Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

By Judson Berger

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Do you ever get the sense that, in this close election between two historically loathed people, all it would take to win would be for one of them to antagonize voters just a little less?

 

On the bright side for him, President Biden has considerable room to work with — as it seems his administration and allies have been intent on aggravating people as much as possible in quotidian aspects of their lives. And in bigger ways: The FAFSA debacle, for one, has left a huge, Healthcare.gov-sized crater in his government’s reputation, leaving many students — and their parents — in limbo during college-acceptance season. But the annoyances and threatened disruptions are mounting apart from that, often the result not of agency ball-dropping but deliberate regulatory choices. The recent decision to backpedal on a proposed menthol-cigarette ban is one indication Biden realizes the tendency could be hurting him.

 

“It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately,” Rich Lowry writes. The president’s latest quarterly average approval rating, per Gallup, is under 39 percent and, for that period, lower than any of the previous nine presidents’. A brutal CNN poll released on Sunday showed not only Biden trailing Donald Trump by six points while the latter stands trial, but 61 percent viewing his presidency as a failure. Jim Geraghty provides his usual spot-on diagnosis of the underlying political problem:

 

This presidential election is a battle between two candidates and campaigns whose primary concerns and worries are light-years away from those of the majority of the electorate.

 

Trump, true to form, aims to make the race about how unfairly he’s been treated, about the “stolen” 2020 election, etc. And Biden, Jim writes, “would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion,” and so forth. Yet poll after poll show it’s the economy and inflation/cost of living, along with immigration, that weigh on voters’ minds.

 

Instead of focusing narrowly on those things, the Biden administration is pursuing the above laundry list, while also:

 

• Botching the rollout of new college financial-aid forms. This can’t be stressed enough. Jim writes here about how the Department of Education fumbled the congressionally mandated overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid system. Per the Associated Press, the muck-up has, for some, delayed college decisions by months and raised concerns that many students will simply not attend: “Across the United States, the number of students who have successfully submitted the FAFSA is down 29% from this time last year.” In Jim’s words, “God help you if you have a high-school senior applying to colleges this year.”

 

• Finalizing a rule that is meant to raise wages for au pairs but could make the program too expensive for many families, and potentially even double the cost.

 

• Pursuing EPA regulations meant to move manufacturers and drivers away from gas-powered cars and toward electric vehicles and hybrids — on a timetable that seems to underplay the enormous amount of work still needed to build out the charging infrastructure and improve the EV experience itself. As NR’s editorial on the push noted, EVs were just 7.6 percent of new car sales last year.

 

• Pursuing a range of rules that seem designed to torment businesses, dealing with everything from overtime policies to noncompete clauses to emissions disclosures to independent contractors. Some of these emanate from independent agencies — but independent agencies run by people Biden appointed, so the president’s separation from these disruptions is limited. These measures won’t all necessarily redound to the benefit of employees, either.

 

• Until recently, trying to ban menthol cigarettes.

 

As National Review’s editorial explains, proponents of the latter idea considered it an act of racial benevolence, but that assumption inevitably collided with the likely consequences of the rule:

 

Menthols are popular among black smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes, the argument goes.

 

Like many “anti-racist” arguments, this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular with black people doesn’t put very much faith in the decision-making abilities of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like anyone else. . . . A national ban on the type of cigarette preferred by black smokers increases the chances for black people to confront law enforcement and face penalties for evading a ban that most white smokers wouldn’t face.

 

So the administration announced it’s shelving the idea.

 

It’s a start. What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”

 

Democrats, do you ever look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.

 

Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .

 

Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?

Fire, Ready, Aim

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

I haven’t written anything about the Kristi Noem story. Nick Catoggio beat me to it here at The Dispatch and was pretty exhaustive. I appreciate his reluctance to eat off my plate, as it were, by writing about the intersection of dogs and politics, or well, dogs and anything else. But that’s okay. And I don’t have much to add to his analysis. But I do think the way Noem has responded to the story is a good example of why politics is so exhausting these days. 

 

Noem screwed up. I don’t mean she screwed up by killing her 14-month-old dog in one of the great modern examples of victim-blaming. She was a bad dog owner and blamed the dog for it. Nor do I mean her decision to parlay her adrenalin boost into some goat slaughter. I mean she screwed up by putting the story in her own book, and telling the story so badly that she shot herself in the foot. I mean that figuratively, of course (though she should probably avoid wearing those slippers that look like dogs for a while, just to be safe). 

 

Whatever her motivation for telling this story the way she told it, it’s inconceivable she got the reaction she’d hoped for. She blew her chances to be Trump’s running mate out of the sky like a poodle out of a skeet launcher. She may have even hurt her chances to be a pundit on Fox News after she leaves office.  

 

But Noem hasn’t given up. She’s now going around blaming the “Fake News” for her problems. “Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted spin,” she tweeted. “I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock. I chose my kids.” On Hannity, she made it sound like she killed Cujo to protect her kids. We can give her the benefit of the doubt that there’s truth to all of this. The fact remains that she didn’t tell the story that way in her own book. She played down the alleged threat to her kids while hyping how happy the dog was and how bad a hunting dog Cricket was. And, as for the poor goat, she basically threw that in because … I don’t know why. It needed killing or something.  

 

She had every opportunity to tell her story however she wanted, honestly or dishonestly. She chose poorly, to the point where everyone from the ultra MAGAs to the cast of The Five were aghast. Rather than own it, she tried to turn it into a story about how she’s a victim-martyr to the “media.” And, of course, Sean Hannity was all too happy to help. He could have asked, “So, are Brit Hume and Jeanine Pirro part of the ‘Fake News’ media?’” I mean he couldn’t ask that, because, Hannity. But you get the point. 

 

DeSantis’ beef with ‘beef.’

 

Since I started out playing clean-up to Catoggio, I’ll keep going. Yesterday, Nick wrote about Ron DeSantis’ decision to make it a crime to make or serve artificial meat. Again, I don’t have a lot to add to his analysis. But there are a couple of things I’d flesh out—organically flesh out, of course. 

