So Pay Them More

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 04, 2022

 

The hearts of men are mysterious. Economics is hard. But the Great Resignation is the least-mysterious development of the Covid era.

 

I know the secret to keeping employees on the job: Pay them more.

 

The econometric libertarians in their propeller beanies, the country-club Republicans in their blue blazers, the people who lecture the world about “bootstraps” and “self-reliance” and “rugged individualism” — all of these people seem to understand how supply and demand work in every market except the labor market.

 

We go through this every year. If the price of gasoline spikes, the would-be central planners of the Left (and, often enough, the by-God populists of the Right) bitch and moan about “price gouging” and market manipulation and whatnot, and then along come the economists to offer the dismal explanation: Prices go up in the summer travel season because demand is high, prices go up when there are interruptions to supply or changes in consumer behavior or other unexpected developments in the market, if oil prices increase, etc. There isn’t anybody behind the scenes pulling the strings of the retail gasoline market; in fact, most retailers make very little money from selling gasoline, which has very low margins. They make their fortunes on Monster energy drinks, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and those weird composite sausage things that sit on greasy rollers for God knows how long.

 

We go through it when progressives complain about “affordable housing” in places such as California while simultaneously making it impossible to build affordable housing in places such as California. “Supply and demand!” conservatives say. “If you want housing to be cheap and plentiful, then you need to let supply catch up to demand.”

 

Politicians naturally cheer when wages go up — or most of them do, anyway. Some of them get an earful from the Chamber of Commerce types, from the employers who have to pay those higher wages, and they start to lecture the world about the wickedness of politicians and wonks who have “never signed the front side of a paycheck.” They don’t usually complain that there’s price-fixing in the labor market, but they do complain that we have a labor shortage. “We can’t fill those jobs,” they say. Well, not for what you’re paying, you can’t.

 

Have you tried . . . paying them more?

 

I’d love it if a Rolls-Royce Cullinan cost about $40,000 and if they were selling Chateau d’Yquem four-for-$10 down at the Circle K. But that’s not how the market works. I don’t think there’s any existential (or oenological) reason for a 1982 Bordeaux to cost three grand a bottle or for Rios of Mercedes boots to cost $500 a pair — hell, I don’t even know why a large coffee at Starbucks costs as much as it does. My local supermarket sells raw salmon that’s $60 a pound. Why? I have no idea. That’s just the market. It costs what it costs.

 

“Workers Quit Jobs at a Record Level in November,” the Wall Street Journal reports today. The people quitting the most frequently are in relatively low-wage jobs in pandemic-affected industries. Surprise. More from the Journal:

 

“Workers continued to switch jobs in light of the many opportunities the current labor market provides,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed. . . . U.S. job openings and workers’ willingness to leave positions have remained elevated with an imbalance between openings and available workers. In November, 6.9 million people were unemployed but say they want work, meaning there were roughly two workers for every three openings.

 

Can’t afford to pay those wages? Tough noogies, Mr. Boss Man. I can’t afford to fly private. A lot of people can’t afford a new Subaru. Things cost what they cost. If your business doesn’t work with labor trading at market prices, then your business doesn’t work. That happens.

 

Pay them more.

 

I’m not an economist, but I don’t think you have to get into the particular mathematics of the relative shares of income that accrue to labor and to capital to appreciate what is going on here. A few critical things have changed in the marketplace, and some workers now have a bit more — or a lot more — negotiating power than they did before. Hurray for the free market. I strongly suspect that the guy who cuts my grass earns in the six figures, and I can’t help but notice that the guy who owns my local car-wash operation drives a more-expensive car than most of his customers do. Some of my local restaurants and shops have raised some prices because hiring decent help has become more expensive, which is — let us all agree — terrific.

 

It is a tough labor market out there. Good help is hard to find. So, pay them more.

Progressives Finally Realize That Covid Is Not a ‘Moral Failing’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, January 06, 2021

 

Earlier this week, CNN’s Chris Cillizza lamented that, throughout the pandemic, “Societally we unknowingly turned having Covid into some sort of judgment on your character.” To remedy this, Cillizza suggested, “We need to recognize that getting Covid isn’t a moral failing! It’s a super infectious disease that you can protect against, sure, but can’t guarantee you won’t get it.”

