S. leadership in NATO and to build up the credibility and
capabilities of the alliance itself. The Danes—and the Canadians—do not lack
for valor, as they have shown on many occasions, but they are not adequately
resourced, and hectoring them about spending x percent of GDP on
national security isn’t going to change that. Yes, they need to spend more, but
that is only the beginning of the challenge. The United States could have been
spending the past 20 or 30 years working to change the military posture of our
NATO allies and other European allies and helping—and prodding—the Europeans
along the path to that “strategic autonomy” they are always talking about. But
that would have taken resources—money, time, attention.
We also had an opportunity to build a free-world trade
alliance excluding China as a counterweight to Beijing’s imperialist
mercantilism—it was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
and Trump killed it. If the administration were serious about China, and in
particular about economic competition with China and economic inference by
Beijing, it would be building wider, deeper, more liberal, more active trading
relationships among the democracies, especially among our most strategically
important allies. But it isn’t doing that. Trade involves tradeoffs—that is the
nature of trade—and the Trump administration has at its center Donald Trump,
who is physically near the age for Depends but temperamentally still fit for
Huggies. The great infantile “I want!” is what makes him—in spite of his
risible endless claims to the contrary—an ineffective and frequently
incompetent negotiator.
So, if the Trump administration isn’t serious about
Greenland and Panama and whatnot, why talk about them?
In the democratic context, demagoguery has two phases:
Before the election, the demagogic populist finds his enemies mainly at home:
the supposedly corrupt or incompetent “elites,” the mythical “deep state,” all
that. But after the inauguration, cleaning up that stuff becomes the
responsibility of the new incumbent administration, and even for such gormless
civic illiterates as those who populate the Trump movement, it is at least a
little bit awkward for the president to protest that he is being frustrated by
the ulterior machinations of an executive branch of which he is the chief
executive. You cannot very well have your “unitary executive” and blame
somebody else for the shenanigans of the bureaucrats who work for you. So the
psychological locus of conflict must be shifted to foreign adversaries.
But you have to be careful about that. The effective
demagogue will avoid shifting attention to some overseas challenge about which
he might be expected to do something, any problem that might subject him to
real judgment about whether he handled it well or that might expose him to
anything resembling accountability. Trump isn’t going to lean into, say,
Taiwan. But let the rubes believe that he’s working on something important in
Greenland, which 97 out of 100 Americans do not know the first thing about, and
that’s political treasure. They may remember from high school English that
there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
This isn’t going to be Ronald Reagan debating
William F. Buckley Jr. on the Panama Canal. This is going to be Sean
Hannity hyperventilating about Latin American “Marxists” between pharmaceutical
advertisements. The current president of Panama (José Raúl Mulino) is, in fact,
a conservative. He says
“there is nothing to talk about” when it comes to control of the canal, and
he’s probably right about that, but there is much for the United States and
Panama to talk about, including northbound migration through the Darién Gap,
which is not, as Donald Trump no doubt suspects, a place to buy cheap jeans in
Connecticut.
The U.S.-Panama relationship is an important one if you
actually care about trade and immigration. But Trump doesn’t care about those
issues because—note well this part—they are issues, and he doesn’t
care about those. Trump cares about Trump—his own power, wealth, comfort,
opportunities to be flattered, etc.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There is nothing else
to the man or his movement. There are no ideas and no issues, which is why
people like Kevin Roberts always end up beclowned when trying to position
themselves as the house intellectuals of a man who despises them both
individually and as a class.
What Trump is up to vis-à-vis Greenland and Panama isn’t
foreign policy or trade policy or anything of the sort—it is rhetorical experialism,
an obvious and obviously dumb way to try to externalize the emotional focus of
his incoming administration in a way that relieves him of the burden of doing
anything of substance at home or abroad.
Words About Words
Hoo, boy, last
week’s observations about “middle aged” seem to have hit a few
people—people right around the age of 40—right in the soul. Yeah, I remember
what that was like.
One interesting but wrongheaded contribution from a
reader insisted, however, that 39 was not the final year of one’s 30s—that last
year of one’s 30s, he insisted, is 40. That is so silly and so wrong that one
could almost overlook the analogy that is being misapplied.
The year 2000, you may remember being told about 6,442
times in 1999, was not the first year of the 21st century—it was the
final year of the 20th century. The first year of the 21st
century was 2001, and the last year of the 21st century will be
2100. So it is true that your second decade of life begins at 11, not at 10,
your third decade at 31 rather than 30, etc. But “thirties” doesn’t mean
“fourth decade.” It means “a series of numbers running from 30 to 39,” a figure
of speech rather than a matter of mathematics. (I have a correspondent who
sometimes writes to inform me that such-and-such a numbers issue does not rise
to the level of “mathematics” but is merely “arithmetic,” and I should write
something about that sometime.) You’re in your early 40s—your earliest 40s—when
you are 40.
Economics for English Majors
As with a
recent discussion in this space about health insurance, it is worth
repeating, in light of the terrible California wildfires, that insurance—all
insurance—is a financial services instrument, not a tool of social policy.
Insurance is there to provide you with a financial hedge against a certain
risk, and insurers are able to do so only when they are able to effectively
price the risk in question. You know how this works: Nobody really knows
whether you are going to get lung cancer or whether you are going to get into a
serious automobile accident, but actuaries know that for every x million
people there will be y cases of lung cancer and z serious
smash-ups, and they are pretty good at matching certain variables with
increased or decreased likelihood of one of those unhappy happenings coming to
pass. If insurers cannot price that risk, they cannot effectively provide
insurance.