 

First, I was a little surprised that Nick didn’t connect the dots between DeSantis’ position(s) on Disney and his position on fake meat. (I’m only surprised because Nick is one of the great dot-connectors and receipt-holders of our age.) When DeSantis signed a law designed to punish social media for censorship or something, the law had a special carve out for Disney. “Theme parks” were immune to the regulations. But, later, when Disney (idiotically) waded into the culture war stuff on the falsely misnamed “don’t say gay” law, DeSantis went after Disney’s special tax advantages in the state. The details are wonky, but the relevant point is that DeSantis was for special treatment for Disney before he was against it. He was also against ethanol subsidies as a congressman but for them as a presidential candidate. Where he was consistent, at least as a presidential candidate, was talking about the evils of “corporatism.” Unfortunately, he rarely used the word correctly. Corporatism is an actual form of political economy with deep roots in medieval European and Catholic thought. It’s not “rule by corporations.” That’s how he meant it when he constantly attacked Nikki Haley’s “warmed over corporatism.”  

 

(Corporatism, as promulgated by the church in the 19th century, was a “system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest.” The church was trying to find a “middle way” between laissez-faire capitalism and authoritarian socialism. But before that, the basic idea of corporatism was that nobles, guilds, clergy, and other stakeholders, would work in coordination to maintain the social order.  The root idea of corporatism isn’t a “corporation” like Intel or Exxon-Mobil, but “corporeal” as in “corpus mysticum” or “corpus politicum.” The whole society working as one body—no surprise that the economic system of fascism is corporatism.)

 

In his defense, I suppose, you could say DeSantis was more consistent in his approach than I’m suggesting, given that he often specified that his real target was the “woke corporatism” of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing in general and the “Magic Kingdom of Woke Corporatism” in particular. But just as “common good” has become right-wing speak for “social justice,” “woke corporatism” is right-wing speak for “corporatism we don’t like.” 

 

Now, I don’t like corporatism, full stop. And I probably agree with DeSantis on most of his criticisms of ESG and the like. But banning—criminally banning—artificial meat is right-wing woke corporatism, in the sense that he means it, and quite consistent with the way the popes of yore meant it. He’s pretty honest about it. He justifies the move as a way to protect cattle interests in the state against competition. Nick writes:

 

The governor himself was explicit about the ban’s protectionist intentions. “What we’re protecting here is the [cattle] industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that views things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantis said at his press conference, reminding the audience that Florida has “one of the top cattle industries in the country.”

 

That’s domestic protectionism, crony capitalism, and corporatist on his terms. Culturally fashionable economic interests get protection from innovators and disruptors. When DeSantis issued his “Declaration of Economic Independence” he bemoaned how “large corporations have secured massive carve outs and bailouts. This has become a form of venture socialism in which gains are privatized at the top, whereas the losses are borne by you, the hardworking American taxpayer.” DeSantis vowed, “No more socialism for the wealthy and rugged individualism for small businesses and for individuals. and for working class people.”

 

Well, DeSantis is providing a carve-out for natural—carvable—beef. If you’re a rugged individual or small business in the artificial beef business, DeSantis wants to put you in jail. This is precisely the sort of thing that happened under the corporatist systems of medieval Europe. I wrote a lot about this in Suicide of the West. Guilds—i.e. incumbent industries—hated innovation. Here are some examples I quoted (via Joel Mokyr):

 

• In 1299, Florence banned bankers from adopting Arabic numerals.

• At the end of the fifteenth century, scribe guilds of Paris managed to fight off the adoption of the printing press for two decades.

• In 1397, pin manufacturers in Cologne outlawed the use of pin presses.

• In 1561, the city council of Nuremburg made the manufacture and selling of lathes punishable with imprisonment.

• In 1579, the city council of Danzig ordered the secret assassination of the inventor of a ribbon loom—­ by drowning.

• In the late 1770s, the Strasbourg council barred a local cotton mill from selling its wares in town because it would disrupt the business model of the cloth importers.

 

These things were done to protect the established order, the world as God willed it. One of the backers of the fake meat ban explained that he opposed fake meat because it is an “affront to nature and creation.” I agree with that, aesthetically. But in the 19th century, this was the sort of thing people said about anesthesia. Women should experience pain in childbirth, for instance, because the pain was God’s will. 

 

I know I’ve ventured from my promise of bloggy punditry, but there’s a second point worth making. Stifling innovation isn’t just bad for the economy and hypocritical for supporters of free enterprise—it’s dangerous. Many of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history were discovered by accident. Smart people trying to do one thing ended up doing something much better. Swiss scientist Walter Jaeger was trying to invent a poison gas detector but discovered his device was triggered by his cigarette smoke. British pharmacist John Walker was messing around with some chemicals and discovered that the congealed gunk on a stick burst into flame when he scraped it on his hearth. That’s how matches were created. Percy Spencer was working on a magnetron for Raytheon when he discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. That became the microwave. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident. Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered X-rays while mucking around with vacuum tubes. The stories are endless: pacemakers, Teflon, popsicles (by an 11-year-old), safety glasses, vulcanized rubber, etc. Tea bags were originally just some packaging, but customers started just dunking the whole package in hot water. Bubble wrap was deliberately invented—as wallpaper. 

 

This gets at the very heart of why humanity started to get rich once—and only once—in all of human history. Innovation was given free rein. That’s the thing about technological and scientific exploration—it’s a process of discovery. Innovation was kept under a wet blanket for millennia to protect the established interests, who rightly feared what the genie would do to them once let out of the bottle. 

I don’t know if artificial meat will ever catch on or be successful at scale. If it is, it will definitely be disruptive. But for it to be actually successful, it will have to be popular, and it can only be popular a) if it’s an affordable substitute for natural meat, and b) if it tastes good. That can only be discovered through competition in the market. 

