Shopping Superstitions

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, November 27, 2020

 

It’s the boss-bossiest time of the year, when Americans getting ready to open up their wallets to buy Christmas presents are lectured by illiterate halfwits about where and how to spend their money. The usual demands: Buy local, or buy from small businesses.

 

This is pure nonsense, and you should feel free to ignore it.

 

The “buy local” people insist that if you choose, say, your locally owned coffee shop over Starbucks, then the money you spend there will somehow stay in the community, hanging around and providing additional economic benefits. But that isn’t how money works: Most businesses spend most of what they take in and then put the rest in the bank, where it becomes global capital.

 

And local businesses do not generally spend their money locally — they can’t. I like my local coffee shop, and I am pretty sure that it does not buy its coffee locally, because I do not live in Colombia or Brazil or Vietnam, and it doesn’t buy its to-go cups from a local maker, since it is not in the shadow of a paper-goods factory, etc. Its lease is probably held by an out-of-town entity, along with its loans. Its espresso machine probably came from Italy or Germany, maybe Hong Kong.

 

For many businesses, the largest expense is personnel. Those local coffee-shop employees aren’t any more likely to spend their income locally than anybody else is, because they will want things like shoes and meat and Netflix rentals that are not made locally — but, to the extent that they do spend that income locally, they are about as likely to do so as a Starbucks employee is. For that matter, you probably have more Starbucks and Amazon shareholders in your neighborhood than you do independent coffee-shop proprietors or owners of small local stores. Shareholders are your neighbors, too.

 

But even if money did work the way the boobs say it does, money isn’t wealth — it is a record-keeping system that enables easy exchange and helps us to store value. What makes our communities, our country, and our species more prosperous isn’t trying to fence in money locally through campaigns of unsolicited advice, but the division of labor and specialization, which allows us to produce more with fewer resources. Sometimes, that favors big businesses, although many big businesses are in effect something more like a big network of smaller businesses: There aren’t a lot of mom-and-pop automobile companies, but General Motors doesn’t make most of the components that go into a Corvette — smaller companies do. There’s room in the market for both my local coffee shop and Starbucks for the same reason there’s room in the market for both Burger King and the French Laundry.

 

(I think the world would have been less mad at California governor Gavin Newsom if he had been dining with lobbyists at Burger King. But with a punk-ass yuppie name like Gavin Newsom — well, have it your way, governor.)

 

People in Portland like their coffee. But Portland isn’t somehow disadvantaged because Portlanders drink coffee that is grown in Lam Dong or Harar. Portland has other problems, mainly the fact that it is packed to the gills with the sort of people who choose to live in Portland. New York City has a lot of famous steakhouses. It doesn’t have a single cattle ranch. And if you have lived within smelling distance of a feedlot, you might be forgiven for suspecting that New Yorkers get the better end of that deal. A lot of cattlemen would disagree — everyone likes what he likes.

 

There is competition in the market, but its salient characteristic is cooperation: Through the market, we solve social problems together on a voluntary, collaborative basis. One of the consequences of that is that the cattlemen in Texas have an interest in the prosperity of the steakhouse patrons in Manhattan, and vice versa. The people who want you to believe otherwise are the same ones who want you to give up Bordeaux for wine made in Missouri or Oregon or Illinois — i.e., people who are not to be trusted.

 

The relationship between small business and big business is complicated. Some small businesses have big-business competitors that make life hard for them. But a big share of small businesses have as their single biggest customer . . . a bigger business. That is true for businesses from machine shops that make components for complex manufactured goods to service providers such as diesel mechanics and landscapers. There are thousands of very wildly profitable businesses across this country that you have never heard of, because they don’t have anything on the shelf in Walmart with the company name on it. But you use their products every day.

 

Small businesses rely on big businesses in other critical ways, too: Online markets such as Amazon and Etsy help small businessmen connect with customers all over the world, and global firms such as FedEx provide them important logistics and shipping services. I was looking for an out-of-print book a while ago, went on Amazon, found a copy at a local bookstore in India — everywhere is local to somewhere — and, in only a few days, I had my book, a bookseller in India had my money, Jeff Bezos (pbuh) had taken a cut for making the connection, and everybody was happy. Not quite magic, but as good as.

 

I like my local coffee shop and the other locally owned businesses in my neighborhood. I hope they do so well that the folks who own them all buy Italian cars.

The Imaginary Trump

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, November 27, 2020

 

Like Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump is man who represents the age in which he lived. Whatever you may think of the age. Jackson embodied a generation of men who had risen and made their mark in a young country. He represented their desire for greater representation, even if it had costs for slaves and Indians. He represented their desire to wrest control of a nation’s institutions, which had been monopolized by a small patrician elite. Jackson was partly a product of a new print-media culture.

