No, Conservatism Isn’t Dying Out

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 28, 2016

As my colleague Jonah Goldberg notes, the Left and some of the Right has long been waiting for a “conservative crack-up,” first predicted by R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. of The American Spectator . . . a generation ago. I am a middle-aged man with more grey in my beard than I would really like to see in the morning, but I was a high-school boy when Mr. Tyrell wrote that book.

These crack-ups are an awful long time coming.

If you spend very much time reading the Left’s advocacy journalism — as I do, for my sins — then you are accustomed to seeing headlines about the pending destruction of the Republican party and the conservative movement. It has been nearly 15 years since John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira heralded “The Emerging Democratic Majority” in their celebrated book by that title. Articles titled “The End of the Republican Party” or similar are found almost daily not only in moonbat online journals such as Salon but in the New York Times.

This isn’t new. The failure to convict Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial was welcomed by Democrats as the end of the Republican party, as a sign of its “disarray” — they are fond of that word, for some reason — and its debilitating internal contradictions. Clinton’s election had been similarly greeted, as was Barack Obama’s. The eventual unpopularity of the Iraq war among the fickle and childish American electorate was supposed to have made the GOP a pariah for a generation. The Donald is not the first trump sounding the conservative apocalypse.

After all that, where is the Republican party, and the conservative movement, in actuality?

Despite what all the best and the brightest assured us was inevitable, the Republican party is in its strongest electoral position since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. It enjoys majorities in both houses of Congress, and commands a large majority of the state legislative houses and governorships. Conservatives have won important debates and political victories on everything from taxation to free speech to foreign policy. Those conservatives who complain that the Right hasn’t accomplished very much forget where the country was in 1955 when National Review was founded and central planning was assumed by all the right people to be the model of the future, or where the country’s domestic policies stood in 1980 or its national-security policies in 2000.

Electoral controversies are only signs of catastrophic disarray for Republicans.

The fact is that Senator Bernie Sanders, the honking Vermont socialist, currently enjoys higher standing in the national polls than does Donald Trump. He may win Iowa and is at the moment poised to win New Hampshire. His philosophy is in fact much more radically at odds with the mainstream of American politics than is Donald Trump’s daft and vulgar populism. His ideas are the ideas of Hugo Chávez and Edmondo Rossoni (though he probably doesn’t know the name) filtered through the loopy 1970s cultural radicalism that at one point had Senator Sanders arguing that cervical cancer is caused by an orgasm deficit.

Senator Sanders, whose politics are best suited to a soft quiet room, as of this writing stands about 1 point ahead of Trump’s national numbers in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. But his emergence is not treated in the media as an existential crisis for the Democratic party or the progressive movement the way Trump’s is for Republicans and the Right.

This is related to a similar theme in our public discourse: Conservatives are not allowed to be popular.

My friend Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine has written an unfortunately sneering piece blaming National Review for the emergence of Trump, among other things noting the magazine’s preference for an assertive foreign policy (Gillespie calls this bellicosity) and particularly cites the magazine’s support for the Iraq war . . . which Trump opposed, or at least says he opposed. Likewise, Gillespie blames the National Review’s corporate views on immigration for the emergence of Trump, who does not share those views. Nicole Hemmer, writing in U.S. News and World Report, makes a similar argument under the headline “National Review rejects the populism it fostered.” What follows is a familiar litany: Fox News, talk radio, etc. have pushed the Republican party in a conservative direction, which set the stage for . . . Donald Trump, who, if nominated, would be the least conservative Republican presidential candidate since self-styled progressive Teddy Roosevelt.

Whatever one imagines to be the sins of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, those sins are at least matched, if not exceeded, by their counterparts on the Left, the vegan rage of SiriusXM Progress and MSNBC and the like. The critical difference is: Conservatives are good at it. Despite vast piles of money and stores of energy directed at the project, there is no left-wing talk radio of any real significance to speak of, unless one counts the bland suburban progressivism of NPR. Fox News on a good night exceeds in audience share the rest of its cable news competitors combined. It surely is not lost on our counterparts on the Left that the peaks of Republican-party power have coincided with the influence of organized conservatism and its journals, whereas the apex of Democratic power came under Bill Clinton, who ran as hard against the campus-crusader radicalism of The Nation and Mother Jones as he did against George H. W. Bush. Mrs. Clinton is running against that same radicalism, albeit less convincingly and less successfully.

Popularity isn’t quality — we can be sure that Kanye West will sell more music than Beethoven this year, and that more young Americans will acquire STDs than Ph.D.s — but if you are a broadcaster or a political campaign, it cannot be ignored, either.

