Jay Nordlinger - National Review

Transcription

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October 20, 2014
$4.99
SPECIAL SECTION ON EDUCATION
BROOKHISER
WILLIAMSON: Why American Manufacturing Lives On
TUTTLE
on Lincoln
on the NFL
Susana
Jay Nordlinger on New Mexico’s
Rising Star, Governor Susana Martinez
www.nationalreview.com
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Contents
OCTOBER 20, 2014
|
VOLUME LXVI, NO. 19
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Jay Nordlinger on Susana Martinez
p. 28
ARTICLES
16 MIND NOT THE GAP
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
by Ramesh Ponnuru
The GOP doesn’t need to solve its problem with women voters.
18 FORGET THE ALAMO
49
by Henry Olsen
Senator Cruz does not understand how to win national elections.
21 WHEN LIBERALISMS COLLIDE
by John O’Sullivan
What the Hungarian prime minister meant by “liberal democracy.”
24 A NEW BIRTH
50
by Richard Brookhiser
by Ian Tuttle
A few miscreants do not represent the NFL.
52
by Jay Nordlinger
The governor of New Mexico runs for reelection.
31 WE BUILD THIS
55
by Kevin D. Williamson
by Arthur Herman & John Yoo
Congress can begin to restore American power now.
58
by Andrew Kelly
59
Aligning the interests of schools, students, and taxpayers.
41 KNOWLEDGE MAKES A COMEBACK
by Frederick M. Hess
SECTIONS
How classroom instructors took on the education bureaucracy.
45 MAKING A LIVING WITH THE HUMANITIES
You don’t have to major in finance.
by John J. Miller
CITY DESK: SETTING
THE TABLE
Richard Brookhiser discusses the
fortunes of a restaurateur.
by Sol Stern
Schools are rediscovering the need for a content-based curriculum.
43 TEACHING REFORM
FILM: OLD SCHOOL
Ross Douthat reviews A Walk
among the Tombstones.
EDUCATION SECTION
38 A REAL EDUCATION MARKET
A NEW WAY OF LIFE
Victor Lee Austin reviews From
Shame to Sin: The Christian
Transformation of Sexual
Morality in Late Antiquity,
by Kyle Harper.
American manufacturing is not dead—it is thriving.
36 FIGHTING OBAMAPOLITIK
A LEVIATHAN THAT WORKS
Patrick Brennan reviews Bring
Back the Bureaucrats: Why
More Federal Workers Will
Lead to Better (and Smaller!)
Government, by John J. DiIulio Jr.
FEATURES
28 VIVA SUSANA!
GOOD OLD DAYS
Terry Teachout reviews The Days
Trilogy: Expanded Edition,
by H. L. Mencken, edited by Marion
Elizabeth Rodgers.
Lincoln continued Washington’s fight.
26 THE CHARACTER OF FOOTBALL
A SAD REVERSAL
David Pryce-Jones reviews Making
David into Goliath: How the
World Turned against Israel,
by Joshua Muravchik.
2
4
47
48
54
60
Letters to the Editor
The Week
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . Richard O’Connell
Happy Warrior . . . . . . David Harsanyi
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Letters
OCTOBER 20 ISSUE; PRINTED OCTOBER 2
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
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Eliot Comes Home
Thanks so much for that eloquent and thoughtful essay by Kevin D.
Williamson on T. S. Eliot and his attachment to his hometown of St. Louis
(“Looking for Tom,” September 22). Everything about Williamson’s essay
is well done, and there is a detail worth adding that has a direct NaTioNaL
REviEW connection.
in the 1990s, i wrote an essay for NR (“Poetic injustice,” May 29, 1995)
lamenting that while great natives of St. Louis were memorialized all over
the city, the greatest poet and literary critic of the 20th century had been
mostly forgotten in his hometown.
as a result of that essay, a longtime NR reader and subscriber, Walker
Taylor iii, a fellow Eliot devotee, contacted his friend the Episcopal bishop
of Missouri, recommending that a significant memorial to Eliot be created
and permanently located in the beautiful Episcopal cathedral in downtown
St. Louis.
i worked with both men and with Eliot’s widow valerie Eliot, a
Londoner, to arrange a sterling bronzed bas relief of Eliot, accompanied by
a famous stanza from his poem “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from
exploration / and the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we
started / and know the place for the first time.”
That luminous memorial to Eliot now adorns one
of the bays in that St. Louis
church, and on the day of
its dedication, another of
america’s great poets of
the 20th century, anthony
Hecht, not only came for
the dedication but also
read much of Eliot’s greatest work.
None of this would have happened without a faithful NR reader making
all the right connections in order to celebrate the literary achievement of
one of St. Louis’s greatest sons, Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Timothy S. Goeglein
Washington, D.C.
Their Majesties
Ken Burns’s “enthronement” of the Roosevelts, as discussed in amity
Shlaes’s review (“Progressives Enthroned,” october 6), is surely lamentable. But i am left to wonder: if the Roosevelts are on the throne, what is
left for the Clintons? Perhaps apotheosis.
Matthew Rountree
Richmond, Va.
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
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Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
OCTOBER 20, 2014
RECLAIMING THE GREAT
Christian Intellectual Tradition
WITH STELLAR FACULTY
MAJOR RECOGNITIONS BY
Union University faculty members excel as
scholars, teachers, authors and national speakers.
Leaders in their fields, they want to teach at
U.S.News & World
Report
Kiplinger’s Personal
Finance
Union, where their Christian faith is part of the
America’s 100 Best
College Buys
package. That’s exactly what Union wants, too.
Princeton Review
To learn more about Union’s commitment to
Christ-centered academic excellence, visit uu.edu.
Center for Student
Opportunity
Colleges of Distinction
StateUniversity.com
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F O UNDED IN 1823 | J ACKSO N, T ENNESSEE
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uu.edu
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EXCELLENCE-DR IV EN | CHR IST-CENT ER ED | PEOPLE-FOCUSED
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week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/1/2014 2:29 PM Page 4
The Week
n The only Justice Department consultations Al Sharpton
should be involved in concern state’s evidence.
n NBC New York reported that after nine months, the
Justice Department investigation into those lane closings on
the New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge
has found no evidence that Governor Chris Christie ordered
them, or even knew of them beforehand. Supplying context,
NBC interviewed a former federal prosecutor, unconnected
to the case, who said that in such investigations, “if you
don’t have [evidence of wrongdoing] within nine months or
so, you’re not likely to ever get it.” Was Christie’s exoneration given the same treatment as the initial story—that is, as
if Martians had landed in New Jersey? No indeed. And since
the federal investigation is ongoing (Christie is not the only
person involved—or, in his case, not involved), and since the
(Democrat-dominated) New Jersey assembly is conducting an
investigation of its own, expect more dribs and drabs. Until,
say, November 2016.
ROMAN GENN
n Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a lengthy
interview with the fashion magazine Elle, which is not noted
for its jurisprudential analysis, has returned to the theme of
eugenics, which seems to be a favorite of hers. Some time
back, she explained Roe v. Wade in terms of population control, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to
have too many of,” and now she has told Elle that insufficient
resources are being put to use in the cause of aborting the children of poor people—or, as she put it, “the impact of all these
restrictions is on poor women.” Her view: “It makes no sense
as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”
Possibly it has not occurred to the justice that a national policy
promoting or discouraging birth among any group of people is
problematic in and of itself, and that a government that takes it
upon itself to classify mothers and children as desirable and
undesirable is by definition an inhumane one. But then abortion is an inhumane act that brings out the inhumanity in its
partisans, and Justice Ginsburg is nothing if not one of them.
n True to most enterprises that have the word “People’s” up
front, the People’s Climate March in New York City—along
with the subsequent Flood Wall Street protests—was a sustained assault not only on free enterprise but also on the idea of
constitutionally ordered liberty itself. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
echoing calls from the academic Left and such scholarly
journals as Gawker, called for the trial and imprisonment of
Charles and David Koch—on charges of treason—for having
the gall to operate energy companies and to oppose Mr. Kennedy politically. At Flood Wall Street, hardly a word was said
about global warming: The rising tide of capitalism, not the
oceans, was the focus. The irony is that care for the environment, which is both necessary and desirable, is functionally a
4
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luxury good, something that societies start to pay attention to
once capitalism has provided an adequately high standard of
living. And what happened to the environment the last time
radical anti-capitalists held power? See the Aral Sea, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl, or the current condition of any given
“People’s Republic.”
n In a deep bow to political fashion, the Rockefeller Foundation announced that it is divesting from fossil-fuel-energy
companies. The announcement was timed to coincide with two
splashy Manhattan events: the anti-climate-change march; and
climate-change talks over on First Avenue, at the U.N., a few
long blocks from the foundation’s Fifth Avenue offices, whose
electricity is not, to our knowledge, generated by windmills. Its
$860 million in holdings has its source in the great wealth generated from the refineries of the Standard Oil Co., co-founded
by the foundation’s patriarch, John D. Rockefeller Sr. The developing world clamors for more cheap energy; the developed
world loftily denounces it, exaggerating its likely environmental cost while offering no realistic alternative either for itself
or for those it would leave impoverished. And the Rockefeller
Foundation calls itself a philanthropy.
n Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, announced in an NPR
interview that the company would no longer fund the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that promotes conservative policies in state legislatures. Schmidt said
that, by denying climate change, ALEC was “really hurting our
children and our grandchildren and making the world a much
worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people.
They’re just literally lying.” He provided no evidence to back
OCTOBER 20, 2014
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THE WEEK
up this heated charge, nor did interviewer Diane Rehm ask for
it. ALEC does not, in truth, deny climate change. Instead it
makes statements such as this one: “Unilateral efforts by the
United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally.” Google has no
obligation to fund such efforts. If Schmidt was aware of the
organization’s actual views, though, it is he who was “literally
lying.” If he was unaware, may we suggest a handy search
engine he can use to look things up?
n Alton Nolen, acting as a one-man Islamic State of Oklahoma,
beheaded Colleen Hufford, a former co-worker, and tried to behead Traci Johnson, another, before their employer shot and disabled him. Nolen, 30, had been fired from the food-processing
plant in Moore, Okla., where he ran amok, so this was a case of
workplace rage. But Nolen was inspired to channel his rage into
jihadism. He had converted to Islam while serving time for a
drug bust, renamed himself Jah’keem Yisrael, and decorated his
Facebook page with images of Taliban fighters and Osama bin
Laden. Obviously the recent spate of ISIS beheadings impressed
him (where else, since the Reign of Terror, has decapitation
been so prominent?). Al-Qaeda was fascinated with hijacking
airliners, which required careful preparation, but later jihadists
have encouraged do-it-yourself mayhem (the Boston bombers
were inspired by an online article, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen
of Your Mom”). There are more than enough homicidal losers in
the world to supply them with acolytes.
AP PHOTO/THE WINCHESTER STAR, JEFF TAYLOR
n Barbara Comstock, a Republican running for Congress in
northern Virginia, is one of the Democrats’ top targets this fall.
You can see why. The three-term Virginia delegate, who has
served as a House staffer, as a member of the George W. Bush
Justice Department, and as a campaign consultant, is a talented,
creative legislator who has worked tirelessly for conservative
reform throughout her career. She recently helped to secure tax
credits for high-tech industries and telework, and backed legislation that opened the Virginia coast to offshore drilling. Her legislation increasing penalties for human trafficking received
near-unanimous support in the Virginia general assembly. Opponents have fixated on her work as chief investigative counsel and
senior counsel for the House Committee on Government Reform
from 1995 to 1999, in the so-called Clinton Wars of the Nineties.
But Comstock should be proud of that work. She was a dogged
investigator—with much to investigate. The tenacity, creativity,
and bipartisan amicability that she has demonstrated throughout
6
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her career will serve her well in Congress. NATIONAL REVIEW is
supporting Barbara Comstock enthusiastically, and we hope you
will, too.
n People who have only heard of Ezekiel Emanuel’s Atlantic
article headlined “Why I Hope to Die at 75” may get a misleading impression of what he is saying. The bioethicist and former Obama-administration adviser opposes euthanasia and
physician-assisted suicide, and he denies that he is arguing for
rationing. Rather, he notes that people’s faculties decline with
age (a rather banal point on which he elaborates needlessly)
and argues that they should not strive to prolong life when its
quality has decreased. He makes two related policy prescriptions, both of them reasonable: We should redirect research
dollars from making old age longer to making it more pleasant,
and we should not use life expectancy, past around the age of
75, as a way of judging countries’ health systems and practices.
As carefully as Emanuel wishes to circumscribe his argument,
however, he still goes too far. He suggests that people older than
75 or so should not go to the doctor unless they have a really good
reason, not including extending their lives. Worse, he makes it
sound as though life is not worth living unless one is at the
height of one’s powers. He thus inadvertently strengthens the
case for euthanasia—and undermines that for human equality.
His argument may not be as bad as it sounds, but people are
right to be nervous.
n Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona representative who was
shot in the head by a lunatic in 2011, has been running ads
promoting gun control. In September, the middle-of-the-road
ArizonaRepublic condemned a political advertisement to which
Giffords had lent her name, describing the spot as “base and vile.”
The commercial suggested that a Republican congressional candidate was guilty of murder for opposing new firearms regulations aimed at stalkers. After the commercial gained negative
attention, and it was revealed that the Republican had been a
victim of stalking herself, it was pulled. Gabby Giffords has
been through a terrible ordeal, and her passion for gun control
is understandable. But the bounds of taste remain in force, and
spurious accusations of murder are a bridge too far—even when
they are uttered by a beloved survivor of violence.
n Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity scientist, turns out to
have a penchant for making things up—and these things tend
to make him look good and people who he would have you
know are very unlike him look bad. Sean Davis has been
checking Tyson’s facts for TheFederalist, a conservative website. The worst example: Tyson claimed that shortly after the
September 11 attacks, George W. Bush had invidiously compared the God of Christianity and Judaism with that of Islam.
Davis pointed out that there is no evidence Bush ever said the
words Tyson attributed to him. A few of those words appeared
in another Bush quote, long after September 11 and not remotely in the context Tyson claimed. After days in which
Tyson’s defenders circled the wagons—Wikipedia editors
tried to squelch all mention of the controversy and even to
delete the website’s entry about it—Tyson said that he stood
by his recollection but had no evidence for it, and would apologize. Tyson likes to present himself as a voice for science
against unreasoning faith. This episode suggests that the
OCTOBER 20, 2014
THE WEEK
gullible can be found in every flock, and a trace of buffoonery
in all sorts of evangelists.
n Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has announced that the IRS
will change its rules regarding “tax inversions,” deals in which
American corporations acquire or merge with foreign businesses
for tax purposes. The new rules won’t make such deals illegal,
but they will make them less profitable, or harder to profit from.
Treasury has a good deal of leeway in how it interprets the
ambiguities of tax law, but this decision is clearly a political
usurpation. The administration says that inversions may be
eroding the tax base, but the amount of federal revenue
involved in such deals is tiny. The changes will affect only
future deals—congressional Democrats wanted an ex post facto
change that would affect deals going back many years—but it
will cost companies considering the deals millions if not bil-
Connecting the Fed Dots
8
|
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Summarizing the “Dot Plots”:
FOMC Rate Forecasts Over Time
4.5
Expected Federal-Funds Rate
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
End of 2012
End of 2013
End of 2014
End of 2015
End of 2016
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2013, and about 1 percent by the end of 2014. In the long
run, the Fed members expected to lift the rate up to about
4.2 percent. Alternatively, each line indicates how the Fed
members’ views of future interest-rate policy changed over
time. The purple line indicates how the forecast for the end
of 2015 has evolved.
So how did they do? While the Fed indicated in 2012 that
it would likely increase interest rates in 2013, it did not do
so, presumably because the economy was so weak. In January 2013, the members again suggested that they would
begin lifting interest rates by the end of 2014. Again, it looks
like they have not. If you look at the forecast from the latest
meeting, they now assure us that rates will be steady for the
rest of the year, but members on average expect the rate to
climb to about 1.25 percent by the end of next year.
So is this an increase in transparency? The Fed has suggested that rates will begin going up in the future, but these
indications have turned out to be false signals in the past.
If, once again, Fed members promise to tighten policy in
the future but then fail to do so when the future arrives, then
market watchers might well find themselves wishing for the
return of Chairman Greenspan’s storied briefcase.
Ja
HE Federal Reserve has an enormous role in determining the path of our country, yet for the longest
time, its deliberations were clouded in near-Mithraic
mystery. In 1999, for example, the thickness of Alan Greenspan’s briefcase was, at least in jest, the focus of discussion. If his case was thicker than usual, the story goes, he
was going to lift interest rates. Today, markets are inundated by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) communications, from detailed press releases and economic
forecasts to live Q&A press conferences with the chairperson. But is the Fed really more transparent today?
The center of the new transparency is occupied by the
so-called dots. Every three months, the FOMC publishes its
members’ projections for the federal-funds rate, their key
short-term policy instrument. The members write down
their explicit projections for the coming few years. The projections are released in the form of dot plots, in which each
dot represents the individual forecast of one FOMC member. Reading the dot plots provides a sense of when and to
what level FOMC members expect to raise interest rates.
When the dots move higher or lower in a new release, it
means the individual committee members have changed
their views about policy.
Financial markets pay close attention to the dots because they indicate a likely path for the federal-funds rate.
A change in the expected path of the federal-funds rate has
a large effect on interest rates for everything from mortgages to student loans. In addition, the dot plots provide
additional clues as to whether the FOMC is optimistic or
pessimistic about the strength of the economy and how its
members’ views have changed over time. But the transparency is useful, of course, only if the dots provide, in retrospect, useful information about future Fed actions. If the
Fed promises to increase interest rates but then fails to do
so, then it is not clear that the promise should be scored as
an increase in transparency.
The nearby graph summarizes the evolution of the average of the dots since their first release in January 2012.
Each point shows the federal-funds rate expected at the end
of a future calendar year, expressed as a mean of the predictions of the 19 committee members. The horizontal axis
marks the date of the forecast and the colors of the line refer
to the different forecasts for the ends of different calendar
years. For example, in January 2012, FOMC forecasts predicted the federal-funds rate would stand at about 0.25
percent at the end of 2012, about 0.5 percent by the end of
Long Run
OCTOBER 20, 2014
THE WEEK
lions in what are called “breakup fees.” There’s only one way
to make American companies stop fleeing the tax code: create
a tax code they don’t want to flee.
n The University of Chicago has done something bold and
wonderful—may it be a precedent. The university canceled its
Confucius Institute. Confucius Institutes are learning centers
that are funded, staffed, and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The institutes are on hundreds of campuses in free
countries around the world. The institutes exist to advance the
CCP’s interests—they are its “soft power.” Earlier this year,
more than 100 faculty members at Chicago signed a petition
objecting to the Confucius Institute on their campus. The university’s administration apparently reassured the Chinese officials
responsible. The officials then boasted that they had brought
Chicago to heel. This must have been awkward for the administration. Now Chicago has broken, saying that Chinese authorities made it impossible to have an “equal partnership.” That is
true of Confucius Institutes in every place. Again, may Chicago,
in its boldness, have set a precedent.
n In the aftermath of the 2008–09 financial crisis, the New York
Fed engaged in some self-evaluation. As a regulator, it had
failed, and its president, William Dudley, commissioned a report
on those failures. Columbia finance professor David Beim was
brought in, and he advised the Fed that its problem was a culture
of submission, that its regulatory posture was supine. The report
was filed, hands were shaken, and nothing else happened. Well,
not quite nothing else: Congress, in its wisdom, gave the Fed
even more regulatory responsibilities, though there was little in
the way of internal reform. A recent joint investigation by Pro-
Publica and the radio show This American Life, inspired by
secret recordings made by Carmen Segarra, a Fed inspector
fired seven months after being embedded at Goldman Sachs,
suggests that Professor Beim’s report had precisely as much
influence as that of any other blue-ribbon commission: none.
Goldman Sachs pointed out that Ms. Segarra had unsuccessfully sought employment at the bank on at least three occasions;
ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein says that she had “applied for jobs
at most of the top banks on Wall Street multiple times over the
course of her career.” None of that is surprising: Our regulatory
agencies tend to be staffed by people who failed to get the jobs
they wanted in the fields they are expected to regulate. That is a
structural problem without an obvious solution.
n James McClain, the Atlantic County, N.J., prosecutor and
anti-gun zealot who had sought to make a grave example out of
a black single mother of two, has relented in the face of public
pressure. McClain had been threatening 27-year-old Shaneen
Allen with up to eleven years in prison for the high crime of having brought a concealed handgun into New Jersey. Allen, a medical practitioner with no criminal record, had been operating
under the mistaken impression that her Pennsylvania carry
license was universally accepted. Pulled over in Atlantic County
for a routine traffic offense, she soon discovered this was not the
case. For almost a year, the error looked as if it would destroy
her life. In September, however, McClain changed his mind,
permitting Allen to enroll in a pre-trial intervention (PTI) program designed to keep nonviolent first-time offenders out of
prison and free of felony convictions. Simultaneously, the state’s
attorney general took action to help future Shaneen Allens, clarifying the rules governing PTI to make it clear that those in a sim-
nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe
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OCTOBER 20, 2014
ilar position should be absorbed into the program as a matter of
course. All that remains now is for New Jersey to amend its draconian laws, the better to fit a free country.
n After being released into the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 70 percent of Central
Americans who illegally crossed the U.S.–Mexican border since
last October have failed to report to federal agents as instructed,
according to the Associated Press. The source for that figure is
an audio recording of a confidential meeting of ICE officials in
Washington. Earlier, when administration officials familiar with
the issue were asked what the numbers were, they dodged the
question repeatedly, as did the public-affairs office of the Department of Homeland Security. The administration’s effort to
withhold this information was both understandable and deplorable, just like its immigration policy.
n The teachers’ union in Jefferson County, Colo., has been fighting with a “hostile” school board for months, over the usual
issues: Teachers want more money and less accountability, and
the school board wants to offer them the opposite. That is a difficult position for the unions to market to the public, and so a
cultural issue has been invented: Teachers are holding a “sickout” to protest the allegedly heavy-handed interference of the
school board with the curriculum. The board, charged by law
with reviewing curricular changes, wishes to review the new
Advanced Placement U.S. History program, a controversial set
of recommendations shaped in part by far-left academics. The
College Board itself has on several occasions insisted that
final details are in the hands of local school boards. The school
board’s determination to do its duty has led to reckless cries of
censorship and—irony of ironies—complaints about politicizing the curriculum. Students have joined the teachers in walking
out. In a great many high-school curricula, the history of these
United States begins with the Middle Passage and ends with the
Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and it’s not unreasonable for a Colorado
school-board member to voice concern that the AP standards
downplay the “positive aspects” of U.S. history (liberty, democracy, prosperity, saving the world from fascism once or twice).
