By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 02, 2024
Happy New Year!
I’m not early. I’m not late. I’m right on time.
For a certain kind of person—and I am one such—the real
new year is the first day of school. I haven’t been a student in a long time,
and I haven’t been a teacher in a good long while, either. Although I’m in my
50s, I keep meaning to head down to Austin for a semester and take that
freshman writing seminar UT says I need to graduate. (And, no, they wouldn’t
accept any of the substitutes I suggested, such as a note from my agent or my
publisher or a testimony from the provost of the college at which I taught
writing.)
My children are not yet of school age either (there is
bold talk of homeschooling), but my interior life remains connected to the
academic calendar—which was, once upon a time, also the Christian calendar:
Michaelmas term, Hilary term, Trinity term, etc. Of course, it varies from
institution to institution and from community to community, but sometime around
the first day of September, there is a feeling of newness and possibility—one
that remains, for me, at least, much stronger than the feeling of January 1.
I suspect that one feels this a little more intensely
growing up in West Texas, where the school year remains intricately linked to
the religious calendar (not the Christian one—I mean high school football
season), and where the first hint of fall weather is a whisper of respite from
the relentless punishment of the hot and dry Llano Estacado summer. Texas at
large can be very funny about autumn: It doesn’t get very cool in Houston, at
least not very often, but if it is below 60 degrees, you’ll see ladies in furs
swanning around River Oaks in the winter sunshine. (You can bet their husbands
are still wearing shorts and golf shirts.) In the high country (Amarillo is at
3,662 feet elevation), you get real winters, the joke being that the only thing
between the Panhandle and the North Pole is 40 strands of barbed wire. I
remember my father having to pull the car off the road in the 1980s due to a
blizzard, the snow coming down so hard he couldn’t see the road. Seasonal
shifts matter more in places where you have actual seasons.
I am one of those people who liked high school. I had a
pretty good time in high school. I went to a good one—academically, it was much
more demanding than college was—and if there was a lot of that John
Hughes-movie cruelty and anxiety going on, I didn’t know much about it. I had a
pretty good time in college, too (too good a time, I suppose: see above), but I
don’t see how anybody avoided doing so. I used to think that I really liked
Austin, and I do—Austin’s fine—but what I really liked was being 20. Other
people have other experiences.
There are times when I suspect that one’s experiences in
high school and/or college are even more formative than the clichés all hold.
The observation is not original to me by any means, but I think there is
something to the conservative observation that about 94 percent of modern
American progressivism amounts to trying to re-create the undergraduate
experience for Americans on the north side of 25: subsidized housing,
subsidized meals, subsidized health care, no real sense of urgency when it
comes to working on anything that doesn’t interest you and offer you psychic
rewards, a dean of students who will expel anybody who says or does anything
that hurts anybody’s feelings, diversity quotas up front and ruthlessly
enforced homogeneity on the backside. But there’s a little more to it than
that, and not everybody who remains attached to the academic sensibility turns
out to be on the political left.
I do suspect, however, that people who were happy in
school are more trusting of modern institutions and less irritated by the most
institutional sensibility than are people who hated school or who were never
much attached to an educational organization. Freud wrote about mourning for
the perfect family that one can never actually have, and perhaps there is a
kind of similar mourning for the idyllic, care-free student life that few, if
any, of us ever got to enjoy. There’s a reason Ralph Lauren has made so much
money selling community-college graduates his sundry sartorial fugues on the
themes of New England prep-school aesthetics and Ivy League sporting life. I
have, in recent memory, had to stop myself from buying a rowing blazer.
Of course, college was infantilizing, too—in some ways,
more so than high school. My high school had an open campus, and I do not
believe I had ever actually set foot in the cafeteria until my 25-year reunion.
If you were a diligent student and didn’t make trouble, teachers would more or
less let you come and go as you liked. College was, in my experience, more of
an assertive welfare state. I remember being amazed, gratified, and just a
little bit offended when I learned that an Austin taxi driver would take you
home—or almost any place other than a bar—no questions asked, if you showed him
a University of Texas student ID. (UT paid the local taxi company a lump sum
for this service.) Most public transit could be used for free (“free,” you
know, another lump-sum payment) with a student ID. It was good that there would
be fewer students driving drunk or tempted to drive drunk, and that students
who lived in far-flung neighborhoods didn’t have to budget for bus fare every
week. But there was something chafing about it, too.
