Outsiders Like Me Know America Is the Greatest Country in the World

By Nikola Kedhi

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

 

America is much more than a country. It is much more than a land or a group of people that came together to form a nation. Ultimately, the United States is a symbol. It is the world’s fullest and greatest embodiment of capitalism, democracy, and freedom. It is the land of the free, the home of the brave, a source of hope, and a defender of justice.

 

Many may not understand the significance of America as an ideal. Some in the United States and Europe have lived comfortably for decades, never been invaded, never lost their land or property, nor their freedom to think or speak. As a result, they can’t value what they already have. It’s an unfortunate reality that you often have to lose something to fully understand its worth.

 

 

My country, Albania, is small today, but in the past, the ancestral lands of my people once spread throughout the Balkans. We had the first queen in Europe, gave the Vatican four popes, provided emperors who shaped history and survived through the strong men and women who died for their country, their traditions, and their families.

 

Nevertheless, neighboring countries with the help of larger empires and states in Europe slowly took our territories and forced into flight large parts of our population. More than 100 years ago, only one country stood up for us, fought for our territorial integrity, and helped us retain the borders we have today: the United States of America.

 

One doesn’t need to travel further back in time than a few generations to find Albania at the mercy of the red terror known as communism. History was warped and changed, important historical figures were erased, monuments were destroyed, churches and mosques were torn down, and religion found itself hanging in the balance.

 

Most of what George Orwell writes in his book 1984, communists and far-left terrorists tried to do in Albania. Sure, there was universal health care, free schooling, and no private property. Everything was centralized by the government into the hands of a few well-connected party insiders. As a result, people starved, lost their humanity, and turned against each other.

 

Our “universal health care” was light-years behind similar systems found in the West. Our “free schools” taught only what the regime allowed. You could go to prison or die for saying the wrong thing or wearing the wrong outfit.

 

Yet, while Europe abandoned Albania, we fixed a hopeful gaze beyond the Atlantic. All freedom-loving individuals hoped day and night that America would come to save us. In time, by defeating the Soviet Union and ensuring the fall of the Iron Curtain, it eventually did. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” remains one of the most consequential phrases of all time.

 

Despite 45 years of propaganda demonizing the United States, the Albanian people never forgot what President Reagan often referred to as the “shining city on a hill.” Indeed, no matter the torture and the brainwashing the regime tried, it could never remove the desire for freedom. The desire for freedom, meritocracy, and justice are deeply ingrained in the human soul.

 

When he arrived in Albania after the fall of the regime, much to his surprise, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was greeted by hundreds of thousands of people. The cheers he heard, the sympathy he received, and the thanks he was given were aimed at what he represented. Make no mistake, the American standard is what every nation on Earth should aspire to.

 

Today, however, as America finds itself under attack, it falls upon not just Americans, but to every one of us to return the favor and stand beside it in its hour of need. The ideology that invaded my country for half a century, tore down monuments and tradition, replaced freedom with oppression, prohibited freedom of speech, encouraged spying, swapped hope with terror, and brought famine instead of prosperity, is now trying to destroy the United States of America.

 

This evil ideology knows as long as America exists, all nations will look at it for strength, inspiration, and courage, and will fight for their dignity and freedoms. The heralds of the radical leftist ideology infecting the United States have gathered their strength and are trying to destroy American. A nation that gives equal opportunities to every man and woman, the population who welcomes everyone into its bosom, the system that encourages economic success, entrepreneurship, innovation, and risk-taking is now facing threats from within.

 

Leftist fascists who hate what America stands for want to transform it into a censorious, barren land of misery, without identity or soul. They cannot — or refuse — to understand what America has brought to the world through blood and sweat. They do not comprehend or understand the greatness of the American model, so they loathe it. Because the modern radical left is unable to appreciate hard work, love for country, meritocracy, protecting history, or valuing tradition, they do what they do best: destroy.

 

Heated rhetoric about racial equality is being used as a siren’s song to brainwash the weak and the vulnerable, as the left often does. A future with such people in charge would lead to the confiscation of property, high taxes, and the rewriting of history. This has happened in many countries in the last century.

 

I am confident the United States will not be fooled and will continue to stand for what is right. Otherwise, a weakened United States would pose an awful danger to the whole world, with a nuclear-powered Iran, Chinese expansion, and an emboldened Russia filling the power vacuum. Europe is already weak; the planet can’t afford to lose the United States as well.

 

Still, hope remains. I see it every day and not just in America. President Trump stands in front of the advance of the radical leftists in the United States and he inspires others to follow his example in Europe. He has vowed that America will never be a socialist country. The history of America is filled with inspiring stories of those who stood up, never gave up hope, and resolutely worked for a better future. A strong and prosperous United States means a safer and better world.

 

Every period in history features strong kingdoms or empires. We have to be grateful that the “empire” of our modern age is, as Thomas F. Madden has noted, a freedom-loving empire of commerce and trust, not of conquest, setting an inspirational example for everyone who longs for a better future.