 

I’m not for giant subsidies for the fake meat industry for the same reason I’m not for DeSantis’ de facto subsidies for “traditional” meat: I don’t know. And neither do the people who think they’re smarter than the market and the innovators. As Virginia Postrel writes in her wonderful book, The Future and Its Enemies, “With some exceptions, the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the dynamic processes through which it is carried.” Fake meat might be a flop. But if it’s a success, it will be a success for a good reason: because it satisfies real human needs. 

 

The people who want to stop innovation in the present are always reluctant to answer the question, “When would you have stopped it in the past?” Before the invention of seat belts, penicillin, the printing press, the microwave, the pacemaker, fertilizer, crop rotation? 

The Curiously Relevant Case of Rick Perry

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Regarding the legal (and legalistic) issues related to the current raft of criminal cases lodged against former game-show host, occasional pornographic-film performer, and disgraced ex-president Donald J. Trump, I commend to you the expert opinions of Dispatch legal analyst Sarah Isgur and frequent Advisory Opinions podcast guest David French of the New York Times.

 

For my part, I have a narrow, but relevant, example to put forward: the felony case against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was indicted by a Travis County prosecutor entrusted with countering political corruption throughout the state of Texas. The prosecutor, a wildly corrupt and out-of-control drunk named Rosemary Lehmberg, indicted Perry for threatening to veto funding for a specific state expenditure: her office.  

 

While she was a Travis County prosecutor, Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving, which is not a great surprise for someone who was consuming about two liters of vodka a week for more than a year in addition to whatever other drinking she did. (I sympathize.) She was pulled over after driving erratically, found with an open bottle of vodka in the car, and came in at about three times the legal blood-alcohol content. That is not great, but the much worse part is that while in custody, she attempted to use her position to bully and threaten sheriff’s officers and other personnel into giving her special treatment and letting her go. She threatened to have them arrested and jailed, among other things.

 

Perry rightly understood this to be an unbearable outrage against the public interest in clean and fair government, and sought—unsuccessfully—to have Lehmberg removed from office. He subsequently announced that as governor he would use his veto powers to block state funding for the office as long as Lehmberg was the incumbent—if Travis County wanted to protect its corrupt prosecutor, Travis County could pay her.

 

Lehmberg retaliated by indicting Perry on felony corruption charges on the theory that, while the governor of Texas has entirely open-ended veto power, it was an act of political corruption for him to use that veto power to try to pressure her to leave office. That was pure nonsense, as the courts eventually decided, and everybody knew it was a vindictive, frivolous case: another outrageous abuse of power from a prosecutor inclined to the abuse of power. Perry was at the time campaigning in the Republican presidential primary while under felony indictment—Donald Trump is not the first to have done so.

 

As our legal writers have observed, there isn’t anything in the statutes or in the Constitution that says you cannot indict a sitting president. There is a Justice Department memo that says the Justice Department won’t do that, and there is the fact that the president, as head of the executive branch, would in effect be prosecuting himself if he were tried under federal law while in office. There isn’t anything that says a local prosecutor cannot indict a president either—that this is not the usual practice is a matter of custom that had not been much challenged before the presidency of Donald Trump, who is a profoundly corrupt, indecent, and immoral man, albeit one who has not yet been convicted on any charge. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it hasn’t always been: President Ulysses Grant was arrested while he was president, and apparently thanked the arresting officer—this having happened in the 19th century, it is worth observing that the police officer who arrested the sitting president was black—and praised him for doing his duty. Grant was a reckless horseman, and the officer had, apparently, given him a prior warning. 

 

I like the story about President Grant, but we don’t live in Ulysses Grant’s world—we live in Rosemary Lehmberg’s world. 

 

The question about legal immunity for presidents mainly has to do with official acts, i.e., with actions taken in the course of performing the duties of a president. Donald Trump believes that such immunity should cover all conduct for presidents, including ordinary crime. It is easy to understand why such a figure as Trump would prefer this, but almost nobody takes that argument seriously. There are some serious reasons to doubt that U.S. presidents are—as opposed to should be—legally entitled to any official immunity, including for plainly official acts while president. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out last week during oral arguments for the case involving these questions, there isn’t anything in the Constitution that explicitly confers such immunity on presidents, while there is plain-text discussion of immunity for members of Congress.

 

The example of Rosemary Lehmberg is one little piece of evidence that obviously official acts within the core executive powers of a chief executive (which a governor is) can nonetheless be read as potential crimes if an enterprising prosecutor so desires. The cases may come to naught, but that doesn’t make them necessarily any less politically useful to partisans or toxic for democratic procedure.

 

None of this is especially relevant to the Trump case at hand, which mostly involves private conduct that would be outside the scope of any plausible immunity claim. Like many of my lawyer colleagues, I was somewhat mystified by Jack Smith’s inclusion of Trump’s desire to fire one attorney general and replace him with another as part of the criminal case against him—choosing his own attorney general is something presidents get to do, provided there is no evident crime involved, such as taking a bribe to fire one Cabinet member and replace him with another. Firing a political appointee because he will not toe the political line is something that would be very hard to understand as a crime, even in the context of the broader Trump-led coup d’état effort after the 2020 election, which was—in my view and, I am confident, in the view of any reasonable jury that should ever get to consider the case in full—a criminal conspiracy. 

 

Consider, for example, the murder case against Barack Obama. There wasn’t one. In my view, President Obama should have been impeached and removed from office after ordering the assassinations of two American citizens—jihadist social-media propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son—who were killed not in the heat of battle but after being put on a hit list (Obama’s lieutenants bragged to the New York Times about it) and targeted for extrajudicial killing. What Barack Obama did wasn’t ordinary criminal murder—it was much worse than that. A self-respecting Congress would have acted against him (Sen. Rand Paul, before he devolved into … whatever it is he has become … tried to do so) and drawn a bright line in policy regarding the assassination of American citizens.

 

But Congress failed to act. Would it have been better, from a civic or constitutional point of view, if some prosecutor had attempted to construe Obama’s national security policy as a murder conspiracy? I do not think that it would. There are a lot of variations on the theme of Rosemary Lehmberg out there, and a lot of Republican answers to Rosemary Lehmberg out there, too. 