 

“Unknowingly”? “We need to recognize”? “Societally”? Does Chris Cillizza live in a sensory-deprivation tank?

 

There has been nothing “unknowing” about the implication that catching Covid is evidence of a “moral failing.” It has been the core of the progressive response to the disease. We see it every time that someone who disagrees with the maximalist approach to lockdowns, restrictions, or mandates is labeled a “Covidiot.” We see it every time the governor of Florida is described stupidly as “DeathSantis,” or the governor of Texas is accused of belonging to a “death cult,” or any politician or writer with a different risk calculus than Anthony Fauci is charged with wanting “to kill grandma.” We see it insinuated by figures such as the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who has compared the states experiencing a seasonal surge to the slaveholding Confederacy. We see it indicated every time that those with rational objections to pandemic-mitigation measures are characterized in the press as conducting an “experiment in human sacrifice.” We saw it last week, when “health-care expert” Gregory Travis told a bunch of kids swimming at a Holiday Inn that, as a result of their indulgence, five out of ten of them would become infected and one of them would die. We saw it in summer 2020’s preposterous assumption that COVID would spread less efficiently if the crowd in question was protesting against racism. We see it each time a Republican celebrity announces that he has the virus and is swiftly blamed for his own illness. We see it in every hysteric who tells desperate business-owners that their desire to reopen betrays a preference for “money” over “love.” It has been the motivation behind the schizophrenic manner in which COVID has been routinely covered by the media — the tone of which has depended almost entirely on where the virus is currently surging, who is being affected by it, and who is the president of the United States. And it is what Nicolle Wallace means when she complains that despite being “a Fauci groupie” and “a thrice-vaccinated, mask adherent” who buys “KN95 masks by the, you know, caseload,” she is beginning to sense that she won’t be able to “outrun” Omicron.

 

When Cillizza says that “we need to recognize,” what he should mean is, “We need to apologize.” There is one reason and one reason alone that Cillizza and his ilk are running away from the Judgment of God assumption that has marked the press’s coverage of Covid for nearly two years: Now that they’ve contracted Covid themselves en masse, the ruse has become unsustainable. It is one thing to point at the hicks down South and conclude that they’re coughing because they have the wrong politics; it is quite another to reckon with what infection must mean when your own city is inundated, when your own friends are sick, when your own policies have failed. It’s different when it’s you and people like you. It’s different when the “adult” president proves as hapless as the “moron” president. It’s different when the Buzzfeed Christmas party, rather than Spring Break at the Lake of the Ozarks, becomes the super-spreader event of the season.

 

Much as Antifa seems to have convinced itself that it must be Good because it is opposed to something that is Bad, so our censorious press came to conceive of itself as the Keeper of Science and Public Health. And then, all of a sudden, it lost its sense of taste.

 

And boy was it sudden! Just like that, President Biden has moved out of his sickly savior mode and admitted that the federal government can’t do much to help after all. Just like that, the teachers’ unions have begun to take hits for their duplicity and their cynicism. Just like that, the efficacy of cloth masks and the workability of the zero-risk approach are being questioned, and some of our most influential voices are acknowledging that there might perhaps be some downsides to shutting down the world. Just like that, we’re hearing talk of previously downplayed concepts such as “endemicity,” “seasonality,” “risk tolerance,” and — heaven forfend! — humility.

 

Many of the defectors wish to pretend that their shifting approach is the result of their having only recently learned the true nature of Covid. Others propose nervously that Omicron is “different.” But it isn’t — at least, not in the way that matters. In its lethality, Omicron is mercifully distinct from previous variants, but the practical question before us is the same as it was before: Are our public-policy measures able to meaningfully control its spread? And the answer to this question is the same as it was before: Absolutely not. Yes, the consequences of this inability are less grave. But that’s not the point. The point, as Matt Shapiro has observed, is that now, as ever, it is “impossible to understand COVID by looking at voting patterns or mitigation regimes or by setting two regionally disperse states against each other,” and it is especially impossible to understand Covid by looking to the moral character of the people who have contracted it. It doesn’t care how virtuous you think you look. It doesn’t care whom you voted for. It doesn’t care whether your mayor has a nice lawn sign. It’s a disease.