 

So, here’s to America winning this latest, most crucial battle — not only for its sake but for all of us who live on this good earth.

Barr Wins the Day

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

 

The Barr hearing wasn’t very edifying, in large part because Democrats were utterly committed to keeping him from saying anything. One of them would make a sermonette, pause to ask Barr a hostile question, and then angrily interrupt him when he started to answer, accusing him of taking up valuable time. Then, the sermonette would start up again.

 

One thing was definitely established, though — Democrats fervently believe that federal officers are attacking peaceful protesters in Portland.

 

Here is a typical riff from Representative Pramila Jayapal complaining that federal officers weren’t called in to crack down on anti-Whitmer protesters in Michigan:

 

Jayapal paints a highly misleading picture of the Michigan protesters, but, whatever you think of them, they weren’t attacking federal property or federal officers — the rioters in Portland are.

 

In general, Barr is an excellent witness. He’s sober, usually doesn’t let his irritation show (although he will spin his pen faster), never says more than he has to, and knows more than anyone else in the room.

 

It’s a tribute to how good he is that Democrats were desperate never to get caught up in a genuine back-and-forth with him.

The Zombie Reaganism Trap

By Peter Spiliakos

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

 

Zombie Reaganism is a trap for the Republican Party. Even many Republican politicians who want out of the trap end up walking back in. This is a problem because Zombie Reaganism causes Republican politicians to focus on the wrong things, and costs conservatives the trust of many Americans.

 

Zombie Reaganism is the application of a distorted version of 1980s Republican politics to a very different time. It might be understood through several examples.

 

Zombie Politics

First, there is the Republican Party’s outdated relationship with the tax issue. Modern Republican tax policy was born in the tax revolt of the late 1970s. The “revolutionaries” then were middle-class homeowners who faced both rising property taxes and inflation that forced them into higher income-tax brackets even as their purchasing power declined.

 

For the average American, Reaganism largely solved this problem at the federal level by indexing income-tax rates to inflation and by multiple rounds of tax cuts. During and shortly after this, Republican presidents won three straight presidential elections with wide pluralities of the popular vote (they have done so once — narrowly — in the last 32 years). Thus, tax cuts became part of the mythology of this supposedly golden age of Republican politics: They enabled the GOP to win elections and they supercharged the economy.

 

Even after this golden age, Republican politicians still wanted to cut taxes — partly because that’s what they thought was necessary to win, partly because they believed it was the key to economic growth, partly because they thought it was what their primary voters wanted, and partly out of what had become generations of habit. The problem was that, after rounds of tax cuts under Reagan and then George W. Bush, there weren’t very many income taxes left to cut on most Americans.

 

This left Republican politicians trying to cut income taxes (which now fell mostly on high-earners) and investment taxes (who also fell primarily on high-earners.) The politics of tax cuts had changed. Instead of offering tax relief to the masses, Republican politicians were making the more difficult argument that taxes cuts for high-earners would primarily benefit the people not getting the tax cuts via economic growth.

 

Republican politicians told themselves and everybody else that they were pursuing Reaganite politics. Instead, they were pursuing a zombie politics in which the body went on with the familiar motions, but with barely any memory or awareness of what they were for.

 

This would have been difficult enough. But, almost simultaneously, post–George W. Bush Republicans and conservatives advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare. With good reason: As the elderly population grew, the size of these promised benefits to older Americans ballooned. Conservatives were not wrong to argue that some of these promises to the elderly would have to be pared back to save money for other priorities.

 

This was never going to be popular (though neither would the tax increases required to pay for no entitlement cuts).  What turned it into Zombie Reaganism was the combination of proposing entitlement cuts while also proposing tax cuts that went almost entirely to high-earners.  And cutting taxes on the rich wasn’t particularly popular even with Republican voters.

 

Together, the policies of cutting taxes on high earners while seeking entitlement cuts was toxic.  That many of these same conservatives seemed willing to vote and pay for deficit-busting wars even as they claimed America was too broke to pay for promised retirement benefits was bad optics as well.

 

Republicans tried to explain that these were all different things. Cutting entitlements was about addressing the debt. Tax cuts for high-earners were about growth and opportunity. Invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan was about a strong America.

 

And, in a sense, these conservatives were right. Given sufficiently deep cuts to entitlements, there would be more fiscal space for tax cuts for high-earners and wars of choice. But voters — including key swing voters who were skeptical of both entitlement cuts and business — could reasonably ask if it might be better to have somewhat smaller entitlement cuts, no tax cuts on high-earners, and smaller and fewer wars of choice.

 

This compartmentalization that Zombie Reaganites were demanding was too obviously self-serving. Most people pay limited attention to politics, but they tend to notice when you do the comical turning your pants pockets inside out thing when you are talking about their Social Security, and then turn around and explain why it is important to cut the taxes of their boss.