 

There are plenty of plausible charges upon which to convict Donald Trump. And for every plausible felony charge against him, there are 14,697 non-criminal reasons he should never again be entrusted with any kind of political power and never should have been in the first place. The scars of the Trump presidency will be on our constitutional order for generations, and the issue of indicting, trying, and convicting former presidents for acts taken while in office will be part of that. Some kind of qualified immunity for plainly official acts, both during the term in office and after, seems to me a reasonable measure—but it also seems to me that this is a question for Congress, not a question for the Supreme Court. As Justice Thomas noted, there isn’t any obvious textual source for any claim of immunity for presidents. An immunity statute written by Congress would do well to include a provision permitting the removal of such immunity (perhaps by a two-thirds vote or as part of an impeachment sentence) in the case of truly outrageous offenses done under the color of official acts. 

 

Rick Perry was indicted on felony charges for threatening a veto. The case against Donald Trump isn’t anything so obviously vindictive or trivial. But the history of our republic does not begin with Donald Trump and—one hopes—it will not end with him, either. This is something we need to get sorted out before there is an even more corrosive test case. The taste for tyranny is not limited to men as lazy and stupid as Donald Trump—and we simply have to prepare for the possibility of a more competent and capable demagogue.

Don’t Bring Gaza to America

National Review Online

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

What is the Biden administration thinking? Reports say that Biden administration officials are batting around plans to bring Palestinian refugees from Gaza to America under the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Such an initiative would be a security nightmare, a potential diplomatic problem, and likely to work against the political interests of the Biden administration.

 

The Biden administration’s top political problem is its negligence of immigration law, combined with its expansive abuse of asylum and refugee status, both of which caused the record flow of aliens into the country. In December of last year, 371,000 illegal aliens were encountered by border enforcement, a new monthly record. That is like encountering the city of Cleveland and a few of its suburbs.

 

The Biden administration has completely neglected even the basic screening of illegal entrants into the United States, even the type of screening liberals believe in, such as for Covid, before giving them bogus trial asylum status that will effectively allow them to stay forever. And now the Biden administration thinks it’s wise to give a special incentive for Gazans to come to the United States as refugees. This is a population in which 70 percent of those polled believe the terroristic assault against Israel on October 7 was just and good. It’s no surprise that neighboring Arab countries, led by Egypt and Jordan, have steadfastly rejected any Gazan refugees.

 

Beyond the very real security issues of bringing in a population sympathetic to Hamas, there are also diplomatic problems. Refugees would have to be certified by the United States as fleeing some form of persecution. That could mean fingering Israel or its armed forces as their persecutor, causing an immediate diplomatic scandal with Israel and lending indirect support to the most geopolitically obtuse nations of the world, such as South Africa, which launched a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ with the support of Ireland.

 

Besides provoking the ire of border hawks, a category which includes a large majority of the nation, a Gazan resettlement program will not even solve the administration’s political problems with the far Left, as it will be reinterpreted by Hamas supporters as cooperation with Israel’s determination to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinian Muslims.

 

If we are looking for signs of brain death in the Biden administration, a plan to settle Gazans as refugees in the United States is one of them.

 

The Biden administration’s utterly lawless record and ad hoc amnesties, work-permit giveaways, and special-status awards to Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans mean that appeals to the rules will not work. Congress must be proactive, affirmatively banning U.S. funds and resources from being used for these purposes. If we’ve learned anything, though, it’s that it is very hard to save Biden from himself.

Don’t Become Sweden

By Rich Lowry

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

There must be worse ideas than admitting refugees from Gaza into the U.S., but none immediately come to mind. 

 

According to CBS News, one proposal the Biden administration is considering is “using the decades-old United States Refugee Admissions Program to welcome Palestinians with U.S. ties who have managed to escape Gaza and enter neighboring Egypt.” Another possibility is “getting additional Palestinians out of Gaza and processing them as refugees if they have American relatives.”

 

Who knows how serious the internal deliberations are, and, presumably, any such programs would be small-scale. That said, few would have thought President Biden would allow millions of people to walk into the country over the southern border, but here we are. 

 

The response to any consideration of letting Gazan refugees into the country in any numbers should be, “Don’t become Sweden.” That admonition from conservatives once was exclusively about the risks of adopting an overweening welfare state; now, it also has to be about the perils of adopting a heedlessly open-handed, self-congratulatory immigration policy.

 

If the Biden administration thinks it can send a message to the rest of the world — and perhaps to Dearborn — about our admirable liberality by accepting large numbers of people from the Middle East who don’t share our values, Sweden has been there and done that. 

 

The Scandinavian country has managed to transform itself from an overwhelmingly peaceful society to one with a gangland violence problem — without really trying, or certainly without intending to. 

 

To conjure an image of contemporary Sweden, think less IKEA and more bombs blowing up outside fashionable Stockholm restaurants. 

 

Sweden welcomed more than 150,000 refugees from the broader Middle East in 2015, an act its leaders framed as a moral triumph. Given the country’s population of roughly 10 million, this was a huge number. 

 

In about two decades, Sweden decided to go from a largely homogenous society to 20 percent of the population being foreign-born, in part, as an exercise in virtue-signaling. (The percentages among young people are much higher.)

 

In 2015, the prime minister Stefan Löfven couldn’t have been more puffed up and morally self-important about the decision to take migrants en masse. “My Europe takes in refugees,” he intoned. “My Europe doesn’t build walls.” 

 

His Europe was incredibly short-sighted and naïve. 

 

The country assumed that poorly educated people from an entirely different culture would fit right into the Scandinavian nation, because, you know, Sweden is Sweden. What could go wrong?

 

As James Traub in Foreign Policy magazine notes, this decision was very costly. Sweden spent more than 5 percent of its overall budget on refugees in 2016. 

 

And, more importantly, it has created social problems where there were none before, at least not on this scale. 