 

Donald Trump represented an age of celebrity, the age of endorsement deals. His is the age of cable-news addiction in old age and sharing opinions as a branding opportunity. He represents a social-media age, which fixes a digital sewage pipe to the brains of every single person on earth and allows the mental diarrhea to gush upon an unready world. He represented the fantasy of a moneyed elite that used to slum it in Queens, but has settled into a Manhattan penthouse.

 

And because he is a celebrity figure and creature of Reality Television, he has become the object of fantasy for much of the public, and most especially for tub-thumpers, journalists, and public intellectuals. These people, most of all, recognized Trump’s weird charisma, and his power over a crowd. Often, being wordy people themselves, they envied his ability to communicate “seriously, but not literally” to an audience.

 

And so one of the most common forms of commentary during the Trump age was to imagine what Trump should say, or to wish he would stop saying the actual things that Trump says. We’ve had five years of people recognizing him as a star performer but wishing they could be Trump’s screenwriter.

 

Right-wing Trumpers tried to imagine Trump as King Cyrus, or Constantine — a strong man who could liberate God’s people from the grip of their tormentors. Most of his biggest fans don’t really have illusions about Trump. But, they still imagined a better version of Trump. One of my favorite examples of this comes from the authoress “Peachy Keenan” over at the American Mind. A COVID-19 hawk from the start, Keenan demanded a “war time Trump” come on the stage and even wrote a speech for him to give in the spring. She envisioned a sharp, rather strict 60-day shutdown, to ramp up the infrastructure necessary to take on the virus.

 

The real Trump would give a sleepy-sounding speech from the Oval Office. He would eventually give long briefings from the White House, poorly reviewed, in part because he would speculate rather freely about bleach and UV light being put in the body. The fantasy Trump took Churchillian control and responsibility for the dire situation. The real Trump wished vainly that the virus would go away, promised what turned out to be vaporware testing sites and websites, and then hoped (again) vainly that the ordeal would be over shortly and we could all celebrate Easter as normal.

 

How was your Thanksgiving?

 

Commentators imagined what a different Trump could do, a Trump who didn’t imply that a judge’s ethnicity made him biased, a Trump who didn’t make a target of Khizr Khan’s family. They imagined a true worker’s party Trump who cast away Paul Ryan’s tax cuts and instead revived America’s engineering and industrial leadership.

 

In the summer this year, Cal Thomas looked forward to a rally in Tulsa. “The president should not just use the speech to fire up his base,” he wrote. “He should propose something substantive that might provide, if not a solution to racial tensions, then at least begin to solve the underlying problem, something Democrats have only talked about for 50 years.” Thomas imagined a Trump who sought to unite white and black Evangelicals in common purpose and preached the Fatherhood of God over all.

 

The real Trump threatened the crowd. “If the Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control.” The real Trump encouraged the crowd to envision a day when their patience finally ran out and they annihilated the leftist mobs. “We had a bunch of maniacs come and sort of attack our city,” he said. “The mayor and the governor did a great job, but they were very violent people. Our people are not nearly as violent, but if they ever were, it would be a terrible, terrible day for the other side.” So much for healing.

 

Some racists imagined Trump would bring about endless racial polarization in our politics that would bring them to prominence. Some anti-racists imagined and feared the same. Strangely, he seemed to depolarize the racial divide in our politics. Extreme Internet reactionaries fantasized about a Trump who took absolute power, dismantling the Left’s institutions. And many progressives fantasized the same, if only to stimulate themselves with fear.

 

But beneath all these fantasies was the real Trump. When he leaves office in January, he leaves a hole in our politics, a gaping void where so many people deposited their most lurid fears and aspirations. The real Trump was a political phenom, but he never justified this.

On Being Grateful

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 26, 2020

 

My mother always enjoyed making Thanksgiving dinner. She took a traditional Southern woman’s pride in being a good cook, following her mother’s recipes, and my family made a rare display of kindness by declining to inform her that she was a fairly dreadful cook, one whose kitchen alchemy on the electric range could turn a cheap cut of round steak into polyester.

 

It took me a while to figure out that she was not a bad cook but a perfectly ordinary cook who was suspended in a kind of culinary limbo where it had never stopped being 1957, when global nuclear annihilation was right around the corner and men died at 66.4 years of age and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to combine canned cherry pie filling with chunks of Philadelphia cream cheese and Cool Whip and sprinkle pecans on top and call it, with a perfectly straight face, salad.

 

There was a half-gallon bottle of Karo syrup in the pantry, and her batterie de cuisine was a can-opener and a skillet.

 

She made great cornbread, though, and I wish she were still around to make it.

 

Gratitude is a form of memory. Loss teaches us how to be grateful, which is why in much of the world the remembrances of the dead come just before, or concurrently with, the harvest festivals. Love and loss, harvest and hunger: These are things we are meant to think about together, two parts of a whole truth. At our harvest festival, Thanksgiving, we are instructed to think about gratitude — practically hectored about it.

