The Politicization of Youth

By Rob Long

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Not too long ago, a young friend of mine was trying to remember the name of a movie. “You know that movie where the two women drive off a cliff at the end? What was that movie called? Was it Laverne & Shirley?”

And he wasn’t even trying to be cruel. In his mind, all of those things just collided together, and why shouldn’t they? When you’re young, everything that happened before you were born is history, and everything that happened afterwards is life. It’s only natural, if you’re young, to care more about life. Laverne, Shirley, Thelma, Louise — what’s the difference, really, if you were born in 1987? One is a TV show that went off the air in 1983; the other is a movie that premiered a mere eight years later.

But when you’re old — and I’m not pointing fingers here, but you know who you are — history and life become so muddled up that the only way to keep the memories straight is to know where you were when certain things happened. The way an old person keeps Reykjavik and hanging chads and ketchup-as-a-vegetable and Janet Reno and fidget spinners all in the right blips on the time line is to think about what was going on in your life at the time: senior year in college, remodeling a house, ninth grade, making real money for the first time, and right before I had my first colonoscopy.

In politics, it often comes down to an emotional memory. Did I care whether George H. W. Bush prevailed against Michael Dukakis in 1988? I really, honestly, and truly did. Did I care, eight years later, whether Bob Dole unseated Bill Clinton? I really, honestly, and truly did not. The difference wasn’t the country or the world or the challenges of the end of the American Century. The difference was me: In 1988 I was 23 and thought that life was full of critical turning points, and in 1996 I was 31 and thought, You know, things just tend to work themselves out. Also, as I have mentioned, in 1996 I was making real money for the first time.

The Obama years are, for me, a mishmash of iPhones. I remember sending emails on my very first iPhone to a politically wise friend of mine, asking when he thought Obama would drop out and concede the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. I can still conjure up the mental picture of his reply — “He won’t. He’s going to win” — and the derisive snort I made when I read it. (I made similar snorts eight years later, by the way.)

I’m pretty sure it was on the 2008 iPhone 3G that I saw a video, produced by some neighbors of mine in Venice Beach, of a dozen or so young kids in identical powder-blue T-shirts with “Hope” emblazoned in what we now call “Obama sans” or “Obama Neue” font, singing a song composed by their beaming parents — visible, like all good progressive parents, just at the edge of the screen, making encouraging gestures and gazing with admiration at their children. “Obama’s going to change it, Obama’s going to lead them,” a picture-perfect little girl sings — she’s even, adorably, missing her front teeth. The kids sing and chant and make stylized jazz hands, and yes, they’re singing about Obama, so yes, it’s all a little much, but it’s hard to watch a bunch of sweetly cheerful children around ten or eleven and keep a scowl on your face. I managed, obviously, but not without some real effort.

The parents, of course, are awful. Dressed in Venice Beach Bohemian, hairdos all kooky and quirky, one of them plays the flute, interesting hat wear, adult males with skateboards — it’s all a little bit past parody, though because these are my neighbors I know it’s true. I know them because I’ve seen them at the local coffee shop with toddlers named “Hosea” and “Mabel,” “Esteban” and “Strawberry.” I’ve seen them look at their kids the way I sometimes look at my Labrador, with a kind of open-mouthed adoration, with the kind of love you can have for a thing that will joyfully and enthusiastically learn the basic commands, run and chase a tennis ball, climb up next to you on the sofa, and put its head in your lap, pretend to care about what you care about, and sing a stupid song you wrote about Obama.

The video is still up there, on YouTube, and depending on your point of view it’s either a nutty artifact of a profoundly silly cult or a grim herald of things to come. My vote is the latter, because ever since I watched that video on my iPhone 3G I’ve been watching similar videos on thinner and faster phones: videos of children at town halls, prodded by their parents (iPhone 4); videos of children protesting this or that complicated issue with doe eyes and hand-painted T-shirts (iPhone 5); and, most recently, a staged confrontation between children upset about climate change and the senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, who finally snapped (she’s almost 90, after all) and told the kids to shut it. And, boy, did that cause a freak-out, because you’re not supposed to yell at someone else’s kids, just like you’re not supposed to reprimand someone else’s dog.