 

We need to recognize that getting Covid isn’t a moral failing? No, Chris. You do.

The Paranoid Style in Democratic Politics

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 07, 2022

 

Democrats are scandalized (or they pretend to be) by the preeminence of conspiracy-kookery and “hidden agenda” talk from the Right, but they are utterly deaf to it when it comes from their own camp. I think this is because they are so used to it. But consider this from Slate today, a Mark Joseph Stern column headlined:

 

The Hidden Agenda Behind the Attack on Vaccine Mandate: Six Republican-appointed justices may use these cases to seize power from the president and Congress.

 

A “hidden agenda” leading to an illegitimate “seizure of power” would be a serious thing. Of course, what the Court is being asked to decide is whether the Biden administration is exceeding its own constitutional authority, which is not, let us remember, unlimited. The question of how much the administration can do to enforce a “law” that has not been passed by Congress is a legitimate constitutional question. But Stern et al. would have you believe it is an illegitimate exercise in “hidden agenda” politics, a judicial coup d’état.

 

I was pleased to read Stern worrying about unconstrained judicial policy-making, that “unelected judges” may “strike down any policy they personally dislike.” Of course, that is exactly what the Supreme Court did in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, invalidating the nation’s abortion laws, which were real laws, passed by legislatures, not administrative innovations. But if the Supreme Court invalidates that act of judicial supremacy, you can be confident that a thousand thousand columns at Slate and elsewhere will denounce that as judicial adventuring and the implementation of a “hidden agenda,” too.

California Wants to Double Its Taxes

By Dominic Pino

Friday, January 07, 2022

 

Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation wrote a blog post yesterday with news that doesn’t seem possible: California — an already high-tax state — wants to double its tax revenue.

 

No matter how Walczak breaks down the proposed constitutional amendment, the numbers are astounding. It would increase the top marginal income-tax rate to 18.05 percent. That’s 7.05 percentage points higher than Hawaii, the next highest state, and 12.75 percentage points higher than the national median. It would increase taxes by an average of $12,250 per household. “All told, the new tax package is intended to raise an additional $163 billion per year, which is more than California raised in total tax revenue any year prior to the pandemic,” he writes.

 

It’s not just income taxes, though. The state wants to implement a payroll tax as well, with the top rate applying to taxpayers making only $49,990 in annual income. Currently, only Massachusetts and Nevada have payroll taxes that do more than fund unemployment insurance, Walczak writes, and Nevada has no individual income tax at all.

 

Walczak points out this oddity that would result from the way the payroll-tax proposal is written:

 

For instance, the payroll tax exempts employers with fewer than 50 resident employees, punishing small businesses for expanding and creating a meaningful tax cliff. Imagine, for instance, the overly simplified hypothetical of a company with 49 employees making $80,000 each. At 49 employees, the company has no payroll tax burden. Hiring one additional employee generates a tax bill of $90,000 — more than that employee’s salary!

 

The most insane part of the proposal, however, is a 2.3 percent gross-receipts tax. Only seven states levy gross-receipts taxes, which are especially harmful to economic growth because they are based on business revenue, not profits. Even if businesses lose money, they still pay the gross-receipts tax because they still made revenue, even though costs exceeded that revenue.

 

Most gross-receipts taxes, however, are below 1 percent. California’s proposed rate of 2.3 percent is basically a giant flashing neon sign that says, “Don’t open a business here!” Walczak notes that the gross-receipts tax “would be imposed in addition to tangible property taxes and an 8.84 percent corporate income tax, and an aggressive one at that, the only state-level corporate income tax in the country with a worldwide tax base.”

 

If this proposal is adopted, California would essentially have 18 tax brackets, and individuals making less than $50,000 per year would wind up paying double-digit marginal tax rates.