But this is really a protest about bank accounts, not historical accounts, and the students are being suckered.
n Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) gave a major defense speech
that was brave, perspicacious, and refreshing. He unapologetically made the case for more investment in the Pentagon, highlighting the findings of the bipartisan National Defense Panel.
As threats increase around the world, the military is deferring
training and maintenance, laying off soldiers, and retiring weapons systems. Post-sequestration military budgets are unlikely
to be adequate to accomplish America’s already diminished
national-defense strategy. Rubio was right to call for spending
what’s necessary to undo this reckless damage. Fiscal restraint
is important, but the first federal responsibility is national
defense. Senator Rubio made it clear he knows this—we hope
other 2016 hopefuls do too.
n Rubio also, in a recent op-ed piece, noted and attacked China’s
one-child policy: “one of the most disastrous and immoral social
policies ever imagined in human history.” Relatedly, he described his new bill, dubbed the “Girls Count Act.” Its purpose
is to provide aid to groups working abroad to register girls: to get
them on the rolls, acknowledge their existence, and make them
less vulnerable to trafficking and a host of other ills. There are
real limits to how much we can advance freedom in China, but
what we can do we should.
n Vladimir Putin does what he can to commemorate the Soviet
Union. Communist nostalgia comes easily and often to him. In
those good old days, a secret policeman like him could get on
with the job, and no questions asked. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the
old-timer who, after the Bolshevik Revolution, made the secret
police the real power in the land. “We represent in ourselves organized terror,” Iron Felix boasted as he ordered the summary
execution of tens of thousands of victims. After his death, the
Dzerzhinsky Division was an elite police unit named in his
honor with the wide remit of keeping public order. In 1994, the
reforming Boris Yeltsin tried to drop grim historical associations
by giving the unit a cumbersome identity as the Independent
Operational Purpose Division. It’s an irony that Yeltsin chose
Putin as his successor, and Putin has restored the former name
of this unit. The clock goes back a little.
n In his speech to the United Nations, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of waging “a new war of genocide”
against the Palestinian people. Maybe we should just give up
and redefine genocide: “An action taken by Israel to defend itself from murder and annihilation.”
n Danièle Watts may be an actress, but no one was fooled by the
show she put on when confronted by Los Angeles police in mid
September. According to the Django Unchained star, she was
merely “making out” with her boyfriend, Brian Lucas, in Lucas’s
vehicle when LAPD sergeant Jim Parker accosted them. The
couple claimed that Parker profiled Watts as a prostitute, since
she is black and Lucas is white. Pictures released by the gossip
site TMZ make clear that Watts and Lucas were doing more than
innocently expressing their affection. Workers in a nearby office
building called the police when they spotted Watts straddling her
boyfriend, the couple apparently having sex in the front seat of
the vehicle, the passenger door and sunroof of which were
open. Since the pictures became public, even Watts’s onetime defenders have backtracked. “It’s like crying wolf,” said Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy
Roundtable, who had initially supported Watts. Indeed. Perhaps
Watts should reserve her theatrics for the screen.
n Just as the U.S. Constitution has a secret clause requiring the
president to pardon a turkey every Thanksgiving, New York’s
mayor must manhandle a groundhog each February 2. This
year the ritual went horribly wrong when Bill de Blasio visited the Staten Island Zoo (after being told where Staten Island
was, presumably) and, amid the obligatory stilted banter, lost
his grip on a squirming groundhog named Chuck. Now the
New York Post has broken the news that Chuck died soon
after of internal injuries “consistent with a fall” of “nearly 6
feet” (de Blasio is six-foot-five; Chuck’s last thoughts were
probably a wish that LaGuardia was still mayor). Moreover,
“Chuck” was actually a female named Charlotte, chosen because the available males were all too hostile (yo, these are
New York groundhogs). So now the mayor can expect outrage
11
THE WEEK
over his marginalization of the transgendered, and since
Chuck/Charlotte’s final prediction was for six more weeks
of winter, he/she will no doubt be labeled a global-warming
denier as well.
n Derek Jeter ended his career appropriately. In his last
at-bat at Yankee Stadium, he used his characteristic
inside-out swing to punch a clutch hit through the right
side for a walk-off win against the Orioles. In the last atbat of his career, a few days
later at Fenway Park, he
reached on an infield single, hustling to the last.
The Yankee shortstop
compiled some magnificent numbers over his career—sixth on the all-time hit
list, between Tris Speaker and
Honus Wagner—but what made
him so special can’t be captured by
the Baseball Almanac: He was a
leader and a winner. In a low, dishonest period in the history of the game,
Jeter exemplified the dignity and class
of a bygone era. Well done, Captain,
well done.
AP PHOTO/ELISE AMENDOLA
n With advanced degrees from Yale Medical School and
Harvard’s School of Public Health, Elizabeth Whelan was an
unlikely member of the conservative movement. Her research
led her to challenge the legitimacy of the Delaney Clause of
the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, in an article published in
this magazine in December 1973. There ensued her book, coauthored with Harvard professor Fredrick J. Stare, Panic in the
Pantry: Food Facts, Fads, and Fallacies, which mounted a
broad attack on many other federal food regulations. In 1978,
along with Dr. Stare and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, she
founded the American Council on Science and Health, then as
now dedicated to injecting sound science into personal and
public-policy decisions on such matters as e-cigarettes, hydraulic fracking, and pesticides. She served on two presidential advisory councils in the first Reagan administration but
declined overtures to become FDA commissioner, lest ACSH
not survive her departure while in its infancy. Dead at 70. R.I.P.
n In 2002, Representative James A. Traficant Jr., an Ohio Democrat, was expelled from Congress. He was only the second person to be expelled since the Civil War. He had been convicted
for bribery. He was a colorful guy, with his wild hair and floor
rants. He had the habit of ending his rants, or other speeches,
with a Star Trek line, “Beam me up.” He was conservative in
some respects—for instance, in his hostility to government
regulations. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “the Lord’s Prayer is 66
words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, the Declaration
of Independence is 1,322 words. U.S. regulations on the sale of
cabbage—that’s right, cabbage—is 27,000 words.” The hair
was a toupee: He had to take it off while being booked. He ran
for office from prison (losing). He ran again when he was out
12
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(again losing). Traficant might as well have been from
Louisiana, not Ohio. To a degree, he was fun. But he was still
a crook. And crooks ought to be drummed out of public life,
as this one was. He has now been beamed up, or somewhere,
at 73. R.I.P.
n The Mitford girls, all six of them, lived their lives in public.
Blessed with good looks, brains, and a title, they seemed to be
playing parts as Communists or Nazis or writers in an ongoing
British aristocratic cabaret. Deborah was the youngest. Mr.
Right would not do, she confided; she would wait for the Duke
of Right—and she got him in the person of Andrew, eleventh
Duke of Devonshire. Looking after a great estate, a social ornament, a rider, and even author of a book, she added the role
of duchess to the family cabaret. Dead at 94. R.I.P.
AT WAR
Learning in Office
presidents—Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan—
come into office knowing what faces them and having
some idea of what they must do. Others—Jefferson, Wilson, Truman, George W. Bush—are surprised by history and
must improvise.
If speech is the man, Barack Obama has been reborn in recent
weeks. The combination of Muslim terrorists ingesting one-third
of Iraq and the Soviet Union 2.0 ingesting as much as it can of
Ukraine seems first to have shocked, then to have sobered him.
His big event was his address to the U.N. General Assembly,
where he presented two issues—observing and enforcing international norms, and rejecting “the cancer of violent extremism.”
The first was aimed squarely at Putin’s Russia, which he
scored for invading Ukraine with proxy separatists and its own
troops, annexing Crimea, and enabling the shooting of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. He pledged to support the victims,
impose costs on the aggressors, and tell the truth about their
respective actions.
His second point—“the cancer of violent extremism”—was
addressed to the Islamic State and, importantly, its backers. ISIS,
he said, “must be degraded, and ultimately destroyed. . . . There
can be no reasoning—no negotiation—with this brand of evil.”
He also hit Muslim terror-funding fat cats: “those who accumulate wealth through the global economy, and then siphon funds
to those who teach children to tear it down.” Another welcome
touch: There was no equating, in the manner beloved of the
U.N., the jihadist menace with Israel.
Equally striking was Obama’s tone. Gone was the manner of
the teacher’s pet stepping forward to be honored at high-school
commencement. The president was serious, stern, just the polite side of grim. He was the principal reading out summonses
for detention.
Obama spoke in a similar vein before and after his U.N. lecture. In remarks to the Clinton Global Initiative, he praised dissidents in Russia, China, and Cuba (singling out Berta Soler and
the Ladies in White, “who endure harassment and arrest in
order to win freedom for their loved ones and for the Cuban
people”). In an interview on 60 Minutes, he told Steve Kroft,
“America leads. We are the indispensable nation,” and added a
reassurance for the Baltic nations, next on Russia’s hit list:
“Article Five of the NATO treaty means what it says.”
S
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THE WEEK
Conservatives could legitimately fault him on various points—
he seemed, on 60 Minutes, to blame his failure to foresee the
metastasis of the Islamic State on faulty intelligence. These were
not, perhaps, remarks that George Patton or Old Hickory would
give at CPAC. But considering the venues, and considering the
speaker, they were impressive performances. Obama came to
office spouting the clichés of post-colonial lit and post-graduate
Marxism. Now he is speaking like an American president.
Will his actions follow his words? The way forward from surprise can be long and tortuous. Jimmy Carter, smacked by the
takeover of our Tehran embassy and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, never found his stride convincingly. All Obama’s instincts will lead him back to his past. He must remember that
following his instincts helped create his messy present.
THE WORLD
Great Britain, for Now
rejection of national independence has been
greeted with deep relief by the current cross-party establishment in Westminster, in accord with Churchill’s
maxim that there is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at
without result. But though an eleven-point margin of victory in
the referendum on September 18 is a better-than-expected result, it is not the unqualified show of support that a healthy
nation-state should command. And it has opened more of Pandora’s constitutional boxes than it has closed.
That a referendum on withdrawing
Scotland from a stable and prosperous
U.K. was held at all is an unacknowledged tribute to the power of the national
idea. In Europe, only ten days after the
Scottish vote, the regional parliament in
Catalonia approved a referendum, though
it was quickly shot down by Madrid, on
independence from Spain, while similar
movements for independence—in Veneto
(from Italy), in Flanders (from Belgium),
in the Faroe Islands (from denmark), and
elsewhere—continue to percolate.
In Scotland’s case, nationalism was
allied to the strong appeal of socialism.
leftist nationalism drew on a disaffection
from Westminster’s central government,
a disaffection that spans the U.K. and, in
England, swells support for Nigel Farage’s
conservative UKIP. And it roused Scotland’s working class,
especially its young men, from a political apathy that has now
lasted a generation.
The cocktail of passions and discontents was powerful and
explains why the referendum reached the point of being held.
It failed in the end in part because the case for independence
made by the Scottish National party was incoherent. If Scotland were to survive and prosper as an independent state without England’s subsidy to its public spending, it would need to
turn itself into a low-tax, low-regulation economy on the freemarket model of, say, Singapore. But the SNP promised that an
independent Scotland would be an even more egalitarian welfare and regulatory state than the U.K. The European Union,
even if it were to have admitted Scotland, would not have played
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the role of sugar daddy to Scottish socialism, and the SNP could
never explain how it would pay the bills for a Scottish socialist
utopia that ran up against the lingering power of Scotland’s
thrifty mentality.
Up to now, the English have always ended up paying the bill,
with only minor complaints. In the aftermath of the referendum,
it is uncertain that they will continue to do so. The slumbering
British nationalism that awoke in Scotland risks sparking an
angry English nationalism south of the border if the labour
party continues its fight to preserve the right of Scottish MPs to
vote on legislation for England. English MPs enjoy no such
authority over Scottish laws.
Such a contradiction poses a great logical difficulty. England
is more conservative, more free-market in economics, more
robust in foreign policy, more defined by the “muscular liberalism” of the English-speaking world than the other constituent
countries of the U.K. Scotland, meanwhile, is protected from
English free-market policies by the U.K.’s devolution of power
to Scotland, which makes its own laws affecting a broad range
of domestic policy.
Since the referendum, Prime Minister david Cameron has
qualified his “vow” to expedite further devolution to the Scottish
parliament. He now proposes to link that step to a removal of the
ability of Scottish MPs in Westminster to vote on matters affecting only England. UKIP, which is increasingly the party of
English nationalism, opposed the vow to begin with. labour
supported the vow but now opposes the proposal to make the
principle of non-interference a two-way street between England and Scotland.
division on this question of fairness to England notwithstanding, the Tories, labour, and the liberal democrats—Britain’s political establishment—have all issued what Gandhi
reportedly once called “a postdated cheque on a failing bank.”
Scotland and England will both try to cash it.
Scottish independence may not be on the ballot again for a
lifetime, but the fight isn’t over. The margin was not a whisker,
but it was too close for younger nationalists to abandon for
the next 40 years a cause they think sacred. No long-term outcome—not even Scottish independence—can be ruled out.
That realization should temper our relief at the wisdom of
Scottish crowds.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Mind Not the Gap
The GOP doesn’t need to solve its problem with women voters
BY RAMESH PONNURU
is no exaggeration to say that
Republican politicians and strategists are obsessed with the gender
gap. Unfortunately, they almost
never think clearly about it.
For decades, American women have
been more likely to vote for Democrats
than men have been in almost every election. It follows that in almost all competitive races, most men pick the Republican
candidate and most women the Democratic one. This year’s elections are following that pattern.
In late September, a CNN poll had
Democrat Kay Hagan three points ahead
of Republican Thom Tillis in the North
Carolina Senate race. He was up four
points among men, while she was up nine
points among women. Around the same
time, a Fox News poll had the Iowa Senate
race tied, with men backing the Republican candidate by eight points and women
the Democratic one by the same margin.
Democrats look at that pattern and
conclude that they need to hit “women’s
issues” hard both to raise their percentage
of female votes and to boost female
turnout. Mark Udall, the Democratic senator from Colorado, has spent half of his
ad money so far portraying his Republican
challenger, Representative Cory Gardner,
as an opponent of contraception. Hillary
Clinton, speaking in Iowa, has put a feminist twist on the liberal economic agenda:
Women, she said, hold most minimumwage jobs, which on her telling made the
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Republican position on wage regulation
especially harmful and the Democratic
position especially helpful to women.
Republicans look at the same pattern
and conclude that they have a problem
with women that they desperately need to
address. They have adopted several strategies toward that end over the years. Some
Republican candidates run soft-focus ads
emphasizing their humanity and compassion. Some Republican strategists counsel
the candidates to downplay their opposition to abortion. Other Republicans say the
party should make the case that its policies
are better for women than Democratic
policies. Mitt Romney often pointed out
during the 2012 campaign how many jobs
women had lost under President Obama.
Republicans are taking all of these
steps this year, and taking others too. Carly
Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO
and a Republican candidate for the Senate from California in 2010, has started a
new group to make the party’s case to
women. Several Senate candidates are
saying that they think the Food and Drug
Administration should reclassify oral
contraception to make it available without a prescription.
Some of these steps might help the
Republican party win elections. If they
do, though, it is probably not going to be
because they shrink the gender gap. The
Republican party has a distinctive problem with female voters, but it is one that
it cannot and does not need to solve.
That problem has nothing to do with
abortion. It has been easy to link the
gender gap and abortion, in part because
the gap took on its modern dimensions
around the same time the parties adopted
their current positions on the issue,
around 1980. Yet polling that asks people
their views on abortion policy or whether
they consider themselves “pro-choice” or
“pro-life” finds no consistent difference
between the sexes, and what differences
it finds are small. Earlier this year, Gallup
found that 38 percent of men and 41 percent of women think abortion should be
legal in “all” or “most” circumstances,
while 58 percent of men and 57 percent
of women think it should be legal in “only
a few” or no circumstances. In contrast,
there are large and consistent differences
between the married and the single, and
between the religious and the irreligious,
on abortion-related issues. (The differences are the ones you’d expect.)
Pro-choice Republican candidates have
roughly the same gender gap that pro-life
ones do. In 2010, a pro-choice Republican candidate for governor won 57 percent of men and 49 percent of women
in Nevada; at the same time, a pro-life
Republican candidate for governor won
57 percent of men and 48 percent of
women in Wisconsin.
In 2012, two Republican Senate candidates stated their opposition to abortion in
cases of rape. Most voters disagreed with
that position and many found the way
they expressed it offensive. Yet they ended
up having slightly smaller gender gaps
than some less controversial Republicans
running that year. Their remarks, that is,
seem to have turned off men and women
roughly equally.
Female Republican candidates do not
seem to do better than their male colleagues, either. In 2010, Kelly Ayotte and
Pat Toomey were the Republican Senate
candidates in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, respectively. Both had ten-point
gender gaps. Fiorina had an eight-point
gap, equal to that of Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson, on
that same Election Day.
The causes of the gender gap are more
likely to be found in other issues. Polling
has for many years consistently found
that women are more supportive than
men of social-welfare spending, economic regulation, and gun control, and
less supportive of military action. In
August, for example, an NBC/Wall Street
OCTOBER 20, 2014
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Journal poll found that the gender gap
on raising the minimum wage was in
the double digits, with women more
supportive. These issues provide an
alternative explanation of why the gender gap opened up around 1980: The
parties became more divided on sizeof-government questions then, too.
The political difference between the
sexes is small but persistent and pervasive. Some subgroups of women generally
fall on the conservative side of policy
questions but are generally less conservative than the equivalent subgroups of
men. Romney won 53 percent of married
women and 56 percent of white women,
for example, but 60 percent of married
men and 62 percent of white men.
Whether they are winning or losing,
male or female, pro-life or pro-choice,
Republican candidates win a larger percentage of male than female votes. Republican candidates who win do not
consistently have larger or smaller gender gaps than the ones who lose. The
winning candidates, that is, do not tend
to be ones who have a particular appeal
to women. Compared with the losers,
they have higher support among both
men and women. George W. Bush did
four points better among women in 2004
than Romney did in 2012, but he also
did three points better among men.
Republicans were pleased to see a
recent New York Times/CBS News poll
that showed them only one point behind
Democrats when women were asked
which party’s candidate they intended to
support in congressional elections. Men
were as usual more Republican, by seven
points. The gap in 2006, a Democratic
landslide year, was four points; in 2010, a
Republican landslide year, it was six.
Republicans seem to be doing pretty well
this year because of increased support
from men and women alike, not because
they have shrunk the gender gap.
These data suggest that Republicans are
thinking about their problems the wrong
way. To win the presidency in 2016, they
need more women to support them than
they got in 2012 or 2008: On that point,
the conventional wisdom is obviously correct. But they don’t need more women
any more than they need more men, and
there is no reason to think that they
have better opportunities to make gains
among women than among men. The
case that Republicans need to take steps
that are specifically designed to win the
18
|
support of a lot more women is a much
weaker one than is generally assumed.
That doesn’t mean that everything done
in the name of shrinking the gender gap
is a bad idea. Neither men nor women, in
general, prefer candidates to crusade on
abortion, so the advice to downplay the
issue is not wholly mistaken (although
candidates sometimes err in thinking they
can avoid it altogether). Humanizing ads
have their place. Men are consistently
more risk-tolerant than women; if Republicans had an economic message that
made the case that free markets and limited government can provide security
and not just risk, it would probably help
them with both sexes but perhaps a bit
more with women.
it is hard to see a political downside to
the new Republican tactic of calling for a
relaxation of the regulations on oral contraception. Access to contraception may
not be as powerful an issue as Democrats
hope and Republicans fear: The political
scientists John Sides and lynn vavreck
found no correlation between polls of the
presidential race in 2012 and the amount
of attention being given to contraception
and abortion in the news. But the Democrats seem to be vindicating the Republicans’ tactic by their response to it.
They say that ending the requirement of
a prescription is no substitute for forcing
employers to cover contraceptives at no
marginal cost to their employees, something the Obama administration has done
and Republicans mostly oppose. Whether
or not Republicans win that policy debate,
the Democrats are being frustrated in their
attempt to portray Republicans as hostile
to contraception, and women.
The Colorado Senate race between
udall and Gardner, where contraception
has become one of the top issues, could
be the most important one this fall. it
will be a test of whether the Republican
party can compete in states that went
twice for Obama. (Most of the competitive Senate races this year are in states
that reliably vote for Republican presidential candidates.) its rising Hispanic
population makes it an important sign
about the future, too. And if Republicans
win there after renewed Democratic
accusations that they are waging a “war
on women,” perhaps they will be a little
less spooked by the gender gap—and
more focused on doing what it takes to
build their baseline level of support
among men and women alike.
Forget the
Alamo
Senator Cruz does not understand
how to win national elections
BY HENRY OLSEN
TeD CRuz is a bright
man with a bright idea: Conservatives have no power because their leaders have no
principles. Rediscover the latter, he says,
and we will recover the former. Would
that it were so.