 

That thankfulness can be a tricky thing, because we are not wired for gratitude — we are wired for comparison. If you met a man who had never had an apple and you gave him one — a really good one — he would think it was the most marvelous thing in the world, and he would be grateful. And, in five minutes, he’d think: Why does that guy have a bigger apple than the one I got? Or: Think of all those lost years, never knowing what an apple is! Or: Will I ever have another apple? And is there maybe some better kind of apple out there?

 

Of course we can’t be happy with the apple. That would be too simple, and so, instead, we have envy, jealousy, and civilization.

 

Comparison is how we really learn, which is why living memory is a gift. When people of my father’s generation who grew up in shocking poverty say things such as, “We didn’t know we were poor,” they are not being precious. That was the world they lived in, and there was no Instagram by which to keep up with the Kardashians. My father had outdoor plumbing and got one pair of shoes a year, when school started — and so did everybody else he knew. There wasn’t anything remarkable about it at the time. We can only see it straight after the fact, when enough time has gone by.

 

That time lag has interesting effects. Those of us lucky enough to know people raised during the Great Depression or the war years do well to note how easy they are not only to please but to delight. Ask an 85-year-old in Beaumont, Texas, or Tucumcari, N.M., about his air-conditioning, and he will sing you a hymn. That weird gelatin-based Eisenhower-era party food was haute cuisine to people who had spent the 1930s eating beans five times a week — or fought standing in blood half-starving at Hürtgen Forest. Their memories can, if we will pay attention, illuminate our present bliss. Every oldster who has ever bored you to death with a story of hardship beginning with the words “In my day” was offering you a gift, and you’d be smart to accept it.

 

Say this, at least, for the annus horribilis 2020: It will give us all some “In my day” stories with which to irritate our grandchildren, if we are so blessed.

 

Unless I am much mistaken, there is a growing sense, combining present dread with wary hope, that we are near to the end of the coronavirus epidemic, that the vaccines coming into use will bring the situation under control — but that this is not going to happen until the end of a long, cold, lonely winter. Maybe there is some Providence in the timing: There is a reason that so many religious traditions have something like Lent, and that it is in the dark months that we choose to prepare ourselves for gratitude. And we need preparation: Virtues do not come easily to us — not to me, anyway. The calendar is a teacher, too: We celebrate the harvest and then prepare for the lengthening darkness of winter, which is not a punishment but a preparation.

 

I want to be careful about the silver-linings stuff. This has been a period of intense suffering for many people — sickness, death, joblessness, loneliness, anxiety — and very little of that has touched me and mine, and it won’t do to be glib about it. I canceled a fun trip to Europe and have made a lot of Zoom calls — not exactly the tribulation of Job. The epidemic has barely touched my family, but I would not have chosen this, for myself or for anybody else, and I want it to be over as soon as possible. But if must go through it, then we should profit by it — it doesn’t cost extra.

 

Elie Wiesel relates a story about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk, known as the Kotzker Rebbe.

 

A disciple tells the Kotzker his woes: “I come from Rizhn. There everything is simple, everything is clear. I prayed and I knew I was praying; I studied and I knew I was studying. Here in Kotzk everything is mixed up, confused; I suffer from it, Rebbe. Terribly. I am lost. Please help me so I can pray and study as before. Please help me to stop suffering.” The Rebbe peers at his tearful disciple and asks: “And who ever told you that God is interested in your studies and your prayers? And what if he preferred your tears and your sufferings?”

 

Writing in the New York Times, Jennifer Senior notes that the celebrated social psychologist Philip Brickman, author of a famed study of happiness, killed himself by jumping off a building. “Happiness Won’t Save You,” the headline proclaims.

 

Who ever was so arrogant, and so small-minded, to think it would?

 

We cannot be truly and fully grateful unless we get right with suffering. There have been many attempts at working that one out. In the great Eastern religions, suffering is something to be minimized and, finally, escaped: The Buddha spoke of the four “noble truths of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation of suffering,” and many teachers in the Hindu traditions speak of a final liberation from suffering. In Islam, suffering selects: It offers a test of faith separating the committed disciple from the unbeliever.

 

Christians take a distinctly radical view: that suffering is neither an evil to be evaded nor a punishment handed out routinely, like some kind of divine speeding ticket, but something to be entered into willingly in order to become not godlike but more fully and more perfectly human. We learn to be grateful not only for the alleviation of suffering but for the suffering itself — that, too, is a gift. We discover ultimate gratitude when we discover the Ultimate Object of our gratitude. Learning that ultimate gratitude does not necessarily mean wandering around the desert in a supernatural daze, though that has worked for many great men in the past. Some of them even sought out such a wild place as Massachusetts, landing there in the winter in rickety boats, like madmen. They went ashore and gave thanks to God.