 

Sweden, in effect, seeded its country with the equivalent of the Paris suburbs. Stefan Hedlund writes of “the emergence of neighborhoods where almost all residents are immigrants, where unemployment rates are very high and where the children of immigrants go to schools where no other children, often not even teachers, are proficient in Swedish.”

 

With this, inevitably, has come disorder. Fatal shootings have doubled over the last 30 years, and on a per capita basis, Stockholm has 30 times the gun violence of London, according to the Wall Street Journal.

 

Only Albania has a higher rate of gun deaths among sizable European countries. 

 

If the shooting incidents aren’t bad enough, the hand grenades and bombs are particularly hard to ignore. 

 

The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said, “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”

 

The Wall Street Journal report cites “turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities.”

 

Young migrants are indeed heavily involved. About 45 percent of suspects in gun-related murder and manslaughter charges are aged 15–20, according to the Guardian. That’s an increase from 23.6 percent in 2012. (Meanwhile, overall youthful offending has declined a bit.)

 

The background of the prominent gang leader Rawa Majid is telling. Referred to as the “Scandinavian Pablo Escobar” by one expert, he was brought to Sweden as an infant by parents from Iraqi Kurdistan and assimilated into a life of crime thanks to his cousins.

 

The chief of Sweden’s central bank has warned that the violence could harm the country’s long-term economic prospects, and across the political spectrum, everyone who hated the idea of walls a decade ago now supports a much more restrictive approach to immigration, as well as tough-on-crime policies. 

 

If Biden wants an even further shift to the right on immigration in the U.S., admitting Gazan refugees would do it. 

 

There’s simply no reason to go out of our way to take refugees from the most dysfunctional culture in the Middle East, shot through with political and religious radicalism and support for a terror group. 

 

It’d especially make no sense to pluck them out of Egypt, the country right next door to Gaza, with a similar culture and values. Many Gazans, after all, ultimately come from Egypt.

 

Of course, we’d be told that all of the prospective refugees are the most pro-American, philosemitic people in all of Gaza. As a practical matter, though, they’d only be checked for terrorist connections, while there’s no effective mechanism for screening for their social and political attitudes.

 

Given how refugees ramify, accepting any significant number would be a choice to create a Gazan diaspora in the United States. Refugees are rapidly eligible for green cards and citizenship, and can in short order bring in family members, in the classic dynamic of chain migration. 

 

We shouldn’t go there and, if we have any doubt about that, should look to Scandinavia. Sweden has indeed created an example for the world. Just not the one it expected to. 

Biden-Harris a Profile in Cowardice on Campus Disorder

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

You can find President Biden’s full remarks about the anti-Israel protests on America’s campuses here. The key excerpt:

 

Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest.

 

Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.

 

Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education. . . .

 

People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.

 

But let’s be clear about this as well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

 

These remarks are fine, but by the time Biden delivered them, shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern Thursday, police had already moved in on the protesters on many of America’s campuses, and the campus buildings and grounds had largely been cleared. The crisis was largely over.

 

If Biden had made the same remarks even just a day or two earlier, it might have looked a bit like leadership — standing up for the rule of law, telling the protesters something they didn’t want to hear, and prodding the hesitant college administrators to stop tolerating the intolerable.

 

In the past few weeks, Americans have witnessed a stark contrast between the written statements and fierce condemnations from the likes of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, and Biden’s on-camera, off the cuff, mushy, “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being. . . .”

 

White House communications staffers kept telling us how much the president firmly believed “forcibly [taking] over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach,” but for some reason, the president, who is rarely more than a few steps away from television cameras, just couldn’t come out and say so himself.

 

It turns out Biden was willing to stand up and call out the illegal actions committed by the anti-Israel protesters . . . but only after the worst-offending protesters had been put in zip-ties.

 

Also note that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre — who is so bad at this — effectively confirmed that the White House stood and watched events on America’s campuses for the past few weeks:

 

Q: Because I asked yesterday, has there been any follow-up or a- — not follow-up — has there been any outreach from the White House to any of the campuses — administrators, leaders on these campuses?

 

Ms. JEAN-PIERRE: I don’t have anything to read out at this time.

 

You can argue whether anyone at the White House ought to be reaching out or having conversations with university administrators. But how much antisemitic violence do we need to see on college campuses before it’s something the president ought to address? (Particularly for a president who said he decided to run for office because of the tiki-torch-carrying antisemites in Charlottesville, Va.) How many students need to get targeted for harassment for being Jewish before the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sees something worth its time and energy? The U.S. Department of Education, which spends billions of taxpayer dollars on student loans, scholarships, grants, etc., doesn’t have any thoughts on colleges canceling classes and graduation ceremonies in a surrender to an angry mob?

 

Over the weekend, NBC News reported, “Amid growing protests on college campuses by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the White House is planning for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to have a minimal presence for a traditional rite of spring: delivering commencement addresses.” If the protests were serious enough to alter the president’s schedule, why weren’t they serious enough for the president to address on-camera and at length before the cops had cleared them all out?

 

Still, at least Biden eventually was roused to address the issue. As far as I can tell, Vice President Kamala Harris has not made any public remarks about the campus protests. The New York Times noted, “Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning on Monday in Wisconsin, again took sharp swipes at former President Donald J. Trump for his actions on abortion, a hot topic across the country. But she stayed silent on the war in Gaza, another issue erupting elsewhere among the critical bloc of young voters she has been courting.” While speaking in Atlanta, “Harris did not address recent protests on Georgia college campuses tied to the White House’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.”

 

The vice president is a former prosecutor. She doesn’t have any thoughts on lawbreaking and whether the police should be called in on campus? For much of the reelection campaign, she’s been on a college tour!

 

Oh, and speaking of the administration’s connections to higher education:

 

President Joe Biden crashed first lady Jill Biden’s Teachers of the Year State Dinner, where the White House wined and dined top educators and teachers’ union leaders. . . .

 

“By the way I actually taught for a number of years in law school and then I was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” he said. “You don’t applaud that?” he said when the roomful of teachers didn’t immediately clap.