Start with Cruz’s retelling of Republican presidential history. He claims that
beginning with Richard Nixon, every
Republican nominee who was elected ran
as a “strong conservative,” while every
loser ran as a moderate. Cruz was born in
December 1970 and clearly has hazy
memories at best of the 1968 and 1972
races, the latter of which saw NATiONAl
RevieW endorse John Ashbrook, a conservative congressman from Ohio, in the
GOP primaries rather than Nixon. Be that
as it may, this is an all-too-simple formulation that overlooks the way politically
successful conservatives have always
tempered parts of the conservative agenda
precisely to gain a principled majority.
Ronald Reagan, whom Cruz frequently invokes in support of his argument,
happens to be the best example of this
approach. in 1964, the Gipper opposed the
creation of Medicare, but in 1980 he frequently said he would not try to eliminate
or even reform the program. Reagan recognized that it was better to focus on the
things he could change than on those he
couldn’t. He understood that principle and
prudence are tightly intertwined.
it’s possible that the country has moved
to the right since Reagan’s day, making a
more consistent conservatism politically
possible. That indeed is the unstated
assumption of Cruz’s idea: that an unwavering conservative majority already exists
if only we find the courage to mobilize it.
Again, would that it were so. All the available data show that this is not true.
The number of self-described conservatives has remained relatively constant
S
eNATOR
Mr. Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public
Policy Center.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
ROMAN GENN
for more than 40 years: De pending on the poll and the year,
it has fluctuated between 33
and 40 percent. The number of
self-described Republicans
has moved more significantly,
but it has never risen above 33
percent for more than a year.
Unlike victory in Texas, victory nationwide requires the
GOP nominee to attract significant numbers of self-described
moderate independents.
These data do not significantly
change when GOP-leaning independents
are added to the mix. Republican support has never reached 50 percent in any
year, and the GOP has almost always
lagged behind the Democrats since well
before 1980. Indeed, the best GOP showing vis-à-vis the Democrats since the
halcyon days of the Gingrich Revolution
came in the immediate aftermath of
9/11, when the GOP ran slightly ahead
of the Democrats. Democratic-party
preference including leaners exceeded
Republican preference even in the GOPwave year of 2010.
Poll data also refute the notion that there
are large groups of moderates who really
are consistent conservatives. A recent Pew
Research poll found that a plurality of people who held mostly liberal views called
themselves moderates, and nearly a third
of those who held consistently liberal
views thought they were moderate. By
comparison, only 13 percent of people
with consistently conservative views called
themselves moderates. Indeed, exit polls
show that a majority of moderates have not
voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, and that moderates have
been more Democratic than the country as
a whole since 1980.
Cruz never confronts such numbers
directly. He did, though, tell the Claremont Institute earlier this year that “over
2 million voters who traditionally vote
Republican stayed home” in 2012. He
then lists Obama’s victory margins in the
seven closest states, noting that they total
727,000 votes and that “less than a million votes would have produced 84 electoral votes, more than enough to win.”
Cruz’s implication is clear: These voters
stayed home because Romney wasn’t
conservative enough, and if they do vote,
a real conservative will win.
This is, at best, a distortion of the facts.
Turnout was down in 2012, but not in six of
20
|
the seven swing states Cruz cites. Of those
seven, only Ohio cast fewer votes in 2012,
and the difference (128,000) was smaller
than Obama’s margin in the state. Moreover, in three of the swing states Cruz cites,
voters actually cast more ballots in 2012
than in 2008, and there is no evidence that,
in these states, there was a GOP-specific
fall in turnout that was counterbalanced by
a rise in turnout among Democratic voters.
If we instead measure the decline in the
percentage of all eligible voters who turned
out, we find that in two other swing states,
the difference was too small to account for
Obama’s victory. Only in Ohio and Florida
was turnout, measured as a percentage of
all eligible voters, down by enough that,
theoretically, the drop accounted for
Obama’s win there; and these two states
would not have provided enough electoral
College votes to defeat Obama had they
supported Romney instead. even that is a
stretch: eighty percent of Ohio’s missing
vote would have had to go to Romney for
him to win there.
And of the conservatives and Republicans who did vote, the vast majority did
not abandon Romney. In fact, Romney
carried 93 percent of Republicans, which
tied for the all-time high since exit polling
began in 1972. His 82 percent among conservatives sounds low until you compare
it with the percentages other GOP nominees won. Only George w. Bush in 2004
bested that share, with 84 percent, and the
only other candidate who even equaled it
was Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide.
Cruz is fond of contrasting his stance
with those of “washington consultants”
who allegedly say that “standing for principle is inconsistent with winning elections.”
He says that there are only two approaches
available to conservatives, theirs or his. But
this is a false dichotomy.
Reagan knew that brazenly drawing a line in the sand for the
American people was the worst
way to combat the liberal
establishment. He explained
to the readers of NATIONAl
RevIew that Goldwater lost
in 1964 because Democrats
had portrayed conservatives
as advocating “a radical departure from the status quo.”
“Time now for the soft sell,” he
said, “to prove our radicalism was
an optical illusion.”
Reagan also knew that ideological
purity is the enemy of principled victory. In 1967, speaking to a conservative
grassroots group, then-governor Reagan
set out his vision for the GOP:
we cannot offer [to individualists] a
narrow sectarian party in which all
must swear allegiance to prescribed
commandments. Such a party can be
highly disciplined, but it does not win
elections. This kind of party soon disappears in a blaze of glorious defeat,
and it never puts into practice its
basic tenets, no matter how noble
they may be.
Reagan knew that victory can come only
by assembling a coalition of people, not all
of whom will agree on every topic.
The Texas senator is fond of quoting
william Barrett Travis’s famous letter from
the Alamo. It ends with the stirring words
“victory or death!” The Alamo defenders
did die, and needlessly, as their position
was neither strategic nor defensible.
Fortunately for Texas, there was another,
more sagacious leader, Sam Houston.
Houston knew that victory was better than
death. He gathered troops to his banner and
kept them from seeking immediate revenge
for the massacre at the Alamo. Patiently, he
waited for the right moment to strike. Six
weeks after the Alamo fell, he found that
moment, surprising the Mexican army at
San Jacinto so completely that the battle
was over in 18 minutes. The inscription on
the San Jacinto monument describes both
the battle and its consequence elegantly:
“The slaughter was appalling, victory complete, and Texas free!”
Conservatives who love liberty more
than political death ought to forget the
Alamo. Far better to follow the words and
deeds of prudent men of principle like
Reagan and Houston, who knew what it
took to win.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
When
Liberalisms
Collide
What the Hungarian prime minister
meant by “liberal democracy”
BY JOHN O’SULLIVAN
IkTOr OrBan, Hungary’s thriceelected prime minister, dominates his country’s politics.
recently reelected with a twothirds parliamentary majority (for the
second time), he has a claim to be the
most successful conservative leader in
Europe. Outside Hungary, however, he
is portrayed—usually but not solely by
politicians and media of the Left—as a
Putin-style authoritarian who is demolishing democracy right by right; a poster
child for populist authoritarianism in
civilian mufti.
My skeptical take on this can be
found in the current Hungarian Review.
society’s existence was all people heard.
and that played into the left-wing caricature of her as a heartless, antisocial
individualist.
at the time, I recalled Willmoore
kendall on Barry Goldwater’s declaration
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no
vice; and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” kendall, a distinguished
philosopher who admired Goldwater, said
wryly: “There’s nothing wrong with that
statement that couldn’t be put right by a
hundred thousand well-chosen words.”
Somewhat fewer words are needed to
correct any misunderstanding of Viktor
Orban’s remarks on liberal democracy.
The key is that he used the term—and in
particular the “liberal” half of it—in a
special sense unfamiliar to people outside
Hungary. He was not attacking liberalism in the sense either of the traditional
freedoms of speech, inquiry, association,
etc., or of their constitutional protections.
He specified this clearly by saying that
“an illiberal state, a non-liberal state”
would not “deny the foundational values
of liberalism, as freedom, etc.” Orban
might have said that more often and
more forcefully, but he did say it. as
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It was uphill work, however, not least
because Orban recently delivered a
speech in which he seemingly repudiated liberal democracy and embraced
“illiberal democracy” instead. That was
interpreted, not unreasonably, as a confirmation of the Left’s hostile critique
from the horse’s mouth.
My own reaction? I was overcome
by a feeling of déjà vu. I remembered
the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s
famous remark—“There is no such
thing as society.”
She would never escape from that
remark, or, rather, from a serious misinterpretation of it. For it really meant
the opposite of what it seemed to say
when wrenched from context. Her full
answer argued that society was not a
“thing”—an abstract entity out there—
but was composed of ordinary men and
women, their families, and their associations, from churches to tennis clubs.
We all had to earn any resources needed
to provide for ourselves and for those
less fortunate. That was all laid out
quite explicitly in the few sentences
that followed. But they were almost
never quoted. Her apparent denial of
9
r nia - 1
71
21
with Mrs. Thatcher, however, that crucial
qualification has rarely been quoted in
reports of the speech or in commentaries
on it. In other words, Orban’s remark was
a critique of ideas that have come to be
described as liberalism in the Hungarian
political context.
Liberalism is, of course, a protean set
of ideas. Its three most common meanings are (1) the broad tradition of constitutional liberty summarized in the above
paragraph; (2) classical liberalism (a.k.a.
neoliberalism), or a broad reliance on
free-market economics; and (3) “progressive” state intervention, initially in economic policy, more recently in education
and social mores, sometimes enforced by
cultural coercion, a.k.a. “political correctness.” We are all liberals in the sense
of (1), including Orban; most conservatives and a few in other parties are liberals (2); and the Left parties on both sides
of the Atlantic are liberals (3), though
many Christian Democrats are also drifting idly in that direction. So what did
Orban mean by the word?
An exasperated Milton Friedman once
remarked that in Britain in the 1980s,
monetarism was “whatever Margaret
Thatcher did.” An irritated member of
Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour cabinet
defined British socialism in the 1940s as
“whatever the Labour government does.”
And in present-day Hungary, “liberalism”
is whatever the neo-socialist governments
of 1994–98 and 2002–10 did.
There is a modicum of justification for
this definition. Self-described liberals
were in those governments; they pursued
policies that they called liberal or neoliberal; it is even true that some of their
policies were liberal in the sense of liberalism (3). Not all their policies, of course.
“Liberalism” and “neoliberalism” are
very bad shorthand for borrowing money
from abroad, using it unproductively to
bribe the voters, and handing the resulting indebtedness on to the next government. Margaret Thatcher’s definition of
socialism—“running out of other people’s money”—would seem to fit the policy better. In the event, however, when
this neo-socialist policy was abandoned
in 2010, the good name of liberalism was
among the collateral damage.
There are dangers for the Right in
embracing this definition of liberalism.
One danger—which plainly tempts Hungary’s conservative nationalists—is to
confuse state ownership with national
22
|
control. With a few narrow “strategic”
exceptions, this is almost always a mistake. When a government owns an industry, the industry owns the government. A
state airline losing money will press the
government to protect it with subsidies,
barriers to entry, and costly regulations
on low-cost competitors. Prices then rise
(or fail to fall as they otherwise would),
innovation declines, and the state carrier
faces bankruptcy anyway. When enough
industries are on the state payroll, you
eventually reach the public/private
reality described by the English economist Arthur Shenfield: “The private sector is controlled by the government, and
the public sector isn’t controlled by
anyone.” That’s not Hungary today. The
country has one of the smallest public
sectors in Europe. But conservative
attacks on neoliberalism point that way.
If Orban was not attacking traditional
liberalism in his speech, however, what
was he attacking? The answer to that
question lies in the tension between liberalism and democracy. Democracy is
about who exercises power and how they
get to exercise it; liberalism is about the
limits on their exercise of power. In principle, the dividing line between these
two is simple: A constitution establishes
rules restraining the government (it can’t
cancel elections; it can’t imprison people
without due legal process; etc.), and a
constitutional court interprets these rules,
sometimes overriding laws or government regulations. A constitutional court
cannot lawfully rewrite the rules; and a
government can do so only if it is given
a supermajority by the electorate.
Clashes arise in two circumstances.
The first is when an elected government
rejects constitutional limits on its authority—which Orban never needed to do,
since his supermajority enabled him to
rewrite the constitution legally. The second is when a constitutional court exceeds its authority by making laws
rather than interpreting them. Both sets
of clashes are increasingly driven by a
third factor: the growing tension between
liberalism (1) and liberalism (3).
Traditional liberalism assumed that
people would differ in various ways—
rich vs. poor, religious vs. secular, enlightened vs. custom-bound—and drew
up laws intended to minimize and arbitrate the conflicts between them. Liberalism (3), however, thinks that whole
classes of people—the religious, the
custom-bound, the narrowly patriotic,
the sexually conservative, adherents and
members of the traditional family—are
the prisoners of their own prejudices and
the unwitting oppressors of those with
opposing beliefs. Both groups should
therefore be liberated from the prejudices of the former.
Because all the prejudiced might well
amount to an electoral majority if they
were added up, however, liberals (3)
cannot trust democracy to pass the laws
that would achieve universal liberation.
So they seek to “constitutionalize” the
rights of oppressed minorities and to
limit the power of democratic majorities to object to the consequences. As
rights multiply, democracy exercises
less and less control over government
and law. Liberalism is transformed from
procedural rules into substantive policies enforced by courts, treaties, and
international agencies. And the voters
lose all influence over how they are
governed—or indeed oppressed.
That is what Orban attacked when he
attacked “liberal democracy.” Oddly
enough, it is what modern liberal elites
in Europe and America mean when
they talk of liberal democracy too. But
it is liberal only by a recent and very
questionable definition of liberalism
that rests uneasily on Rousseau’s notion that democratic citizens can be
“forced to be free,” and it is democratic
only insofar as it holds elections (from
which its managers seek to drain all
significance).
If we have to yoke these two words
together to describe the political system
of modern Europe, “undemocratic liberalism” would be the least bad coinage.
Orban is right to reject the thing and to
search for a better thing with a better
name. To propose “illiberal democracy”
for either, however, risks losing too
much that is valuable—notably liberalisms (1), the great 19th-century tradition
of constitutional liberty he explicitly
endorsed, and (2), the classical-liberal
tradition in economics that has lifted the
world from near-universal poverty to
mass prosperity.
Besides, I see no good reason to surrender liberal democracy, either as a term
or as a system, to the Sixty-Eighters,
nomenklaturas, and apparatchiks who
have stolen and degraded it. Orban is a
fighter; I trust he will come to see it
that way.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
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A New
Birth
Lincoln continued
Washington’s fight
BY RICHARD BROOKHISER
INCe our families never give us
everything we want or need,
we look for sufficiency in surrogates—adopted families of
friends, mentors, or figures of history and
myth. For a boy in early-19th-century
America the handiest surrogates, great
enough to be awe-inspiring, near enough
to be familiar, were the Founding Fathers.
“Father of his country”—pater patriae—
was an honorific bestowed by the Roman
Senate on Camillus, a general of the fourth
century B.C., who earned it by refounding
the city after driving out an invasion of
Gauls. Americans revived and pluralized
the terms “father” and “founder” to honor
the heroes of the Revolution.
Abraham Lincoln—born in 1809,
raised on what was then the frontier—
never laid eyes on an actual Founding
Father. If he wanted to meet a Founding
Father it had to be in books. The book
that made the greatest impression on him
was about the greatest of the Founders,
George Washington.
When Americans used the term “father
of his country” in the singular it always,
and only, meant Washington. He earned
it by his long and spectacular career—
eight and a half years as commander-inchief of the Continental Army during the
Revolution, eight years as first president—and even more by the personal
qualities that wove an aura of confident
masculinity around him.
The most popular early biography of
Washington was The Life of George
Washington, by Mason Locke Weems,
better known as Parson Weems. Lincoln
first read it when he was a boy, and it
shaped his view of Washington. We
know this because there came a time
when Lincoln explained what his view
S
Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor of NATIONAL
REVIEW. This article is adapted with permission
from his new book, Founders’ Son: A Life of
Abraham Lincoln (Basic Books).
24
|
of Washington was, and where he had
learned it.
In February 1861, President-elect Lincoln took a train from his Illinois home
to Washington, D.C., where he would
give his first inaugural address. The
trip was a political tour, showing the
flag as the country fell apart, with
stops in six states.
On February 21 he spoke in Trenton, to
each house of the New Jersey legislature
in turn. He began his address to the state
senate by recalling New Jersey’s role in
the Revolution. Few states, he said, had
witnessed so many battles, which was
true: New Jersey saw three major ones
(Trenton, Princeton, Monmouth) plus a
blizzard of small engagements.
“Away back in my childhood,” Lincoln went on, “. . . I got hold of a small
book, such a one as few of the younger
members have ever seen, Weems’s Life
of Washington.” He proceeded to tell the
senate about an episode in Chapter Nine.
Of all the battles Weems described,
“none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at
Trenton. . . . The crossing of the river;
the contest with the Hessians; the great
hardships endured at that time, all fixed
themselves on my memory.”
What else would we expect Lincoln to
say? What else would any politician say?
He was in Trenton, on the day before
Washington’s birthday; Weems’s book,
so far from being obscure, was still in
print. Bring on the clichés.
But Lincoln’s remarks did not float in
the ether of buncombe; brief though they
were, they tracked Weems’s account of
the battle. He was not speaking in generalities but recovering a reading experience from more than 30 years earlier.
every feature of the Battle of Trenton that Lincoln summarized—river,
Hessians, hardships—was something
Weems had described at length. When
Weems took Washington across the
Delaware, he piled on the details. “Filled
with ice . . . darksome night, pelted by an
incessant storm of hail and snow . . . the
unwelcome roar of ice, loud crashing
along the angry flood . . . five hours of
infinite toil and danger . . . frost-bitten.”
These details also underlie Lincoln’s reference to “great hardships.” Weems gave
the Hessians several pages, first as
clownish marauders, speaking in crude
German accents, who believed that
Americans scalped, skinned, and ate their
prisoners—“Vy! Shure, des Mericans
must be de deble”—then as pitiable prisoners themselves, induced to switch sides
by the merciful treatment they receive:
“Poor fellows!” the Americans tell them.
“Leave [your] vile employment and
come live with us.”
But the strongest proof that Lincoln
had been molded by Weems’s Life is
that the most important lesson he drew
in 1861 from the Battle of Trenton was
the very lesson that Weems had presented as most important. “I recollect thinking,” Lincoln continued, “. . . boy even
though I was, that there must have been
something more than common that those
men struggled for . . . something even
more [important] than national independence . . . something that held out a great
promise to all the people of the world to
all time to come.”
Weems thought so too, and he expended
his powers, such as they were, in evoking
it. When Washington and his troops,
having crossed the Delaware, began their
march on Trenton, they were accompanied, Weems wrote, by an invisible being,
“the weeping GeNIuS OF LIBeRTy.” This is
no father-figure, but a grieving mother.
“Driven from the rest of the world, she
had fled to the wild woods of America,
as to an assured asylum of rest.” But
tyranny followed—“the inhuman few,
with fleets and armies, had pursued her
flight!” Who would fight for her? “One
little band alone remained . . . resolved to
defend her or perish.” For Weems, the
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Battle of Trenton was a struggle for the
world; the fate of liberty everywhere depended on it.
When the Americans finally reached
Trenton, Weems gave the last word to
Washington. “All I ask of you,” he tells
his troops as they are about to charge, “is,
just to remember what you are about to
fight for.”
Lincoln remembered. He told the New
Jersey senate that he wanted to perpetuate Liberty and Union “in accordance
with the original idea for which that
struggle” at Trenton “was made.” Washington and his men had defended liberty,
Lincoln and the nation must be ready to
defend her again. Washington’s task was
now his.
Lincoln found Washington in Weems,
but he also had to save him from Weems,
or from those chapters of The Life of
Washington that had the greatest popular
impact. So powerful were Weems’s tales
of Washington’s youth that the father of
his country became an icon of moral
virtues, beyond and above politics.
Thanks to Weems, the most famous
thing Washington ever said—“I can’t
tell a lie”—was something he almost
certainly never said.
When Lincoln first read Parson Weems,
he responded most not to Washington as
a good boy but to Washington as a man
of action and principle, and he invoked
that response again during his own trials
decades later. Not that he reread Weems
in 1861. He did not have to; Washington
was inside him. As he said in Trenton,
“You all know, for you have all been
boys, how these early impressions last
longer than others.” The Battle of Trenton was more useful to Lincoln, as an
ambitious boy and as president-elect,
than the cherry tree.
But Washington and the other Founders
did not belong to Lincoln alone. every
politician of the 1850s and ’60s wanted
to claim them, often for very different
purposes. The struggle over slavery took
the form of a fratricidal contest over who
was the revolution’s legitimate heir.
Lincoln spent years contending with
rival visions of the Founding Fathers.
He contended successfully—and legitimately. For all the times he squeezed
the evidence or hurried over the
record, he was more right about the
Founders than wrong—and more right
about them than any of his contentious
contemporaries.
26
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The Character
Of Football
A few miscreants do not
represent the NFL
BY IAN TUTTLE
O
ver the past several weeks, the
National Football League has
taken its hits. There was the
appalling elevator behavior of
Baltimore ravens running back ray
rice, brought to renewed public attention
by gossip website TMZ. There was the
overzealous corporal punishment meted
out to his young son by Minnesota vikings
running back Adrian Peterson. And tying
those two together was the incompetence—or worse—of NFL commissioner
roger Goodell. Add to these publicrelations nightmares the ongoing hate
crime being perpetrated by the league’s
Washington franchise, and the NFL would
seem to need a Hail Mary to escape intact.
After all, this is what critics have been
claiming for a generation: A sport that permits violence on the field is likely to facilitate violence off it. Thus football players
are likely candidates to be wife beaters,
child abusers, and all-around thugs—as
are the beer-swilling fans who cheer them
on. Now along come rice and Peterson,
and their adoring crowds: swaggering
proof. In the words of the narrator of
Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak,
“The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of
people are now rewarded for it. They call
it football.” Naturally, the book’s villain—
a serial rapist—is on a football team.