 

We need not go so far, and, besides, we have business to attend to here at home, to which our attention is likely to be enforced for a few more months. Gratitude may not make us saints, but it should leave us cheerful, useful, modest, and patient, and ever mindful of those gifts and blessings that we could not possibly hope to deserve.

Gratitude: What We Owe to Our Country

 By William F. Buckley Jr.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

 

Note: The following essay by National Review founder William F. Buckley comes from the first chapter of his 1990 book, Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country.

 

I have always thought Anatole France’s story of the juggler to be one of enduring moral resonance. This is the arresting and affecting tale of the young monk who aspires to express his devotion to the Virgin Mary, having dejectedly reviewed, during his first week as a postulant at the monastery alongside Our Lady of Sorrows, the prodigies and gifts of his fellow monks. Oh, some sang like nightingales, others played their musical instruments as virtuosi, still others rhapsodized with the tongues of poets. But all that this young novice had learned in the way of special skills before entering the monastery was to entertain modestly as a juggler. And so, in the dead of night, driven by the mandate to serve, walking furtively lest he be seen and mocked by his brothers, he makes his ardent way to the altar with his sackful of wooden mallets and balls, and does his act for Our Lady.

 

This account of the struggle to express gratitude is unsurpassed in devotional literature. The apparent grotesquerie — honoring the mother of the Saviour of the universe, the vessel of salvation, with muscular gyrations designed to capture the momentary interest of six-year-olds — is inexpressibly beautiful in the mind’s eye. The act of propitiation; gratitude reified.

 

How to acknowledge one’s devotion, one’s patrimony, one’s heritage? Why, one juggles before the altar of God, if that is what one knows how to do. That Americans growing into citizenhood should be induced to acknowledge this patrimony and to demonstrate their gratitude, for it is the thesis of this exercise. By asking them to make sacrifices we are reminding them that they owe a debt, even as the juggler felt a debt to Our Lady. And reminding them that requital of a debt is the purest form of acknowledging that debt. The mind tends to turn to the alms-giver as one experiences the alms he has to give us. We are familiar with the debt an exonerated defendant feels toward the judicial system on which he suddenly found himself relying. The man truly hungry looks with a different eye on the person who feeds him. It is entirely possible to live out an entire life without experiencing the civic protections which can become so contingently vital to us at vital moments. Even if we never need the help of the courts, or of the policeman, or of the Bill of Rights, that they are there for us in the event of need distinguishes our society from others. To alert us to their presence, however dormant in our own lives, tends to ensure their survival. And tends also to encourage a citizenry alert to the privileges the individual might one day need. This enjoyment, this answering of needs, can make us proud of our country — and put us in its debt. In this essay on the theme of Gratitude, I postulate that we do owe something. To whom? The dead being beyond our reach, our debt can only be expressed to one another; but our gratitude is also a form of obeisance — yes, to the dead. The points I raise will disturb some “conservative” presumptions as also some commonly thought of as “liberal.” I have, in any event, the obligation to explore the social meaning of duty. Those who respond to religious guidelines will not be surprised, for example, by the Christian call to reinspect Divine commandments: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Although religious faith is not required to prompt attention to the nature of the injunction, the intensity of the concern of some Americans is sometimes best understood by the use of religious metaphors. Emile Durkheim wrote engrossingly on the question when he spoke of the “relation of a devoted child to his parents, of an ardent patriot to his fatherland, [of a] cosmopolitan to mankind, of a worker to his class, of a nobleman conscious of his rank to the aristocracy, of the vanquished to his conqueror, of the good soldier to his army.” “All these relations,” Durkheim concluded, “with their infinitely manifold contents can, indeed do, have a general tenor as far as their psychic aspect is concerned — which must be called a religious key.”

 

Durkheim might have added to his list the relation of the citizen to the community organized to protect his rights. An intensity which can be called religious characterizes the devotion shown to their community by literally millions of people who routinely sacrifice — time, money, labor — to remark that devotion; and, using their own language, methods, and skills, to requite the community. Mother Teresa characterizes her altruistic, prodigious efforts as an attempt to repay the Lord for bringing her to life, and giving her an opportunity for perpetual life by His side. The anonymous soldier who volunteers for a dangerous mission to enhance the prospects of the army that seeks to defend his nation is moved by a great passion to serve. Most service is not heroic in character — they also serve, who only stand and wait. But service is twice ennobling: it acknowledges that which deserves veneration, and satisfies the hunger of those who cannot be satisfied save by a gesture of requital. That as a nation we should encourage the requital of such young citizens is the enthusiastic premise of these pages.