This is in essence a vast exercise in concern-trolling by progressives. National Review et al. have, in this analysis, simply been too effective, driving the Republican party to such exotic reaches of extremism that it is — do pardon me for noticing — winning previously unimaginable political victories in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Michigan . . .

Yes, of course Trump is a problem, and he could hand the 2016 presidential election to the Democrats as Ross Perot did in 1992. And inchoate populism is not, and never has been, a reliable ally of conservatism, a philosophy that begins with the assumption that most public appetites will never be satisfied and that many of them shouldn’t be satisfied even if it were possible. What should conservatives do? What can they do? Oppose Trump, of course.

But regardless of what happens on Election Day 2016, we will wake up in a world in which property rights need to be secured, free trade protected and expanded, government limited, the rule of law honored, children reared, citizenship cultivated, and enemies defeated. These are among what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” and the defense of them, which we call “conservatism,” is the permanent burden of free people. That isn’t going anywhere.

On the Difficulties of the Movie Star

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 29, 2016

One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya, reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.

Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year, either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at least a half a million people died.

Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.

The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.

Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself, scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — with insufficient frosting? What are we, brutes?

There have been endless interviews about this artificial controversy, meaning endless opportunities for Hollywood’s best to remind the world that actors don’t usually do well when someone else isn’t writing their dialogue. Inevitably, there came the subsequent theatrical public apologies. Members of the academy have made their spontaneous apologies without being asked. Julie Delpy, a French actress, remarked that critics can be especially hard on women, and added, “I sometimes wish I were African American, because people don’t bash them afterward.” Hoo, boy. This was accompanied by a whole Yoko Ono album’s worth of angst and wailing, climaxing in a groveling apology in which she begged forgiveness for not showing proper deference to “someone else’s struggle.” You can complain about women’s treatment in Hollywood — Emma Watson seems to be dedicating her post–Harry Potter career to that — so long as you do not put any stress on the victimhood hierarchy within the Moviestar-American community. Charlotte Rampling said that maybe none of this year’s black actors really deserved to make the final cut: angst, wailing, groveling public apology. The academy’s president issued a blanket apology.

The Academy Awards are the most prestigious celebration of talent on earth. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. If you doubt that, ask yourself which of these men does not have a Nobel prize in physics: Takaaki Kajita, Arthur B. McDonald, or Adam G. Riess. Trick question: They’ve all won the Nobel prize for physics, but you probably didn’t know that — almost nobody does. The Academy Awards aren’t exactly meretricious — Hollywood has many lamentable tendencies, but it does produce some works of lasting merit — but they are fixed in a celebrity culture with rituals (“Who are you wearing tonight?”) that are something close to the definition of shallow, literally skin-deep on occasion.

The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white  —  and who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa; Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan.

The problem for the proponents of minor diversity, meaning black and Latino Americans, is the emergence of major diversity in Hollywood, which is a fully global enterprise. African Americans may constitute 12 percent of the U.S. population, but Academy Award nominees are drawn from the population of the entire world, of which African Americans constitute something less than a rounding error. If we were to assume a random distribution of Academy Award nominations, then we would expect to find no African American nominees in many years, just as we would expect to find no Ukrainians or Comorians in many years. If African-American actors, writers, and directors are nominated in numbers lower than their presence in the industry would suggest, it reflects the fact that black Americans, like white Americans, are wildly overrepresented in Hollywood. But that fact is changing. No one will admit to being annoyed by it, but more global diversity in Hollywood will mean less local diversity, which is a problem if you want to define “diversity” in such a way as to include two ethnic groups instead of . . . well, there are 213 different ethnic groups identified in the New Zealand census alone. There are many more ethnicities on earth than nation-states.

The convolution of thinking necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the offense, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart. But Hollywood has in fact been pressing in precisely the opposite direction, insisting that Latin Americans must not be considered white. There is at the very moment an outcry over the fact that Charlie Hunnam, the star of the hit television series Sons of Anarchy, has been cast in the lead role in a film about the Mexican-American drug baron Edgar Valdez Villarreal. Mr. Hunnam is a fair, blond-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, whereas Mr. Valdez is a fair, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mexican American. Mr. Valdez is in fact such a pale specimen that his nom de narco was “La Barbie,” after the doll. We should all be so lucky as to have Mr. Hunnam cast in our life’s stories, but the objection here isn’t that Mr. Hunnam is implausibly handsome but that his presence in the role is ethnically outrageous.

Which is to say: Latinos are white when it suits activists’ complaints, but it is outrageous to cast a white actor in the role.