But the stereotype does not match the
facts. Writing at FiveThirtyEight, Benjamin Morris reports that the arrest rate of
NFL players is just 13 percent of the
national average for men ages 25 to 29
(the average age of players on NFL teams
is about 26)—though the percentage
varies with the crime. For example, relative to the general population of men in
their age group, NFL players commit 5.5
percent as many thefts, but 27.7 percent
as many DUIs—the most common
offense among them. Still, the highest
relative arrest rate, for domestic violence,
is only half the national average (55.4
percent), a result that aligns with a 1999
study by criminologist Alfred Blumstein
and author Jeff Benedict, which found
that the incidence of overall violence
among NFL players was half that of the
general population. Add these results to
the debunked claim that incidents of
domestic violence spike on Super Bowl
Sunday, and the numbers make clear that,
pace the National Organization for Women, the NFL does not have “a violence
against women problem.”
But that does not mean the NFL has no
problem. If the sport’s rough-and-tumble
is not being transferred onto players’
families, it still may be destroying the
players themselves. In February 2011,
Dave Duerson, a four-time Pro Bowl
safety whose career in the NFL from
1983 to 1993 earned him two Super Bowl
rings, committed suicide at his Florida
home with a gunshot to the chest. He left
instructions that his brain be given to the
Boston University School of Medicine,
which is researching chronic traumatic
encephalopathy (CTe), a degenerative
neurological disease, only diagnosable
postmortem, that is sometimes found
in victims of multiple concussions.
Duerson’s autopsy revealed evidence of
CTe—as did postmortem analysis of star
linebacker Junior Seau and more than 30
other former players. Several living players—including Hall of Fame running
back Tony Dorsett and quarterback Brett
Favre—have reported memory loss consistent with CTe. In April 2011, attorneys
for seven former players filed a federal
lawsuit against the NFL, alleging that the
league “deliberately ignored and actively
concealed” information about the risks
of injuries from players. Approximately
4,500 former players are now involved
in similar lawsuits.
As opposed to the “war on women”
meme, player safety is a real concern. But
it has suffered from the zeal of its advocates. “How different are dogfighting
and football?” asked Malcolm Gladwell
in a 2009 essay in The New Yorker. “I
mean, you take a young, vulnerable dog
who was made vulnerable because of his
allegiance to the owner,” Gladwell said
on CNN in 2013, defending his thesis,
“and you ask him to engage in serious,
sustained physical combat with another
dog under the control of another owner,
right? Well, what’s football? We take
young boys, essentially, and we have
them repeatedly, over the course of the
season, smash each other in the head,
OCTOBER 20, 2014
with known neurological consequences.
And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches
and a feeling they’re participating in
some grand American spectacle.”
It’s provocative rhetoric but subpar
philosophy. Consider: The NFL has
approximately 1,700 active players; the
NCAA reported 70,147 men playing
football on campus during the 2012–13
academic year; and in 2009–10, according
to census data, 1.1 million high-school
boys were playing football. Football
players have a reputation as meatheads,
but at least a few of these 1.2 million
players exercised more choice in the
matter than Michael Vick’s pit bulls.
Gladwell’s hit, like so many, smacks
less of concern for player safety than of a
constitutional distaste for the masculine
brutishness that characterizes football.
Note that no one is calling for the end of
girls’ soccer, even though, according to
the Journal of Athletic Training, highschool females who play suffer concussions 68 percent more often than their
male counterparts. No, in many liberals’
utopian vision, sports—if they had to
exist at all—would be less Meadowlandsscrum, more meadowland-frolic. The
barbarism of football was supposed to be
sloughed off with the times. Boys—make
no mistake: football remains a game of,
by, and for Y-chromosome carriers—
were supposed to take up cross country,
or tennis, or urban dance.
But guys like to tackle one another—
and have, historically, been willing to
countenance the bumps and bruises.
During an interim in the battle against
Troy, Homer recounts, not content with
the dangers of war, the Greeks memorialized their fallen hero Patroclus by boxing and wrestling. And in early medieval
times, Shrovetide in England was celebrated with a game of “mob football,” in
which entire villages pummeled one
another to get the ball to the goal; according to an ancient handbook, the only unacceptable tactics were manslaughter and
murder. Proper libertarian sport, that.
The history of Homo ludens is the history of young lads mashing one another
into the sod. Unsurprisingly, that is a
mixed heritage—but in our sanitized
age, we increasingly pound the vices to
the detriment of the virtues. Football is
an outlet for America’s “lust for violence” and “patriarchal domination,”
writes Steve Almond in Against Football:
One
Fan’s
Reluctant
Manifesto. His disdain for the NFL’s inclination “to channel
our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed” is not unfounded—
but the NFL and football need not be
synonymous, as University of Virginia
professor Mark Edmundson observes in
his Why Football Matters: My Education
in the Game. For Edmundson football
is “potentially ennobling, potentially
toxic”—it can breed “brutality, thoughtlessness, dull conformity, love for the herd
mentality and the herd,” but it can also be
salvific; football (and philosophy) saved
him, Edmundson writes. “When a boy is
trying to grow up, football can be a form of
education that works when no others can.”
In an age when tee-ball leagues refuse
to keep score and P.E. dodgeball is denounced as “murderball,” it makes sense
that, as a Harris poll found earlier this
year, professional football is far and away
Americans’ favorite sport (and college
football is third). Tuning in on Sunday
afternoon does not have to be a matter of
bloodlust; perhaps Americans simply
still appreciate the strength and grit and
fearlessness that football—increasingly
alone among pastimes—celebrates.
And celebrates not merely pro forma.
The manly charm of football is that it involves real, actual danger. Strength and
grit are on display because there is danger, because it requires grit to run for the
end zone knowing eleven other players
are hurtling themselves at you. Of course
players celebrate touchdowns. As Craig
Ferguson quipped, “Anyone who’s just
driven 90 yards against huge men trying
to kill them has earned the right to do jazz
hands.” Baseball can be elegant and contemplative, basketball can be swift and
gymnastic—but they cannot be tough the
way football is tough. And critics who
think we, as a species, have moved past
“tough” are fooling themselves.
But a cultural divide seems to be forming with football at its center, and a moment of reform for the sport might be at
hand. So is there a path forward for football—one that recognizes the physical
dangers that the game can pose while also
retaining the game’s traditional vigor? Yes.
As a matter of safety, options exist.
Leagues can make liberal use of safety
equipment (the quality of which has been
steadily advancing in recent years), and
they, of course, should follow practical
medical guidelines. The practice of allowing athletes to play with concussions, for
instance, will not stand up to increased
scrutiny, nor should it.
Some contend, though—and not unpersuasively—that more concussions are, in
fact, an unintended consequence of better
helmets; that armored to the hilt, players
are more inclined to throw themselves
about recklessly. One counterintuitive
approach would be to remove helmets,
which would encourage players to protect
themselves. A less drastic option would be
to keep the helmet but remove the face
mask. Regardless, moving players away
from head-first tackling toward something more like rugby’s bear-hug technique is likely to be a necessary step in
reducing head injuries.
That said, if informed adults decide
that the potential benefits of playing
professionally outweigh the risks, why
should they be victims of sanctimonious
tut-tutting?
In any case, increased attention to
safety alone will not suffice, if football
is to continue to serve its “potentially
ennobling” role, especially for its youngest players. Coaches with an eye to the
dignity of the game would do well to reject, as much as possible, the spectacle
and theatricality that have made the sport
a vehicle for achieving celebrity rather
than simply a good game worth playing.
For the vast majority of players, football
will not be a career; but the virtues that
the game can instill can serve them in
whatever career they choose. Coaches
and players, even professionals, should
keep in mind the long view. NFL players,
too, will spend much more of their adult
lives retired from football than playing it.
Football has its Ray Rices. But it has
also had Tom Landrys and Pat Tillmans
and Peyton Mannings. Of those figures—
men of the best sort, forged in the heat of
two-a-days—we could use many more.
“Football may be the most potent form
of education that America now offers,”
writes Edmundson toward the end of his
book. We would give up something important if we decided to ignore the lessons
it has to teach.
27
Viva Susana!
The governor of New Mexico runs for reelection
Las Vegas, N.M.
t the end of the tarmac here at the Moriarty
Municipal Airport, a tent has been set up. Moriarty
is a little town east of Albuquerque. Outside the tent
are two flags side by side: the U.S. and the New
Mexico. they look good together, waving in the wind. New
Mexico’s flag is one of our most distinctive, with its bright
yellow. What is going on here is a little ceremony to mark the
opening of a new facility: an outpost of Google, the Californiabased Internet giant. A building is going up before our eyes.
Apparently, the company is going to test drones. the facility
will employ something like 200 people, and governmental
authorities will provide about $1 million in infrastructure
improvements.
the star of the show this morning, other than Google, is
New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez. In almost Clintonlike fashion, she is late—but not unpardonably late. A little
more than a half hour. No one seems to mind. When she
arrives, people light up at her, and she lights up back at them.
there are hugs and kisses all around, as well as laughter. the
governor is in a jeans jacket and blue jeans, with stylish boots.
“New Mexican chic” is the phrase that comes to mind. At the
rostrum, a string of local officials praise the new facility,
praise Google, and praise Martinez. they thank her for her
A
28
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“pro-business attitude.” they say it in a tone that suggests that
such an attitude is unusual. One official notes that, in attracting
Google, New Mexico has beaten “the country to the east”—
meaning texas.
When it’s her turn at the rostrum, Martinez apologizes for
her outfit: She says she is in jeans because she may have to go
inspect flooding in the southeastern part of the state. In the
course of her remarks, she says there was a time, not long
ago—like before she was elected—when New Mexico could
not attract businesses. they went to texas, Arizona, Colorado,
and elsewhere. the reason was, New Mexican taxes and regulations were business-unfriendly. Martinez says that she was
recently invited to a conference in Denver, speaking to 1,500
CEOs and other executives. She was the only governor invited
to speak. She made her pitch for New Mexico. the participants, she says, were surprised that the state was open for business. the line at the New Mexico booth was long.
Much of her little speech here at the airport is the usual political pabulum. the platitudes numb the ear: “work together”; “as
a team, we can do anything.” But then there comes a line unusual
for a governor or other politician. turning to the Google representative, she says, “We will build the infrastructure, then get
out of the way to let you do what you do best.”
OCTOBER 20, 2014
AP PHOTO/WILLIAM FAULKNER
BY JAY NORDLINGER
After the ceremony, Martinez mingles with her colleagues,
constituents, and fans. There is more lighting up, more beaming. Old men beam at the governor. Young women beam at her.
She beams back at them all. As she mingles, she is both efficient
and patient. She moves along but doesn’t rush, leaving no one
obviously shortchanged. Many want pictures with her, and she
takes note of light angles: “Where’s the sun?” She also helps
people with their smartphones. People may be nervous when
the moment comes to snap a picture. To a TV reporter, she says,
“The pipeline was empty in 2011,” her first year in office. She
means that there were no businesses or jobs coming into New
Mexico. “Now the pipeline is full.” And “we’re soaring.”
When I greet her, I tell her I don’t buy that her outfit is her
grubby work clothes—her inspect-the-floods clothes. The outfit strikes me as New Mexican chic. She says I have no idea
what I’m talking about.
S
uSANA MARTINeZ,
as you will have inferred, was elected
in 2010. She is a Republican—a conservative Republican—in a state that is heavily liberal and Democratic. She won 53 percent of the vote. For those who care
about sex and ethnicity—and what American doesn’t?—she is
the first Hispanic woman to be the governor of an American
state. Born in 1959, she grew up in el Paso, Texas. Her parents
were Reagan Democrats. So was she. After law school, she
moved to Las Cruces, N.M., about 50 miles northwest of el
Paso. She worked in the district attorney’s office. eventually,
she switched from being a Reagan Democrat to being a Reagan
Republican. She ran for D.A. herself: winning her first election, and being reelected three times.
When Martinez became governor, New Mexico had a budget deficit of $450 million. The state was ranked dead last in
business competitiveness. New Mexico’s motto is Crescit
eundo, “It grows as it goes.” What was chiefly growing in New
Mexico was the government. everyone said that Martinez had
to be “realistic,” drop her cute free-market principles, and raise
taxes, to close the deficit. She refused. She wanted to reform
government and stimulate the economy instead. Now the state
has a nearly $300 million surplus. And New Mexico is becoming known for, of all things, business competitiveness. earlier
this year, there was a headline in the Albuquerque Journal:
“Report: NM No. 1 in West for Manufacturing.”
Furthermore, Martinez was determined to be an education
reformer. New Mexico is a poor state, with a crush of social
problems, and has long ranked 48th, 49th, or 50th in various
categories. The state is liable to fight with Mississippi to keep
out of last place. But Martinez holds that any child can learn,
no matter how poor (and that is a term she uses freely, by the
way—“poor,” instead of euphemisms such as “low-income,”
“underprivileged,” or “disadvantaged”). She has promoted
high standards. And she boasts of results, including this: New
Mexico has the fastest-growing graduation rate in the country.
This fall, Martinez is running for reelection. Her opponent is
Gary King, the state attorney general and a pillar of the
Democratic establishment. His father, Bruce, was governor
here for three terms. Gary King lives in Moriarty, where
Martinez had her somewhat in-your-face Google ceremony.
The campaign follows predictable contours: King says that
Martinez is a ruthless Republican who favors fat cats over the
little guy—and that he is a Democrat, like the state itself.
Martinez says, in effect, “Are you better off than you were
four years ago?” And she tells them the answer is yes, for X,
Y, and Z reasons.
The term “compassionate conservative” has long been in bad
odor on the right. That’s what George W. Bush called himself,
and many conservatives associate “compassionate conservatism” with socialism lite. Bush himself said, “It’s compassionate to help our fellow citizens in need; it’s conservative to
insist on responsibility and results.” Martinez has always
struck me as a compassionate conservative. I know she resists
the label, though, along with most other labels: I know this
from an interview I did with her in January 2012. This year, she
has run a TV ad called “Breakfast.” It touts a program of hers
called “Breakfast after the Bell,” which feeds more than
60,000 poor children at their desks at the beginning of the day.
Into the camera, Martinez says, “It’s harder for hungry kids to
learn. That’s why I started a program that ensures that every
child gets a good breakfast.” And “while I believe in a strong
safety net for those in need, we can’t allow adults to abuse the
system. That’s why we prohibit the use of welfare cards at
places like bars and casinos. We can help those in need and
protect taxpayers.”
Two weeks ago, Gary King, the Democratic nominee, made
waves at a fundraiser. He said, “Susana Martinez does not have
a Latino heart.” (King is a standard Anglo guy, just for the
record.) Martinez answered with above-the-fray cool. “We certainly have different views on the issues,” she said, “but I know
what’s in my heart and I won’t question what’s in his.”
When she was elected in 2010, some of us asked, “Will she
be a one-term wonder?” The wind was at her back in 2010. That
was a huge Republican year, all over the country. Democrats
were falling left and right. Also, the Democratic administration in New Mexico, under Governor Bill Richardson, was
inept, unpopular, and none too clean. Could Martinez be
reelected in this solidly Democratic state? It seems she will be.
A recent poll shows her ahead by 54 percent to 36 percent.
What’s more, she is swamping the Democrat in cash: She has
almost $4 million on hand, he has a measly $158,000. His campaign manager has just resigned, the third of them to do so.
King has had a rocky run.
T
He day after her Moriarty caper, Martinez is traveling
from the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe to Las Vegas—
the New Mexico Las Vegas, not the Siegfried & Roy
Las Vegas—about an hour east and a little south. I ride along
with her. I bring up something she mentioned to me in 2012:
At a Walgreens in Santa Fe, liberal ladies would scurry up to
her and say, “Don’t tell anyone, but I voted for you.” Do they
still do that? Oh, yes, she says: Democrats tell her all the time
that they voted for her once and will again. They say things
like, “My mother would roll over in her grave if she knew I
was voting Republican!” People who have never voted for a
Republican in their lives are voting for Martinez.
I ask her how Republicans can escape the tag of heartlessness—whether the hearts they allegedly lack are Latino or some
other kind. I cite the 2012 presidential election. exit pollsters
asked voters what they thought about the candidates’ leadership, vision, values, and caring. Mitt Romney beat Barack
29
Obama on the first three questions. But he got clobbered on the
fourth one, caring. Martinez says that Romney is an exceptionally caring person, the author of countless acts of charity and
kindness. No one knows about those acts, though. She goes on
to tell me something about her own approach to politics.
“I like to get in the middle of crowds,” she says. “I like to
meet people. I travel the state over and over.” She does, in this
very vehicle: an SUV, a Ford Expedition. She works at a little
desk in the back. Sometimes an Internet connection, or phone
reception, is a problem. New Mexico is a big state with a small
population. It is the fifth-largest state in the Union, with
122,000 square miles. It is No. 36 in population, with about 2.1
million people—fewer than in Houston. Martinez says that she
goes where Republicans, traditionally, are uncomfortable
being. She says she does not feel uncomfortable anywhere. She
Amnesty, she is firmly opposed to. For one thing, she believes it would be “disrespectful” to those who have waited in
line to enter the country legally. She points out to me that she
has lived on the border for a long time: first in El Paso, then
in Las Cruces. Her father was a policeman; she was a prosecutor. She has looked at the problem of border-jumping her
whole life. The border must be secured in order to prevent
another “wave” of illegals, she says. At the same time, she is
full of sympathy for the illegals we might call “refugees.” She
talks of meeting such people, including children, at an immigration center in Artesia, N.M. The tales she relates are poignant
and powerful.
About education, she talks at length. But her views come
down to a single phrase: “no excuses.” People will always have
excuses for a child’s failure, she says: The family is poor, the
Susana Martinez believes in asking one and all for their
votes—if you don’t ask, and try to persuade, you probably
won’t receive.
is happy at tony country clubs and in squalid barrios. She has
seen it all, back in El Paso and during her 25 years as a prosecutor. She believes in asking one and all for their votes—if you
don’t ask, and try to persuade, you probably won’t receive.
Driving to Las Vegas, we talk about a range of economic
issues. For instance, she is friendly to oil and gas, whereas her
predecessor was not. She cleared away obstacles. In July, an
Associated Press report began, “Federal statistics are showing
what many people in New Mexico already know: The state is
in the midst of an oil boom.” There is also the matter of the
minimum wage—the state’s minimum wage. Martinez vetoed
a hike that she thought was too steep, and the Democrats are
using this veto against her. How could the governor take bread
out of people’s mouths? Martinez’s answer is that it’s better to
have a job than to be laid off because the employer can’t afford
higher salaries.
We further talk about some “social issues.” “You’re antiabortion,” I say, “and that hasn’t hurt you politically?” She
gives me one of her pleasant stares, which I’m familiar with
from our prior interview. “Nope,” she says. I continue, “And
you’re still anti–gay marriage?” Another pleasant stare—
maybe longer. Then she says, “I believe marriage is between a
man and a woman, yes.”
The entire time she has been governor, she has tried to get a
law repealed, concerning immigration. New Mexico grants
driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Martinez believes this is a
public-safety issue, above all. People up to no good come to
New Mexico from all over the country to acquire a driver’s
license. Then they disperse, to perform their misdeeds. The
New Mexico legislature (Democrat-controlled) has not yet
repealed the law. I ask the governor about immigration more
generally. “There is no desire on the part of Washington to
solve the problem,” she says—the problem of illegal immigration, and the 12 million illegal immigrants within our borders
now. She believes that a comprehensive solution can be found.
“There’s a lot of room between the deportation of 12 million
people and amnesty,” she says.
30
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parents are divorced, the mother or father is drunk. But for seven
hours a day, in a school, a child should be able to learn, no
matter what, says Martinez. I think of a book by Abigail and
Stephan Thernstrom, the scholars and reformers: No Excuses:
Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. I also think of a phrase
from George W. Bush (another one): “the soft bigotry of low
expectations.” Martinez has high expectations. One of the educational results she boasts about is that New Mexico’s Hispanic
kids lead the nation in Advanced Placement testing.
On this journey to Vegas, I ask the governor, “What’s a
Latino heart?” She gives me a priceless look—one of bemusement, mainly. “I have no idea,” she says. “I don’t know what
he meant by that” (meaning her Democratic opponent, Gary
King). A little later, she tells me a story: She was on a radio
talk show once when the chairwoman of the New Mexico
Democratic party called in. The chairwoman said, “I can’t
believe that you are a woman and Hispanic, and that you’re a
Republican.” Martinez replied, “Then you must believe that I
cannot think for myself and that I cannot choose my own
values. You must believe that I will follow a particular group
or party simply because of my heritage and my gender. And
that is ignorant.”
Here is another story: Last year, a Democratic candidate in
Albuquerque said that Democrats who cross party lines to vote
Republican are a “bunch of pendejos.” Pendejo is a very rude
Spanish word for “idiot” or “jackass.” Martinez was on another
radio show, and a woman heard her. The woman was washing
dishes, but she dropped everything and drove to the station.
She waited for the governor to come out. And when she did,
the woman called out excitedly, “Susana, soy tu pendeja!”
(“Susana, I’m your pendeja!”).
As a governor, Martinez deals with such matters as the minimum wage and floods in Carlsbad. But I ask her about her view
of America in the world: Does she believe in America as a global
power or something else? Is she a Reaganite in her foreignpolicy views as in other fields? “America has been the greatest, strongest country in the world for many years,” she says.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
And she believes that “policies of reducing our military and
our strength around the world” are wrongheaded. So too the
practice of “apologizing” for the united States. She notes that
the Middle east is erupting at the same time our defenses are
dwindling: “i am concerned.” i tell her she sounds like the
daughter of a Golden Glove boxer in the Marines (which she
is). Yes, she says, and also the stepmother of a Navy Special
Forces man.
w
We Build This
American manufacturing is not
dead—it is thriving
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
pull into the plaza in las Vegas. (The Reagan-era
cold war movie Red Dawn, by the way, was filmed
in this town.) Martinez is going to do some campaigning at a restaurant called “el encanto,” meaning “the
charm” or “the spell.” People are gathered on the sidewalk out
front waiting to greet her. They have their smartphones poised
to snap her as she emerges from the SuV. There are young and
old, Hispanic, indian, and white. it is an American tableau. She
is a rare thing, this governor: a one-named pol. She is simply
“Susana.” More than a politician, or a government official, she
is a celebrity. The enthusiasm for her is beyond politics. She is
a star, in this pond of New Mexico. As in Moriarty, she moves
easily and happily in the crowd. She eats it up as much as they
do. She takes a mother’s toddler and keeps holding the girl as
she mingles with other people. Some want to speak to her in
Spanish, and she switches languages seamlessly.
inside the restaurant, i meet Alfonso ortiz, the mayor of las
Vegas. He is a staunch and lifelong Democrat. He is also a
staunch Martinez supporter and fan. He says they saw more of
Martinez in las Vegas during the first months of her governorship than they saw of her predecessor, the Democrat, in eight
years. He says that Martinez is constantly rubbing shoulders,
listening to concerns, and delivering.