 

Coming very slowly to a boil in Congress is the question of national service. It is a very old idea, by the way. George Washington spoke in favor of national service, which was commonly supposed at the time to be service in the military, it being military preparedness that was in those days most commonly needed to defend against the agents of His Majesty King George, or the red-skinned agents of Chief Charging Bull. The proposition that American citizens owe something to the community that formulated and fought to establish their progenitive rights was proffered in 1910 by William James, in an essay still widely referred to as a kind of charter instrument of national service (“The Moral Equivalent of War”). The durability of the idea of national service at the very least betokens an inherent appeal. It was all so very much easier to speak about, and even to fancy, back when the tradition of public service meant the military. The Ferocity of the Warrior was readily transmuted to the Pride of the Father. In an age in which military contention absorbs less and less social energy (it has been 17 years since an American was drafted for military duty), the eye roams, under the prompting of a parched heart, for service of another kind; for the satisfaction, say, of juggling for Our Lady.

 

Both political parties, since the presidential contest of 1988, have declared themselves in favor of national service. Indeed, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, acting for his party, introduced as the very first bill (S-3) in January 1989 a Citizenship and National Service Bill. What it says, to use only a few words to describe it, is that young people should be induced to give service to the nation. By no means does the bill propose that national service be limited to the military. Indeed, since the bill was introduced, because of the happy events of 1989 in the Communist bloc, it becomes apparent that we face the need for fewer, rather than for more, soldiers in the field. Accordingly, the efforts of many national-service volunteers would be directed to extra-military pursuits, of which there are a dismaying number. Dismaying in this sense: if you add up the number of young people whose services could profitably be used — say, in helping old people; in assisting teachers both in instructing children and in protecting them; in advancing environmental goals; in protecting deteriorating books in libraries — you add up quickly to more than one-half of the three million Americans who, every year, become 18 years old. The Nunn bill addresses the younger generation and says: Look, if you will agree to give us a year of your time in national service, we will pay you $10,000 beyond the pocket money you will get during your national service. This $10,000 you can use toward your college tuition payments, if you go on to college; or as a down payment on your mortgage when you get around to buying a house.

 

It is conceived as a grand federal enterprise, and I do not wish only for that reason to oppose it, though I do so for reasons I will elaborate. As of this writing, the Republicans have (I concede, as I’ll do later in greater detail) a half-hearted substitute bill, not worth exploring. It is very much worth remarking, however, that the subject of national service, although the debate about it has not yet reached the voter’s hearth, is very much there, a subject waiting to be deliberated. It is going to run into any number of hostile presumptions, among them the aversion to an idea of federally sponsored philanthropy (though the Federal Government has long since encouraged philanthropy by granting tax deductions); an egalitarian resistance to special favors for special classes of citizens (though the government has long since favored veterans with the GI Bill, which pays much of college costs); and, not least, the inertial resistance to the blight of any Grand New National Idea. I hope to confront these objections, and even to suggest that not every conceivable Grand New National Idea ought to be discarded out of hand. (Wouldn’t many of us agree that it would be a Grand New National Idea to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “America the Beautiful”?)

 

Meanwhile, it is fair to note that those politicians who have entered into the argument, and they are both Democrats and Republicans, are saying that participation in the community should take more active form than merely paying taxes, buying and selling in the marketplace, and voting (occasionally, if at all). And of course the question is necessarily raised in the context of the one question we can never get away from. I treasure the story of Congressman Rich of Pennsylvania, who sat in the House of Representatives for years and years and rose to speak in session after session, year after year, to make only the one simple comment before sitting down again: “How are we going to pay for all this?” And then one day, at two o’clock in the morning, after the House had been in session continuously for over two days and a bleary quorum was ready for the final vote — up shot the hand of Congressman Rich, resignedly acknowledged by the Speaker, to a chorus of vocal dismay. He rose and said solemnly, “April Fool!” Even on April 1, the question of cost cannot be dismissed. I reveal at this early moment that I deem it entirely manageable. But just as the question is bound to arise — how much will national service cost? — so an advocate of the idea is required to consider that cost and to explore its ramifications. In the last analysis a society has to accumulate a surplus before it gets around to thinking in terms of expenditures beyond those absolutely necessary to produce food and shelter. Without an economic surplus we are left with not even enough to afford a set of the juggler’s mallets and balls.

 

Of course. Practical attention needs to be paid to the question of national service, but if the idea takes over the public imagination, as it has done my own, the cost will prove bearable, and its fruits beyond the reach of slide rules. And then, properly conceived, the status of the citizen in a republic, uniting privilege with responsibility, evolves into a kind of nobility no less aristocratic for being widespread and universally accessible (is there any difficulty in conceiving of a society, every one of whose members is of an aristocratic order?). Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight. National service, like gravity, is something we could accustom ourselves to, and grow to love.

Thanksgiving Is Not a Lie

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, November 26, 2020

 

We live in a time of heedless iconoclasm, and so one of the country’s oldest traditions is under assault.

 

Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as, at best, based on falsehoods and, at worst, a whitewash of genocide against Native Americans.