Which brings us back to Mr. Gandhi, who was played by Ben Kingsley in Richard Attenborough’s hagiographic film biography. Mr. Gandhi was Gujurati. Mr. Kingsley’s father was a Kenyan of Gujurati descent, and his mother was a British woman born out of wedlock back when that meant something, whose ethnic background is unknown. (She may have been of Jewish ancestry and uneager to speak about that.) Unlike Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, Kingsley is generally greeted by nice American liberals as Sir Ben Kingsley rather than mocked with his given name, Krishna Bhanji. Kingsley is a light-skinned man who was heavily made up for the role of Gandhi — “brownface,” some have called it. Proper? Improper?

When they get around to casting the lead in The Barack Obama Story, they’ll probably just cast Harry Lennix. But if they don’t, what is the ethnically correct thing to do? Find a half-Luo, half-daffy American-hippie actor? Tell every actor from each of Africa’s 3,000 ethnic groups that they’re all interchangeably black in the eyes of Hollywood liberals? In fact, a film about the Obamas’ early courtship has just been released, with Parker Sawyers of Zero Dark Thirty as the future president. His professional material identifies him as generically “African American.”

Close enough?

The activists will never be satisfied, because being unsatisfied — being outraged — is their business. It’s a good business: Universal Studios’ “chief diversity officer” holds the rank of executive vice president. The money in the diversity racket is big: Google is spending $150 million to increase the diversity in its work force, in which whites are slightly underrepresented while Asians are dramatically overrepresented — again, if we’re using U.S. demographics for our point of comparison. And it is by no means clear that we should: Google, like Hollywood, is global.

There is a certain irony to our historical moment: At the very moment when a black American family has reached the apex of American social life — the presidency, and a cute movie about their first date! — African Americans are as a group experiencing a stressful disorientation: The racial dynamic in the United States was, for many years, effectively binary. Not any more. In an increasingly multiracial society whose most prestigious institutions are truly global, African Americans are no longer the moral yardstick by which the American commitment to our liberal founding ideals is measured. In 30 years, it very well may be the case that African Americans are no more of a significant interest group than Vietnamese Americans or Norwegian Americans, and the social and economic success of Nigerian American immigrant families, among others, complicates the meaning of “African American” as a concept, in that these communities are likely to maintain a certain distinctiveness that renders “black” devoid of clear meaning.

That is a big, attractive lever for the Al Sharptons of the world to let go of, which is why we’ll see more #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite rather than less, even as the question becomes less significant nationally.

What, you thought this was about how hard movie stars have it?

For Hillary Clinton, Feminism Means ‘Blame Men First,’ and to Disagree Is ‘Misogyny’

By David French

Friday, January 29, 2016

Please allow me to explain the progressive rules of modern discourse. A feminist — often seated in a powerful perch in academe, the government, or pop culture — spits out disdain for men as a whole, reserving particular venom for the worst of people, the dreaded “white male.” Never mind that white males include everyone from Bill Gates to a recovering junkie living in a trailer park, this courageous action is called “punching up.” It’s “speaking truth to power.”

If the white male responds — especially if that response either is angry or includes any sort of sweeping generalization about women — then that man is “punching down.” He’s spewing hate and perpetuating the patriarchy. Thus, a white male student can oppress his professor merely be responding to her arguments, and Hillary Clinton is victimized by sexism merely because Bernie Sanders accused her of “shouting.”

When inhabiting the comfortable confines of progressive cocoons, this style of argument is a no-lose proposition. The angry leftists’ position on the moral high ground is so unassailable that the very act of resistance is seen as proof of their argument. “Look at the angry white male. He can’t stand seeing a mere woman question his power and privilege.” Either the man acquiesces, or he’s a misogynist. But when the feminist leaves the cocoon, the argument is far less persuasive, and men are more difficult to browbeat.

I was reminded of this reality by Camille Paglia’s fascinating recent essay in Salon, where she traces Clinton’s roots in “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” second-wave feminism. Paglia observes:

    Hillary has unfortunately adopted the [Gloria] Steinem brand of blame-men-first feminism, which defines women as perpetual victims requiring government protections. Hillary’s sometimes impatient or patronizing tone about men, which can perhaps be traced to key aspects of her personal history, may prove costly to her current campaign.

Indeed, the gender gap hurt Clinton in 2008, Bernie Sanders is riding a massive gender gap to contention in Iowa, and early numbers indicate that Clinton could face the widest gender gap in modern political history in the general election.

To her hard-core supporters, however, this is all proof of pervasive misogyny. The solution is more identity politics, more accusations of sexism, and more public shaming. But Clinton lost in 2008 when the race devolved into competing claims of racism and sexism, and the non-progressive public is growing increasingly inoculated against political correctness.

