Who’s in Charge Here?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, December 16, 2018

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump was asked on many occasions whether he would “accept the results” of the election if he were to lose. Democrats and their media allies demanded that he make a solemn vow to “accept the results.” It was never entirely clear what anybody thought the alternative to acceptance was: Donald Trump’s raising a revolutionary army and marching on Washington like Francisco Franco breaking the Siege of the Alcázar?

Better that question should have been put to Theresa May.

The people of the United Kingdom, having been consulted on the matter, voted to leave the European Union. That vote happened on June 23, 2016. Here at the end of 2018, it remains unclear whether the U.K. government and the European Union will actually accept the results of that election. The editorial board of the New York Times complains that the current debate over the particulars of the British departure from the EU “largely exclude any thought of European Union interests.” It takes a special cast of mind to miss that that is precisely the point.

The British people voted to leave the European Union because many of them felt that they had lost control over their country, that key decisions important to their own lives and to the common life of the British people were being made by unaccountable men far away in Brussels. The existence of a European Parliament did little to assuage those anxieties, because the European Parliament is a parliament that barely deserves the name: The real power rests in the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and — above all — the European bureaucracy based in Brussels.

Since the Brexit vote, the people of the United Kingdom have been informed by their government that they may not have their own way and get what they voted for because giving it to them is too complicated. Which — again — is precisely the point. The difficulty of leaving the European Union highlights the necessity of doing so if the people of the United Kingdom are to remain the masters of their own lives. The British fought hard and sacrificed much for the principle that Parliament is sovereign — that even the king must answer to the people through their representatives — and the self-satisfied gentlemen in Brussels made a smug show out of pissing on that principle from a great height.

The British indictment of the European Union will sound entirely familiar to American ears: It represents the wresting of power from the people by unaccountable elites, it holds in contempt the concept of national sovereignty, it is associated with excessive and disorderly immigration, it pursues economic policies that serve the interests of the high and mighty rather than the common people, etc.

In the United States, the Left and the Right talk about those issues in different ways, and they emphasize different complaints: The Democrats suddenly changed their tone on immigration when they realized that Bernie Sanders in 2016 sounded quite like Donald Trump, which was not pleasing to several important Democratic constituencies, while Republicans have developed a little bit of double vision on the question of how they feel about rich guys and Big Business: Cheers for Peter Thiel, jeers for Mark Zuckerberg, three cheers for Exxon, nuts to Google.

But the populist Left and the populist Right in the United States — which, increasingly, means simply the Left and the Right in the United States — begin with fundamental complaints that are functionally identical: Wage growth for middle-income Americans has been disappointing, and they have very little security in their jobs, which surely is the result of collusion between American bigwigs and dirty foreigners somewhere, particularly in China. Jake Werner of the University of Chicago noted this curious bipartisanship in Foreign Policy: “Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) echoes President Donald Trump’s talking points, decrying the transfer of ‘our’ technology to China and condemning investment there. Fellow progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is lining up with former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon calling for an ‘aggressive’ policy. Establishment Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are endorsing Trump’s trade war with China.”

These complaints are not limited to government and public policy. If anything, both Left and Right have developed a newly intense resentment of the way in which purely private actors can exercise tremendous influence over their lives: corporate mergers and restructurings take away jobs and upend the economic situation of communities dependent on them; Facebook and Twitter endeavor to silence unpopular political views, or else are used as vehicles for ochlocratic attacks on hapless Starbucks staffers and Chipotle managers; in 2008–09, the world economy was convulsed by the fact that a great many Wall Street firms made bad investments that they did not quite even understand, necessitating trillions of dollars in bailouts and “quantitative easing” to stave off economic disaster. It is easier for a man to walk away from his wife and children than from his credit-card debt or student loans. Nobody seems to really know what his health insurance will cover — or what it will cover the day after tomorrow. A third of the teachers participating in a grant program found themselves saddled with loans — loans they had never signed up for, sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of dollars —because of paperwork issues. Innocent men and women are wrongly prosecuted and end up financially ruined even when they escape jail, and even as prosecutors boldly boast about abusing their powers.