Last month — and I know it was last month because I saw it on my new iPad Pro with Retina display — I watched an eleven-year-old boy perform a drag act at a gay bar in Brooklyn, collecting dollar bills from adult male patrons and getting a lot of positive media attention. His parents aren’t evident in the video I watched, but news accounts portray them as terrifically supportive. They’d have to be, I guess, because someone has to pay for those outfits and all that makeup. The kid is good but, to judge from the video, not much of an earner. Yet, anyway.

The parents are brainwashing those kids! is what we hear, on Fox News and on Twitter timelines. And that’s probably true, although the thing about brainwashing is that it doesn’t really last.

They’re using their kids as props! is another claim, and that’s definitely true. There’s something off-putting about parents who are so eager to put their obedient and politically aligned children front and center, uploaded to YouTube or annoying a senator or twerking for dollars in drag. It’s weird and creepy in the same way that the old Toys-R-Us logo was creepy. It had the “R” printed backwards, as if drawn by a child. (Or a Russian, but that’s not what they were going for.)

We knew it wasn’t drawn by a child. We knew it was drawn by an art director who was trying to draw like a child, which made the whole thing seem forced and untrue, like a bunch of kids pretending to love a presidential candidate or an eleven-year-old lip-syncing to songs he (I hope) doesn’t totally understand.

Full disclosure: I am not licensed to practice psychology, though I’m about to do it anyway. We say that parents try to “live through” their children. Their hopes and dreams, thwarted ambitions, unrealized goals — all of these are loaded onto their offspring in a set of impossibly heavy expectations in order to have their children become just like them, only better. Here, though, with these parents, it seems to be reversed. They don’t want their kids to be like them; they want to be their kids. They don’t want to be grown-ups with all of that irritating experience and perspective. They want to be children, wearing T-shirts and shorts, confronting politicians with youthful zeal and ignorance, not being responsible for doing the reading or appreciating the complexity. Not being adults, in other words. The children of these parents have become what Freudians might call “self objects” — empty vessels to be used to wrap up some unfinished business, to complete some childhood experiences, to have the activist and politically dramatic youth that kids who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s didn’t have.

Look at the faces of the parents in that long-ago Venice Beach video. (For that matter, look at their clothes! Perfect for after-school play dates!) Listen to the voices of the parents of those kids who got an earful from Dianne Feinstein. They sound like petulant children. The actual children involved, on the other hand, sound a lot more tempered and philosophical. Maybe that’s why their parents gave them such grown-up, old-timey names. It keeps them in their place. “Doug” and “Jennifer” sound like kids’ names. “Hosea” and “Mabel” sound like old people.

It was more than ten iPhones ago when my Venice Beach neighbors made their children sing praises to Barack Obama. The angelic children of that video are now twelve years older — some of them out of college already, on the way to lives of their own. Some of them, I’m pretty sure, work at my local coffee shop, and every now and then I try to look past the neck tattoos and ear gauges and skinny jeans and see if I can recognize one or two. I wonder whether they remember that day and that song. I wonder whether they have a really clear memory of the man they were singing about or it’s all a Laverne & Shirley & Thelma & Louise muddle. I wonder, while I watch them gravely pour out some heart-shaped latte art, whether their parents ever backed off and let them have childhoods of their own.

The Dangers of Unchecked Nationalism

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 29, 2019

I have to write this quickly because I have to head down to the National Review Institute Ideas Summit and Basket Weaving Expo to debate — or “engage” — my friend and boss Rich Lowry on the question of how conservatives should think about nationalism. So in order to organize my thinking, I’m going to lay out my basic view here.

For this nationalism conversation thing, it would be best if I said he’s for it, and I’m against it. But that’s misleading. I haven’t read Rich’s book yet, but we’ve chewed this over like a younger me in a chicken-eating contest enough for me to know that Rich’s position is more nuanced than that. In his big essay with Ramesh, he championed “benign nationalism.” As I noted at the time, the “benign” does a lot of work. And as Rich would concede, there are many kinds of unbenign nationalism. You could look it up.

My position is nuanced, too. While I can live with the formulation that there are good kinds of nationalism and bad kinds, I think more in terms of degrees of nationalism. A little nationalism is necessary for holding together a nation-state or a people. If there isn’t some conception of “us,” then there is no investment in the success of the collective enterprise. Countries without a sense of being a nation do not last and cannot get much done.