 

For the millionth time, Joe Biden was not “a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” as he keeps describing himself. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2019 that, “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” Note the words “on campus,” meaning that while the Penn Biden Center would intermittently host once-a-week class sessions, it wasn’t primarily used for classes or teaching.

 

The more Biden insists upon describing himself as a former professor, the worse it makes his stance on the campus antisemitic insanity appear.

 

Professors at UPenn are running around declaring “playing the victim is what Jews are best at,” but the self-described “professor at the University of Pennsylvania” in the Oval Office doesn’t have any thoughts about what his old employer ought to do about it, huh? What a profile in courage.

 

The Campus Protesters Lose the Argument

 

I don’t begrudge anyone for looking at the functionally — sometimes literally, in their choice of headgear — pro-Hamas protesters and feeling like America’s college campuses are going to hell in a handbasket.

 

But as a public-persuasion tool, the anti-Israel protests and the unhinged campus left are actually turning into Israel’s most effective public-relations ally. For the past six months, we’ve seen enormous efforts to push the argument, “Regardless of how you feel about Hamas, Israel has become the aggressor in the war in the Gaza Strip, and Israel is no longer morally worthy of American support.” And that argument has absolutely failed to get any traction, in large part because the people making it come across as a bunch of maniacs.

 

The campus protests have had no discernible impact on generally pro-Israel American public opinion:

 

While 59% think Muslim students face Islamophobia on campus, the 69% who see antisemitism there has come on strong. “That number wouldn’t have been stratospherically high, and it is very high, even as recently as one year ago,” said Nesho.

 

Two-thirds of voters today believe that it’s not safe to be openly Jewish on university campuses, and a huge majority favor suspension for students or teachers who call for violence against Jews, which is what many onlookers hear in common protestor chants. “The majority of the public, and the majority of voters, are not with the protestors,” Nesho said.

 

Among the 64% who believe there’s a “problem” with what higher ed institutions are teaching students these days, 40 percent identified racially divisive theories, 34 percent cited a lack of political diversity, 33 percent deplored the promotion of anti-Americanism, and 27% cited teachings that promote antisemitism.

 

Wait, there’s more. The April Harris survey found that 52 percent of Americans feel favorably toward Israel, and just 28 percent feel unfavorably. Just 16 percent feel favorably toward the Palestinian Authority, and 51 percent feel unfavorably, and 14 percent of Americans feel favorably about Hamas, and 64 percent feel unfavorably. (Admittedly, the ideal percentage of Americans who feel favorably about Hamas would be zero.)

 

In the ongoing conflict, 80 percent said they support Israel more, and 20 percent said they support Hamas more.

 

In perhaps the single biggest demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the anti-Israel message, 67 percent believe Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties, and 33 percent believe it is not trying to avoid civilian casualties. Among respondents ages 18 to 24, 64 percent believe Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties, 36 percent do not.

 

Sixty-one percent believe “a ceasefire should happen only after the release of all hostages and Hamas being removed from power.” That’s down slightly from 63 percent in March. Seventy-eight percent believe Hamas should be removed from running Gaza, and 72 percent believe Israel should “move forward with an operation in Rafah to finish the war with Hamas, doing its best to avoid civilian casualties even though there will be casualties.”

 

In a vivid demonstration of how the wording of question matters, Harris asked people, “Do you favor or oppose a permanent ceasefire in Gaza?” and 70 percent said they favored one. When they followed up, “Would you favor or oppose that ceasefire if it meant that Hamas was allowed to continue to hold hostages and Hamas were to continue to run Gaza?” 68 percent said they would oppose such a cease-fire.

 

ADDENDUM: Daniel Gordis shares the thoughts of Yotam Berger, an Israeli Ph.D. student at Stanford. The whole thing is worth reading, but this excerpt may well summarize America in 2024 as well as anything:

 

This year I finally got it. No, if I were an American, I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trump’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.

Hooray for ‘The Uniparty’

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

 

We start with a confession. At a press conference on Wednesday morning, “Moscow Madge” unveiled some new political merch—and, to my surprise, I’m eager to buy and wear it.

 

Who said populist demagoguery never produced anything good?

She called the presser to announce that she’ll force a vote next week on her motion to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, which has been pending in the House since late March. Greene filed that motion out of frustration after the speaker partnered with Democrats on a $1.2 trillion government funding package but held off on putting it on the floor, believing that it would be more useful held in reserve. She knew that Johnson would soon have to decide whether to support another round of military aid to Ukraine and hoped that the threat of being Kevin-McCarthy-ed would pressure him into opposing it.

 

It didn’t. The speaker chose to try to Make Ukraine Great Again.

 

Her bluff having been called, Greene was left with two unhappy options. She could relent on her motion to vacate and admit defeat (hah!) or she could move forward with it and antagonize the great majority of her own conference by doing so. As she weighed that dilemma, however, Democrats threw her a curveball: On Tuesday morning, Hakeem Jeffries and his deputies announced that if Greene brings her motion, they’ll side with Johnson by voting to kill it.

 

Defeat was now assured—but you know how MAGA is. The important thing is to fight, not to win. Grievance is the lifeblood of the movement; the more populists win and get their way, the less they have to feel aggrieved about. Better to lose and retain the establishment as a foil than to win and risk becoming it.

 

So on Wednesday, Greene vowed to fight on and lose to “The Uniparty” that had come together to save Mike Johnson.

 

That’s a cute talking point, but it’s not Democrats who’ll need to worry about their next primaries after voting to save Johnson, especially with many House progressives destined to join the effort next week. The people whom Greene wants on the record with respect to the speaker are members of her own party, of course, which is in keeping with her politics. The populist project aspires to replace traditional conservatives with post-liberals more fervently than it does to replace Democrats with Republicans, as the results in GOP primaries frequently remind us. And Moscow Madge has been unusually candid about it.

 

Hence her framing of the coming vote on Johnson. Her Republican colleagues can choose to oust him and side with The People—which in this case means by my guesstimation something like one-quarter of the population scattered across mostly rural areas—or they can choose to keep him and side with “The Uniparty.” Pretty straightforward. In theory.