The burden of these developments always seems to fall on those who do not have much money or power. You miss filing a 1040EZ one year and you’ll get your bank account hijacked by the IRS; Lois Lerner hijacks the entire IRS for a political project and she ends up with pension that’s twice what most American households earn in a year. Corporate executives flit from one gilt perch to the next, politicians flout both law and morality without real consequence, and their cronies and minions rarely miss a paycheck. Meanwhile, the New York Times is full of advertisements for Rolex and Cartier, Tiffany and Zegna — and stories about how nobody can really be expected to get by on $200,000 a year.

In Francis Fukuyama’s magisterial Origins of Political Order, he specifies three things that undergird the development of political development: the state, the rule of law, and accountability. The first we have plenty of — more of than we need, really. The other two . . . less so. Irrespective of how you feel about the current legal efforts being made against President Trump, it is impossible for any intelligent person to look at the situation and conclude that anybody — anybody — involved in this mess is simply working to apply the law rather than conducting a political jihad or counter-jihad through legal means — lawfare, as they call it. The rule of law took a beating during the Obama administration, and the chaos of the Trump administration does not seem likely to contribute much to its recuperation.

But it is accountability that is foremost in the minds of the disaffected and despairing. The British want to know that if they are unhappy with this law or that regulation, they can vote against their local MP — or at least go give him the polite British business — if he doesn’t get on board. A perplexing European apparatus headquartered in a faraway country? It is difficult to get accountability out of such a beast. The same lack of directness and comprehensibility has sustained the drive against our own multilateral commitments, including good ones such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

A few years ago, I was in Switzerland writing a piece in which I argued that the Confoederatio Helvetica is the world’s best-governed country. You may not agree, but it is a country with a remarkable level of accountability — accountability that is held close to the Swiss people. Around the time I was visiting, Tina Turner, a longtime resident of the country, was in the final stages of becoming a Swiss national. Because of the eccentricities of Switzerland’s democratic and radically local governance, the famous singer had to trundle down to the Swiss version of her local city council meeting and prove to them that she could speak German well enough to function as a Swiss citizen and resident of the Canton of Zurich, that she had sufficient financial resources to avoid being a public ward, and that she was an all-around good egg. The local government, not only the national government in Bern, has a say in that. Imagine a United States in which, say, the City of Minneapolis or the representatives of Presidio County, Texas, had a real say over immigration decisions.

It would look different. Maybe you think that would be an improvement and maybe you don’t, but it almost certainly would be more representative of what people actually want — or, at least, the decisions would be made at a level that is more readily subject to the exercise of democratic accountability.

As things stand, our immigration regime gives the distinct impression that nobody is in charge — and that nobody is accountable. The president wants one thing (or a basket of inconsistent and contradictory things), Congress another — and its basket of inconsistent and contradictory things is divided between the parties and subdivided among the factions within those parties, while the bureaucracy goes, as it generally does, its own way. If the desire to have somebody in charge and accountable presses downward, you get Switzerland — or you get American-style federalism, localism, and subsidiarity. If the desire to have somebody in charge and accountable presses upward, you get caudillo politics.

The United States, with its mass and diversity and complexity, is never going to be very much like Switzerland, with its neutrality and its localized democracy and its friendly-but-no-more-than-friendly relations with the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. And though there are partisans of caudillo-ism in the United States — in both parties — that is not a very likely outcome, either. We are too dynamic and unruly for that.

One model of working toward real accountability would be pressing not only political decision-making but also political administration down to the state and local level as much as possible. In the Nordic welfare states that our progressives admire, many social programs are administered at the local rather than national level — in Sweden, for example, health care is managed at the county level, not the national level. That means that people can see for themselves how social services are managed, delivered, and consumed. The United States, on the other hand, has been pursuing a program of centralization — pushed by progressives — for about a century. Some on the Left have started to see the light on this issue: Faced with a Trump administration, there are many in California who have developed a sudden appreciation for the virtues of federalism. They want to let California be California. If only we could convince them to let Texas be Texas, too.

If we do not find a way toward more robust accountability, the most likely outcome is not strongman rule: It is chaos, with desultory, emotive, largely symbolic populist episodes producing counterproductive interventions here and there in disorderly and contradictory fashion — and probably vindictive fashion—in a way that in effect cedes an ever-larger share of real power to the bureaucracies, which are the institutions least likely to provide real accountability.

And it is very difficult to take back power from a bureaucracy set on keeping it. Pass all the laws you like, win every election, and you still may not get what you want. Ask the British.