And I do sometimes wonder if that isn’t really a big
driver of the two very different tribes of American political and cultural
life: the kids who liked school and the ones who didn’t. By the former, I don’t
mean only the ones who were good at school, or that the ones who were good at
school are exclusively in that camp. Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s recently
incarcerated trade guru, is an absolute crackpot—but he does have a doctorate
in economics from Harvard, so he must have been pretty good at school. He is,
however, like most Trumpists, thoroughly an anti-institutionalist. Kamala
Harris is academically undistinguished, but you get the feeling that she felt
pretty comfortable at Howard and Hastings—she has the look, affect, and voice
of an assistant dean of students (which is to say, those of a jumped-up
kindergarten teacher) along with the very soul of a vice principal. The tribe
of people who were happy at school produces the likes of Ezra Klein (his father
was chairman of the math department at UC-Irvine) and Elizabeth Warren, while
the tribe of people who hated school produces the likes of the late Rush
Limbaugh and Donald Trump, two graceless and friendless harrumphers who had
adjacent private-jet parking and believed that their “instincts” (Trump is always
going on about his “instincts”) and common sense not only were workable
substitutes for formal education but superior to it. Limbaugh was a college
dropout and Trump holds an Ivy League undergraduate degree, but they ended up
in the same place (Palm Beach) with the same kind of sensibilities.
William F. Buckley Jr. used to say that he was
conservative but not a conservative: “I feel I qualify spiritually and
philosophically as a conservative, but temperamentally I am not of the breed.”
He once despaired that it seemed as though half of National Review’s
readers lived in Arkansas, and his reading habits—devoted to the New York
Times—scandalized some of his more populist friends and cooperators. As
Michael Lind put it:
The embittered libertarians and
far-right “paleoconservatives” … denounced Buckley as an opportunistic social
climber who had abandoned his earlier principles to hobnob with Truman Capote,
Bill Blass and David Bowie. My own judgment is that Buckley’s gradual, lifelong
move to the center was sincere. … He told me confidentially that he had angered
his friend President Reagan by arguing that the Reagan budget cut too many
benefits for the poor. He supported the decriminalization of marijuana. He made
a juvenile joke about tattooing gay men with AIDS to warn their partners, but
he also hosted civil debates about gay rights on “Firing Line.” In 2004 he
conceded that “federal intervention” had been necessary to destroy Jim Crow. He
opposed the Iraq War. Many on the right believed that the older Buckley, like
his friend Barry Goldwater in his old age, had gone soft and betrayed the
cause. By the standards of today’s radical right, they had.
Unlike Buckley, I am not a major character in this story.
But even in my much-less-cosmopolitan life, I feel some of the same tension. I
am sure that if you drew a Venn diagram of everything that I want politically
and everything that Mike Johnson wants politically, there would be a lot more
overlap than I’d be comfortable with, even though I wouldn’t piss on him if he
were on fire. On the other hand, I have friends at places such as MSNBC and the
New York Times, and I enjoy spending time with them irrespective of any
political differences. That’s just me, living a pretty low-key life far from
Washington and Manhattan. I imagine that this must be much more intense for a
genuine creature of the Ivy League such as Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law),
which I suspect must explain in no small part why he and others like him seem
like such obvious phonies. George W. Bush (Phillips Academy, Yale, Harvard
Business School) was on his father’s side descended from the nonpareil line of
Great American Institutionalists, and, as governor of Texas, he mostly acted
like it—whereas, as a presidential candidate, he did what so many Texas
politicians do and tried to howdy us all into submission. Rick Perry,
another educated and cosmopolitan man, did the same thing when he was running
for president, until he finally wised up, taking off the boots and putting on
the wingtips.
The tribe of people who liked school produces
insufferable snoots, of course, and I fall into that from time to time. I am
not proud of the fact, but there is a part of me that understands the
inconveniences of air travel (for example) as an unfortunate situation in which
the people who did all the assigned reading get held hostage by the people who
didn’t. Lots of bureaucracy—public sector and private—gives me the same
feeling: It is the revenge of the back row against the front row.