Clinton forgets that there are very good reasons why the public embraces fairness and equal treatment for women while shunning “feminism.” Indeed, a recent Vox survey found that only 18 percent of Americans call themselves feminists. Increasingly, the public experiences feminism more as an anti-male ideology than a pro-female movement. It’s about tearing down more than building up, and that kind of messaging is deeply repugnant to the millions of women who actually like men — especially their husbands, fathers, and sons.

Indeed, as modern feminists often view even the effort to be likeable as a capitulation to patriarchal norms, look for leftists to grow only more strident. And why not? It keeps working in universities, Hollywood, and government. Surely it will work in November.

Despite the Democrats’ demographic triumphalism, Clinton looks to be a weaker general-election candidate than Barack Obama. As the race progresses, it will be interesting to see how her progressive allies deal with the gender gap. I’m expecting more hectoring, more public shaming, and claims of sexism at every turn. Expecting to rally women in a grand crusade, they may find out that gender solidarity isn’t as easy to manufacture as racial solidarity, and that the “coalition of the ascendant” is more fragile than they thought.

What If Trump Wins?

By David Harsanyi

Friday, January 29, 2016

There are many potential outcomes to a Donald Trump GOP nomination. And every one of them is a disaster for conservatives.

The fact is, Trump fans will not be placated — not if they lose, and definitely not if they win. Unless unforeseen events alter the dynamics of American politics, it’s difficult to imagine conventional Republicans and Trump fans inhabiting the same space after this is all done. Me? I look forward to loathing three major political parties.

Now, if Trump prevails in the primaries, principled small-government conservatives (however many are left) will be faced with a distasteful choice: They can either back the nominee, picked fairly by the rank-and-file of the party, or they can disregard party politics and actively try and sink him.

If they support Trump? A disaster. Those who decide to endorse Trump because of partisan loyalty will also be supporting a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, policies barring immigrants based purely on religion, and whatever other half-baked policy ideas spring from Trump’s mind. And they should be really comfortable with Trumpism (and, with that, his many liberal positions) because they’ll be spending the rest of their careers justifying the support. For those who think they can embrace neutrality to escape this fight, their silence will be treated as tacit endorsement by liberals and treachery by Trump’s fans. It’s conceivable that a number of local races will suffer in these intraparty skirmishes, hurting conservatives in state races and probably Congress.

If they fight Trump? A disaster. For those who decide to actively oppose Trump — and you assume many factions on the right would — the prospects are not much better. There’s no modern precedent for a party’s establishment undercutting its nominee, so it’s improbable the Republican party would participate in torpedoing Trump. The time for that has passed. (One day, perhaps, Reince Priebus will explain how he let a populist liberal reality-show host win a major party’s nomination.)

More distressing, at least for some of us, is the prospect that Trump’s outlook will turn out to be more popular than anyone imagines. Maybe a flood of candidates will begin aping his populism and succeed. Maybe Trump begins to transform American discourse into something more closely resembling European politics, where nationalists and socialists argue about who should run the state apparatus.

Many conservatives will undoubtedly toy with the idea of running a third-party candidate (not as easy as it sounds, when you consider the logistics and the factional nature of Republicans today), which would be likely only to spoil the GOP nominee’s prospects and challenge his risible claim to conservatism.

The important question for conservatives is: Would they rather have a Republican president with views antithetical to their own, or Hillary Clinton as president? Would they rather have a Republican who might cause irreparable damage to their brand, or Bernie Sanders? Would they want a GOP monopoly in D.C., led by Trump, or continue with gridlock as the purer opposition party? We can imagine, though, that helping put Clinton (or Sanders) in the White House would blow up any hope of a healthy right-of-center consensus for many years to come.

If Trump loses? A disaster. If conservative intellectuals and many of their institutions and leaders fail to back the nominee, Trump’s fans will hold those elites culpable for the loss, further feeding the frustrations that had alienated them in the first place. The idea that a bunch of know-it-alls can undermine the democratic process will only generate more anger and paranoia. Do Trump boosters seem like the sort of group that will embrace rapprochement and constructive change after having an election stolen from them?

Even more terrifying for many of us is the prospect of a successful Trump presidency. Even without Congress, as Obama has shown, a president can accomplish many destructive things — though probably not enough to satisfy Trump’s supporters, who will undoubtedly be disappointed. Presidents can’t just slap huge tariffs on other countries without Congress, and they can’t make Mexico pay for border fences, nor take oil from countries in the Middle East, nor deport 13 million immigrants here illegally. When this becomes evident, I suspect his fans will still blame the establishment for its lack of willpower, support, and patriotism.

And, of course, finally, Trump might lose the GOP nomination (I still don’t believe he’ll win, but I’m cognizant of the fact that this is probably wishful thinking). Then, it’s likely that the Republican party will go back to business as usual. Which is a disaster of a whole different kind.