 

In reality, the concept of “The Uniparty” isn’t straightforward.

 

***

 

“Uniparty” is reminiscent of “globalist” insofar as each word has a generally discernible meaning yet is often swallowed by convenient exceptions, as the populist agenda requires.

 

For instance, any MAGA diehard would tell you that Western support for Ukraine’s defense against rampaging Russian fascists is a case of globalist “warmongering,” to borrow a term from one of the most odious Republicans in Congress. But ask them if support for defending Taiwan from communist China is similarly “globalist” and they might pause. Ask them if U.S. support for Israel against Hamas is “globalist” and some might get indignant at the suggestion.

 

If you doubt me, compare Donald Trump’s comments this week to Time magazine on two theaters of foreign policy. Pressed about the fate of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea in his second term, he complained: “Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country.” Pressed about whether he’d intervene in a war between Israel and Iran, his tone changed: “If they attack Israel, yes, we would be there.”

 

The degree to which “America First” does and doesn’t require resistance to interventions abroad depends on the degree of tribal affinity or antipathy that right-wing populists feel for the combatants in a particular conflict. When they start grumbling about “globalism” with respect to war, that’s their way of saying that their affinity for the side backed by Washington is lacking.

 

“Uniparty” is similarly slippery. Let’s consider: Among the many players in the conflict between Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, to whom does that term rightly apply?

 

Start with House Democrats. Are they truly “Uniparty” comrades of the speaker in this case? 

 

Even before Jeffries and his deputies issued their statement on Tuesday, support for Greene’s motion to vacate was weak among House Republicans. Only two of her GOP colleagues had stepped forward to endorse it; there were already at least that many House Democrats prepared to oppose the motion as of mid-April. Had Jeffries said nothing, Greene might have let the matter drop instead of forcing a House vote on the matter. Even if she did force a vote, he could have quietly allowed his members to vote how they wished instead of endorsing Johnson himself.

 

Instead, by bear-hugging the speaker, Jeffries deliberately inflamed populists’ impulse to demagogue their enemies within the Republican Party as cat’s-paws of the left. “Fresh bait always finds a fish,” a senior GOP official told Politico. “Jeffries throwing that out there, it’s chum in the water. Everyone knows what he did.” Greene took the bait, and now Democrats get to sit back and reap the benefits. A rift will open on the right over the speaker’s fate, pitting Republicans against each other. Johnson will be aggressively delegitimized as a “Democrat Speaker of the House” by right-wing critics, and he’ll theoretically owe House Democrats something for the favor they’ve done him, which may translate into fewer “messaging bills” on the floor and more bipartisan legislation. No wonder Johnson has tried to make clear he had no idea Jeffries’ statement was coming.

 

Jeffries calculated coldly and cleverly that his party stands to gain more on balance by rescuing Johnson than by giving him the McCarthy treatment. The speaker did the right thing for Ukraine, and so Democrats are willing to reward him for it. If and when he stops doing the right thing legislatively, their willingness to rescue him from the right’s Jacobins will stop as well. It’s a matter of creating self-interested incentives, not a case of friendly back-scratching altruism between members of a “Uniparty.”

 

***

 

How about Greene herself? Where does she get off pointing fingers about “The Uniparty”?

 

If bipartisan support for Johnson is enough to make him an avatar of “The Uniparty,” she needs to explain how her own motion to vacate, if successful, wouldn’t make her the same thing. She can’t get the 218 votes needed to oust him without near-unanimous support from Democrats, after all; when Kevin McCarthy was deposed last fall, all but eight of the ballots to remove him came from Jeffries’ conference. It’s a neat trick for Greene and her defenders to dub Johnson a de facto Democrat due to his temporary marriage of convenience with the left while she goes about trying to arrange the very same marriage for herself.

 

Greene would answer that, I assume, by noting that it’s not the mere fact of bipartisanship that makes Johnson’s coalition a “Uniparty,” it’s the fact that that coalition was built around a “Uniparty” policy priority: funding Ukraine. The speaker is being rewarded with Democratic support because he’s advancing the Democratic agenda. When Republicans join forces with the left to do that, that’s “The Uniparty.”

 

But this too is more complicated than populists would have us believe.

 

Ask the average House Republican who’s to blame for Democrats getting their way so often on legislation this term and they’ll have very strong opinions—but not about Mike Johnson. Time and again, they’d note, MAGA members have opposed GOP bills on important matters simply because the terms aren’t maximalist enough for their liking. That’s forced Johnson to choose between bowing to their unrealistic demands—which risks a long stalemate with the Democratic Senate while leaving those important policy matters unaddressed—or partnering with House Democrats to move bills that will necessarily be more liberal in substance than the GOP would prefer.

 

Simply put, populists have weakened their leader’s hand in negotiations by proving themselves unreliable partners and engineered legislative outcomes that are even less conservative than the initial bills that Johnson has offered. Look no further than the Ukraine aid package, which the speaker sought to pair with new border security measures as a sop to the MAGA wing. Some House Democrats might have signed onto that, but it all went up in smoke when three populist Republicans on the Rules Committee voted against the border bill to protest Ukraine funding. That forced Johnson to try to pass it under “suspension of the rules,” which requires the support of a two-thirds majority of the House. The bill fell short.

 

So instead of getting modest improvement on immigration enforcement, the GOP got nothing. “They’re making us the most bipartisan Congress ever,” one House Republican complained to Axios about the MAGA wing. “Because they are unwilling to compromise just a little bit in a divided government, they force us to make bigger concessions and deals with the Dems.” The numbers bear that out: To a freakish degree, the minority party has provided most of the votes on major legislation this term.

 

So tell me, who’s leading “The Uniparty”? Mike Johnson, or the populists who keep handing Hakeem Jeffries leverage over policy on one must-pass bill after another?

 

***

 

What about … Donald Trump? Is he part of “The Uniparty”?