That may not seem like it has anything to do with
politics—and aren’t we supposed to be talking about politics here on the
cusp of autumn?—but I think it does. Our understanding of the world isn’t made
up of white papers and Wall Street Journal editorials, Economist reports
and podcasts from The Dispatch. It is made up of all of the encounters
we ever had and the memories, however faded, of how we felt about those
encounters and the people on the other side of them. I liked school and was
good at it, I liked my teachers and wanted to please them, and one is naturally
inclined to keep doing the things for which one is rewarded. Other people felt
unfairly judged or shortchanged, bullied or ignored, or simply that their time
was being wasted on things that were not important to them. There is a reason
that so much of our politics—particularly in the current populist moment being
expressed in different but similar ways on left and right—ends up feeling like
a kind of weird, embarrassing, far too public therapy session.
Of course it must be the case that high school
never ends. Life was like high school long before there was any such thing as
high school: Human social life is a never-ending competition for status against
a background of economic and sexual anxiety, and some of those things are felt
more intensely by teenagers, who have not yet learned to guard themselves
effectively against feeling them too much. One of the benefits of an education
in art, literature, and religion is that it provides the means to put some of
that in perspective and to make us more aware of how primitive so much of our
longing and driving turn out to be, sophisticated as our pretenses sometimes
are.
Our town had its first day of school in mid-August, which
is too early, in my view. You need that promise of autumn to really think—it is
difficult to have a clear mind if it is 91 degrees outside and humid, if the
lightning bugs are still out at night. You want to be looking forward toward November, not backward
toward July. But do you know what we’re going to be doing on the big day in
November that everybody is talking about? Working out the same things that the
kids here are groping their way through on the first day of school. Like the
official New
Year in January, the unofficial new year on the first day of school is full
of false promise. It’s always the same lie: This will be the year that
everything changes.
But nothing really changes. It never has.
Words About Words
I suppose I could do this once a month for the rest of my
working life, but: I have been asked—by an editor, so it’s almost an
assignment!—to revisit begging the question, because it is used wrongly
so consistently.
So:
To beg the question is not to raise the
question or to invite the question. So you would not want to write: Planning
an outdoor wedding in June begs the question of what kind of weather we should
expect. Or: Deciding to buy your teenager his first car begs the
question: Which car is best for a young driver?
No, no, no. To beg the question is, depending on
how you look at it, either a rhetorical gambit or a logical fallacy (or both!)
in which an argument is presented in a way that assumes the truth of the point
being argued. For example, you might write: David French is wrong in his
assertion that conservatives should support Kamala Harris, because
conservatives’ political interests are better served by electing Republicans.
The part after because is question-begging, i.e., it assumes as
true the very thing being debated. French has argued that conservatives’
interests would be better served by electing Harris in November rather than
Donald Trump, both in the long term (by reducing the influence of Trump and
Trump-ism on the GOP and on the right more generally) and in the short term
(because Harris has more sensible views on a few important issues, such as
Ukraine). It may be the case that you think conservatives would be better off
electing Republicans, but French thinks otherwise—and, if you want to argue the
case against him, then you have to argue the case against him. Otherwise, you
are simply begging the question.
In Other Wordiness …
My friend Jonah Goldberg often describes simplistic
political analysis as “a drunk looking for his car keys under the street light,
not because that’s where he lost him but because the light is better there.”
The image is proverbial. But I recently emailed him a question: “Shouldn’t we
be happy that the drunk is looking for his keys where they aren’t? We don’t
want the drunk to find his car keys, do we?”
Also revisiting some earlier “Words About Words”
material, in light of an internal Dispatch discussion: to flounder
is to flop around like a fish; to founder is to fill up with water and
sink or, by analogy, to become bogged down in insurmountable problems. Peace
talks could flounder, I suppose, but, normally, they founder.
In Other News …
I hope you all have been enjoying the Dispatch–Bulwark
spat as much as I have. (Though nobody has been enjoying
it as much as Nick Catoggio has.) The fundamental issue is a disagreement
about how much advocacy journalism should be advocacy and how much it should be
journalism. Most everybody around here has been too polite to put it exactly
this way, but the criticism Steve Hayes and others at The Dispatch
have made of The Bulwark amounts to charging that the Bulwark
sometimes does bad journalism when it wants to do more advocacy—more fluffing
of Democrats, as Hayes put it with more pepper than he apparently intended.
(Hey, Steve: If you want to know a whole lot more about porn terminology, I
have some stuff you can read.)