 

Why does California need all this money? To fund CalCare, its proposed single-payer health-care system. If you want European-level government benefits, you have to pay European-level taxes.

 

Calling these taxes European-level is actually doing a disservice to Europe, however. The top marginal federal income-tax rate is 37 percent. That means the combined state-federal top marginal income-tax rate in California under this proposal (the actual burden that taxpayers would have to face) would be 55.05 percent. That’s a higher top marginal rate than Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or the United Kingdom. The only European countries with top marginal rates higher than 55.05 percent are Finland at 56.95 percent and Denmark at 55.9 percent.

 

Progressives know they can’t impose taxes like this on the federal level, so they’re giving it a try in a state they control. (Now do you see why Democrats wanted the SALT deduction so badly?) That’s federalism — more power to ’em! — but if this amendment passes, California Democrats shouldn’t be surprised when people move to Arizona or Nevada. California already lost 0.8 percent of its population in 2021. This proposed constitutional amendment could hardly be better designed to make sure that population decline continues.

The Left Supports the Constitution — Except When It Doesn’t

By Rich Lowry

Friday, January 07, 2022

 

The Constitution must be defended — except when it must be jettisoned.

 

We’ve heard much upon the anniversary of January 6 about how Donald Trump wanted to distort the Constitution to get Vice President Mike Pence to try to throw the election to him a year ago.

 

And this was, indeed, a cockamamie, counter-constitutional scheme. Neither the Framers of the Constitution nor the drafters of the Twelfth Amendment, the provision in question that day, intended to invest unilateral power in one person to decide presidential elections.

 

Indeed, besides Pence, who refused to buckle to Trump’s pressure, the biggest hero of the post-election period was the constitutional system itself. Once again, it proved a durable vehicle of representative government and a frustration to anyone hoping to seize and wield illegitimate power.

 

Its distribution of power via federalism to the 50 states, its separation of powers at the federal level, and its provision for an independent judiciary made it impossible for Trump allies to press one button and reverse the outcome of the election.

 

So, it’s bizarre for the Democrats and the Left to profess to consider a possible repeat by Trump in 2024 an ongoing national emergency, and yet establish more precedent for a president of the United States acting unilaterally beyond his constitutional powers (via Biden’s eviction moratorium and OSHA-imposed vaccine mandate); push to nationalize the country’s voting rules; play with the idea of destroying the legitimacy of the Supreme Court through Court-packing; and generally undermine and tear at the fabric of the Constitution as a racist relic unworthy of the 21st century.

 

If Trump 3.0 is an existential threat, they should want to make it absolutely clear that all presidents have to strictly abide by the Constitution in all circumstances. They should seek to maintain a highly decentralized election system. They should work to buttress the standing of the Supreme Court. And they should hold up the Constitution as a time-tested bulwark of our liberties.

 

Instead, we’ve seen the opposite — because doing these things makes it harder to pursue the progressive project.

 

The academic Corey Robin stated it with admirable forthrightness in an essay for Politico magazine headlined, “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution.”

 

This has become a mainstream view on the center-left, where it is considered an outrage that the Founders didn’t foresee that a left-wing Democratic Party would have trouble competing in many rural states and therefore be at a disadvantage in the Senate and the Electoral College.

 

The last few years should have given progressives a new appreciation of federalism, though — it allowed, for instance, deep-blue California to keep governing itself largely according to its own lights even when Trump was president.

 

That the Constitution makes it hard to get things done in Washington, another charge in the indictment against it, also serves an important function. It forces parties to win big majorities if they want to forge transformational changes, or to mobilize public opinion behind their agenda.

 

Otherwise, the gravitational force of the system is toward consensus. We see this in the debate over the sweeping Democratic voting bills. The Democrats are unlikely to get these bills through with their razor-thin, probably transitory majorities, although there is clearly an opening to pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act — changes that would be bipartisan and actually responsive to the most important, Pence-centric element of Trump’s post-election push in 2020.

 

This is considered intolerable, though, and Democrats are entertaining ideas — whether blowing up the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, or adding new states for partisan advantage — that violate the kind of norms they always cited in opposing Trump.