 

In the 2012 presidential exit poll, only 34 percent of voters answered that Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s policies would primarily benefit the middle class. A majority answered that Romney’s policies would primarily benefit the rich.

 

One could attribute this to Romney’s business experience, his wealth, and his personal style. This — and Romney’s opposition to amnesty — is the preferred interpretation of the Republican establishment in its post-election. You need the right messenger. The policies were sound and should be popular. All you needed was a politician with the right background (preferably working-class), or the right style, or the right surname, or the right skin tone, or the right genitalia, and the people will see that the Zombie Reaganite policies are right and good.

 

What establishment Republican politicians can’t accept is that the public wasn’t fooled. Rather, the public has made a judgement on a policy agenda that combines high-earner tax cuts, entitlement cuts, and more wars of choice: They don’t want Zombie Reaganism, and you probably can’t fool them into wanting it.

 

The Trap

But even recognizing that Zombie Reaganite policy is unpopular is not, in itself, a solution. Whether among social conservatives, or Republican lobbyists, or Tea Partiers, Zombie Reaganism has formed the framework for thinking about politics for so many years that a comprehensive rethink of the party’s agenda and priorities seems unimaginable. The result is that even Republicans who recognize that Zombie Reaganism is insufficient end up adopting a strategy of Zombie Reaganism Plus. They take traditional Zombie Reaganism, add one or two things, and call it something new. But it isn’t new.

 

In the 2012 cycle, for example, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum argued that tax cuts and balanced budgets weren’t going to suffice to win elections anymore. He anticipated the politics of the next elections cycle when he said:

 

The center point of my campaign is to be able to win the industrial heartland, get those Reagan Democrats back, talking about manufacturing, talking about building that ladder of success all the way down so people can climb all the way up.

 

He was right. That was how the next Republican presidential candidate won, but it wasn’t Santorum. Santorum was an experienced and principled politician, but one can point to particular personal weaknesses to explain his failure. He wasn’t well-funded, he could come across hot-headed, he tended to get sidetracked into pointless arguments, and his campaign was not particularly well-organized.

 

But one reason was that, unlike Donald Trump, he didn’t do enough to break from Zombie Reaganism. The centerpiece of his tax plan was eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturing in order to revive the industrial economy. His tax cuts were also broader than most of his rivals in that most Americans (and the rich) would have seen some tax relief. But since he didn’t want to cut defense spending and was committed to deficit reduction, he proposed even deeper and more immediate cuts to old-age entitlements than most other Republican candidates. What he gave with one hand, he more than took away with the other.

 

On the night Rick Santorum shocked the world with his strong performance in the Iowa Caucuses, he criticized “the Republican vision which is let’s just cut taxes, let’s just reduce spending and everyone will be fine. . . . But I also believe we as Republicans have to look at those who are not doing well in our society by just cutting taxes and balancing budgets.” The tragedy of Santorum was that he could see that Zombie Reaganism wasn’t going to work, even as he embraced a more extreme and politically self-destructive version of that same ideology. It turned that Zombie Reaganism plus favoring domestic manufacturing was still mostly Zombie Reaganism.

 

Florida senator Marco Rubio also tried to revise Zombie Reaganism to make it more palatable to wage-earners and swing voters. His tax plan included vast cuts to business taxes, but also an expanded child tax credit for working parents and a wage subsidy to encourage and reward work for the lowest-earning Americans. His criticism by the Wall Street Journal editorial board proved he wasn’t just about the rich.

 

But, like Santorum, Rubio didn’t make it. Also like Santorum, Rubio’s failure could be put down to factors particular to Rubio himself. He had repeatedly and spectacularly flip-flopped on upfront legalization of unauthorized immigrants. He was the target of attack ads from a well-funded Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush. He had a bad debate performance just before the New Hampshire primary.

 

But, also like Santorum, Rubio failed to break sufficiently from Zombie Reaganism. Some populists criticize mid-2010s reform conservatism as just an expanded child tax credit. That’s an unfair criticism of reform conservatism. But it is a somewhat fairer (but still not entirely fair) criticism of Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Rubio’s policy revisions were fine. Some versions of an expanded child tax credit have plurality support. But it is not, in itself, an agenda or sufficient to save an otherwise unpopular agenda. Zombie Reaganism plus a child tax credit and wage subsidy is still mostly Zombie Reaganism.

 

The answer to Zombie Reaganism can’t be just one or two things because the world has changed too much from the 1980s for even authentic Reaganism to have many of the answers. We have new problems: the collapse of family formation and fertility among Americans in their twenties and thirties; the ruinous costs of a college education; the declining employment prospects of those who don’t manage to graduate from college; the ability of a small number of tech companies to effectively lock out the opposition from public debate. These are our problems.