I don’t want to overly wallow in nuance, but sometimes even a lot of nationalism can be a good, or certainly necessary, thing. Nothing arouses the nationalist spirit more than war (and few things can arouse the spirit of war more than nationalism). That’s because from the earliest humans onward, we have evolved an instinct to unify in the face of an external threat. Our success on the food chain derives only secondarily from our intelligence. Our primary advantage was our ability to cooperate.

As Darwin noted in The Descent of Man, our capacity for altruism and cooperation was the key to the survival of our genes. “If the one tribe included . . . courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other.”

A tribe of prehistoric disciples of Ayn Rand — “this tuber is mine and you can’t have any of it!” — would not last long against a band of small-browed ruffians that worked well as a team. The John Galts of the Savannah would scream, “You’re violating my property right!” as the brutes smashed their faces in with a rock.

As G. K. Chesterton put it, “Nationalism is the consciousness of nationality; and the consciousness of nationality comes from the constant consciousness of danger.”

This goes a long way toward explaining why nationalist movements inevitably find themselves using the language of war. As I recently wrote in National Review, it’s no coincidence that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez constantly invokes World War II as a rationale for the Green New Deal.

The language of war flips a switch in our brains that causes us to drop other concerns and considerations. It’s like the episode of Little House on the Prairie when Carrie falls down a mine shaft. Everyone drops what they’re doing, forgets about property rights, commerce, or other personal priorities and rallies to save the girl. Nels Oleson, the owner Oleson’s Mercantile, doesn’t charge anyone for the lanterns, kerosene, or ropes he lends to the effort. Nobody says, “You can use my horses, but it’ll cost you five bucks.”

In times of emergency, we’re all in it together. And that’s a good thing.

But there are two caveats. The first is that emergencies do not last, and when the emergency is over, the old rules need to come back. If they don’t, then capitalism, democracy, and liberty are done for. Emergencies must be the exception to the rule, because if we make the spirit of emergency the rule, then we no longer live under the rule of law, but the rule of tyrants or mobs.

The second problem is that real emergencies must be obvious to all — or at least nearly all. There are moral equivalents to war. A girl down a mine shaft is one. A meteor heading to earth is another, as are various forms of natural disasters, zombie, vampire, and C.H.U.D apocalypses, etc.

The Allure of Power

The problem is that there are people who are very attracted to the power that comes with emergencies. Power is seductive in whatever form it takes: Emergency powers, money, Infinity Stones, the One Ring, or, as we’ve seen in the case of Jussie Smollet, the cultural power that comes with being able to claim you are a victim.

This leads people to declare emergencies when they do not exist or to exaggerate real challenges so they can do an end run around the conventional rules of democracy. There’s been a lot of the latter over the last decade or so.

My problem with nationalism is that, left unchecked, it devolves into the spirit of emergency. By placing the logic of “us” above all, it must create thems that must be defeated. It casts about for threats to justify a cult of unity. As Orwell observed, “As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit.”

It is fine to talk of “benign nationalism” being a good thing, but this is a kind of tautology. Benign simply means good. So of course, good nationalism is good in the same way that good violence is good. A policeman who uses violence to thwart a rapist is using good violence. A nation that uses nationalism to defeat Nazism is deploying good nationalism.

The hitch is that the concept of “good” lies outside the four corners of the concept of nationalism. Rich and Ramesh write that “Nationalism is a lot like self-interest. A political philosophy that denies its claims is utopian at best and tyrannical at worst, but it has to be enlightened. The first step to conservatives’ advancing such an enlightened nationalism is to acknowledge how important it is to our worldview to begin with.”

I have no quarrel with this. But think about that. Self-interest is not necessarily a personal, social, or abstract good. Serial killers act on their self-interest, as they define it. Not to go all Thomist, but my understanding of Christianity (and Judaism and conservatism and the liberal arts) is that we must use reason to inform and form the conscience to define self-interest in moral and productive ways. Nationalism is only good when it is informed, tempered, and constrained by ideas outside of nationalism.