 

The New York Times recently ran an editorial arguing that every day is January 6. That is clearly absurd. But the Constitution is indeed always under threat, and it falls on its friends to defend it from all challengers.

What Happened on January 6

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 06, 2022

 

What happened on January 6 of last year?

 

In one sense, it is simple: Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, told many fantastical lies about the election and repeated the fantastical lies of others, and instructed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight,” to make what he frankly described as a show of force — which they did.

 

What happened was not a peaceful protest with a few rowdy elements. For a very detailed look at the violence itself and its relation to what was happening in the political sphere at the same time, you may consult any number of documentary sources; I found HBO’s Four Hours at the Capitol very useful as a play-by-play in which the insurgents are given the courtesy of being permitted to tell their own stories in their own words, to damning effect, and also recommend the New York Times’s 40-minute “Day of Rage” report. Of course, these will be rejected by the cultists who have convinced themselves that anything disagreeable to their own sentiments is “fake news” and fabrication. It is precisely this kind of delusional cult thinking — encouraged by the likes of Sean Hannity, whose recently revealed texts show that he knew at the time exactly what was happening and why, even if today he pretends not to have — that led to the sacking of the Capitol in the first place.

 

In another sense, what happened on January 6 is not simple. The riot at the Capitol commands the attention of the public, the media, and the Democrats, because it is dramatic and therefore makes for good entertainment and good campaign fodder alike. And, as is so often the case, it is the less-important aspect of the story — the sideshow — that takes center stage in the public mind. This is a familiar pattern in political scandals: What mattered in the impeachment of Bill Clinton was the perjury and the suborning of perjury, but what everybody talked about was Monica Lewinsky. Richard Nixon complained that his administration was undone by a “third-rate burglary” — but it wasn’t: It was undone by the coverup and related corruption, even if it is the burglary that is most vividly remembered.

 

The homicidal clown show at the Capitol was one prong of a multi-pronged attack, part of a failed coup d’état that proceeded on several fronts and that — this part matters — proceeds still on several fronts, prominent among them the effort to purge responsible and patriotic Republican officials from state election-oversight positions in order to replace them with Trump sycophants and conspiracy cultists for the purpose of nullifying or sabotaging future elections that produce uncongenial results irrespective of whether Donald Trump ever again appears on a ballot. The most important part of the coup d’état wasn’t the guy with the bison horns shaking his spear at the rotunda — it was the effort to come up with some pretext for formally nullifying the elections and to recruit a sufficient number of coconspirators to act on the pretext. The coup d’état failed because that more insidious project failed, not because the sideshow at the Capitol faded out. There is no great reason to be confident that the democratic firewall will hold again next time.

 

Because American political discourse in our time is something like an opera written in pig-Latin — full of great pitch and moment but signifying a good deal less than it would seem to the casual listener — it is very difficult to discuss the deficiencies of the 2020 election, or any other election, in an intelligent and productive way. And there were problems with the 2020 election, one of the largest of them being the Pennsylvania state supreme court’s usurpation of the state legislature’s power to oversee and manage elections, a power that is the legislature’s particularly and not the court’s to seize or revise when the judges believe the legislators to have acted unwisely or even unfairly. The U.S. Supreme Court was wrong not to take up the appeal that resulted. And, contrary to what Democrats and their media cheerleaders insist, election fraud is fairly common, and indeed widespread, in the United States, which is why we put people in jail for it every year. At the same time, none of this suggests that the 2020 election was — pick your favorite adjective — “rigged,” “stolen,” “fraudulent,” or anything else of the sort. There are irregularities and improprieties in every election year, and, sometimes, the courts do not rule the way they should. None of this provides a basis for invalidating the 2020 election. The efforts of Donald Trump and his allies to do that amounted to an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States and install an illegitimate president on illegitimate grounds, and the riot at the Capitol was intended to instill the fear of physical violence in legislators and government functionaries who might resist.