 

Rubio and Santorum deserve credit. Even if they didn’t go far enough, they recognized that the Republican agenda requires substantive revision. For a decade now, most Republican politicians have approached the unpopularity of their agenda like the proprietors of those scammy websites that would get people to click by promising to solve their problems with one weird trick. One weird trick to get out of debt. One weird trick to find a sex partner. One weird trick to lose weight. One weird trick to make people forget they don’t want Zombie Reaganism.

 

There is no one weird trick. There aren’t two weird tricks. America is a country with many problems. Those problems will require lots of answers — and most of them won’t come from looking at the 1980 GOP platform.

Who Is My Neighbor?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

 

I suppose it is normal to be sophomoric when you are a sophomore, but I was a junior in high school when Clayton Williams and Ann Richards faced off in the Texas gubernatorial election. Richards was a hero of Democrats from coast to coast thanks to her insult-comic practice of politics, and Clayton Williams was Donald Trump before Donald Trump was; i.e., a boorish rich man with no obvious preparation for the office he sought and a penchant for saying stupid and ugly things. Richards won that one, but Texas has never yet elected another Democratic governor.

 

It was a close race, and the yard-sign action was pretty hot in Lubbock, Texas, especially in the parts of town where college professors and other imported progressives were likely to live. I had a stridently left-wing American-history teacher, a would-be union organizer who taught the crime-spree version of American history, which, in her curriculum, consisted of very little other than slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. She was mad for Ann Richards, of course (Richards, like Lyndon Johnson, had been a schoolteacher, giving social-studies classes at Fulmore Junior High School in Austin, the name of which has been changed because Zachary Taylor Fulmore served as a private in the Confederate army) and believed Clayton Williams to be the devil incarnate. So we took a couple of Clayton Williams signs and planted them in place of the Ann Richards signs on her front yard, out of juvenile meanness. She did a little Three Stooges–worthy slapstick when she witnessed the vandalism. It was gratifying. We returned her signs, mostly because we wanted to take credit for the prank, which she didn’t think was as funny as we did.

 

(Technically, we were pre-sophomores, because sophomore properly refers to the university years rather than to high school.)

 

As I have mentioned before, I live in a pretty assertively lefty neighborhood (big cities in Texas are a lot like big cities in the rest of the country) surrounded by diehards who are not going to take the “Beto for Senate” stickers off their Audis. (Forgive me for quoting myself: “We admire our neighborhood for its diversity: There are white people with Audis, black people with Audis, Latino people with Audis, Asian people with Audis, gay people with Audis . . .”) But they are mostly nice people, and we rarely talk about politics. Sure, all that “Black Lives Matter” paraphernalia does sometimes give one the sneaking suspicion that these nice white progressives are trying very, very hard to elide the fact that they all live north of the street that forms a socioeconomic Berlin Wall between our neighborhood and the poor and largely non-white one to the south, that they’re all over here with the nice restaurants with vegan options and the new coffee shop and the National Review guy rather than a few blocks away with The People.

 

But there have been two little eruptions of political nonconformism in the precincts. In one instance, a modest little Trump yard sign made an appearance, and lasted a day or two. I do not know what happened to it, but it is gone. In the second episode, a big “Trump 2020” flag went up in front of a neighbor’s house. (The tragedy of gentrification is that it doesn’t happen all at once.) That announced a little escalating arms race on the block: A Biden sign went up directly across the street, and then — in case anybody missed it — there were two Biden signs in the same yard. (You know who needs to be told twice? Joe Biden.) Other little eruptions followed. Random bearded hipster pedestrians passing by pointed out my neighbors’ Trump flag to denounce it. With my mouth I said, “People like what they like,” and with my heart I said, “Keep walking, hippie, and don’t slow down.”

 

And then the Trump flag was gone.

 

I assume somebody stole the flag or that the neighbors were bullied into taking it down. (I haven’t had a chance to ask and haven’t really gone looking for one. Good emotional fences make good neighbors.) I suppose it is just barely possible that they could have had a late July change of political heart after reading something in the back pages of The Economist, but these particular neighbors don’t seem the constantly-rethinking-my-priors type. Given a choice between the people with the Trump flag and the smug hipster snoot stopping randomly on the street to gossip about how awful it is that somebody has a Trump flag, I’ll take a hard pass on the eye-rolling dopes spilling a fair-trade almond-milk latte on my Kentucky 31. I don’t give a flying MacGuffin how my neighbors vote.

 

There’s an art to neighborliness. It is simultaneously libertarian and communitarian. If we would be good citizens, we should first be good neighbors.

 

Neighborliness requires us to abide by Russell Kirk’s “principle of variety,” to cultivate our “affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.” The radical systems that Kirk refers to are all at heart totalitarian in the sense that they recognize no community apart from or superior to the factional community. For the old-time Communist or the modern practitioner of political correctness, the shadow line runs through everything, and there is a choice between good and evil when it comes to every pronoun, every book, every magazine and newspaper, every film, every social-media account, every breakfast, every dinner, every relationship and friendship, etc. The monstrosity of cancel culture is in its refusal to make room for private life, private conscience, and private differences. The tendency to make totalizing creeds out of political ideologies is by no means reserved to the obvious old jackboot-and-manifesto ideologies of socialism, fascism, etc. Ayn Rand’s pseudo-philosophy of Objectivism was, as has been noted elsewhere, in practice an aesthetic and a complete lifestyle demanding allegiance not only in politics and economics but in everything from taste in music to interior-decorating styles.