As the governor prepares to speak, a young woman calls
out, “Viva Susana!” Martinez gives a little speech about
New Mexico’s progress. “we got Google. Google! Here in
New Mexico!” Before she wraps up, she says, in disciplined
political fashion, “i’m asking for the vote.” She continues,
“whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent, i’m asking for your vote. At the end of the day, i work
for you. And i treat Democrats, Republicans, and independents exactly the same.” She asks for a show of hands: “How
many of you are Democrats?” Most people raise their hands.
Then she applauds, and they applaud too. She praises the
secret ballot. “You go into the privacy of the voting booth and
select whatever candidate you like.”
Someone says, “Susana for president!” Politicians get this a
lot, of course. Martinez gets it more than most. She is unquestionably a vice-presidential prospect, and some people think it
makes sense for her to run for the top job. She has a number
of assets. She articulates firm principles in a soft feminine
manner. She practices conservatism in a liberal state. (with
Mississippi, New Mexico is tied for first in dependence on the
federal government.) During her 25 years as a prosecutor, she
saw the dregs. child-rapists and murderers were her daily
fare. She is no babe in the woods. Yet she seems to have a
sunny outlook on life. And she has that strange personal
magic, which touches people and transcends politics.
First, she has to win reelection, which seems likely. Then,
who knows?
e
Gowanus, Brooklyn
Bukiewicz, hipster cutler and proprietor of cut
Brooklyn, thought he was going to be a novelist. what
he is is the textbook example of the new American
manufacturer, a maker and purveyor of bankrollbustingly expensive kitchen knives prized by blade aficionados
and steel freaks around the world, from home enthusiasts to
celebrity chefs. ursine and bearded, surrounded by grinders and
other machinery scavenged from industrial sites around the
New York area, he’s a businessman who doesn’t seem quite
comfortable thinking of himself as a businessman: He’s part
artisan, part post-industrial industrialist, part social-mediaenabled entrepreneur, and his stoic affect rarely gives away that
he’s always quietly going off in eleven directions at once, running
to Fedex for last-second deliveries one minute, trying to figure
out if city codes will permit him to build a demonstration kitchen
in his shop the next.
Not the sort of thing they teach you when you’re getting a
creative-writing MFA.
Bukiewicz and his fiancée, both working on novels, retreated
from New York to a family farm in Georgia, where he spent his
days alternating between writing and working around the property. The book project was frustrating, and when he was finished,
he swore off writing for three months. “But i needed to work,” he
says, “to make something.” He decided to make a knife out of
some scrap metal he’d found in a shed, but he really had no idea
what he was doing.
“i made a . . . knife-shaped object,” he says. An imperfect first
effort, but in the end, “i had this beautiful and useful thing.” The
idea stuck, and the next phase of his education began: online
tutorials and articles, YouTube videos, obscure knife-making
books tracked down on the web, and other resources helped
him get a handle on the science of the thing, and he now talks
casually about the Rockwell hardness scale and the like. “The
internet is an amazing resource for learning as well as selling,”
he says. “i couldn’t have done this 20 years ago.” The science he
could learn, but the art was all trial and error. “Mistakes are the
best way for me to learn,” he says.
when the market speaks, it sometimes speaks very clearly.
Bukiewicz’s shop is open only four hours a day—two days a
week—during which limited time he reliably sells everything
he has put up on the wall. General Motors has a multi-billiondollar marketing and inventory-management apparatus to help
it deal with unsold cars; Bukiewicz has Twitter, and it’s more
efficient. in fact, his first big problem as a businessman was
exactly the problem you want to have: Too many people wanted
to give him money in exchange for his products. when he
decided to go into business, signing a lease on a Brooklyn
J
oel
31
storefront the same week he got married, he started taking
orders and immediately found himself with a backlog that he
feared would take him years to clear: “I made myself a worker
in my own factory, and that wasn’t what I wanted.” As the
waiting list “started eking up on three years,” he stopped taking orders, worked donkey hours to clear out his backlog, and
then instituted a new business model: He makes what interests
him, and sees if anybody wants to buy it.
So far, so good.
Bukiewicz is one of the more celebrated faces of a minor
manufacturing renaissance in Brooklyn, where a community
of small enterprises and individual artisans has grown up
and come together around the business of making things,
from high-end furniture companies such as Wonk to the
Kings County Distillery, which turns New York–grown
grains into handmade hooch at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Jewelers turn reclaimed precious metals into new pieces,
milliners transform vintage hats into modern products.
“MADe IN BrOOKLYN” is a source of local pride in everything
from boots to mayonnaise.
But when Americans think of manufacturing, they aren’t
thinking of Joel Bukiewicz. Nobody comes into his shop and
punches a clock before an eight-hour shift on an assembly line.
With their sentimental attachment to a 1950s romantic ideal of
the manufacturing economy that never really existed—those
jobs were a great deal harder and paid a great deal less than is
generally appreciated—Americans tend to imagine something
more like what’s across the line in Queens, where Steinway and
Sons, despite its financial struggles, still manufactures its
famous D concert grand and eight other models of piano, its
factory topped by an $875,000 solar-powered dehumidification
system to protect the masterpieces within from the vicissitudes
of New York City’s punitive weather.
Steinway could be the textbook case of American manufacturing’s ascent—and its recent difficulties, too. Heinrich
engelhard Steinweg, a German immigrant, opened up a piano
workshop in Manhattan in 1853. Steinweg became Steinway,
and soon it was a big enough business to occupy a company
town in Queens and to maintain a second factory back in
Germany. An innovative firm, it held more than 100 patents for
improvements in the manufacture of pianos. Most of the businesses once like it are gone now, their factories converted into
loft apartments, but Steinway and Sons soldiers on, with some
difficulty: Orders crashed after the 2008–09 financial crisis,
and a third of the New York work force was laid off.
Hedge-fund titan John Paulson, a collector of Steinway
pianos, bought the company outright in 2013 and took it private.
His firm had invested in many companies over the years, but it
had never purchased one outright. Why this one? The answer is
that what Joel Bukiewicz is to kitchen cutlery, what Brooklyn’s
empire Mayonnaise is to artisanal bacon and black-garlic oiland-egg-yolk emulsions, Steinway is to pianos: a maker of
extraordinarily high-quality, high-value-added products that are
part high tech and part high art. explaining his decision to
acquire the piano-maker, Paulson said: “No one has such a
high share of the high end.” That’s what the best American
manufacturing is: We’re never going to compete on price with
poor sweaty hungry backwaters when it comes to churning out
injection-molded plastic toys and flip-flops—nor should we
want to. America isn’t Casio—we’re Steinway.
32
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W
St. Louis
e have been told a story about the decline of American
manufacturing, and it’s mostly B.S. American manufacturing is not dead and it is not dying. Our manufacturing output is, in real terms, up—way up—over the post-war
golden age, and from Boeing aircraft to Mercedes SUVs, the best
things in the world are still American-made.
“We’ll compete with anybody, anywhere,” says Michael
Geraghty, president of Sensient Technologies’ Color Group in
St. Louis. “We beat them daily. Our advantage is the cultural
approach to business in America—we innovate, we fall forward,
we adapt, we don’t give up. For us and for American manufacturing, the emerging global middle class is an opportunity.”
The so-called race to the bottom, in which American workers
and firms are undercut by Asian sweatshop hostages with no
safety or environmental protection, is largely a fiction. Sensient
isn’t outsourcing—it’s insourcing, bringing operations based in
Tijuana back to the United States. Contrary to the myth that
elizabeth Warren and Mike Huckabee want to sell you, global
direct investment does not generally go chasing low wages and
closed economies: The No. 1 recipient of foreign direct investment last year was, in fact, the United States. The United Kingdom was No. 2. China and Hong Kong are on the top-ten list, to
be sure, but the rest of the gang is Germany, Belgium, France,
Canada, Switzerland, and Spain. If there is a race to the bottom
on wages, the finish line is not in Zurich, Stuttgart, Brussels,
Toronto, Barcelona, or New York.
Neither is it in St. Louis, an old industrial city that has seen
its share of struggles, where Sensient is quietly going about
being one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of, and
a company that prefers it that way.
“If you look in your refrigerator, or in your medicine cabinet,
we’re probably in one out of every three products you see,”
Geraghty says. Sensient, a leading maker of colors, flavors,
scents, coatings, and related materials, does not talk about its
clients, many of them makers of iconic products, but the orange
tint in your orange soda, the cherry flavor in your cough syrup,
the blue in your prescription medication and the time-release
coating that it requires, the “antique fuchsia” in your cosmetics—
there’s a pretty good chance that Sensient had a hand in one or
more of them.
It is, by all accounts, a great business to be in. So you’d think
that people would be lined up at the door with résumés in hand.
But Geraghty tells a story that is repeated by everybody from
executives at high-end construction companies to high-tech
recruiters: even with millions of Americans unemployed, good
people are hard to find.
“We hire a lot of chemists and chemical engineers,” he says,
“but we also hire technicians, skilled laborers, and for other positions, and it is harder than you’d imagine to find A players.” He
cites problems in the education system and returns several times
to the theme of unrealistic expectations and the sense of entitlement among Millennials. “We move people up and promote from
within,” he says. “There are many people here who do not have
degrees but are in positions of responsibility. Sensient is about
results, not the degree behind your name. But you have to perform.” He says he likes to recruit former military and has found
the company’s experiences at college job fairs “spotty.”
“We’re always looking for people who want to make and
build,” he says. “Make and build” is a formulation that I’ll hear
OCTOBER 20, 2014
repeated over and over by makers and builders who
have never met one another but who all intuit the same
thing—that the future of American manufacturing is as
much a cultural issue as an economic and political one.
It would of course be an excellent thing if regulators
did not work quite so hard to suck all the joy out of
making and building. As Sensient executives walk me
through the basics of the FDA-oversight process—they
cannot so much as put a label on a batch of Red Dye No.
5 until the FDA has sampled it—I think about Joel
Bukiewicz back in Brooklyn and his reference to “all
kinds of codes,” to being unsure what he is permitted to
do under the law. He and I did not talk politics, and I
certainly did not get a whiff of flaming right-winger off
the New School creative-writing MFA. Still, there was
a distinct note of frustration in his voice when he discussed how difficult it can be for him to find out “if it’s
even legal” to set up a certain piece of machinery in his
shop. Companies such as Sensient can handle that—the
St. Louis facility spends $8 million a year just on maintenance, so lawyers and regulatory-compliance officers
are no big deal. But what about the little shops, the startups, the three-man operations? Your average smallscale clothing company in Brooklyn does not throw off
enough revenue to keep a team of lawyers on retainer.
Those businesses may seem like they’re worlds apart
from an industrial giant like Sensient, but there is more
of a connection between the chemical company and the
Brooklyn artisan-entrepreneurs than you might imagine. Geraghty is pretty stoked to tell me about a product
his company is making to enable digital ink-jet printing
on textiles, using aqueous ink. “A designer in New York
can go from the drawing to the shelf in a month,” he says. “If you
have an idea for a design, you don’t have to order a whole shipment. You can print one tie.”
Strange how the cutthroat competition of American capitalism
so closely resembles cooperation.
LUBA MYTS
S
is not an outlying success story. In real (that is,
inflation-adjusted) terms, U.S. manufacturing output
today is more than four times what it was in the 1950s, the
purported golden age of American manufacturing. In populationadjusted terms, we manufacture more, not less, than we did then.
We export more, too, and what we export tends to be the really
good stuff: airplanes, semiconductors, industrial components,
etc. Our manufacturing workers are about three times as productive today as they were in the 1970s, thanks to a mountain of
investment in productive capital, and they are paid much, much
more than they were then, too.
As the rest of the world began to pick itself up from the ruins
of World War II and the ruination of Communism, other countries began to catch up, and our part of total world manufacturing output declined relative to theirs: In the post-war era,
nearly $1 in every $3 in worldwide manufacturing was
American output; today, it’s about $1 in every $5. In the 1980s,
the Asian superman who terrified American business executives was Japanese; today, he is Chinese, but the IMF finds
that both the American and the Chinese contribution to world
manufacturing output have stabilized in the post-crisis era,
eNSIeNT
with each country producing about 20 percent of the total. No
doubt we will find a new Asian with whom to terrify ourselves
in a year or two. India’s looking pretty good.
But there is one manufacturing metric that some people find
disheartening, because they misunderstand what it means:
Manufacturing employment is down from its 20th-century peak.
We make a lot more stuff than we used to, but we employ fewer
people doing it. That should be good news: Manufacturing
employment isn’t down because Americans aren’t good at manufacturing, but because Americans are awesome at manufacturing,
making radical gains in efficiency and productivity that have
allowed fewer resources to be consumed in the production of
greater output. If you have a 19th-century, Bismarckian view of
society as one big factory, that’s a problem: The schools are a
factory that produces workers, and more factories are needed to
absorb them. If the factories are absorbing fewer workers, then
that’s a cause for panic, and politicians start talking about how
many jobs they’re going to “create,” which is a laughable
proposition if you think about it for two seconds.
But there is another way of looking at the work force. Instead
of asking, “My God, how are we ever going to create enough
jobs to employ all these millions?” try asking, “My God, we
have this incredibly rich resource, these millions of workers in
one of the most well-educated, highly skilled, dynamic
economies in all the world—to what productive ends might
they be put?” People need jobs, and companies such as Sensient
need people, but we’re trying to put a lot of round employee
pegs into square employer holes. Addressing that in a substan33
tive, aggressive way is necessary both to American workers’
employment prospects and to American manufacturers’ competitiveness—which are intimately intertwined issues.
Cliff Clavin has some pretty good ideas about laborer–
manufacturer matchmaking. John Ratzenberger, a veteran actor
who was in everything from Gandhi to The Empire Strikes Back,
is probably known to your kids as hamm the Piggy Bank from
the Pixar Toy Story series, but you know him as mailman Cliff
Clavin from Cheers. For some years, he hosted a reality television show called “Made in America,” in which he explored the
how-to behind such iconic American products as harleyDavidson, Airstream, Pyrex, Steinway—even Spam. And as he
traveled from factory to factory, a deepening awareness set in:
We have millions of people unemployed, millions of young people marginally employed with dire prospects, and factories that
cannot find the skilled workers they need, because nobody is
being trained for the work that needs doing. We’re all going to
college on the theory that that is the ticket to the middle class, but
there are other avenues of advancement that may be more attractive for many young people. It may be that Joel Bukiewicz found
getting his MFA very enriching, but a great many young people
would rather bypass those lost working years and the studentloan debt to go straight into rewarding, remunerative work.
Ratzenberger, whose mother worked in the Remington Arms
factory in his native Connecticut, sees two problems: The first
is the basic lack of available vocational training; the second and
arguably more serious problem is a culture that dissuades
young people from taking skilled-labor jobs.
“We’ve denigrated people with skills since the Woodstock
era,” he says. “That’s when it started. I was a traveling carpenter
at the time, among the Woodstockians in the Age of Aquarius,
and people would say, ‘Oh, Mister Macho Man,’ because I had
a tool belt—but they said it in a way that was supposed to make
you feel bad. Then that started to be reflected on television and
in movies: Every time you saw somebody with a toolbox—
plumber, carpenter, lumberjack, whatever—they were depicted
as being an idiot. Why would a child growing up seeing that all
their lives want to do that kind of work?”
Ratzenberger is an advocate of vocational education, and promotes a program called MOST—Mobile Outreach Skills
Training—that works with businesses searching for skilled
workers and dispatches mobile classrooms to provide training
on site. Ratzenberger is not shy about comparing MOST’s operating model with that of traditional government job-training
programs. “We go to the companies, say, ‘What do you need?’;
they tell us, and we pull up our trailer-truck classrooms and train
people to do specific jobs. It costs us about $7,000 a head to train
these people; for the government, it’s six figures. Our retention
rate is 96 percent of people on the job after six months; for the
government, it’s 14 percent.”
he relates a conversation with the CEO of a very large construction company in the West who suggested that the company
might have to reduce its operations or even close in a few years
because it cannot find enough skilled drywall installers, masons,
glaziers, and technicians to do its work. Ratzenberger dreams of
establishing a “tinker’s class” for every five-to-eight-year-old,
where children could follow in the footsteps of Edison and
Franklin and simply explore the physical, mechanical world to
see what they can do. he connects the loss of the tinkering habit
directly to the decline in the tradition of skilled work.
34
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“Bridgeport, where I grew up, was the ‘arsenal of democracy’
in World War II, and it produced a phenomenal amount of war
materials—tanks, helicopters, guns, you name it. Everybody had
a skill. There was never a repairman called to our neighborhood:
If your father or uncle couldn’t figure it out, a neighbor could.
Growing up in that atmosphere, that’s what I thought the world
was like. At 14, I wanted to learn to build a house and everything
in it—and I learned. I built a couple of houses and some furniture.
But I still haven’t built everything in it.”
If he wants to build the house and everything in it, he should
talk to Merle Adams.
‘W
Gallatin, Mont.
hEn you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of
drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall
and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re
going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.” That’s one
of many quotes from famous builders cited by Montana’s Big
Timberworks, and the builder in this case was an especially
famous one: Steve Jobs. And Merle Adams sounds more than a
little like the Apple visionary when he describes his business:
“We don’t sell things—we sell ideas.”
To call Big Timberworks a woodworking shop would be like
calling Apple a computer company. Yes, it is, but it is a great deal
more. They’ll make you a desk—a bespoke, one-of-a-kind item,
possibly made from wood recovered from the 1907 PierceArrow factory in Buffalo or a grain elevator in Saskatchewan,
fastened with old railroad spikes from Montana. The firm recently advertised its acquisition of a load of wood from the old
Trojan condom factory in Trenton, n.J. (“a nice selection of large
timbers,” indeed). They’ll outfit your home with shelves, closets,
pantries, staircases, and furniture unlike anything you can buy
anywhere—or they will build the whole house, if you like. As
Adams shows a group of visitors around the facility, the scale of
the operation becomes apparent. “The way we work, I can go out
to the shop and see how they’re building something and say ‘Yea’
or ‘nay’ on the spot. I don’t like being dependent on other people. I like doing it in the way I want it to be done.” his guidelines
are verbatim those that Joel Bukiewicz uses to describe his
knives: “Beautiful and useful.”
“My generation, from the Seventies, there was still some
necessity to invent, and I tried to find cheap, cool things.
Sometimes, I see kids in their 20s, and there’s not much desire to
make things—they’re enraptured by technology. But around
here, in Montana, there’s a lot of people who make cool stuff.”
And it’s more than woodworking: Across town, another company builds $100,000 custom rock-crawlers—not bolting aftermarket parts onto Jeep Wranglers, but fabricating components
on laser-cutting tables. As with media, the tools of manufacturing have been democratized. But the tools require training,
skill, and, most important, curiosity.
When Adams was getting started, he says, he’d regularly
see “wild-eyed” young men show up at his shop with the
desire to build something. now, it’s harder for him to find
young people. “I’d like to get three or four more young ones.
I like to try to keep a mix, and some of my guys have been
with me almost 30 years. I’m wondering if there’s still that
desire to experiment, that passion.”
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Big Timberworks is sort of like one of those Sonoma farmto-table restaurants, with everything from the sawmill to the
architect to the timber-framers in one shop, with work from
design and engineering to fine joinery executed by a single
worker-owned cooperative. It is hard work, but there is a certain romance to it. Adams says that of his current projects, the
one that excites him most is a barn he is building, which will be
used for special events. “It’s built in a traditional manner, and
it’s very, very rustic. It’ll be a place where people are married,
people party, people gather together. They wouldn’t know me
from Adam, but the work of my hands, my design, might create
a memory for them.”
He shows off some cool pieces, desks and dining tables that
might be bound for a Montana cabin or a Tribeca loft, and tells
stories about the oddball places from which his favorite pieces of
wood have been reclaimed. But he keeps a careful eye on the
sawmill, too.
“I’m a wild-eyed dreamer,” he says. “But I’m also a realist.”
A
cuSTOM knife-maker in Brooklyn, a major chemical
company, a former itinerant carpenter from the
Woodstock generation, a Montana-based builder in the
most traditional sense of the word: Without even getting into the
household-name manufacturers, the breadth and depth of what
Americans make and do is spectacular, and it is not rendered less
so merely because industries such as finance and services have
made spectacular advances of their own in the past several generations. Of all the executives, technicians, and craftsmen I speak
with, it may be the carpenter-turned-actor who best puts his
finger on our current challenge—a culture that treats those who
work with their hands as being somehow less than those who
work with symbols and software.
We are, in a sense, victims of Bastiat’s “seen and unseen.”
The failures are what jump out at us: Our automotive industry
isn’t what it used to be, and competitors overseas have displaced American firms in fields that once were points of pride,
from consumer electronics to steel. But to lament the fact that
the American economy of 2014 doesn’t look like the American
economy of 1963 is backward-looking and deeply unAmerican—and it blinds us to the success stories all around us.
That not only gives us an inaccurate picture of the economy,
but it prevents us from learning and applying the lessons
offered by the best American makers.