This is the “gilding the
lily” that The Bulwark’s Tim Miller talked about in his
conversation with Steve a few months ago. The Dispatch is
anti-gilding: of lilies and of the knockoff
antique furniture in Manhattan penthouses. My own view is that advocacy
journalism—opinion journalism, call it what you will—is, first and foremost, journalism,
not a form of electioneering. I have a fairly traditional view of opinion
journalism: If your opinions can’t stand up to good journalism, then you need
different opinions. Suffice it to say that The Dispatch and The
Bulwark see their missions differently.
I was thinking about that because I remain constantly
surprised by the naked stupidity of Slate’s coverage of the Supreme
Court, which is pure advocacy and absolutely incompetent—and, at times,
positively dishonest—as journalism. Here is an
example of what I mean:
Last week, the Supreme Court
signaled it would revisit an issue it had settled over a decade ago, allowing a
new Arizona law to go into effect requiring proof of citizenship to register to
vote. Reopening the issue at the last minute and after registration has begun,
the justices are fomenting a false public narrative that noncitizens are a
threat to U.S. elections. This is the latest signal that the justices are in
cahoots with former President Donald Trump and may be prepared to meddle in the
election—unless it is decided by margins too large to tamper with.
That is … not true. It simply is not the case that
the Supreme Court is “in cahoots with” Trump and prepared to “meddle” in the
election. There is no evidence for this claim, which is, on its face,
preposterous.
I don’t know if that functions well as advocacy. As
journalism, it is pure crap, and, as usual, Slate should be ashamed to
publish it.
Economics for English Majors
A thing I always wonder about: How closely connected is
Americans’ economic sentiment to the actual performance of the economy? I mean
that in two ways: 1) How accurate are Americans’ views about the economy? How
closely do they reflect the actual economic data? 2) How much does sentiment
affect the economy in the real world? Pessimistic people don’t make major
purchases or start new businesses as often, I would assume, so there has to be
some effect.
From
the Wall Street Journal:
“Spending and incomes have
generally been healthy. Overall GDP growth has been healthy. But you haven’t
seen that positive environment reflected in sentiment data,” said Vanguard
senior economist Josh Hirt.
Hirt expected mindsets to have
improved even more by now. But sentiment measures can get stuck on both the way
up and the way down. “There’s a bit of persistence that can happen,” Hirt said.
In 2018 and 2019, economic
expectations were stubbornly high. Now, he said the opposite could be true.
“The way we’re looking at it more
importantly, consumers are still voting with their dollar, they’re still
spending,” he said.
Worth reading, and thinking about.
In Conclusion
The New York Times’ editorial board is
calling on Joe Biden to try to end the federal death penalty on his way out
the door. I would like to see capital punishment eliminated, too, but I remain
perplexed that so many opponents of the death penalty are unable to produce a
single good and convincing argument for their case. The Times writes
that “this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a
deterrent to crime.” The first of those is probably wrong, the second is
plainly wrong, and the third is a question of fact (disputed, of course) that
isn’t necessarily relevant (in that life sentences, or even long sentences, are
no more obviously effective as deterrents to homicide, but there is not much
urgency directed at the question). The headline—“America Does Not Need the
Death Penalty”—is correct, but there are lots of things the country doesn’t
need that the country retains.
I am reminded of how seldom one hears a good argument
from abortion-rights advocates. “What a woman does with her own body is her own
business,” for example, is pure question-begging. There are good arguments for
abortion rights, but abortion rights advocates do not make them very often.
People are sometimes wrongly convicted of crimes. But
that isn’t an argument against the death penalty any more than it is an
argument against any other form of criminal sanction. No, you cannot give a
dead man his life back, but you cannot restore to a man the 40 years he lost in
prison, either. In most of the cases I have looked into, the condemned criminal
clearly deserved death. To forgo the death penalty in cases where it is
not merited is simply to avoid performing a positive act of injustice. Mercy
consists in forgoing the last measure of justice where it is merited, of giving
the guilty—and, in this context, mercy is for the guilty—less than what
is deserved. And if we lived in that “Christian nation” some of my friends on
the right go on and on about, we’d begin with the distinctively Christian
understanding of who is guilty: Me. You. Peter and Paul. All of us are
condemned criminals.
The alternative view is utilitarianism. And when it comes
to the ultimate questions, that Benthamite algebra is going to take you some
places you may not want to go.