 

The totalizing instinct is to be found everywhere, including in a now-famous passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s new book, Everybody Who Disagrees with Me Is a Racist. (Oh, that’s not the real title, but it may as well be.) Professor Kendi writes: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.” Which is to say: This ideology demands affirmation and obedience for everybody everywhere in all circumstances — pure totalitarianism. Progressives used to scoff at that kind of “if you’re not with me, you’re against me!” talk, when it was deployed by George W. Bush in the campaign against jihadists. Of course Professor Kendi is writing the purest nonsense inasmuch as it is very easy to think of policies adopted by institutions that neither sustain racial inequality nor ameliorate it. (The limit of ten items or fewer — fewer, not less, damn your eyes! — in the express lane does not have any meaningful racial consequences. Especially at Trader Joe’s.) And even race-conscious policies get pretty complicated: California’s desire to use racial discrimination in college admissions would in theory make things easier for members of one racial minority (African Americans) while making things harder for members of another racial minority (Asian Americans). The doctrine of “intersectionality” is intended to help sort that kind of thing out by imposing a rule under which such decisions are basically left to a committee composed of Professor Ibram X. Kendi, Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and Professor Ibram X. Kendi. Dissenters will be cast into the outer darkness.

 

“Intersectionality” is a kind of mutant neighborliness in that it recognizes that people belong simultaneously to many different communities but attempts to impose hierarchical political discipline on the natural organic diversity of human life. Genuine neighborliness, on the other hand, accommodates genuine diversity, and it honors the different communities to which we all belong by treating them as real and meaningful human connections rather than as lines on a utopian org chart. In the abstract, this is what makes genuine human community possible. Practically, what it means is that I don’t want to see the restaurant down the street fail financially because I suspect its owners have a different view of abortion than I do. It also means that I prefer a community in which norms of privacy, toleration, and property rights are scrupulously observed to one in which casual vandalism is accepted as long as it is directed at sufficiently unpopular people. We cannot put people outside of the considerations of neighborliness without doing violence to the community as a whole. Neighborliness is necessarily inclusive, though it also is exclusive in the sense that it thrives best where boundaries and limitations are observed.

 

“And who is my neighbor?” a certain lawyer asked. As it turns out, there is a pretty good answer to that question, if you are willing to hear it. It begins with an ill-advised journey to Jericho. . . .

The Self-Importance of The Lincoln Project

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

 

A couple of erstwhile Republican operatives who notably failed to elect Republican presidents are now trying to elect a Democratic one.

 

They call their super PAC, self-importantly, The Lincoln Project. The operation is devoted to churning out harsh and often ridiculously over-the-top ads attacking President Donald Trump that are invariably praised by the media and progressives on Twitter, who are The Lincoln Project’s political base.

 

The project’s operatives tend to this constituency with a slavish devotion, catering to its long-standing hatreds and its momentary passions.

 

They know that without cable-TV mentions and Twitter buzz, The Lincoln Project — which doesn’t spend much on actually broadcasting its much-vaunted ads — would be a complete irrelevance, and so far, they have proven more adept at this game than they did at electing John McCain or Mitt Romney.

 

It is certainly understandable to be a Republican who’s appalled at Donald Trump and refuses to vote for him. But it’s another thing entirely to go raise millions of dollars from Democratic donors and run ads not just against Trump but against run-of-the-mill Republican senators whose only offense is having an R next to their names.

 

The Lincoln Project launched with its founders, including politicos John Weaver, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt, jointly writing a high-minded New York Times op-ed promising to reach persuadable voters and heal the nation’s wounds.

 

This was all self-serving tripe, as a glance at the insult-filled Twitter feeds, op-eds, and cable appearances of the principals instantly demonstrates. These people aren’t resisting the coarsened political culture to which Donald Trump has contributed more than his share. No, they are happily embracing it, apparently believing that their spittle-flecked rage passes for wit.

 

The ads aren’t any better. The Lincoln Project churns them at the pace of the Twitter news cycle, and they are clearly meant to garner retweets rather than to speak to on-the-fence voters. A subgenre of ads is meant solely to get a rise out of President Trump. With his usual self-discipline, the president has obliged by attacking the project — to the delight of its Twitter following and media cheerleaders.

 

The idea of Republican political pros working against Trump is irresistible to The Lincoln Project’s progressive fans. But it’s not really true. John Weaver, for example, hasn’t been a GOP stalwart in about 20 years. He left to go work for the Democratic House campaign committee after John McCain’s 2000 primary campaign flamed out. He returned as the strategist to the 2016 presidential campaign of John Kasich, who will be speaking at the Democratic convention this year.