As Ratzenberger argues, it would be an excellent thing if our
education system spent less time trying to place people into
third- and fourth-tier academic programs to swell the ranks of
marginally employed poli-sci and Victorian-lit graduates, and
invested more in those who make and build and do; if we valued
the beautiful and the useful as much as we do the clever; if we
reconnected with the great American tinkering tradition that
brought the world such innovations as the airplane and the personal computer. More than any government program, regulatory
reform, or targeted tax cut, it is reinvigorating that culture, and
the entrepreneurial vocation that goes along with it, that will
keep Americans building the next big thing, the insanely great
thing, the beautiful and the useful thing. The politicians always
get it wrong: We did build that. We do. We will.
You Are Invited to Attend the Human Life Foundation’s 12th Annual
Honoring
KRISTAN HAWKINS and CLARKE FORSYTHE
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2014
THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB
38 EAST 37TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
Please join us in honoring these friends of life. For more information and/or to purchase
tickets online, visit our website at www.humanlifereview.com. You may also
email us at [email protected] or call 212-685-5210.
35
Fighting
Obamapolitik
Congress can begin to restore
American power now
BY ARTHUR HERMAN &
JOHN YOO
and Democrats act resigned to two more
years of retreat and setbacks for the United States in
international affairs, particularly when it comes to
Russia. President Obama remains commander-inchief and has at his disposal vast diplomatic, military, and
intelligence resources. But a House and Senate unified under
conservative leadership could use its own constitutional
powers to counter presidential passivity toward Russia and
begin to rebuild American influence.
How so? Unlike the president’s domestic policy, foreignpolicy decisions cannot be reversed by the other branches of
government. Congress cannot order the Air Force to bomb
the Assad regime in Syria. It cannot hold a summit meeting
with Vladimir Putin and force Russia to vacate Crimea. It
cannot reach agreements with new governments in Iraq or
Afghanistan. Still, a conservative Congress could take concrete
action now to strengthen American power and enhance security
cooperation with our embattled allies. A strong Congress can
pressure a weak president, and when such a president refuses
to lead on foreign policy, Congress must do it for him.
Congress may lack executive powers, including those of a
commander-in-chief, but it controls the purse, the size and
shape of the armed forces, and foreign commerce, including
arms exports. While Congress cannot make international
agreements such as treaties, it can provide material assistance
to other countries. While it cannot launch attacks, Congress
can fund new classes of weapons, such as cyber technologies,
that improve our defenses.
There is precedent for this sort of congressional activity. In the
1970s, for example, President Jimmy Carter pursued an Obamalike policy of détente toward the Soviet Union, despite all the evidence that Moscow was continuing a nuclear- and conventionalweapons buildup and destabilizing Third World regimes.
Conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress, such as
Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington, responded by successfully opposing the SALT II agreement on nuclear weapons and
beginning a buildup of the American nuclear and conventional
R
ePUBLICANS
Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of The
Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the
Soul of Western Civilization. Mr. Yoo is the Heller Professor of Law at the
University of California at Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, and the author of Point of Attack: Preventive War,
International Law, and Global Welfare.
36
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arsenal. Congress launched programs for stealth aircraft, the M1
Abrams tank, and other technologies responsible for the stunning American battlefield victories of the 1990s and 2000s.
Missile defense provides another striking example. In the
1990s, President Bill Clinton chased the Democratic-party
dream of killing off Reagan’s Star Wars program. Star Wars had
helped drive the Soviets into bankruptcy, but Senate Democrats
led by Joe Biden argued that it undermined the strategy of
mutually assured destruction. The Clinton administration tried
to maintain the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty’s ban on defensive
systems, even though the Soviet Union, the treaty’s other signatory, had dissolved. After Newt Gingrich led the 1994 midterm landslide, the Republican-controlled House and Senate
fully funded national missile-defense programs in defiance of
the Clinton White House. President George W. Bush eventually
deployed missile defense in Alaska against possible North
Korean missiles and terminated the ABM treaty.
T
precedents provide direction for a new conservative Congress to respond to Russia and begin the
restoration of America’s world standing. The first policy to adopt, and the most urgent, would be to clear the way for
sales of military equipment and weapons systems to allies in
Ukraine and the rest of the world. Congress should resuscitate
FDR’s Arsenal of Democracy for the 21st century. The pivot
point of FDR’s military-aid program was the Lend-Lease Act of
1941, which enabled American defense contractors to supply
arms at American expense—more than $500 billion, in today’s
dollars—to the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, and other
countries under attack from Axis powers.
Congress’s task today would be far simpler and far less
costly—it could even be profitable. Congress would have to
significantly amend two pieces of legislation that oversee
American arms sales to foreign powers: the Foreign Assistance
Act of 1961 and the Arms export Control Act of 1976. Relics
of the Cold War, they steer arms sales abroad through a complicated labyrinth involving myriad congressional committees
and Pentagon and State Department bureaucrats. As defense
experts know, the Arms export Control Act encourages the
Pentagon to peddle big-ticket items such as F-35 fighters by
giving the Defense Department an 8 percent surcharge on all
sales. Instead, Congress should encourage the sale of the arms
that our allies in europe really need: destroyers, frigates, helicopters, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, and conventional
fighters such as the F-16 and F/A-18.
Our allies know they must revamp and modernize their
forces, especially in the face of a resurgent Russia and an
aggressive China. earlier this year Japan’s defense ministry
proposed a budget increase of 3 percent, to about $49 billion.
That’s the biggest defense budget Japan has seen since 2003.
South Korea is considering an even bigger boost, of 4.2 percent,
while the Philippines is gearing up to modernize its air and
sea forces. In europe, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh
Rasmussen has called for members to begin increasing their
defense spending to 2 to 2.5 percent of GDP. Most don’t spend
anything close to that proportion; Germany, for example,
spends barely 1.3 percent. But a jump to 2 or even 2.5 percent
could mean up to $43 billion in additional funding for its military—with American defense companies poised to help out.
HeSe
OCTOBER 20, 2014
To streamline rearmament by Western Europe, Japan, and
Korea, Congress must change existing laws to allow more
transfer of advanced technology to our most trusted allies
when they need it, not when Washington bureaucrats decide
they may have it. Sentiment already exists on the hill to
update these 40- and 50-year-old laws. President Obama
himself has recognized the need to update them for a changing defense landscape, but the changes made so far have been
piecemeal. Congress can take the lead and make it possible
for our allies to buy the arms and equipment to modernize
their forces.
A second major step would be to downgrade Russia’s
influence in the world and, correspondingly, restore ours to
its former strength. Putin has used the pretense of Russia’s
great-power status to win popularity at home—he has never
ridden so high in domestic opinion polls as he does now—and
to humiliate the United States in Iran, Syria, and Ukraine. In
response, the United States should stop regarding Russia as a
superpower and instead conduct foreign policy in ways that
take advantage of its declining military capability, its shrinking population, and its crumbling economy (whose growth now
depends on commodity prices). Reducing the international
position of Russia and its authoritarian allies would neatly
match the steps discussed above to strengthen U.S. allies. In the
absence of any policy from President Obama, Congress should
again take the lead.
Congress can begin by terminating the New START treaty,
which placed the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals under the
same limits. There is no reason to impose the same ceiling of
1,550 nuclear warheads on Russia, which can no longer afford
to project power beyond its region, and on the U.S., which has
a worldwide network of alliances and broader responsibilities
to ensure international stability. Russia cannot afford a nuclear
arsenal higher than New START’s 1,550-warhead limit, while
the United States needs broader capabilities to deter rising
threats in several regions at once.
Congress can further sanction Russia and restore the strategic
balance of power by withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. In late July, the Obama administration publicly revealed that Russia had violated the 1987 agreement, which bans ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles
with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Even faced with
demographic and economic decline, Moscow is overhauling its
nuclear and conventional arsenal with new, multiple-warhead
ballistic missiles, and it has suspended the treaty limiting its
European conventional forces. It claims that the rise of its neighbor in the East, China, and new threats along its southern border
justify new delivery systems.
Rather than struggle to save the INF treaty, the United
States should use Russia’s breach as another opportunity.
The treaty has become obsolete. Nuclear war in Europe no
longer looms as it did during the Cold War. NATO can counter
Russian deployment of intermediate-range missiles with airand sea-based weapons of greater accuracy. The treaty also
interferes with Washington’s ability to preserve global security,
a responsibility that Moscow does not share. Maintaining the
international system that has brought peace and prosperity
for the last seven decades demands that America have access
to the full spectrum of conventional and nuclear options.
Withdrawing from the INF treaty would signal that the United
States will consider Russia a strategic rival if it seeks to redraw borders in Europe.
Next, Congress could restore anti-ballistic-missile (ABM)
defense systems in Eastern Europe. Concerned about Iran’s
push for ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, the Bush
administration began the process of deploying advanced ABM
systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. As part of its effort
to reset relations with Russia, the Obama administration canceled the program without securing any reciprocal concessions
from Moscow or Iran. Redeploying the missile-defense systems would send an important signal of American support for
our NATO allies, especially those near Russia, and raise the
costs on Russia and its allies of seeking to keep pace with the
American military.
A last facet of Congress’s initiative on foreign policy should
be to craft new legislation that mandates a comprehensive plan
to share information with our NATO allies on cyber attacks,
which both Russia and China have used to coerce their neighbors and to inflict costs on the United States. The Obama administration’s handling over the past six years of this urgent security
threat has been feckless when it hasn’t been nonexistent. The
Justice Department’s recent indictment of five Chinese intelligence officers for alleged hacking is too little too late.
The Defense Department’s Cyber Command should establish
strong cooperative links with the intelligence services of our
closest allies. The U.S. should share more information on
cyber attacks and vulnerabilities and shape a strong counterstrategy including retaliation in kind when evidence of an
attack is clear. Plans for such data exchange and collaboration
with allies have been in the works inside NATO since last year.
It’s time Congress insisted that those plans become reality and
that a similar exchange be set up to share information and
shape strategy with Asian allies, including South Korea, Japan,
and even India.
All of these steps rest within Congress’s undisputed constitutional powers. Congress can use its authority over military
spending to fund new intermediate-range weapons systems. It
can counter Russian testing and deployment of new missile
systems by funding research and development of similar
American weapons. It can fund the deployment of new ABM
systems and stop the reduction of our nuclear arsenals to New
START levels. Congress has longstanding precedent for terminating treaties, beginning with the 1798 Quasi-War with
France, which ended the 1778 alliance made with the government of Louis XVI. More recently, Republican Congresses in
1995–2000 established the groundwork for withdrawal from
the ABM treaty by supporting the development of national
missile-defense systems. Once Bush took office, Congress and
the president agreed on the ABM treaty’s obsolescence, and
the president terminated the agreement.
C
for a decisive conservative victory this coming
November, with Republican majorities in both the
house and Senate, are still good. Such a victory would
present an extraordinary opportunity for the GOP to take leadership and reverse the course of American decline, not just at
home but abroad as well. It is important that conservatives realize that they need not wait two more years for Obamapolitik to
come to its end.
hANCES
37
3col - Education:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/30/2014 11:07 PM Page 38
A Real Education Market
Aligning the interests of schools, students, and taxpayers
B Y A N D R E W K E L LY
mid June, the Department of
Education put for-profit Corinthian
Colleges out of business. Citing the
company’s failure to respond to
claims it had fudged job-placement data
and falsified attendance records, the
department placed a 21-day hold on any
additional federal loan and grant money
due the institution. Corinthian’s 107 colleges—serving 72,000 students under the
Heald, Everest, and Wyotech brands—
draw 83 percent of their revenue from
federal sources, and the firm was already
reeling from two years of declining
enrollment and a dozen state-level investigations. Despite Corinthian’s $1.6 billion in revenues in 2013, the department’s
hold left it without enough cash to pay the
bills. In early July, the firm agreed to sell
most of its campuses and close the rest.
The announcement sent a shock
through the for-profit sector. The
Obama administration’s bloodlust for
such schools had put the industry on its
heels since 2009. But before June, none
of them had been effectively forced out
of business by the government.
Education Department officials them-
I
n
Mr. Kelly is a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, whose Center on Higher
Education Reform he directs.
38
|
selves must have realized that they had
overstepped, and feigned ignorance that
the hold would be the final nail in
Corinthian’s coffin.
Many conservatives were understandably outraged by the administration’s
coup de grâce. The Wall Street Journal
editorial page called it an “extraordinary
violation of due process . . . akin to a
judge issuing the death penalty while a
case is in discovery.” Economist Richard
Vedder called it an “ideological victory at
the expense of many poor younger
Americans.” A longtime Wells Fargo
analyst of the sector called it a “chilling
and aggressive new level of oversight.”
These critics are right to question the
administration’s ideological campaign—more witch hunt than reform
effort—against private enterprise in
education. Still, it is also hard to ignore
the incongruity here: Since when are
conservatives the staunchest defenders
of a company that takes nearly all of its
revenue from taxpayers, let alone one
that is known to charge substantial sums
for a shoddy product? As of 2012, nearly 30 percent of Corinthian students
defaulted on their federal loans within
three years of entering repayment, and a
2013 investigation found that campuses
had boosted job placement numbers by
paying temp agencies $2,000 to hire
their graduates for short stints.
Two things can be true simultaneously:
First, the department’s execution of
Corinthian was an ideologically motivated and inappropriate use of federal
power. Second, any rational market
would have driven many of Corinthian’s programs out of business long
ago. Indeed, perhaps the most telling
aspect of the Corinthian saga is that it
takes unprecedented federal overreach
to drive a poorly performing college out
of business.
The bigger problem is that for every
Corinthian College there are literally
hundreds more—public, nonprofit, and
for-profit alike—that fail students and
taxpayers but operate just below the
radar. Thousands more charge far too
much for a mediocre product, saddling
students with debt that outweighs the
value of what they were taught.
It’s time to ask why we subsidize so
much failure in American higher education, and what we can do about it. Our
goal should be to change the incentives
that allow colleges—and not just the forprofit ones, but all of them—to survive
and even thrive regardless of whether
they deliver anything of value.
From the outside, federal highereducation policy looks like a conservative Shangri-La: Aid is given out as a
voucher, and students can choose any
college they want, including private institutions. Private accreditation agencies are
tasked with ensuring academic quality,
keeping government regulators at arm’s
length. Ideally, market forces should
reward good colleges and force the bad
ones out of business, with accreditation
agencies setting minimal standards: a
model of market-based social policy.
But this market has been less successful in reality. Colleges have capitalized on goodwill, federal largesse,
and hands-off regulation by doing
whatever they please. That has included
charging ever-higher tuition to finance
ever-larger campuses while paying little
attention to how their students fare once
they enroll.
Unfortunately, the students aren’t faring particularly well. Evidence suggests
that college students spend ten fewer
hours studying per week today than they
did in the 1960s. When two researchers
tracked student learning at four-year
OCTOBER 20, 2014
SIPA VIA AP IMAGES
Education Section 2014
colleges, they found that more than onethird made no perceptible gains in critical thinking between their freshman and
senior years.
Nationally, just over half of all students
who start a degree or certificate program
finish a credential within six years, and
those with some college but no degree
now earn about as much as their highschool-educated peers. While those who
graduate are better off, they are often
unprepared for the world of work. The
New York Fed found that 44 percent of
recent college graduates were working
shortage of embarrassing results. In 2012,
681 public colleges had graduation rates
of less than 25 percent, a mark matched
by 165 for-profits.
No, the problem is much deeper and
more insidious than tax status alone. It’s
a function of colleges’ self-interest and
the flawed federal policies that indulge
them. Democrats argue that for-profit
colleges’ interest in maximizing revenue
encourages bad behavior. What they fail
to realize is that all colleges operate
according to self-interest. Public and
nonprofit institutions may not be out to
First, federal aid programs encourage
any high-school graduate to enroll in
any accredited institution at any price.
With no underwriting of any kind, federal loans provide no signal as to the
expected value of a given program. A
generous federal loan program for parents, which allows borrowing up to the
cost of attendance, helps ensure that
students will have the money to pay
tuition bills. And access to easy credit
gives colleges every incentive to enroll
students. Whether they succeed or not,
colleges are paid in full.
Public and nonprofit institutions may not be out to
maximize revenue per se, but they work instead to
maximize prestige and influence.
jobs that did not require a college diploma
in 2012, a fraction that has been on the
rise since 2000.
All of this failure costs a whole lot
more than it used to. Tuition prices at
public four-year colleges have nearly
quadrupled since the early 1980s, and
the federal government now hands out
$170 billion a year in grants, loans, and
tax credits. Students are borrowing more
than ever to finance college, but earnings have not kept pace. The effective
delinquency rate on student loans is now
as high as it was on subprime mortgages
at the height of the housing crisis.
If you ask progressives, many will tell
you that for-profits are to blame for
these troubling trends. For instance, in a
recent New York Times op-ed, Cornell
professor Suzanne Mettler argued that
“tougher regulations of the for-profits,
long overdue, are the quickest way to
help the poorest Americans who seek
college degrees.”
But the notion that problems are limited to a particular tax status—and one
covering schools that enroll only about
12 percent of higher-ed students—is
nonsense. According to the latest federal
data, borrowers from 488 of the colleges
eligible for federal student aid had threeyear default rates of 25 percent or higher.
True, the majority of those schools were
for-profit, but 166 were public institutions and 40 were private nonprofits.
When it comes to graduation rates at
two- and four-year colleges, there is no
maximize revenue per se, but they work
instead to maximize prestige and influence. These colleges operate under
what economist (and former president
of the University of Iowa) Howard
Bowen called the “revenue theory of
costs”: They raise all the money they
can and spend all the money they raise.
And because the quest for prestige is
open-ended, public and nonprofit colleges will tend to seek never-ending
increases in spending, financed by neverending fundraising and never-ending
increases in tuition.
But maximizing prestige may have
little to do with the quality of the education students receive. In fact, since
measures of student learning don’t factor into popular rankings or publicfunding formulas, there’s little reason to
invest in great teaching. University of
Michigan economist Brian Jacob and
his colleagues have found that outside
of the highest achievers, students tend
to choose campuses that spend the most
on amenities, not the ones that spend
the most on instruction. Of course, the
same problem applies to the for-profits:
Building the best recruiting and marketing departments will attract students
and revenue, but it won’t help them
learn anything.
Higher-education policy could try to
change these incentives. But the federal
student-aid system seems tailor-made
to serve the interests of colleges. The
problem is threefold.
Second, prospective consumers have
difficulty judging the quality of different
options. Some of this is unavoidable;
college is hard to evaluate until it is
actually experienced. But some of these
blind spots are self-inflicted. Basic
pieces of information needed to make a
sound investment—out-of-pocket costs,
the proportion of students who graduate
on time, the share who earn enough to pay
back their loans after graduation—are
either incomplete or nonexistent. That’s
due, in part, to a 2008 law that prohibited
the federal government from collecting
data on all college students. Championed by the private-college lobby and
congressional Republicans, the ban
keeps useful (and potentially embarrassing) information—things like graduation
rates, debt, and post-college earnings—
out of the public eye. As a result, prospective students typically have no idea
whether a given program will be worth
their while and are easily wooed by
flashy amenities, high tuition prices, and
promises of a high salary.
Information gaps would be less problematic if we could count on the accreditation agencies that serve as gatekeepers
for federal aid programs to hold colleges accountable. Therein lies the third
problem: Rather than protecting consumers, accreditation actually keeps
poor-performing colleges in business.
Accreditation is a process of peer review. Faculty from other campuses evaluate peer institutions, and accreditation
39
agencies finance their operation with
dues from the colleges they accredit. It
is also a binary variable—you are either
accredited or you’re not. Because federal
aid is the lifeblood of colleges, the consequences of revoking accreditation are
incredibly severe, with the result that
accreditors are reluctant to go that far.
Together, these three structural problems have created a system in which
poorly performing colleges that would
never pass muster in a functioning market are rarely stripped of their access to
federal aid. That aid, in turn, encourages
consumers to buy substandard products
they would otherwise avoid.
Conservatives typically respond to
these problems with familiar calls to do
away with federal aid entirely. But without any federal aid, we’d face the underprovision problem we started with: Many
low-income students who would benefit
from post-high-school education could
not afford it. Phasing out federal aid
would certainly lead to a drop in prices,
but it’s not clear that the market alone
would ensure equal opportunity for all
qualified students.
In the absence of serious efforts to
change the incentives for colleges, Republicans have ceded this ground to
Democrats. As the existing system continues to deteriorate, progressive proposals to create an elaborate system of
federal college ratings or a federally
funded “public option” will get serious
consideration. Conservatives who want
to maintain and improve the marketbased system must present their own set
of solutions. Two ideas stand out.
The most direct way to align the interests of colleges with those of students and
taxpayers is to give colleges “skin in the
game” when it comes to student loans.
Currently, colleges can enroll any highschool graduate with a pulse because
they bear almost none of the risk that the
student will fail. They’re held harmless
unless and until more than 40 percent of
their borrowers default on federal loans
within three years. Default rates are easily
gamed, though, and if students default after
three years, the college gets off scot-free.
Last month, the Department of Education
went so far as to “adjust” some schools’
default rates at the eleventh hour in order
to save them from losing aid eligibility.
As my American Enterprise Institute
colleague Alex Pollock has argued, when
40
|
mortgage lenders operated under a
similar set of incentives—handing out
risky loans, bundling them up, and
then selling them to investors, thereby
shedding the risk—the result was the
subprime-mortgage crisis. “A principal
lesson from mortgages, nearly universally agreed upon, is that those who
create the mortgages should retain a
material part of the credit risk,”
Pollock wrote in 2012. It is a lesson
that he argues we should extend to
higher education.
The simplest approach would be to
make colleges responsible for paying
back a fixed percentage of the loans
their students default on. A clear, objective risk-sharing policy would hit colleges where it hurts—their budget—and
would not be all-or-nothing like current
default-rate regulations or the accreditation system.