 

The New York Times ran a piece the other day titled, “The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year,” bristling with hostility toward the day of gratitude and noting that “the holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice.” (The paper is admirably consistent — a couple of years ago it ran an article headlined, “Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong.”)

 

When Arkansas senator Tom Cotton slammed the Times piece, as well as the newspaper’s stilted and dishonest 1619 Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architect of that venture, Nikole Hannah-Jones, replied with incredulity. “Imagine calling the 1619 Project debunked in order to defend a childish Thanksgiving myth,” she tweeted.

 

Childish myth? It’s true that debunkers can score some easy points.

 

The term “Pilgrims” wasn’t popularized until later. They didn’t wear dour clothes. They didn’t consider their iconic gathering in 1621 a formal thanksgiving, which would have been given over to solemn religious observances. And so on.

 

But the basic contours of the holiday are recognizable in that long-ago event. The settlers who had arrived in the Mayflower in 1620, and survived a brutal winter that killed half of them, feasted, enjoyed games, and marveled at the material abundance of their new home.

 

One of them, Edward Winslow, wrote a friend that “our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labors.” He noted that “among other Recreations, we exercised our Arms.” He concluded, “although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

 

It’s not inconceivable that they ate turkeys. Plymouth governor William Bradford wrote of that autumn, “besides waterfowl there was a great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.”

 

And they celebrated, as we’ve all always learned, with friendly Indians. Edward Winslow recorded “many of the Indians coming amongst us” and “for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer.”

 

Tribes in the region had been devastated by disease after contact with Europeans, but easily could have eliminated the settlement. Instead, the leader of the Wampanoag forged an agreement with them, with an eye to a potential ally against the rival Narragansetts.

 

Finally, the legendary Squanto did indeed provide essential assistance. He belonged to the Patuxet band that had lived in the Plymouth area and had been completely wiped out by the epidemic.

 

Finding his people gone (he had been kidnapped by an Englishman and sold into slavery in Spain before escaping), he joined with the Pilgrims and taught them indispensable skills, including how to plant corn. Bradford called him “a special instrument sent of God.” He was a translator, guide, and, importantly, the chief envoy between the Pilgrims and neighboring tribes.

 

The peace with the Wampanoag lasted about 50 years. It’s a mistake to read future conflict back into the 1621 feast, a moment of comity and hopefulness.

 

As Melanie Kirkpatrick explains in her history of the holiday, New England colonies eventually established annual general thanksgiving days. Thanksgiving as we know it arose from these days and the memory of the 1621 event, with layers of tradition added over time (the formal date in late November, the cuisine, the association with football, etc.).

 

If we didn’t have such a day — to stop and express gratitude to our Creator, to be thankful for the abundance of this great land, to gather with friends and family — we really would have to invent it.

The 1620 Project

 By Cameron Hilditch

Thursday, November 26, 2020

 

On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower arrived on the eastern coast of North America. She had weathered the slings and arrows of maritime misfortune for almost ten weeks at that point, but the passengers thought the discomfort of crossing a small price to pay for passage to the Promised Land. After all, these were radical Protestants, and to them a land undefiled by any previous association with the Catholic Church was more to be desired than Canaan itself, with all its rivers of milk and honey.

 

And so the settlers settled and gave thanks with the natives and worked and lived and died. Though centuries have passed since the last Mayflower pilgrim was entrusted to the earth in a makeshift Massachusetts cemetery, the symbolic freight of the ship and its voyage has only grown. It’s safe to say no other passage from the Old World to the New — with the possible exception of the Titanic — is likely to be commemorated in a column such as this one 400 years later.

 

There’s good reason for the Mayflower’s staying power in the American psyche, but it may not be immediately obvious. It wasn’t the first ship to alight in the New World (we have Columbus Day to remind us of that). Nor was it the first ship to carry English passengers to America: Virginia had been granted a royal charter and settled decades earlier. The Mayflower pilgrims have no claim to uncharted waters or undiscovered countries. Their pathbreaking endeavor wasn’t geographic at all. It was political and, more specifically, constitutional.

 

The ship had set out for Virginia but ended up landing on Cape Cod instead, which was beyond the legal domain of the Virginia Company. To head off lawlessness and anarchy, the passengers and crew of the ship quickly came together to draft and undersign the Mayflower Compact, which functioned as a governing document for the community. Its purpose was to establish “a civil body politic,” in order to make “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices” for the new colony.

 

This compact, more than anything else, is what cemented the place of the Mayflower pilgrims in the annals of American folklore. Other settlers had been governed by written charters before, but those had always been granted by a king or a queen across the water. The Mayflower Compact, by way of contrast, was a written constitution framed by the people and for the people. The temptation to view the document as an historical overture, sounding notes and themes that would be played again in the old courthouse in Philadelphia, was irresistible for latter-day Americans looking back on it from a post-Revolutionary perspective.