 

It is my view that none of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 results should ever hold office again, and that no candidate who is unwilling to forthrightly condemn both the violence of January 6 and the lies that inspired that violence ought to enjoy the support of any conservative, any organ of the Republican Party, or, indeed, any American who calls himself a patriot. No candidate who cannot give a simple yes or no answer — and give the correct one — to the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump ought to hold office. If that puts the Republican Party into the minority for a generation, then the Republican Party deserves it, having become a menace not only to the conservative principles and governance it purports to cherish but to the political structure of the nation and the Constitution itself. Those who have no use for caudillos and mobs, and who hope to see our constitutional order endure, should seriously consider separating themselves from the Republican Party unless and until it proves capable of reforming itself.

Anniversary of a Disgrace

National Review Online

Thursday, January 06, 2022

 

On January 6, 2021, Mike Pence presided over a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes. The Trump-Pence campaign disputed the 2020 results in election contests and in court, but by January 6, the legal options were exhausted. Each state government sent only a single slate of electors to be counted.

 

Under our Constitution and laws, nothing remained but to count the votes. Instead, an angry mob descended upon the Capitol to prevent that from happening. This will, and should, be remembered as a stain on the nation’s history.

 

There is no defense for what the mob did that day. None. The people have a right to form loud, angry crowds to petition and protest their government. They need not do so in ways that are pleasant or polite. The “Stop the Steal” protesters who listened to the speeches and went home were exercising their rights as citizens.

 

But ours is a government of laws, not of men. A rule-of-law system has no place for physical intimidation or mobs obstructing the peaceful, constitutional transfer of power. The Founding Fathers feared few things more than mob rule. They created a federal district to avoid a repeat of a 1783 riot around the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

 

There is also no defense of what Donald Trump did to summon the crowd, tell it that there remained any option but counting Biden’s electoral victory, and urge the assemblage to march on the Capitol because “if we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country . . . you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s recklessness disgraced the office of the presidency.

 

Additionally, there is no defense of Trump’s pressuring Pence to take unilateral, unlawful action against the counting of electoral votes, then telling the crowd that Pence might do so, knowing full well that they would discover when they reached the Capitol that Pence would not. Some of them, entering the Capitol, chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” It was Trump who led them to believe that his own vice president was allowing their country to be stolen.

 

For that matter, there is no defense of Trump’s prolonging the election contest far beyond the point of plausibility, spreading blatant lies about the election, and pressuring state legislators and governors to usurp their states’ popular votes and certify electors not chosen by the people.

 

What happened at the Capitol that day is best understood as a riot that was particularly dangerous because of its setting and context. It was not a purely peaceful protest, or a cartoonish costume party with a little bit of trespassing. The Secret Service had to rush Pence to safety. Members of Congress emptied the chamber and fled for cover. The vote-counting process was interrupted for five and a half hours. The Capitol itself was wreathed in smoke. This is the stuff of a banana republic.

 

January 6 was a day shrouded in tragedy. Four of the protesters died, including one woman who was shot by Capitol Police while she was breaking through a door at the head of a screaming mob, and a 42-year-old Capitol Police officer who was pepper-sprayed had a pair of fatal strokes just eight hours later. Even if not all these deaths are directly attributable to the riot, the mayhem that day has been documented on video — people being stomped on, one officer being beaten with an American flagpole, rioters crushing one police officer in a door. The violence is why, of the more than 700 people who have been arrested, over 200 have been charged with assault or resisting arrest, including scores charged with assaulting police with dangerous weapons (mainly toxic sprays). Police officials report that 140 officers suffered injuries including bad cuts and bruises, burns, and broken bones. There was also damage to the Capitol that was estimated to exceed $1 million.

 

Defenders of Trump and apologists for the riot argue that the events of January 6 did not emerge out of nowhere. It is true that past Democratic misconduct helped to set the stage for the riot, but that does not exonerate Trump or the rioters.

 

For two decades, prominent Democrats have attacked the legitimacy of American elections. They claimed that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore. They indulged ridiculous fantasies about Ohio being stolen in 2004, resulting in dozens of Democratic members of Congress objecting to counting its electoral votes. Many of those Democrats are now powerful committee chairs, including the chair of the committee investigating January 6. Violent protests marred Trump’s inauguration, and leading Democrats denounced him as illegitimate. Polls showed that supermajorities of Democratic voters believed that Russian hackers stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, and she has given every indication that she shares that view. In 2018, Stacey Abrams was anointed a hero by her party for refusing to accept the legitimacy of her loss of a governor’s race. It would have been wrong for Trump to emulate this behavior; but he went well beyond what even the most reckless Democrat has done in contesting an election.