 

One would think the populist-in-chief can’t be a member almost by definition. He’s the leader of the revolution; “The Uniparty” is what he and they are hoping to overthrow. But if “The Uniparty” is defined by the policy positions it takes, I’m not sure what conclusion we can reach except that the Mao Zedong of MAGA has unofficially joined the establishment lately.

 

Trump now agrees with Democrats that blue states should remain free to legalize abortion. He agrees with them that Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza is dragging on too long and that the devastation appears “heinous” and “horrible.” He agrees with them that the COVID-19 vaccines should be celebrated. He agrees with them that Ukraine’s survival is an “important” U.S. interest. And he agrees with them that Mike Johnson should remain speaker.

 

How many “Uniparty” positions is he permitted to hold before he’s considered One Of Them rather than One Of Us?

 

His own handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Whatley, reportedly met face-to-face with Greene on Tuesday to try to talk her out of moving forward against Johnson. “He said, one, this is not helpful, and two, we want to expand and grow the majority in the House,” a source told Politico, recounting the conversation. “He was clear that any disruption to the conference on these efforts, including filing this [motion to vacate], does not help the case for party unity.”

 

An RNC stooge locking arms with the Republican speaker, the Democratic minority leader, and Donald Trump to try to preserve the status quo in the House amid bitter populist disappointment sounds pretty “Uniparty” to me.

 

We can repeat the analysis with lesser Republicans. Reps. Matt Gaetz and Eli Crane each voted to oust Kevin McCarthy last fall, as any populist who despises “The Uniparty” might be expected to do. Gaetz seemed poised to give Johnson the same treatment, reportedly warning the speaker before the vote on Ukraine aid that Republicans would move to remove him if he pushed the bill. Gaetz even threatened his GOP colleagues who planned to support the measure, according to the Washington Post, “saying the far-right bloc would target them on social media and campaign against them.”

 

Fast-forward to Tuesday and Gaetz now sounds opposed to trying to oust Johnson while Crane is a flat “no.” Maybe Trump prevailed upon them to back down lest there be another round of Republican chaos in an election year. Or maybe they reflected on the weeks-long agony of trying to replace McCarthy last year and concluded that, even as revolutionaries, they should probably have some idea of who might succeed Johnson before resolving to guillotine him.

 

Either way, it sounds like they’re prepared to vote with the speaker and with Jeffries. Matt Gaetz: “Uniparty” or no?

 

***

 

The more closely you scrutinize this populist argle-bargle, the shallower it appears.

 

Ask a Trumpist how they think “The Uniparty” feels about this week’s pro-Hamas protests and they’d likely land somewhere between indifference and outright support for “woke” agitation. At the very least, I expect, they’d accuse “Uniparty” members of wanting to distract the public from the ugly campus spectacle that’s embarrassed the left and to refocus attention on some more trivial controversy.

 

But the reality is otherwise. Mike Johnson has immersed himself neck-deep in criticism of Columbia University, replete with a visit to campus last week where he was heckled. That’s smart politics, not only by amplifying an issue that plainly helps his party but by earning goodwill with populist Republicans who are disgruntled about the Ukraine package. The person who’s drawing public attention away from the protests is … Marjorie Taylor Greene, by forcing a showy yet ultimately pointless vote on removing the speaker.

 

Which one is serving “The Uniparty’s” (alleged) interests?

 

Another thing: If Greene is serious about exposing how “The Uniparty” in Washington thwarts the will of the people whom it claims to represent, why has she chosen Ukraine as the issue to illustrate that point?

 

It’s true that most Republican voters oppose further aid to Kyiv, but at least one recent national poll finds a narrow majority of Americans overall in favor. When “The Uniparty” does what most citizens want it to do—especially in an election year—that sounds like democracy at work. As one Dispatch colleague put it, “What if the ‘Uniparty’ is just what a majority of Americans think, broadly speaking?”

 

There is an issue, actually, on which Congress isn’t currently representing what a majority of Americans think. That would be Israel, which just received a new U.S. aid package despite the fact that 55 percent of adults now disapprove of Israeli military actions in Gaza. Greene herself opposes all foreign aid on grounds that taxpayer money should be used to address the border crisis instead, but she supports Israel in principle and has had few complaints about Johnson’s role in moving funding for Tel Aviv through the House. On the contrary: “It’s antisemitic to make Israeli aid contingent on funding Ukrainian Nazis,” she tweeted in mid-April. “These should be separate bills.”

 

If Greene cares about “The Uniparty” following the people’s will instead of enacting its own preferences, why isn’t she making more of a stink about Israel aid passing? And if the answer to that is “because Republican voters strongly support that aid and she has a duty to represent them,” then, er, how can she justify having voted no on the bill herself?

 

In the end, “Uniparty” is just populist shorthand for when some policy favored by the GOP base is thwarted in Congress with Republican help. It would be a defensible bit of sophistry if it were applied consistently, as one could argue (although I wouldn’t) that a representative should always vote the way a majority of his constituents prefers. If most Republican voters oppose Ukraine aid, Republicans in Congress should oppose it too.

 

But it isn’t used consistently, it’s used selectively, as Green’s “no” vote on the Israel bill demonstrates. To take just one example, poll Americans on various forms of gun control and you’ll find huge majorities across all parties—Republicans too!—in favor of all sorts of new restrictions. Even so, if a bill proposing those restrictions hit the floor in the House, I promise you’d never, ever hear Marjorie Taylor Greene complain about “The Uniparty” if members of both parties united to block it.

 

“Uniparty” is mostly demagoguery, as so much of modern Republican politics is. It’s good for fundraising and TV hits and it’s a subtle way to inculcate in populists the sense that there’s something untoward and conspiratorial going on when a bipartisan majority in Congress opposes their policy preferences. It also not very subtly implies that right-wing populists and traditional conservatives aren’t members of the same party in a meaningful sense: The former are Republicans, the latter are “Uniparty.”

 

Which is fine by me. The sooner conservatives come to see that Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t their ally, the better off we’ll all be. Hooray for “The Uniparty.”