The Liberal Arts Weren’t Murdered — They Committed Suicide

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The great culture wars on the campuses of the 1980s were largely lost by traditionalists. And the question then became not if but when the liberal arts would die off as a result. What is strange nearly 40 years later is that the apparent outrage over what was clearly foreordained is now becoming fact. What did academia expect, given its years of academic specialization and politicized indoctrination?

Recently the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point announced plans to drop liberal-arts majors in geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art — and history. The Atlantic ran a well-meaning essay by Adam Harris on the controversial move, “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century” — again, a topic much in the news recently. The article’s chief thrust is that insidious efforts to promote STEM vocationalism — the need to prepare young people for careers requiring extensive math and science skill sets — has driven out the need for more in-depth focus on the liberal arts, in a climate in which crass Republican state legislators, in allegedly vindictive and short-sighted fashion, demanded catastrophic cuts in state public higher-education budgets.

The Stevens Point campus highlighted a popular perception that emphases in literature, history, or languages lead nowhere for cash-strapped graduates but to more debt and fewer jobs. Yet what the article on official university policy misses is why students do not concentrate in the liberal arts in the fashion of the past.

After all, only that fact of declining enrollments allows the university to institutionalize the unspoken reality of eroding student interest. In other words, the university is simply burying liberal-arts majors that were already killed off not by bottom-line-minded state legislators but by the choices of either students or faculty or by university policies, or by combinations of all three.

If higher education’s increasing fixation on job training is the whirlpool that swallows history majors, the monster across the narrow straits of liberal-arts education is a many-headed politicized orthodoxy, a Scylla that consumes the flesh of the liberal arts and leave the bones as dreary reminders of boilerplate race, class, gender, and culture agendas. In the case of history, few increasingly wish to sit in a class where the past becomes tedious melodrama rather than complex tragedy, a sort of reeducation camp in which modern standards of suburban orthodoxy time-travel to the past in order to judge materially impoverished historical figures or pivotal events as either culpable or exonerated.

The tragedy, then, is not just that a campus of the University of Wisconsin would drop the history major but that the custodians of history in the 21st century lost the ability to teach and write about history in a way that sustains a hallowed 2,500-year tradition. In other words, what is being jettisoned is likely not just history as we once understood it but rather de facto poorly taught “-studies” courses — which sadly become snapshots of particular (and often small) eras of history — designed to offer enough historical proof of preconceived theories about contemporary modern society. The students then are assumed by the course’s end to be outraged, persuaded, galvanized, and shocked in politically acceptable ways. Usually they are just bored, as supposedly with-it professors endlessly regurgitate the esoterica picked up in graduate schools.

Of course, not all historians see the past as an orthodox way of fixing the present, but enough do to discourage students, especially when younger faculty members draw on their rather specialized doctoral theses or narrow journal-article expertise to drive home an agenda that seems preachy or proselytizing to naturally resistant young spirits. To the Millennial mind, calcified Sixties-era radicalism is about as edgy as once was the Stalinist 1930s Old Left sermonizing to the Woodstock crowd. Trendiness that once pleased faculty committees and careerist deans did not always please students, and therefore the result is now not so pleasing to faculty committees and careerist deans.

Once a student has signed up for a class on the Renaissance or the Great Depression and quickly learns that it can become a periodic harangue on the oppression and victimization of particular marginalized groups, she will likely not wish to repeat the experience on money borrowed at between 5 and 7 percent interest, or to be convinced that her future employer wishes to be woke by a heady 21-year-old. The irony about the Atlantic article is that when it quotes liberal-arts and history professors to document their outrage at the Wisconsin cuts, their defense of their fields become perceptions of how history is necessary to advance particular contemporary agendas. So, for example, we are told that “in mid-November, the university announced its plans to stop offering six liberal-arts majors, including geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art, and history. The plan stunned observers, many of whom argued that at a time when Nazism is resurgent society needs for people to know history, even if the economy might not” (emphasis added).

So “stunned observers” offered a touché to both today’s Nazi apologists and right-wing money-grubbers!

In a utilitarian sense, students certainly can benefit from becoming aware of Nazi-like dangers by studying history. Unfortunately, few universities offer courses in World War II, which might most effectively offer a variety of explanations of why Nazi Germany was able to absorb most of Europe and trigger what would become a global conflict that cost 65 million lives.