 

Steve Schmidt repaid John McCain for the opportunity of a lifetime running his 2008 presidential campaign by self-servingly dishing on the wreckage, and making a new career among the people who hated the McCain campaign. Just last year, he was the chief strategist to prospective independent presidential candidate Howard Schultz, chairman emeritus of Starbucks — showing he wasn’t going to let a self-evident absurdity get in the way of a good payday.

 

It’s hard to maintain the fiction of The Lincoln Project as a Republican group when Weaver gave a defensive-sounding interview to the Washington Post promising to support the agenda of a prospective President Biden and attack Republicans for opposing him.

 

If the media didn’t share The Lincoln Project’s political goals, it might cast a more jaundiced eye on the group and simply see political consultants doing what they do best — namely, separating gullible people from their money, in this case Democratic donors.

 

Most of The Lincoln Project’s ad buys are for show and, regardless, they are a pittance compared with all of the other advertising out there genuinely designed to persuade voters. The group got a dubious write-up from the Center for Responsive Politics earlier this year, pointing out its unusual spending practices.

 

But, hey, it’s good work if you can get it — and lack the self-respect to turn it down.

The Executive-Branch Threat to the Presidency

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

 

Whether Donald Trump hangs on for four more years, on for four more years, or turns the White House over to Joe Biden, his first term has exposed a tremendous danger to the office of the president. Unfortunately, that danger is the White House itself, and the larger executive branch around it. The elected president is in peril of being swallowed by the presidency.

 

There has always been a concern that the unelected bureaucrats could stymie the will of an elected president and that Republican presidents in particular have difficulty finding the kind of administrators who will faithfully and energetically carry out the will of the lead. Advisers too have always presented a problem for presidents, in that they may try to contain the principal’s decisions by manipulating the information that gets to him.

 

But the problem is much worse as we approach the end of Trump’s first term. Trump has faced an unprecedented wave of insubordination by his own White House staff, and he has often met that with an unthinkable, unleaderly passivity.

 

Sometimes Trump merely tweets his will rather than attempting to effect it, such as his proposed ban on transgender persons serving in the military. His tweet on this was simply ignored. Sometimes, as in the case of White House counsel Don McGahn’s flagrant ignoring of presidential orders, the adviser has saved the president.

 

The absolute worse case, however, came in foreign policy. You may remember that after a call with Turkish president Recep Erdogan in December of 2018, Trump announced the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. He had asked if Turkey could finish the job of mopping up ISIS. When Erdogan signaled that Turkey could, Trump shouted the new order down to prepare for withdrawing all troops to then-national security adviser John Bolton. It was obvious, from this exchange, that Trump had been looking for options his advisers would not give him, and he moved at the first moment a NATO ally gave him one.

 

But weeks later, “the White House” announced that 200 troops would in fact stay engaged in Syria, a 90 percent withdrawal. A few days after that, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States would perhaps do only a 50 percent withdrawal. This kind of behavior, authored by Trump and his advisers, threatens the democratic connection between the president and the operation of the executive branch of the government.

 

The only reason this hasn’t ended in a constitutional crisis is blind luck. If American troops were killed in Syria, something like what happened in Somalia under President Bill Clinton, it would immediately leave the president responsible for a decision he didn’t really make.

 

This pattern of insubordination or taking advantage of the president’s inattentiveness keeps repeating itself. And, in many ways, the Trump years have been an occasion in which a conscious resistance spread across the administrative state. Beyond that, judicial and even media figures have used the first term to practice a kind of undirected coordination to resist and undermine the president.

 

The danger is not lifted by the election of a “normal” politician such as Joe Biden. In fact, Biden has almost invited an escalation of this treatment by ambitious people around him by declaring himself a transitional figure, a bridge to a Democratic future in which he is neither a beloved nor respected figure.

 

The populist energy that infuses American political life at the moment is partly a product of constitutional dereliction. Congress no longer passes laws and therefore fails to do the work of deliberation and conciliation of America’s factional interests. And in that environment, the judiciary pronounces sweeping victories and defeats for our warring factions on principle.

 

The diminution of many civil associations, churches, and unions has meant a lack of energetic representation for certain interests at the heart of our political life. This in turn allows a bipartisan consensus to simply remove issues such as immigration and foreign policy from democratic input. And now the authority of the presidency itself is overwhelmed by an increasingly permanent administration. Such a situation risks severing the president’s legitimating connection to the American people.

 

Those who put the “world order” or “liberal values” into such direct conflict with constitutional duty have been playing a very dangerous game. One wrong move, and there will be little hope of reconciling them again.