Democratic senators Jack Reed, Dick
Durbin, and Elizabeth Warren have introduced legislation that would force colleges with high default rates to pay
back a share of defaulted loans. But here
again, Democrats would rather play
favorites than hold all colleges to
account. The bill includes exemptions
for historically black colleges and universities and for community colleges,
schools that have default rates higher
than the national average. And the proposal would cover only campuses where
more than 25 percent of students take
out loans. In other words, Democrats
believe that only a subset of colleges
should have skin in the game.
Excluding groups of colleges from
risk sharing would be akin to exempting
some mortgage lenders from regulation
because they lend to subprime clients.
We know how such lenders behaved
when they had no skin in the game, and
it wasn’t pretty. A better way to avoid
unintended consequences would be to
couple risk sharing with rewards for
serving low-income students well. For
instance, the feds could provide colleges
with a cash bonus for every Pell Grant
recipient they graduate, providing
schools with an incentive to lift students
out of poverty.
The second way to align the interests
of colleges, students, and taxpayers is to
provide consumers of higher education
with the information they need to make
informed decisions. In K–12 education,
Republicans have been the party of
transparency and accountability. The
No Child Left Behind Act failed on
many fronts, but it did compel states to
collect and publish valuable information on the performance of public
schools. When it comes to higher education, though, many congressional Republicans have stood in the way of
similar ideas, not only rejecting the
Bush administration’s recommendation
to collect better federal data but banning
such collection outright. This policy has
left consumers in the dark when it comes
to basic facts about their options, leading to bad investments and stunted market discipline.
Not all Republicans have toed the line.
Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.) teamed up
with Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon to
propose the Know before You Go Act,
which would require the federal government to collect data on graduation
rates, debt, and post-college earnings
and publish that information for each
program a college offers. Without support from other conservatives, however,
these efforts to empower and protect
consumers will go nowhere.
Some might argue that skin-in-thegame and transparency reforms represent an expansion of federal power.
Conservatives should strenuously disagree. Skin in the game is not an expansion of the federal role, but a way to
ensure that federal investments don’t go
to waste. This sort of arrangement is
standard in other policy areas. In the
food-stamp program, for example, if
local agencies dole out too many benefits in error, states must pay financial
penalties to the federal government.
Since that policy was instituted, foodstamp error rates have plummeted.
Likewise, the federal government is
the only entity that can systematically
track and publish information on postcollege earnings and debt. Some states
have tried admirably, but they can’t
follow graduates across their borders.
Put simply, better consumer information is a public good without which the
market will continue to fail.
Rather than micromanaging colleges
from Washington, these reforms would
compel them to consider taxpayers
and students’ interests as well as their
own. Conservatives should welcome
such a change.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Knowledge
Makes a
Comeback
Schools are rediscovering the need for
a content-based curriculum
BY SOL STERN
BEgAn writing about education 20
years ago, in part because of the disturbing instructional practices I was
seeing at my children’s new York
City elementary school. When my oldest
son was accepted for the kindergarten
class at P.S. 87 (despite living outside the
catchment area) my wife and I celebrated
our good luck. Also known as the William
Tecumseh Sherman School, P.S. 87 was
considered the crown jewel of Man hattan’s Upper West Side by the neighborhood’s liberal parents. It had just been
I
Mr. Stern is a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
named by Parents magazine as one of the
ten best elementary schools—public or
private—in the United States.
P.S. 87 proudly affirmed its progressive educational traditions, but I had no
idea what that would mean for my kids’
education. The first thing I learned was
that the school followed no common
curriculum. Many of the teachers had
been trained at Columbia University’s
Teachers College or the Bank Street
College of Education, where they were
taught that they should “teach the child,
not the text” and that all children were
“natural learners.” Another pedagogical
insight disseminated at these progressive
ed schools was that the classroom teacher
must be a “guide on the side” instead of a
“sage on the stage.”
Thus my son’s third-grade teacher devoted months of classroom time to a unit
on Japanese culture, with the children
building a Japanese garden. When I asked
my son what he had learned in math each
day, he cheerfully answered, “We’re still
building the Japanese garden.” My wife
and I expressed our concern to the teacher
about the apparent lack of math content.
He told us not to worry; in building the
garden with his classmates, my son was
acquiring “real-life math skills.”
nevertheless, we continued to worry,
even more so when our son’s fourth-grade
teacher assigned “real life” math-homework problems, including one in which he
was asked to calculate how many Arawak
Indians Christopher Columbus killed during his conquest of the island of Hispaniola.
As for history, P.S. 87’s children were
taught almost nothing about the American Revolution or the Founding Fathers.
I once asked my son and several of his
friends whether they could tell me anything about the heroic Union commander
their school was named after. They gave
me blank stares. I realized that not only
had the children not been taught anything
about the historic figure who delivered
the final blow against the slaveholders’
empire, but they knew almost nothing
about any aspect of the Civil War. When I
reported this to P.S. 87’s principal, he told
me not to worry. Though he granted that it
was important for children to learn about
the Civil War, it was “more important to
learn how to learn about the Civil War.”
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I was now even more worried about
my kids’ school. This led me to read
E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s first two education
books, Cultural Literacy and The Schools
We Need and Why We Don’t Have
Them. Without ever having stepped into
P.S. 87, Hirsch critiqued the instructional
approach that it and many other schools
across the country were using. His books
convinced me that the adults who worked
in my kids’ school had abandoned common sense in favor of unproven progressive education fads that were causing
harm, and not only to comparatively fortunate students but also, and especially, to
poor minority children.
On the first page of Cultural Literacy, Hirsch summed up the appalling situation in the nation’s schools: The
“unacceptable failure of our schools has
occurred not because our teachers are
inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum
based on faulty education theories.” The
problem was not that progressive educators (like P.S. 87’s principal) favored the
wrong curriculum, but that they stood
for no curriculum at all, rejecting the
idea that there might be a set body of
knowledge that all students should be
expected to master. Citing romantic theories of child development going all the
way back to Rousseau, the progressives
assumed that with just a little help from
teachers, children could acquire their
own knowledge.
The most devastating consequence of
this “anti-curriculum” doctrine was that
it tended to widen rather than narrow
the gap in intellectual capital between
middle-class children and those from
disadvantaged families. “Learning builds
cumulatively on learning,” Hirsch wrote.
“By encouraging an early education that
is free of ‘unnatural’ bookish knowledge
and of ‘inappropriate’ pressure to exert
hard effort, [progressive education] virtually ensures that children from welleducated homes who happen to be primed
with academically relevant background
knowledge, which they bring with them
to school, will learn faster than disadvantaged children who do not bring such
knowledge with them and do not receive it
at school.” Hirsch believed that the struggle he was leading to create a contentrich curriculum for all children was the
“new civil rights frontier.” This was
long before education reformers of the
42
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Left and the Right began using the civilrights analogy.
During the two decades since my children left P.S. 87, I have written about
many of the attempts that have been
made to transform the system by making
schools more competitive and accountable—including vouchers, charter schools,
and curbing the power of teachers’
unions. I ultimately concluded that
although such “market” reforms were
sometimes useful, they were insufficient by themselves to bring about significant overall improvement in student
achievement or to significantly narrow
the racial achievement gap. The market
reforms did not affect the classroom.
Hirsch argued that any reform scheme
must ultimately be judged by whether it
produces better classroom instruction
and a coherent curriculum: “The effort to
develop a standard sequence of core
knowledge is, to put it bluntly, absolutely
essential to effective educational reform
in the United States.”
Hirsch’s warnings about the absence of
a curriculum based on a defined body of
knowledge have been prophetic. While
there have been some gains in American
students’ math scores in the early grades
in recent decades, reading performance
has lagged far behind. Moreover, according to a recent report from the National
Assessment of Educational Progress,
“average reading and mathematics scores
in 2012 for 17-year-olds were not significantly different from scores in the first
assessment year [1971].” Improvements
in the lower grades aren’t significant if
they disappear in high school, or if students entering college or the work force—
the end product of the public-school
system—need remediation in reading and
writing, as many now do. Meanwhile, the
ed schools continue to miseducate future
teachers into believing that reading can be
taught as a set of skills, including phonics,
while ignoring the broad content knowledge that all good readers must acquire.
It’s tempting to speculate about how different this alarming picture of American
student achievement might have looked if
more attention had been paid to Hirsch’s
plea for a content-based curriculum. Until
the unveiling of the Common Core State
Standards in 2010, Hirsch and his supporters had encountered little success in
convincing school districts that the key to
improving student achievement was a
coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum.
Now, with the adoption of the standards,
there is at least an opening to do just that.
There has been much legitimate criticism of the Common Core nationalstandards document that 43 states have
now pledged to implement. But with the
exception of Massachusetts’ 1993 Education Reform Act (which was also heavily
influenced by E. D. Hirsch’s ideas), no
state’s standards have ever explicitly
called for a content-based curriculum. On
that point, the Common Core is a major
improvement.
You wouldn’t know it from the incessant complaints about the standards by
conservatives, but the Common Core
document includes a breakthrough declaration about revolutionizing classroom
instruction that is perfectly consistent
with traditional education principles:
While the Standards make reference to
some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S.
documents, and Shakespeare, they do
not—indeed cannot—enumerate all or
even most of the content that students
should learn. The Standards must
therefore be complemented by a welldeveloped, content-rich curriculum
consistent with the expectations laid
out in this document.
Many of the grade-specific standards in
the Common Core also require students to
engage with specific content and broaden
their historical and cultural literacy. For
example, students in ninth and tenth
grades are asked to “analyze seminal
U.S. documents of historical and literary
significance (e.g., Washington’s Farewell
Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, King’s
‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), including how they address related themes
and concepts.”
These and other passages about content
knowledge in the standards are an acknowledgment by the Common Core writers that the evidence has vindicated E. D.
Hirsch’s critique of progressive education,
along with his call for restoration of a
content-based, grade-by-grade curriculum.
After a quarter century of neglect by the
education establishment, this is a redemptive moment for Hirsch. It’s also an opportunity for my son’s old elementary school,
P.S. 87, to begin teaching a coherent curriculum, including the Civil War.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Teaching
Reform
How classroom instructors took on
the education bureaucracy
BY FREDERICK M. HESS
T
hOSE who fear that the big prob-
lem with America’s schools is
the teachers who work in them
would be heartened by spending
a little time at an Educators 4 Excellence
(E4E) conclave. Sydney Morris and Evan
Stone launched Educators 4 Excellence
in 2010 to push unions and schools to
get serious about recognizing excellence and addressing mediocrity. The
idea of E4E germinated during their
hour-long commute on the 4 train from
New York’s East Village up to their
elementary school in the North Bronx,
when they had plenty of time to share
their frustrations. Says Morris, “In room
402, I could close the door and focus on
my students. In that room, I had lots of
responsibility, autonomy, and control.
Yet beyond those four walls, I had little
say in any decision that affected my students or me as a professional.”
Morris and Stone launched E4E after
learning that, in the United Federation of
Teachers’ 2010 leadership election, 65
percent of the votes were cast by retirees
or non-classroom personnel. Morris marvels, “Classroom teachers were actually
a minority of the folks who voted in
that election!” Together with a dozen
colleagues, Morris and Stone penned a
declaration of beliefs that became the
foundation of E4E. Stone says, “We had
a bunch of teachers from seven or eight
schools, some new and some with a
decade or more of experience, but we all
had the same frustrations: a lack of meaningful feedback, of tools and supports, of
aspirational career pathways. The goal
was to lay out our visions and beliefs and
see if other teachers felt the same way.”
Teaching has long suffered occasional
bouts of enthusiasm for “new unionism,”
Mr. Hess is the director of education-policy studies at
the American Enterprise Institute and the author of
the forthcoming book The Cage-Busting Teacher.
which promises to end industrial-era
conventions in favor of a performanceoriented culture. Such talk has consistently
come up empty because of entrenched
union resistance, adverse conditions, and
a lack of organizational muscle. But we
may be in the midst of a more significant
shift, as a generation of teacher-reformers
seeks to take advantage of changes that
give them a fighting chance.
The teachers’ unions face some daunting challenges. Financial headwinds
have caused decades of persistent spending growth in schooling to give way to
choppier waters, pitting young teachers
against old on issues such as layoffs and
pensions. Successful GOP efforts to narrow the scope of collective bargaining in
states such as Wisconsin and Indiana
have cost unions members and threatened their clout. Reformers fighting to
curtail tenure protections and to get serious about teacher evaluation are visible
across the land. And, for the first time in
memory, these trends have caused the
mighty 3 million–member National Education Association to suffer substantial
membership losses. Unions are struggling to regain their footing and just may
be forced to evolve.
Today’s teacher-reformers may be
fresh-faced, but they’re also passionate,
tech-enabled, and backed by big philanthropy and professional operatives.
They’re fighting for an outsider’s reform agenda with an insider’s credibility
and savvy. E4E’s declaration calls for
the kind of tough-minded reform that
teachers are often thought to oppose. It
calls for a system that uses “an evenhanded performance-based pay structure to reward excellent teachers.” It
calls for eliminating “last in, first out”
layoffs and ensuring that tenure is a “significant professional milestone.” And it
advocates “plac[ing] student achievement first” when making decisions about
schooling or spending.
Stone says that advocating these beliefs
hasn’t been easy. There have been plenty
of petty attacks and cheap shots. “But,”
he says, “we kept growing because we
offered like-minded teachers camaraderie
and a safe space for solutions-oriented
dialogue. It wasn’t one teacher standing
up, but many standing together.” Today,
E4E encompasses more than 15,000
teachers in locales including New York
City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Connecticut,
and Minnesota.
VISITING SCHOLAR IN CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT AND POLICY
The College of Arts and Sciences invites applications for the
Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy. We
seek a highly visible individual who is deeply engaged in
either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative
thinking and policymaking, or both. The Visiting Scholar
will continue an open dialogue on campus featuring the
principles of conservatism. The successful candidate will
receive a senior professorial appointment, without tenure.
The term of the appointment is variable, with a minimum
of one semester. Specific duties include teaching, delivering
public lectures, and organizing events. The compensation
package is competitive. The University of Colorado
Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education
and employment. Materials including a letter of interest
and curriculum vitae or resume can be submitted to
jobsatcu.com or directly to: Professor Ann M. Carlos,
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, 275 UCB,
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0275.
43
Meanwhile, the union diehards may not
be as strong as is commonly assumed.
Teach for America co-CEO Matt Kramer
observes that TFA alumni (who include
both Morris and Stone) have long shown
little interest in pursuing union leadership.
More recently, he says, “we’ve started to
see promising stories of TFA members and
alumni getting involved. . . . When our
people get involved, they see the ways
they can make a difference, they step up,
and we’re seeing changes. The unions
have been held captive by a fringe ele-
majority of teachers and change the direction of their unions. After all, teachers
know better than anyone that they suffer
for the incompetents in their midst. The
journal Education Next reported in 2014
that teachers believe 5 percent of those
teaching in their local school systems deserve an “F” and another 8 percent a “D.”
The independent think tank Education
Sector has found that 75 percent of
teachers want their union to make it simpler to remove ineffective teachers, and
a survey by Scholastic and the Bill and
approved with 56 percent support. That
made it the ‘official policy’ of the UTLA.”
His success provided a model for a
group of Boston Teachers Union members to form a group named BTU Votes
and successfully fight to open up their
union elections.
Stryer says, “Money could have helped,
but it wasn’t necessary. This was all
social media and word of mouth. It really
only takes a few people. We were able to
do this in Los Angeles with a core group
of five!”
Rather than disparage unions or offer insincere laurels to
all teachers, reformers should stand foursquare behind
teachers who are fighting for professional responsibility.
ment. But that’s changing in some places.”
Celine Coggins launched the Bostonbased Teach Plus in 2009 because, she
says, “at the time, when we talked about
performance-based pay or teacher leadership, union leaders could say, ‘Teachers
don’t want that,’ as if teachers were monolithic. And no one could really challenge
or question them when they said that. I
thought it’d make sense to bring teachers
together, especially younger teachers,
and see what they said.”
Drawing on her experience in both the
classroom and the Massachusetts department of education, Coggins says, “When
teachers think about unions and city councils, most of them think those are a waste
of time and that it’s all just talk. Connecting the dots helps them get over that.”
Teach Plus has put forward teacherinspired plans for merit pay, performancebased evaluation, and tenure reform that
have influenced policy in a number of
cities and states. Today, there are more
than 17,000 Teach Plus members in cities
such as Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago,
Memphis, D.C., and Indianapolis.
E4E and Teach Plus aren’t alone. Other
ventures include New Orleans–based
Leading Educators, Chicago-based VIVA
Teachers, Gates Foundation–sponsored
ECET2, and the reinvigorated National
Network of State Teachers of the Year.
Much of this activity has been turbocharged by a generation of energetic TFA
corps members.
It can be easier than onlookers expect
for these reformers to win over the silent
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Melinda Gates Foundation found that
89 percent believe tenure should reflect
teacher effectiveness.
Mike Stryer started teaching highschool social studies in Los Angeles after
nearly two decades in international
business. Elected a building representative to the United Teachers of Los
Angeles (UTLA), Stryer walked into
his first union meeting and noted that
the topic of discussion was not L.A.’s
“35 percent dropout rate” but “the condition of Bolivian tin miners.” He says,
“It made me realize why a lot of teachers
are completely turned off by the union.
It didn’t represent classroom realities,
the needs of teachers, or the needs of
students.”
In response, Stryer helped launch
NewTLA. Stryer and his allies elected
75 teachers to the 300-member UTLA
assembly. Stryer laughs, “I was called
everything under the sun. Folks were
saying, ‘You have a hidden agenda, you’re
a privatizer.’ Just the other week, I was
called a ‘Kool-Aid-drinking Nazi propagandist.’” The same group then pushed
the UTLA to fight for teacher evaluations that would be based in part on student achievement.
Anticipating a fight, Stryer “studied
the contract and the bylaws. It turns out
we could bypass the leadership and take
a referendum directly to the members if
we got 500 members to sign a petition.
The result couldn’t be overturned. Few
people even knew you could do that. But
we gathered the signatures and got it
It’s easy for politicians and reformers
to paint with too broad a brush. When it
comes to teachers and unions, the usual
formulation has been, “Teachers’ unions
are awful, but we love our teachers.”
This line has proven as ineffective as it
is incoherent. For one thing, as Stanford University political scientist Terry
Moe has shown, teachers’ unions generally reflect the preferences of their
members. For another, attacks on tenure make clear that reformers think there
are plenty of teachers who don’t deserve to be loved.
At a time when tens of thousands of
reform-minded teachers have organized
a vanguard, reformers would do well to
paint teachers and unions with a finer
brush. Rather than disparage unions or
offer insincere laurels to all teachers,
reformers should stand foursquare behind teachers who are fighting for professional responsibility.
Twenty-first-century school reform,
from Bush’s No Child Left Behind to
Obama’s Race to the Top, has suffered
for its fascination with grand national
solutions. Efforts by today’s teachers
reveal a more Tocquevillian impulse.
Theirs is the activism of shopkeepers
stripping off their aprons and working to
set things right. Such an effort is altogether admirable. These teachers bring
to the reform cause not only hard-won
credibility, but also a practical appreciation of consequences and daily realities
that can elude impassioned advocates
who talk while others do.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Making a
Living with the
Humanities
You don’t have to major in finance
BY JOHN J. MILLER
S
HOrTLY after giving his State of
the Union address this year,
President Obama traveled to a
General Electric factory in
Wisconsin to praise federal job-training
programs. “I promise you,” he said,
“folks can make a lot more potentially
with skilled manufacturing than they
might with an art-history degree.” right
away, he sensed his blunder: He had
trash-talked an entire academic field.
“Nothing wrong with an art-history degree!” he quickly added. “I love art history!” A few days later, he backtracked
further, sending a note to an art-history
professor in Texas. Obama apologized for
a “glib remark” and said that an appreciation for art history “has helped me take
in a great deal of joy in my life that I
might otherwise have missed.”
Yet he didn’t disavow his putdown
completely. That would have required
him to claim that taking a lot of art-history
courses leads straight to a prosperous
career. And as everybody knows, there
really is something wrong with an arthistory degree: College students who
major in this area or in any of the other
soft fields of the humanities have doomed
themselves to part-time jobs at coffee
shops where they serve caramel macchiatos to the people who were wise
enough to study something more practical, such as business or finance. At
least that’s the presumption.
As the cost of college continues to rise,
the humanities have gone on the defensive. Parents and students increasingly
worry about the “return on investment”
they’ll receive from tuition payments that
can soar into six figures. In this environment, courses on medieval poetry and
colonial America begin to look like luxury
goods. Although the odds that students
will major in one of the humanities has
held steady in recent years, some schools
have seen sharp declines. Harvard, for
instance, says that its humanities concentrations dropped by about 20 percent
between 2003 and 2012—and last year,
it produced a 53-page report that puzzled over the reasons why. Yet it isn’t
much of a mystery, right? To borrow the
president’s phrase, “folks can make a lot
more” if they don’t waste their time
reading the Iliad, learning about the
Northwest Ordinance, or gazing at the
paintings of the Dutch masters.
The reality is in fact a bit more complicated. To a large extent, smart people who
work hard will flourish, no matter what
they study in college—and for many, the
humanities are a perfectly sensible choice.
Earlier this year, the Association of
American Colleges and Universities
published a report on how students who
major in different subjects fare over the
course of their careers, based on census
data. One of its chief findings was clear
Truth Matters
“Consider your origins: you were
not made to live as brutes, but to
follow virtue and knowledge.”
thomasaquinas.edu
s
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Thomas Aquinas College
Thoma
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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45
and predictable: Engineering students do
really well. Upon receiving their undergraduate degrees, they can expect to earn
more than $40,000 per year. Median
salaries double after about a decade and
peak at just above $100,000, when engineers are in their 50s. No other large category of college graduates ever catches up,
though students who major in math and
the hard sciences put on a good show, with
much of their success fueled by those who
have a long-term focus on the whole
career. Majoring in the arts and humanities can be a practical option.”