One of the main goals of politicians as a class seems to
be stopping insurers from pricing risk—i.e., preventing insurance from working
as insurance. Instead, what politicians want to do is to enact social spending
by means of insurance regulation. That’s a big part of what the grievously
misnamed Affordable Care Act (ACA) was all about—putting an end to
“discrimination” by insurance companies, who have this manic need to take
account of who is sick, who is more likely to get sick, who is less likely to
get sick, etc., and to act on that data. The idea of the ACA and similar health
insurance schemes is to in effect create one big pool of insurance by mandating
that insurers cover everybody and cover them on more or less the same basis (a
basis dictated to them by politicians) with the tradeoff that everybody be
required to buy insurance, thereby forcing the young and the healthy to
subsidize coverage for the old and the sick, in theory being repaid in a few
years when they are the new old and sick. It doesn’t work very well if you
don’t enforce the individual mandate—the mandate that everybody buy
insurance—which we never did with ACA (unlike the ruthless Swiss, who have
practically 100 percent compliance with their mandate). In the end, we got rid
of the individual mandate altogether. We decided to eat dessert first and skip
the vegetables entirely.
Something like that has happened with fire insurance in
California. The state has, over the years, interfered with the workings of the
property insurance marketplace where it comes to fire coverage, preventing
insurers from raising premiums to economically appropriate levels, preventing
them from canceling policies that they judged to be too high-risk, etc. As a
result, many insurers simply
stopped offering any fire coverage in the state. Fewer insurers meant fewer
choices for consumers, higher prices, and less coverage, meaning fewer people
among whom to spread the pain around. A classic vicious cycle.
The Wall Street Journal reports,
with uncharacteristic imprecision:
The state accounted for eight of
the 10 costliest U.S. wildfires through last year, after adjusting for
inflation, according to Aon.
Despite those risks, its
consumer-friendly laws for decades kept home-insurance rates relatively low,
compared with the national average, industry data show.
Leading insurers have pulled back
from the state, leaving many in the path of the fires with only bare-bones
insurance provided by a state-sponsored insurer of last resort—or worse, no
insurance at all.
Even before the fires were sparked,
millions of homeowners in the Golden State, especially those in the path of the
L.A. infernos, faced double-digit insurance-rate increases, nonrenewals or a
dearth of any available private coverage.
Leading insurers, including State
Farm and Allstate,
have stopped selling new home-insurance policies in the state, saying rate
increases approved by regulators were insufficient to cover their losses,
including from the devastating wildfires of 2017 and 2018.
A question for the Journal reporters and their
editors: Given the results—“double-digit insurance-rate increases, nonrenewals
or a dearth of any available private coverage”—in what sense were California’s
laws “consumer-friendly”?
“Consumer-friendly” and “pro-consumer” and such are just
marketing slogans for politicians. If a regulation or a piece of legislation
is, in fact, good for consumers, then we don’t need the politicians to tell us
that—the markets will tell us, and so will the consumers.
There are two ways to go about this: We can let markets
work, in which case California homeowners building in fire-prone areas—and
particularly in expensive fire-prone areas such as Malibu—will pay a lot for
fire insurance. In fact, they will pay, collectively, more than the fire damage
costs in the long term—that is how insurance works. The insurers will
not be popular—but the checks they send to homeowners after fires will be very
popular. That’s one way to do things.
Another way is to decide that people who build in
fire-prone areas ought to have their investments protected socially, that, in
case of disaster, they should be made whole irrespective of whatever provision
they made or didn’t make for the eventuality. Call it Medicaid for Malibu
Mansions. California can tax people to support bailing out burned-out
homeowners and then appropriate the money. The taxes will be about as popular
as insurance premiums, and the tax collectors will be about as popular as insurance
companies. But the checks the state writes to homeowners after disasters will
be very popular. Of course, the money paid into the system through taxes will
exceed, by some considerable margin, the cost of the damage itself—there will
be administrative costs to consider, and in wet years the state will want to
divert some of that money into other (surely worthy!) projects.
What will not work is expecting insurance companies to
make homeowners whole while preventing them from making the business decisions
that will make doing so economically feasible, and then denouncing the
profit-seeking activities of profit-seeking enterprises as “greed” when the
bill comes due.
Pick your pain.
In Conclusion
I love California. I tried to move there once, but could
only get as close as southern Nevada—California’s taxes, absurd housing costs,
and busybodying about my property (including my firearms) was just too much. I
think Los Angeles is one of the most interesting (and most enjoyable) American
cities, and the Eisenhower Republican in me feels right at home in Palm
Springs.
I hate to see anybody lose their home to a fire, of
course, but one especially regrets seeing such lovely places wrecked. The
California wildfire story has some policy aspects to it, but it is not mainly a
policy story—neither for my progressive friends who want to use it for a homily
about climate policy nor for my conservative friends who want to use it for a
hectoring little lecture about California’s hostile business climate. (And I
trust I have avoided doing that above. I have tried.)
California has had wildfires for a very long time and it
will continue to. There are things we can do to make life better or worse, to
improve or degrade Californians’ ability to adapt to the facts on the ground
they inhabit. And the state of governance in California—in the state, in Los
Angeles County, in the city of Los Angeles, in many other jurisdictions—is
truly lamentable. Ronald Reagan once quipped that if the pilgrims had landed on
the West Coast, then New England would still be a wilderness. I agree with the
spirit of the remark.
I think if I were a 26-year-old smart so-and-so with
political ambitions, I would move to California and make it my program to begin
by rescuing the California Republican Party, the current leadership of which
might very, very charitably be described as mediocrity on stilts. As it
stands, Californians have their choice between public employee union factota in
the Democratic Party and feckless Trump sycophants on the other side.
Rebuilding the California GOP would be a real achievement. For somebody. Not
me.
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