But when one looks at the Wisconsin campus catalogue, one seems to find few if any classes in World War II. The closest might be “Women, War and Peace,” “Dilemmas of War and Peace: An Introduction to Peace Studies,” or “War and Propaganda in the 20th Century.” No doubt such offerings might be great courses, but I don’t think they would cover fully the Nazi aggrandizement of the late 1930s, particularly the role of Soviet collaboration, British and French appeasement, and American isolationism, or the tragic circumstance of the Munich Agreement — in other words, the likely best way for students “to know history” of any purported contemporary Nazi ascendance.

Nor I am sure that by agreement we live in a time “when Nazism is resurgent.” Certainly the world’s most frightening societies are North Korea and Venezuela, where wide-scale poverty and government oppression are normalized. Both are failed Communist states. The current likeliest threat to the global order for future generations of liberal societies will be statist and authoritarian China, whose government is still proudly Communist in a tradition that includes Mao Zedong’s 50 to 70 million dead. The point is that if students are interested in riveting history classes, they will probably not wish to be told that they should so enroll in one because “Nazism is resurgent” in today’s West.

Harris in the Atlantic article also notes that “the chairs of each department at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point were assessing their programs ahead of a biweekly meeting with the dean.” The chair of the history department “may not have been feeling great, but he was at least upbeat. ‘I felt like the department had really diversified its curriculum in a way to shore us up.’”

One wonders what exactly “diversified its curriculum” means — the greater inclusion of now rare military, diplomatic, or political history, or more-diverse intellectual approaches or a greater variety of liberal and conservative historians? Or does the reference to “shoring up” suggest ever narrower race, class, gender, and environmental courses, which deductively seek to use the past to lead students to preconceived contemporary agendas — and thereby so often erode students’ natural interests in history?

Yet if one walks through the local Barnes & Noble bookstore, reviews the non-fiction best-seller lists, scans Amazon’s most-read categories, or looks through book ads in popular magazines, one is struck how well biographies of Churchill and Grant sell, and how histories of war and peace, exploration, and political careers capture the public interest — reminding us that the fault of declining college interest in the liberal arts may be not in the stars of vocationalism or the wrong values of students but rather deep within the university faculty and administration themselves.

Twenty years ago, John Heath and I co-authored Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, a failed warning that formal university study of the classical past was dying off, caught between vocationalism, or narrow specialization, and politicization of both the classics curriculum and faculty research. In other words, at the very time it was becoming necessary to offer the university a counter-argument that liberal arts do enrich the education of business and tech grads and can make them both more-aware citizens and better managers and engineers, liberal-arts faculty in so many cases narrowed their fields, employed a new off-putting jargon, and recalibrated the past in monotonous fashion as a primer on victims and victimizers. And students as a result walked, as academics killed their own field and blamed their suicide on larger sinister forces in society.

Often, the choices of young professors and scholars are limited by career concerns and limited time. If a young, recently minted classics or history Ph.D., lucky enough to land a temporary lectureship, had to make an either/or choice between tutoring all his struggling students in Latin 1A, along with giving community lectures on Spartacus or Thermopylae at the local Rotary Club and junior high, or writing a journal article on the perspectives of ethnic, gender, and race relations and their empirical referents in Roman cults in Asia Minor, or even another scholarly note on abnormal uses of the optative mood in Diodorus, choosing politicization and specialization would be the far wiser career move — even as participating in broad community and undergraduate outreach, in this endangered climate, would be the wiser investment to save an entire discipline.

The provost in the Atlantic article is quoted as rightly asserting, “We’re facing some changing enrollment behaviors. . . . And students are far more cost-conscious than they used to be.” But the reason students are more “cost-conscious” than they used to be is perhaps because in aggregate they currently owe about $1.5 trillion in student loans. And that staggering and unsustainable debt is largely because colleges and universities on average have jacked up their costs per annum higher than the annual rate of inflation, perhaps in part owing to federally guaranteed student loans that encouraged undisciplined spending (whether for ever more diversity czars and assistant deans for inclusion or for Club Med student unions).

These price hikes were not accompanied by any guarantee that students on graduation would read, think, and compute far more effectively than when they were admitted, or at least at a level necessary to ensure employers that graduates of four-year colleges had more advantageous assets than those with far less liberal-arts education. The university was largely unable or unwilling to reconsider orthodoxies such as lifetime tenure, national exit exams for granting the B.A. degree, the inordinate number of units taught by exploited part-time faculty, or the allowance of an M.A. degree in math, science, and the liberal arts to substitute for the teaching credential.