 

After the Constitution was ratified in 1787, the Mayflower Compact came to be understood as a kind of colonial prototype for our current governing document. Similar to the first Christians, who interpreted prophets like Moses and Jonah as prefigurements of Christ, Americans have traditionally read the Mayflower Compact as a document that presages the full flowering of American liberty.

 

John Quincy Adams called it the “first example in modern times of a social compact or system of government instituted by voluntary agreement conformable to the laws of nature, by men of equal rights and about to establish their community in a new country.”

 

Later in the 19th century, historian George Bancroft claimed that in “the cabin of the Mayflower . . . humanity recovered its rights, and instituted government on the basis of ‘equal laws’ for ‘the general good.’”

 

But perhaps the most salient expression of Mayflower mythology came from Calvin Coolidge, who spoke at the 300th anniversary ceremony a century ago:

 

The compact which they signed was an event of the greatest importance. It was the foundation of liberty based on law and order, and that tradition has been steadily upheld. They drew up a form of government which has been designated as the first real constitution of modern times.

 

The Mayflower Compact has endured in our national memory for so long because it inaugurated a project on these shores that we’re still engaged in today: the project of free government under a written constitution.

 

Until the American Revolution, most free countries in the world preferred an unwritten constitution of customs and norms established over time. This model allowed almost all matters of public concern to be hammered out by the rough-and-tumble process of electoral politics. The British constitution still functions this way today. The Founding Fathers, however, established a government framed by a written constitution. A supreme law exists in this land, around 7,200 words long, that governs and restricts the actions of civil magistrates.

 

In his brilliant book on the subject, Greg Weiner called the American constitution “Madison’s metronome.” It was written and ratified to regulate the convulsive political passions of the early republic and channel them into sustainable and productive thoroughfares that would steady the more erratic political rhythms of the Union. In this respect, it served as a more refined and civilized successor to the Mayflower Compact of the previous century.

 

The Mayflower pilgrims confronted more elemental threats than the framers of the Constitution: Starvation, exposure, disease, and the animal enmity these things bring out in people were the chief obstacles to their continued survival. Still, faithfulness to their governing covenant saw the pilgrims through these threats and helped them to keep the political beat of ordered liberty throughout the riotous years of early colonial life. It provided a prototypical structure and rhythm for liberty in America, saving it from an early death in the Hobbesian wilderness of the New World. The traditions of self-government inaugurated in the Mayflower Compact serve to remind us that freedom and form make happy bedfellows and that we owe the fruit of their union in the shape of our Constitution to the brave men and women of ages past.

The Coup That Wasn’t

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

 

Donald Trump is not done challenging the results of the 2020 election in court, and he is by no means done complaining. But there will be no “coup.” Any prospect of Trump remaining in office without a legal process that declares him the recipient of more legal votes in the decisive states has now evaporated. All that remains is a host of extremely long-shot court challenges — each of which is short on evidence. This was always the likely outcome.

 

Sure, we heard lots of overheated charges about how Trump was trying to stage a “coup” or “steal” the election. We have heard for years alarmist claims that Trump would not leave office peacefully. Trump, as usual, brought some of that on himself by his irresponsible rhetoric, his promotion of bomb-throwing lawyers into the spotlight, his general disregard for legal and democratic norms, and his inability to ever admit a fair defeat. From my own perspective, Trump’s behavior throughout this latest episode has underlined why he has always been unfit for the presidency as a matter of character. But there has been a disconnect — as there has been throughout Trump’s presidency — between what Trump might realistically do and what his opponents claimed he would do. That disconnect arises partly from their hysteria, but also from the limits on Trump’s power to act alone.

 

A trend that we have seen fairly consistently throughout Trump’s presidency, going back to 2017 and 2018, is that Republican politicians are most afraid to publicly cross Trump when he is running his mouth or using the unilateral powers of the presidency, and most effective in restraining Trump when they can — privately when possible, publicly when necessary — let him know that he needs help and that it is not coming. So, Trump is at his most unconstrained on Twitter or when acting entirely alone, as when he is using the presidential pardon power. Republicans know that criticism alone will bring them grief while doing nothing to stop him. The same mostly applies to the Trump White House or to other aspects of the government or the party that are under his sole control. Trump’s lawsuits are restrained only by how responsible his lawyers are, which is why it was so counterproductive to bring public-pressure campaigns against his original legal team and encourage him to rely instead on Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood.

 

By contrast, when Trump actually requires the active assistance of Republican-elected officials, he has to avoid putting them in positions that require them to personally take steps that break with institutional or legal norms — not just shrug at Trump doing so. This is why Trump’s legislative record, his judicial nominees, and the behavior of most of his executive agencies (outside of the immigration area) all look a lot more like those of a traditional Republican presidency.