 

Left-wing mobs have targeted the workings of government, for example overwhelming the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011 to protest Scott Walker’s union-dues bill. Republican legislators had to be evacuated by police, as Democratic legislators egged on the mob. In 2018, protesters repeatedly disrupted the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, chased Republican senators down hallways and into elevators, accosted them in restaurants, and broke through Capitol barricades, resulting in hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement was unduly lax in punishing these offenses against democratic self-government.

 

In the summer of 2020, riots convulsed many American cities with courthouses and businesses burned and police assaulted. Democratic politicians pandered shamefully to the rioters and in many cases went easy on prosecuting them. Media outlets expressed horror at deploying police and the National Guard to restore order. The conflict between the Trump administration and D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser over the summer of 2020 seems to have contributed particularly to the sluggish response to the Capitol riot. There is significant force to the claim that Democrats have forged a two-tiered justice system in which the radical Left gets a comparative pass for politically motivated violence. But then, two wrongs do not make a right.

 

The January 6 anniversary calls for serious reflection on how it happened and why it failed. Unfortunately, Democratic politicians and their media allies prefer hysteria, hyperbole, and crass opportunism.

 

Democrats intend to use the January 6 anniversary to pressure two of their own senators (Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) to join them in abolishing the filibuster for the purpose of enabling a federal takeover of voting and elections, the suppression of political speech, and radical reform of everything from congressional districts to judicial ethics. This is cynical politics. If they were serious, they would instead focus on reforming the Electoral Count Act.

 

The New York Times editorializes that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” and one of its columnists argues that Democrats should “Wave the ‘Bloody Shirt’ of Jan. 6” as Republicans did against Democrats after the Civil War — as if this compares to a four-year war in which 3 million Americans served and 750,000 died. Other opportunists (including Joe Biden) call the riot the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” or say it is comparable to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. CNN and other cable news obsessives plan wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary in order to inflate its importance and help Democrats wave that bloody shirt.

 

This is a loss of perspective. In 1915, a former Harvard professor set off a bomb at the Capitol and shot J. P. Morgan. In 1954, five congressmen were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists in the House chamber. In the early 1970s, the left-wing Weather Underground set off bombs at the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. In 1983–84, the Communist group M19 bombed the Capitol, an FBI office, and Fort McNair and the Navy Yard in D.C. In 2001, 3,000 people died on 9/11, air travel was grounded across the country, the president was shuttled to a secure location, and a wing of the Pentagon was destroyed. In 2017, a gun-toting Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to massacre Republican congressmen at a baseball practice, gravely wounding Steve Scalise, the Republican House whip.

 

America has the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Our system has outlasted many others because we distribute power that is centralized in other nations and bounded by rule-of-law norms. Though the riot was heinous, it was not an existential threat — the electoral votes were going to be counted and Biden acknowledged as the winner, an eventuality that was delayed by a few hours but never in doubt.

 

Power to overturn the vote counts did not lie in one man or one city; it was spread out among state legislatures, governor’s mansions, state and local elections officers, the vice presidency, Congress, and the courts, beyond the reach of a single Parisian-style mob. Over and over again, Republicans in those positions turned away Trump’s pressure — but the burden never lay on a single pair of shoulders. By contrast, the Republicans in Congress who shamefully supported the objections to Biden’s election mostly did so in the same fashion as the Democrats who objected to prior presidential elections — secure in the knowledge that they were participating in a cynical stunt and would be saved from the consequences of their actions by others.

 

Many of the January 6 opportunists on the left want to respond by enacting centralizing changes to the American system. But in January 2022, as in January 2021, we should mistrust anyone who says we won’t have a country if we let the system work as it always has. America works, and its system should not be burned down in the name of saving it.