Over the past few years, lots of employers have privately concluded that today’s graduating liberal-arts majors are quite confident and yet so often poorly educated. Or worse, those hiring were turned off by the strange combination of youthful ignorance and arrogance. Employers had clearly no desire to be enlightened by fresh graduates who were entirely unaware that their inductive skills were suspect or nonexistent.

The Progressive Patriarchy

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Monday, December 17, 2018

In the Hans Christian Andersen tale, the emperor had no clothes. These days, if the emperor puts on the right clothes, he can call himself an empress. And we all have to applaud.

Yesterday’s Miss Universe contest featured, for the first time in the event’s 66-year history, a transgender woman. Competing as Miss Spain, Angela Ponce entered the pageant to much acclaim, writing in an Instagram post: “Today I am here, proudly representing my nation, all women and human rights.”

Ponce didn’t win, but the 27-year-old has been hailed by the media merely for competing. “Miss Philippines Catriona Gray took home the crown at the 2018 Miss Universe pageant on Sunday night in Bangkok, Thailand, but she wasn’t the only winner of the night,” a writer for ABC News declared Monday morning. “Miss Spain’s Angela Ponce became the competition’s first transgender contestant, a major step for the 66-year-old pageant.”

“In the wake of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show that many feel failed on the inclusivity front, Spain’s Angela Ponce is poised to make history as the first transgender woman to compete in Miss Universe,” a Yahoo! News writer began her article on the topic. The NBC News feature on the Miss Universe competition didn’t even mention Monday night’s winner until four paragraphs into the article, focusing instead on how Ponce “broke barriers.”

All of this fanfare raises the inevitable question: Could Ponce actually “represent all women” without being a woman at all? In our unscientific moment, so much as asking this question is enough to warrant being drummed out of polite company in certain circles.

Dwell for just a moment on the reality of Ponce’s biology — a reality that, no matter how much cosmetic surgery Ponce obtains and regardless of whether Ponce truly feels like a woman, cannot be altered. Technology might disguise that truth, but no amount of medicine or mutilation can coax Ponce’s chromosomes into submission.

But consider another question, too, and perhaps a more important one: Can Ponce live as a transgender woman without forcing us to go along for the ride? The Miss Universe pageant, the progressive media complex, and, increasingly, the left wing of American politics seem to think not.

Ponce told Time magazine in November that winning the contest would be symbolic: “Trans women have been persecuted and erased for so long. If they give me the crown, it would show trans women are just as much women as cis women.”

This is the charade we are being asked to accept. It is not enough to say, as we should, that gender dysphoria is a real psychological phenomenon, that a just and compassionate society ought to recognize the reality of the struggle people like Ponce face, and that bullying and hatred directed at such people is evil and wrong.

We are also meant to chant along with the crowd that Ponce is a woman. Anything less is transphobia. Decency and charity are no longer enough; affirmation and glorification — ideally before as large an audience as possible — are the only acceptable course.

And what does this new frontier of progressivism mean for other planks of the platform? The unassailable dogma that women are constantly oppressed and subjugated by the patriarchy — that we can only be free if we recognize and disempower the tyranny of white male privilege that prevents women from expressing ourselves and taking control of our lives — requires that there is such a thing as womanhood, and that it can be defined consistently.

Ponce’s much-hailed appearance in the Miss Universe contest, on the other hand, implies societal acceptance of the idea that men can in fact be women.

These two doctrines of progressivism are in fundamental tension. Even if one accepts the notion that some biological males can feel so female that they essentially are, in some intangible way, women, such a view necessarily conflicts with the feminist claim that there is something unique about being a woman — and that womanhood deserves to be shielded from the encroachment of male power.

The wholehearted embrace of transgender ideology necessarily, and quite intentionally, erases womanhood. It allows biological males to don the mantle of femaleness simply by asserting that it is their birthright. There has never been a more patriarchal claim.

As the Democratic party drifts toward identity politics, a clash of these two identities looms on the horizon. In an “intersectional” movement where minority groups are given more currency for having experienced more oppression, women struggling against the patriarchy could easily be crowded out by transgender women who insist that their minority status and experience with stigma give them the victimhood trump card.

Perhaps the far Left believes that if its members force skeptics to nod along with Ponce’s pageantry, they can avoid the schisms inherent to a movement that claims to value feminism while insisting that being female has no meaning at all.