 

So, Trump tweeted, and a lot of Republican-elected officials looked the other way. He filed lawsuits and demanded recounts, but these are normal steps, even if ones that most politicians don’t take without a closer margin and a better set of arguments. Again, most Republican politicians were willing to let the process play out, recognizing that this was what a lot of their voters wanted. And several Republican-appointed judges have heard Trump’s legal claims and turned them away. Matthew Brann, the Middle District of Pennsylvania judge who wrote a scathing rejection of the most recent high-profile Trump suit, was an Obama appointee but had been active in Republican politics, the Federalist Society, and the National Rifle Association before taking the bench. As the losses in court have piled up, even conservatives committed to Trump’s cause have started publicly complaining that Trump’s lawyers have not been backing up their theories with evidence. On Monday, Rush Limbaugh went after Powell for this.

 

What happened when talk turned to whether Trump would pressure state legislators to appoint slates of electors who disregarded the popular vote in their states? As I noted on Friday, the obvious trouble sign for the plan was that even Trump and his campaign were unwilling to openly make the case for it. Was that because Trump was being responsible with his words? Unlikely. Much more likely, he was getting enough negative feedback to recognize that the plan was a non-starter with the Republican legislative caucuses he needed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. The White House meeting with the Republican heads of Michigan’s two legislative chambers ended with them publicly affirming that the election results would follow the state’s popular vote. Michigan then went ahead and certified a Biden victory, with a decisive vote by Republican canvasser Aaron Van Langevelde, who concluded, “We have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the elections. We cannot and should not go beyond that.”

 

In Georgia, the Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has bent over backwards to provide a hand recount of the state; but he’s also spoken out vigorously in defense of the integrity of the voting process he oversaw. So has Al Schmidt, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia. There has been no significant groundswell of Republican state legislators publicly volunteering to vote in pro-Trump electors in states where Trump lost the vote. Republican governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona have not pushed for any such plans.

 

Over the past week, multiple Senate Republicans have piped up to object to Trump’s scorched-earth approach in various ways. Joni Ernst told Guy Benson that it was “outrageous” and “offensive” for Powell to claim that Republican and Democratic candidates had paid to have their elections rigged. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse criticized Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome in Michigan, where Trump lost by over 150,000 votes, and Romney called the appointed-electors scheme “undemocratic.” Lamar Alexander, Shelley Moore Capito, and Bill Cassidy all called for Trump to authorize the General Services Administration to make presidential-transition funds and services available to Biden, while John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, and James Lankford all called for Biden to receive intelligence briefings. A variety of other statements pushing towards a transition and away from claims of a stolen election came from Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski in the Senate, from Liz Cheney, Don Young, Francis Rooney, Adam Kinzinger, John Shimkus, Paul Mitchell, Don Bacon, Will Hurd, Tom Reed, John Curtis, and Denver Riggelman in the House, and from Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland.

 

Finally, on Monday evening, the Trump-appointed head of the GSA, Emily Murphy, gave the go-ahead to the Biden transition and briefings — earlier than had been done for George W. Bush in 2000 — with Trump’s express approval:

 

I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

 

Biden will receive, with the signoff of the Trump White House, the president’s daily briefing.

 

Efforts to pressure Republicans to take drastic steps have fared no better. Lin Wood called on Georgia Republicans to boycott the special Senate election on January 5 as a way of pushing Kemp to “order a special session of the legislature,” a preliminary step to appointing electors:

 

Let’s speak truth about @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue. Why are they doing little or nothing to support efforts by GA citizens to address unlawful election & need for @BrianKempGA

 to order special session of legislature? If not fixed, I will NOT vote in GA runoff. Will you?

 

Politicians love votes & money (not necessarily in that order). Want to get @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue out of their basements to demand that action must be taken to fix steal of the 11/3 GA election? Threaten to withhold your votes & money. Demand that they represent you.

 

But Donald Trump Jr. blasted the notion:

 

I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @PerdueSenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people. We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.

 

Presumably, the president’s son would not have brushed back the president’s lawyer so publicly if he thought the appointed-electors scheme was going anywhere.

 

At the end of the day, it would have required a lot of Republican assistance for Donald Trump to even contemplate taking the election out of the hands of the voters, the vote-counters, and the vote-counter-reviewing courts. It was the absence of that assistance, not the typically overwrought garment-rending by media Resistance figures, that resulted in the plan never getting off the ground. The Republicans who dug in and did their jobs, and those who spoke out, made a difference; so, too, did those who remained silent instead of leaping to the president’s aid.

 

None of this excuses Trump’s own words and deeds. Nor is it proof of any particularly exceptional virtue on the part of Republicans. What it does show is two things. One, the rest of the Republican Party was never the vast conspiracy of Resistance fever dreams. And two, the American system still works. Even among a defeated party with much suspicion of electoral misconduct afoot and a sitting president spinning wild ideas, the norms supporting a peaceful transition of power and acceptance of the verdict of the voters remain a strong pillar of our constitutional republic.