Or as Rich and Ramesh write, nationalism “should be tempered by a modesty about the power of government, lest an aggrandizing state wedded to a swollen nationalism run out of control; by religion, which keeps the nation from becoming the first allegiance; and by a respect for other nations that undergirds a cooperative international order.”

In other words, for nationalism to be good it must be countered and constrained by the concept of the good. If nationalism were an unalloyed good — like, say, love — it wouldn’t need the adjective “benign.”

In its raw form, the only concept of the good contained within nationalism itself is the good for us. This is why nationalism is, like violence, at best an amoral concept. And like any amoral thing — violence, tools, fire, whatever — good or bad comes from what you do with it. The Iranians are nationalists; the Nazis were nationalist; Maduro, Chavez, Stalin, Castro, Mussolini, the Kims: They’re all nationalists. So were Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and de Gaulle. What differentiated the heroes from the villains was how they deployed nationalist sentiments.

Nationalism and Socialism, Again.

My objection to the new nationalist fad is that many of its practitioners do not do what Rich and Ramesh do; they skip the part about nationalism needing to be tempered and constrained by things outside of nationalism. Championing nationalism qua nationalism is simply championing power. “Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception,” Orwell writes. “Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakably certain of being in the right.”

This is why, historically, nationalism and socialism are kindred phenomena. I’ve written dozens of times that, as an economic matter, nationalism and socialism essentially mean the same thing. When we nationalize an industry, we socialize it. And vice versa. Some doctrinaire Marxists think nationalism and socialism are opposites, because they subscribe to the straw-man concept of global Communism, or they unwittingly still subscribe to the Stalinist propaganda known as the “theory of social fascism.” Stalin came up with this notion as a way to excommunicate any socialist or progressive movement that wasn’t loyal to Moscow. He felt it necessary to promulgate his totalitarian encyclical because it turned out that lots of people liked the idea of socialism, they just also liked the idea of nationalism — hence national-socialist movements that were stealing Bolshevik market share.

From the Bolshevik/Trotskyite perspective, any nation-state that puts its interests above others is betraying the global cause. But in the real world, this is nonsense. Because once socialists take power, national interest and the self-interest of the ruling classes force the rulers to talk and govern in nationalistic ways. That’s what happened with Stalin, Castro, and every other Communist regime.

Looking Backward

Rather than rehash all of that, let’s look at Edward Bellamy.

Edward Bellamy was, by any fair accounting, a socialist. His utopian novel Looking Backward did more to popularize socialist collectivism in America than anything Karl Marx ever put to paper. When he died in 1898, The American Fabian eulogized:

It is doubtful if any man, in his own lifetime, ever exerted so great an influence upon the social beliefs of his fellow-beings as did Edward Bellamy. Marx, at the time of his death, had won but slight recognition from the mass; and though his influence in the progressive struggle has become paramount, it is through his interpreters, and not in his own voice, that he speaks to the multitude. But Bellamy spoke simply and directly; his imagination conceived, and his art pictured, the framework of the future in such clear and bold outlines that the commonest mind could understand and appreciate.

Looking Backward inspired a mass “nationalist” movement, dedicated to “the nationalization of industry and the promotion of the brotherhood of humanity.” The first Nationalist Club appeared in Boston in the summer of 1888, founded by a labor reporter for the Boston Globe. The following year it started publishing the Nationalist magazine. It didn’t take long for clubs to sprout up across the country. Two years after the publication of the book, there were clubs in 27 states and the District of Columbia. In Chicago, the Collectivist League, which had been founded in April of 1888, changed its name to the Nationalist Club of Illinois ten months later on February 12, 1889. Soon there were hundreds of such clubs. One estimate held that were some four thousand “Bellamy societies” in the United States and hundreds more in Holland, Denmark, and Sweden.

Looking Backward offers an insight into how nationalism and socialism occupy the same part of our brains, even if some ideologies try to keep them separated. Bellamy was at first reluctant to call himself or his work “socialist,” even though it was instantly recognized as such by his avowedly socialist contemporaries. “Bellamy was anxious that his plan of social and economic organization be called Nationalism because he wished to distinguish it from other and more vague forms of socialism and because it was to proceed by the nationalization of industries,” writes John Hope Franklin. Socialism for Bellamy seemed too divisive a term. Nationalism was more inclusive.