Unleashing the Furies

By Mathis Bitton

Monday, July 27, 2020

 

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

 

— Marcus Aurelius

 

The genealogy of the state has long been a subject of philosophical inquiry. Aristotle, seeking the origins of human society, found the polis to be a fact of nature. For him, man was a political animal, a creature of logos in search of collective bonds. Born out of a desire to achieve self-sufficiency, the state constituted a sublimation of our most deep-rooted feature: rationality. Centuries later, Hegel would go further and argue that the state embodies “the spirit of the world,” an almost mystical force without which the course of human events would have come to a halt. Rejecting Saint Augustine’s insistence upon the futility of the civitas terrena, i.e. the City of Man, Hegel called the state “an incarnation of the divine idea as it exists on earth.” Naturally, these accounts of statehood feel rather detached from today’s globalized world. In 1970, the historian Joseph B. Strayer wrote that “we take the state for granted”; 50 years later, the disappearance of statehood seems more evident than its inescapability.

 

For the literary critic Harold Bloom, the value of statehood was best captured by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. In his tripartite Oresteia, the tragedian related the rise of Athens and the fall of the house of Atreus, an aristocratic family trapped in a vicious cycle wherein one kin-murder justifies another.

 

The play begins with the end of the Trojan War. The Greeks have vanquished their enemies, and their commanding general, Agamemnon, is on his way home. Behind the expressive smiles of soldiers, tension shrouds the night. The ten-year conflict may be over, but the Mycenaeans still recall the bloody act that enabled their ships to sail. When Greek warriors assembled at Aulis to launch the expedition against Troy, the goddess Artemis demanded the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. The dilemma opposed Agamemnon-the-father to Agamemnon-the-statesman. The latter prevailed — and had his daughter executed to appease the whims of Artemis.

 

Iphigenia’s death represented the logical continuation of a dreadful pattern haunting the house of Atreus. Agamemnon’s father had murdered the children of his own brother Thyestes, with whom he had fought for the rule of Argos. In response, Thyestes had pronounced a curse on Atreus’s descendants: Decade after decade, they would kill one another in a perpetual struggle for power and revenge. By sacrificing Iphigenia, Agamemnon carried the curse into another generation.

 

When the victorious Greek warriors reach the shores of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, welcomes her husband with open arms. Eager to celebrate the glory of her beloved war hero, she asks the returning king to approach ceremonially on a red carpet. He hesitates; she insists; surrounding soldiers begin to moan in foreboding. Agamemnon decides to follow his wife’s command. Shortly thereafter, Clytemnestra slaughters him to avenge her daughter — and the pattern continues.

 

Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns to Mycenae. On the way, he meets his sister Electra, who questions the code of blood vengeance. But Orestes knows that his duty is to avenge his father by killing his mother, which he does. At no point does Aeschylus encourage any illusion about the inescapability of revenge; blood, and blood alone, can wipe away the stains of blood.

 

After the death of Clytemnestra, the Furies — ancient earth-god creatures who oversee primeval justice — pursue Orestes to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Furies embody the violence of what Hobbes would later call the “state of nature,” this uncivilized world of violence and rage that precedes the emergence of statehood. They think in simple terms: Orestes’s matricide is a blood crime, for which he must pay with his life. Their reasoning does away with circumstances, with subtleties, with dialogue. Devoid of clemency and forgiveness, the Furies blindly uphold their moral absolutes. Yet Apollo refuses to yield to their ire and protects the young man.

 

Troubled by this conflict, Athena welcomes Orestes to Athens, where she asks him to be judged by a jury of citizens selected at random. Apollo will defend the accused, and the Furies will prosecute him. Gone is the unrestrained anger of the state of nature, gone is the use of violence in the name of the good. Enters a new conception of justice based upon mutual respect, due process, and rational deliberation. The trial also symbolizes the separation between the public and the private; for the first time in centuries, the house of Atreus leaves the fate of its heir in the hands of others. These two phenomena do not happen simultaneously by accident. For institutions to serve their purpose, opposing sides must leave the emotional weight of personal grievances at the door.

 

The trial results in a hung jury, but Athena casts the deciding vote to acquit Orestes. Naturally, the Furies refuse to accept the verdict and threaten to pitch Athens into civil war. Their outrage must be legitimate, and any disagreement with their rage must constitute an affront to real justice. The Furies’ rejection of Athenian jurisprudence signifies the fragility of civil order. Those who fail to distinguish between the public and the private, those who dress themselves in the garb of heroes whose virtue they have never possessed, and those who hide behind “justice” to sentence people to infamy will never accept the rule of democratic institutions. Just as many pluralists today exhort their compatriots to “live and let live” as long as everyone chooses to live in “the right way,” so the Furies stand ready to accept the trial as a process — but only if its outcome ratifies their worldview.

 

After invoking Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, Athena forces the Furies into submission. If they are to remain in what will soon become the Athenian republic, the dreadful creatures must abandon their unidimensional rage and embrace the spirit of deliberation. Rhetoric and rationality triumph over unrestrained anger and revenge. Centuries before social-contract theorists, the tale of Aeschylus captured the essence of statehood and democracy: Both presuppose a strict separation between the public and the private, a rejection of emotional whims, and an unwavering respect for institutions.

 

In a way, tragedy itself constituted an Athenian institution to be revered. Inculcating civic virtue to an attentive citizen audience, the playwright was a figure of primary importance. By promoting a sense of responsibility through the lens of ancient traditions, drama became a democratic paideia — i.e., education — complete in itself. Freed from the urgency of decision that marked other political institutions, drama encouraged inclusive and reflective thinking about contemporary issues. The Oresteia was no exception. The trilogy made the Athenians reflect upon the revolution of 462, a series of uprisings in which democrats led by Pericles brought the city close to civil war in order to defend the rule of law against an arbitrary justice system.

 

By interweaving founding myths with contemporary politics, Aeschylus established a balance of proximity and distance that put events of his time in a pattern more complete, and thus more intelligible, than that available to Athenian political leaders themselves. Distance from the present furnished a universal context in which to understand the complexities of the time. Tragedies did not deprive issues of their urgency, but they did allow the citizen-audience to see themselves both as protagonists responsible for their deeds and as products of forces beyond their control.

 

Dramatizing Athens’s original struggle against revenge politics, Aeschylus reminded his contemporaries that the gifts of their ancestors must be deserved and their victories rewon. He turned the citizenry into a new generation of heroes and provided them with a magnified reflection of their living past — notably, the Oresteia ends with the whole people of Athens on stage. With eyes on those who came before them, and thoughts on those who would follow, Athenians could turn sight into insight and foresight.

 

The Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote that “literature is the memory of humanity.” Unfortunately, our time suffers from a pernicious kind of amnesia, deliberate for some, innocent for most. We have left the warnings of Aeschylus unheard. As Gilbert K. Chesterton put it, “every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things” — among them, the need to keep Furies in check.

 

Rage has gripped the democratic world. The recent spasms began in Chile, where over a million people descended to the streets in response to a 4 percent increase in mass-transit fares. In all, 29 protesters were killed, 7,000 were arrested, 2,500 were injured, and property worth $1.4 billion was destroyed. A few months later, the French would launch the “yellow vest” movement after the imposition of a 7.6-cents-per-liter tax on diesel. There, 12 protesters were killed, 4,000 were injured, 8,400 were arrested, and an estimated €4.4 billion were lost to the economy. Now the tide of political anger has come to American shores — and the death count has already reached 28.

 

Naturally, these numbers need not delegitimize any of these mass movements. In fact, popular outrage is first and foremost a symptom of the widening gap separating the elite from the citizenry. But we should note that the only country where recent protests have remained peaceful and calm is Hong Kong — where people are fighting against a non-democratic government. Why do the victims of despotism feel the need to protect the kind of decorum that American, French, and Chilean protesters have proven incapable of maintaining? Perhaps because the causes of this surge in violence are not exclusively political.

 

Consider Portland as a case study. On the left, the same media outlets that deemed conservative gatherings careless, selfish, and fascistic now applaud mass protests. While the protests have been by and large peaceful, a majority of activists and commentators seem unable to condemn riots and arsons with even a bare minimum of tact. On the right, President Trump’s decision to send federal security officers dressed for combat — wearing jungle-camouflage uniforms with unclear markings, carrying heavy weapons, using batons and tear gas, and throwing people into unmarked vans — to Portland has done nothing but galvanize protesters.

 

Was the decision unconstitutional? No. Was it comparable to “storm troopers” or to the Chinese police state? No — had Trump wanted to imitate President Xi, peaceful and violent protesters would be staying in Xinjiang-style “re-education” camps by now. But what Trump’s response does show is his wider attitude toward politics. The president needs to fight an enemy, to be against something, to manufacture a narrative in which he is the last defender of civilization — even if that narrative elevates the status of the rioters and gives critics handy arguments to talk about “dictatorship.” A few weeks ago, the Trump campaign rolled out an ad proclaiming that the president would protect a statue of Jesus from the great awokening — which could have been fair enough had the statue not been Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer. This week, another ad in defense of “law and order” used a Ukrainian photo from 2014; the supposedly evil protesters in the picture were democrats fighting against the authoritarian rule of Viktor Yanukovych, a Ukrainian autocrat backed by Putin’s regime.

 

Some may respond that culture wars need to be fought with panache, or that the end justifies the means. But these incidents are not clumsy missteps. They are symptomatic of a zero-sum conception of politics in which every facet of life becomes a gladiatorial contest to be won with fire, fury, and unabashed intellectual dishonesty. Every maladroit provocation, every careless ad, every manufactured battle opposing Americans to one another gets us further away from E pluribus unum.

 

On both sides, the public–private distinction has collapsed. We live, breathe, and work in echo chambers where everything and anything has to become political. Addicted to Twitter duels and fiery hyperbole, we have unleashed the Furies of our age — and their ire threatens the foundations of the nation.