The nationalist movement died in labor while giving birth to the populist party. But the populist party gave way too much of the progressive movement which was very nationalistic. But contained within progressivism is a greater loyalty to power and the most important tool for exercising power: The state.

Nationalism isn’t statism, but left un-tempered and unconstrained, it always expresses itself as statism, and statism is the enemy of all the ideas that make America’s form of nationalism valuable and unique.

Springtime of Their Discontent

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Ezra Pound, who might have recognized a thing or two in our current political environment and found them familiar, once defined literature as “news that stays news.” Two of William Shakespeare’s plays have for the past ten years or so been of particular interest for the light they shed on American political news. The first is Macbeth, which is in the end a play about debt, a subject from which there is no escape in this life. The other is Richard III.

Richard III is an interesting play and Richard III is an interesting character because of the way in which contradictory tendencies come together in them: the gravity of high affairs of state conducted with glib frivolity, crimes of the worst depravity perpetrated with lightness of spirit, civil war understood as a kind of schoolboy romance. Nobody, including Shakespeare, seems to be taking things quite as seriously as they should be taken.

Richard III is a play in which the principal characters lie to one another — and to themselves — about their motives. In the famous opening soliloquy (“Now is the winter of our discontent”), Richard, who is a hunchback, informs the audience that he is embarking on a course of treachery as a balm for his romantic exclusion: “Since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” He convinces Anne that he killed her husband, the Prince of Wales, and her father-in-law, King Henry VI, out of desire for her. She eventually marries him, purportedly out of pity — continuing the theme of self-deception. Elizabeth asks the elderly Queen Margaret for advice on how to curse Richard, and Margaret offers a master’s course in self-deception:

Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;

Compare dead happiness with living woe;

Think that thy babes were fairer than they were,

And he that slew them fouler than he is:

Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse.

Fouler than he is. That is the current operating mode of American presidential politics, which in these imperial times comprehends American politics as a whole.

There was a great deal to dislike about Barack Obama, and much to oppose. He was preening and dishonest, a serial violator of constitutional constraints, an aggrandizer of presidential power with contempt for the legislative branch and its prerogatives, and, not least, an assassin. But for many of his critics — Donald J. Trump prominent among them — that wasn’t enough. He had to be something more and something worse, something fouler than he is: a secret Marxist agent, a Kenyan-born crypto-jihadist, a Manchurian candidate. None of that was exactly political in the conventional sense: Conservatives and Republicans were going to oppose the Obama administration because of its left-wing agenda and its contempt for the constitutional order. The Kenyan/Marxist/Muslim stuff was not about how Republicans thought about Obama — it was about how they thought about themselves.

And now the same story repeats itself in the matter of President Trump and the Russia investigation. Trump’s defects as a man have been uncontested public knowledge for decades now — he has made them part of his brand. His deficiencies as a president are well known and admitted even by those of his partisans who have a measure of intellectual honesty. But that is not enough for his opponents — not as a matter of politics but as a matter of theater, the dramatic narrative in which they understand themselves to be plucky heroes standing bravely against the incursions of an alien menace, soldiers in the resistance, anything other than ordinary political partisans whose personal bitterness and bile are grossly in excess of what the actual facts of the political case would justify.

It is of course more comforting for Democrats to believe that they were sucker-punched in 2016 by a conspiracy led by the Russian intelligence apparatus rather than bested in ordinary electoral politics by a man who, though a teetotaler, took as his unstated campaign slogan: “Hold My Beer!”

Who would choose to be feckless chumps when they could instead be martyrs to democracy? Who could resist bettering the conditions of their loss by making the bad causer worse? Only those who are willing and able to make the supernatural effort to be honest with themselves.

Like Richard III, our political partisans tell themselves that they are acting not out of inchoate malice or thirst for power but out of love: love for the one half of the country that they do not hate, and hate utterly. But Richard loves no one — least of all himself. As he waits sleepless on the night before a battle in which victory is far from assured, he faces the facts: “I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself?” In the end, we all face the facts — we are made to.

For the Democrats, this is a springtime of discontent: They had been hoping, with a smile inside, to hear a tale of treason authored under the imprimatur of the special counsel, and are bitterly disappointed to be denied it. What good have they done unto themselves?

Or the country?