Bosses may not care if their employees
can identify a poem’s iambic pentameter
or discuss the causes of the Embargo Act
of 1807, but they value people with a
broad range of skills. A 2013 survey by
Hart Research Associates found that 93
percent of employers believe that among
job applicants, the “capacity to think
The School of Athens, by Raphael
reap the benefits of advanced degrees.
They are the clear runners-up in the race
for lifelong earnings.
The surprise of the AACU study was a
comparison involving everybody else:
college graduates who major in the humanities and the social sciences and
those who major in a more professional
field. In other words, it pitted the English
and history crowd against the business
and health-science gang.
Directly out of college, the preprofessionals earn a bit more money at
their first full-time jobs, roughly $31,000
compared with $26,000 for the others. As
time passes, however, this gap closes.
When the people in these two groups
reach their 40s, their earnings are indistinguishable. In the final stages of their
careers, around the age of 60, the ones
with degrees in the humanities and the
social sciences enjoy slightly higher incomes, $66,000 compared with $64,000.
“We need to shift the conversation,”
says John Churchill, president of Phi Beta
Kappa, the national honor society. “Too
many parents and students have a shortterm focus on how much money people
make at their first job. Instead, they should
46
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critically, communicate clearly, and solve
complex problems is more important
than their undergraduate major.”
As it turns out, students who major in
traditional academic disciplines are much
better at developing these traits. In 2011,
Richard Arum of New York University
and Josipa Roksa of the University of
Virginia published Academically Adrift, a
devastating indictment of higher education. Their data-driven book showed that
large numbers of undergraduates don’t
learn much, in part because so many
courses demand little in the way of reading and writing. The typical college student, for example, studies only 12 to 14
hours per week. This means that for many
students, a supposedly full-time education is really just a part-time occupation.
Buried in their book, however, is a fascinating detail. After examining scores
on the Collegiate Learning Assessment,
a standardized test that seeks to measure problem-solving abilities, Arum
and Roksa discovered that students who
major in one of the old-fashioned liberal
arts—everything from the hard sciences
to the humanities—make big gains as
thinkers and writers. The pattern holds
true across the disciplines, from chemistry to classics. Students who major in
business, communication, and education,
by contrast, see substantially less improvement. “We think it’s partly a function of academic rigor—standards are
generally higher in the arts-and-science
core,” says Arum. Each semester, these
students read and write more than their
peers. Their term papers on Thucydides
may not have a direct bearing on what
they’ll do later on at work, but
these exercises nevertheless
force them to investigate, interpret, and convey complex information. “There’s so much
churn in the labor market these
days, students often are best
served by developing general
competencies,” says Roksa.
“We need to think about longterm thriving.”
Income can vary quite a bit
within each field of study, too.
“There’s always a distribution of
salaries,” says Anthony P.
Carnevale of Georgetown University. His research shows that
although engineering is a lucrative profession whose average
performers do well, about a quarter of all
people who major in one of the humanities will earn nearly as much as and in
many cases more than the ordinary engineer. Carnevale’s advice for humanities
majors is to imitate the children of Lake
Wobegon, who are all above average:
“Plan to be at the 75th percentile,” he says.
The top quarter of art-history majors—
i.e., those at the 75th percentile and
above—bring home $70,000 or more per
year, and the typical art-history major
earns about $50,000, according to Carnevale’s data. That’s a lot less than petroleum engineers, but it’s still enough to
live away from mom and dad’s basement:
These numbers are similar to what people
who major in hospitality management
can expect, to pick a job-oriented degree
that probably looks a lot more practical
on a résumé.
The humanities teach many things,
including the important lesson that money
isn’t everything. It follows that turning
careers and earnings into a scoreboard of
life is a gross mistake. At the same time,
we all have bills to pay—and folks who
major in art history or any of the other
humanities appear to do just fine.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
lileks--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/1/2014 1:26 PM Page 47
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Java Jive
FAdEd sign on a hotel wall in Fargo, n.d.:
“Just a cup of coffee to you, but a reputation
to us.” I always appreciated the fear in the
sentiment. They knew they were one weak
ration of jake away from losing a customer for good.
Although sometimes people think coffee has a bad reputation for serious, moral reasons. Here’s a headline from
the New York Times’ new “Op-Talk” online section: “If
you read this, you may never drink a latte again.”
You know where it’s going, don’t you? Of course. let’s
guess:
1. Coffee is bad, because most of it is grown in countries with poor human-rights records that were given aid
by Reagan, so the Gipper’s sharp teeth gleam in the
flickering light of hell every time you brew a cup. Boo.
But coffee is also a sign of one’s exquisite taste, if it’s
artisanal, expensive, locally roasted one bean at a time,
and conjured up by aloof young men with preposterous
mustaches who fuss over a cold-press ration, hand over
the cup as if they’d just made a Fabergé egg, then ban the
customer for adding too much milk.
no progressive wants to feel bad about his coffee. So he
buys fair-trade shade-grown coffee hand-picked by indigenous peoples who send the beans north in the only possible
ethical method: secreted in the digestive tracts of children
who cross the border for a better life. You’re actually surprised when the bag of Ethical Coffee doesn’t have a picture of the kid on the back, along with the date of the
immigration-status appointment he didn’t keep.
2. So coffee can be good. Whew. But then there’s the
milky part of the latte. It comes from cows, who have been
subjugated by man into a role they never chose. In a just
world cows would be free, and would wander over when
they were in a giving mood and have a mutually beneficial,
non-exploitive relationship with the milker. But factory
dairies force cows to lactate on schedule, hooked up to
cold machinery; really, the cartons with the pictures of perfect farms should have ARBEIT MACHT FREI on a sign over
the barn door.
There’s the issue of bovine growth hormones, which
might combine with vaccines and household-cleaning
chemicals and sippy-cup plastics to produce autism. Could
happen! My friend accidentally gave her cat milk that had
bovine growth hormone and now the cat just walks around
doing what it wants and doesn’t seem concerned at all with
how her owner is feeling.
So lattes might be a problem. Having lined up the straw
men and opened up the flamethrower nozzle, let’s see what
the article really says.
A
To some, drinking [a latte] makes you a snob. To others, it
makes you a spendthrift. But neither of these perceptions may
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
be particularly accurate — and in fact, the latte can tell us a lot
about how America thinks about food, work, and money.
Ah! Of course! It’s about class. The Right may think
lattes are for foppish men who can’t take their jake straight
the way God and John Wayne intended, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s always more complicated than that.
The notion that lattes are a sign of privilege may be offbase. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and
gender and women’s studies who’s a former food journalist
and the author of “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in
the 19th Century,” told Op-Talk that “the latte, while it
may be attached on a certain level to too much upper-class
food knowledge and pretension, it really is no longer an
upper-class drink. . . . It’s important to think about the
explosion of all of these industrialized lattes, all these
frozen lattes, all the Frappuccinos, as links to a larger
problem of creating cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition
food for working-class people.”
You think you’re doing well because you can afford
the latte. But it’s a lie. The lattes, which are frozen, are
links. The links indicate the larger problem. The larger
problem results from the industrialized lattes. Which are
ExplOdInG.
For Ms. Tompkins, the way we talk about lattes — as signifier of wealth when they’re not, as bank-breaking indulgence when they may not be — is a symptom of something
larger.
Well, no one ever got tenure saying that sometimes a latte
is just a latte. But linger for a moment over that wonderful
phrase: the way we talk about lattes. We have reached a point
in human civilization at which it is not enough to write about
the fact that people talk about a milky coffee beverage. Our
attention must be brought to the way they talk about it.
“The latte as a symbol has sort of disengaged itself from
the actual use and the consumption of the latte as commodity,” she said. “How does the symbolism of a thing
get dislodged from the ways in which it’s actually used
and actually consumed?”
I don’t know. With a penknife? Rocking it back and
forth until it pops out? Maybe I should go get one and consume it with no more thought than the pleasure of the drink
itself, shorn of its meaning and context and class signifiers.
I’ll just regard it as a cup of coffee. Is that nihilism or anarchism or an individual journey to seek the platonic ideal?
Hard to tell, but it has to mean something, so you can judge
the reasons for my latte consumption.
It’s just a cup of coffee to me, but it’s my reputation to
you.
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longview--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/30/2014 11:15 PM Page 48
The Long View
Wilson & Sterling
A professional corporation
IN RE: CLINTON/CLINTON
CONTINUATION-OF-MARRIAGE
AGREEMENT 2000, AND ADDENDA, UPDATED OCTOBER 2014
Dear Steve:
Many thanks for your phone call yesterday. I received your e-mail proposal
this morning and have discussed it with
my client, Secretary Clinton.
As you know, my client, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton,
treasures the relationship and loving
marriage she shares with your client,
former president Bill Clinton. She
wishes for me to convey to you, and
through you to her husband, whom she
loves and with whom she enjoys a
mutually loving and beneficial marriage, congratulations and best wishes
on his becoming a grandfather. She
wishes for me to convey to you, and
through you to her husband, many
thanks for the humorous “Gramma
Don’t Take No Crap!” apron that our
office recently received from your
office as a gift from the president.
Your proposal strikes us as useful
and constructive and well within the
guidelines of the most recent amended
agreement of the MASTER AGREEMENT, CONTINUATION OF
CLINTON/CLINTON MARRIAGE
2000–20xx, 26,976 pages, AMENDMENT XXIX with special reference to
the GRANDPARENTS AND MEDIA
AVAILABILITY section.
What we propose is a series of
“casual” and “impromptu” photo opportunities, to be orchestrated over an
upcoming weekend in the Chappaqua
residence, in which your client and
mine can interact meaningfully on camera with their new infant grandchild.
Please let us know at your earliest
convenience when your client is available for this 48-hour photo session. He
will be required to bring along several
changes of clothes, reflecting the various seasonal “scenarios” we will try to
48
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capture to make this an efficient and
stress-free session.
With best wishes,
Greg
[dictated but not read]
Wilmer, Patton
IN RE: CLINTON/CLINTON
CONTINUATION-OF-MARRIAGE
AGREEMENT 2000, AND ADDENDA, UPDATED OCTOBER 2014
Dear Greg:
Many thanks for your letter. I have
a call in to you from last week, but
wanted to jot down some thoughts to
clarify issues before we speak.
As you know, my client, former president Bill Clinton, remains a devoted
and loving husband to your client,
former secretary of state Hillary
Clinton. (I notice that you used the
“Hillary Rodham Clinton” formulation in your letter to me. Is this a
new choice? Please recall that all
forms of address were carefully
negotiated—and revisited—in the
original document CLINTON/
CLINTON CONTINUATION-OFMARRIAGE AGREEMENT, both the
1998 Basic Draft and the subsequent
Addenda—the “Senator” and “Madam
Secretary” codicils.)
While my client reiterates his deep
love and total commitment to his long
and lasting marriage, it is also prudent
to note that a 48-hour period of togetherness in the Chappaqua home—even
one as focused and on-point as a photo
session with the newly born infant
grandchild—will be trying and stressful. Your client, it must be said, has no
heart- and/or stress-related health
issues. My client, sadly, does. And we
cannot afford another Thanksgiving
2011 incident.
What we are suggesting—and please
bear in mind that this photo opportunity
was the original idea of my client,
something he is under no obligation to
do, something that inures 100 percent to
your client—is that my client be
allowed, for the duration of the twonight photo session, to invite a guest (or
guests) into his private bedroom suite as
BY ROB LONG
a “stress reliever” and a “relaxation aid”
as he makes himself available for various photographic scenarios, both
seasonal and holiday, in the appropriate wardrobe, with the new infant
grandchild, while gazing devotedly at
your client.
Please respond in writing as soon as
convenient with your thoughts on this
matter as scheduling is a concern.
With best wishes,
Steve
Schulte & Moore
IN RE: CHARLOTTE CLINTON
MEZVINSKY
Dear Greg and Steve:
In the interests of efficiency, I’m
writing to both of you to inform you
that as of this morning, the infant
daughter of Chelsea Clinton and Marc
Mezvinsky has retained the firm of
Schulte & Moore as legal and business
representatives.
I will be personally representing
Charlotte in all areas, including (but not
limited to) her interactions with your
clients.
I understand that both of your
clients are interested in arranging a
48-hour “photo op” session in which
to capture images of a happy and loving family doting sweetly on the new
infant. I certainly don’t want to stand
in the way of that.
And yet, as the baby’s legal and
financial representative, I am compelled to ask you both to explain how,
exactly, my client benefits from such a
transaction. In what way is my client to
be compensated for her time and efforts
contributing to what will surely be
image-burnishing photographs, fundraising Twitpics, and other “good feeling” material?
Please supply my office with your
itemized proposals at your earliest convenience. We all look forward to a long
and fruitful grandparent–grandchild
relationship.
All the best,
Douglas
OCTOBER 20, 2014
books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/1/2014 1:09 PM Page 49
Books, Arts & Manners
A Sad
Reversal
DAVID PRYCE-JONES
Making David into Goliath: How the World
Turned against Israel, by Joshua Muravchik
(Encounter, 296 pp., $25.99)
I
srael does what it has to do in
order to survive on the battlefield
and off it. The international order is
sometimes upset. There are some
who think it only right and proper that a
small country should defend itself in the
face of implacable neighbors, but quite a
swath of public opinion conjures up hostile analogies to Nazi Germany. In the
1930s, Nazis boycotted Jews, and today,
liberals boycott Jews. Prominent figures
such as former president Jimmy Carter
and archbishop Desmond Tutu accuse
Israel of racism as though it were a pariah
nation comparable to apartheid south
africa. In the streets of the great cities of
europe, demonstrators have waved placards proclaiming, “Hitler was right” and
“Jews to the ovens.” Making David into
Goliath is a discussion of the politics and
personalities responsible for completely
misrepresenting Israeli and Jewish reality.
Written with only the lightest touch of
polemics, this book is instructive and of
course could hardly be more timely.
Take the recent fighting in Gaza.
Hamas, the Gaza branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, hoped to kill as many
Israelis as possible by firing missiles
indiscriminately at them. anticipating
Israeli countermeasures, Hamas compelled the inhabitants of Gaza at gunpoint
to stay put as human shields in premises—some right next to mosques and a
hospital—where they had sited their
launch pads. sure enough, some of these
unfortunates were killed in air raids.
Making sure to publish grim photographs
of dead civilians, Hamas accused Israel
of “disproportionate bombing” and “war
crimes,” the very actions for which they
themselves ought to have been brought
to account. Deliberate inversion of the
truth brings together Muslim extremists
and secular european freethinkers whose
sole belief in common is that Jews will
always do their worst.
a fellow at the Johns Hopkins school
of advanced International studies,
Joshua Muravchik traced in a previous
book, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and
Fall of Socialism (2002), the wreckage
that socialism strewed in its wake.
Today’s misrepresentation of Jews and
Israel, as he presents it, is a socialist hangover. The core doctrine of the left used
to be that equality and progress depended
on class struggle. egalitarian in its early
years, Israel was widely praised for practicing traditional european socialism.
The left also approved of Zionism as the
national-liberation movement of Jews
determined to survive as an independent
nation in spite of Hitler and the Holocaust. even stalin at first agreed to Israeli
statehood.
With the Cold War under way, the
soviet policy of subsidizing and arming
the militarized regimes coming to power
in egypt, syria, and Iraq necessarily
meant abandoning Israel. In the run-up
to the six-Day War of June 1967, these
client arab regimes threatened to
exterminate Israel. People everywhere
agonized that another Holocaust was
imminent. Israeli politicians and generals were known to have had breakdowns
under the stress. The crisis ended unexpectedly with Israel occupying the West
Bank and the Gaza strip, the territories
that ever since have been an insoluble
problem. To cover the setback, within 24
hours the soviet media and apologists in
the West were already mythologizing
Israel as Nazi Germany and Moshe
Dayan, then defense minister, as another
Hitler. To quote Muravchik, the perception of hitherto potential victims of geno-
cide had been instantly transformed
from that of “pioneers” into that of “colonizers,” perpetrators of aggression, fascists, and imperialists.
alone or in combination with other
arabs, Palestinians have gone to war
with Israel whenever they have been
able to and no doubt will do so again,
next time perhaps with Iranian help. Of
course they would prefer to win, but the
balance of power is against it. Under
the leadership of Yasser arafat, Palestinians pursued tactics that baffled
Israel and the United states. a master
of deception, arafat calculated very
exactly the degree of terrorism that
would incline Western politicians and
diplomats to appease him. Frisked at
airports, threatened by dramatic hijackings, intimidated by the murder of
Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic
Games, fearful that the oil embargo
after the so-called Yom Kippur War of
1973 might give the arab producers the
whip hand over economies, people began
to wonder whether Israel consciously or
unconsciously was making them pay too
high a price for its existence.
More than that, arafat made a virtue
of terrorism. His Palestine liberation
Organization was only one among other
similar movements taking power in the
countries of asia and africa. Israelis
might pretend to have a national-liberation
movement, but to Palestinians they
were definitely Western colonizers and
imperialists. ethnicity in this view was
class struggle at a national level. Violence
in getting rid of Western influence should
be understood as liberating, and genuine progressives everywhere ought to
support it.
Invited to address the General assembly of the United Nations, arafat
appeared in khaki fatigues and was
obliged to leave at the doorway his
revolver, but not its holster. The promises he then gave of peace with Israel
blended with threats. “The difference
between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which he
fights,” he said. “Whoever stands by a
just cause . . . cannot possibly be called
a terrorist.” Having given him a standing ovation for this, the General assembly voted the notorious resolution that
49
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Zionism is racism. What it had come to
was that the newly independent Asian
and African countries had a forum where
they outnumbered the democracies,
exploited the intellectual climate that
favored them, and institutionalized the
misrepresentation of Israel. According to
Muravchik, three-quarters of the General Assembly resolutions criticizing a
particular country apply exclusively to
Israel; and the right word for this is
“demonization.”
elist Howard Jacobson. Psychologists
will have to explain this mystifying
phenomenon.
A chapter is devoted to the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American
professor at Columbia University, and
himself another special case. Published
in 1978, his passionate tract Orientalism
put in intellectual form the Third World
grievance that the West is exploitative
and oppressive. According to Said, everyone in contact with the world of Islam
Gathering force, the campaign to
delegitimize Israel is a call to arms, a
danger bound to be tested on more
battlefields.
Westerners offer parallel misrepresentations of Israel. After the 1967 war,
General de Gaulle described Jews as “an
elite people, self-assured and domineering,” which must have been a surprise
to Auschwitz survivors or the million
refugees from Arab countries. De Gaulle
probably thought that French interests
lay with the Arabs. Bruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983, was
another foremost leader (in Muravchik’s
words) “undoing Europe’s sympathy for
Israel and its people.” His case is complicated. Jewish, he seems to have felt
that he had to excuse himself to fellow
Austrians. On the one hand, he defended
and promoted former Nazis, and on
the other, he waged a highly personal
and unseemly campaign against Simon
Wiesenthal, celebrated for his role in
helping bring Adolf Eichmann to trial
for arranging the logistics of the Holocaust. Muravchik quotes from Kreisky’s
memoirs a passage stating that what was
happening in Israel was “abominable
and repugnant.” Criticism is one thing,
but the masochistic torment that some
Jews and Israelis, mostly academics
and journalists, inflict upon themselves
is something quite else. Muravchik
holds up for scrutiny some of the better
known—for instance, Noam Chomsky,
Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch,
Norman Finkelstein, and Richard Falk
on the United Nations Human Rights
Council. Whether out of fear, guilt, a
misplaced inferiority complex, or the
longing to be notorious, they are “proud
to be ashamed,” in the phrase of the nov50
|
was an imperialist, consciously or unconsciously advancing Western interests at the expense of Muslims. Even
scholars and travelers were in this
unacknowledged conspiracy to obtain
power. Professional Orientalists have
been busily demolishing Said’s argument, pointing out its inconsistencies,
contradictions, and plain historical mistakes. Nevertheless, Said’s intention
was to fit Israel into the wider context of
colonization, in effect denying that its
existence has anything to do with a
movement of national liberation, and
insisting that the country rightfully
belongs to the PLO.
Does it matter that the misrepresentation of Israel has been carried to such
lengths and fed by so many sources?
Authoritative Muslim voices like to assert
that Jews are not part of the Holy Land’s
history. Ancient Jewish archaeological
remains, Hebrew inscriptions, and the
Bible are treated as evidence of nothing.
Muslim clerics preach that the Temple in
Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall are monuments of Islam. Palestinian spokesmen
claim that the land’s inhabitants in those
early times were proto-Arabs, although
the real Arabs broke out of the desert
many centuries later. Some go so far as to
say that Jews aren’t really Jews at all but
descendents of pigs and apes.
Gathering force, the campaign to delegitimize Israel is a call to arms, a danger
bound to be tested on more battlefields.
If things were ordered rationally, Making
David into Goliath would stop that campaign dead in its tracks.
Good Old
Days
TERRY TEACHOUT
The Days Trilogy: Expanded Edition, by H. L.
Mencken, edited by Marion Elizabeth
Rodgers (Library of America, 750 pp., $35)
I
1936, H. L. Mencken was as low
as an ebullient pessimist can be.
Sara, the beloved wife of his middle age, had died a hard death the
previous year. Franklin Roosevelt, his
detested arch-enemy, beat Alf Landon by
a landslide in November, a pulverizing triumph that Mencken failed to foresee. He
had quit The American Mercury, the magazine that he co-founded with George Jean
Nathan in 1924 and that helped to make
him, in Walter Lippmann’s oft-quoted
words, “the most powerful personal
influence on this whole generation of educated people,” and now that most of those
same people were embracing FDR’s biggovernment liberalism, his influence had
waned to the point of invisibility.
It was time for a sea change, and
Katharine White supplied it when she
invited him to try his hand at writing for
The New Yorker. He responded by sending
her a reminiscence of his Baltimore childhood called “Ordeal of a Philosopher.” “It
is really not a short story, but what it is I
don’t know,” he told her. “I had a lot of fun
writing it, and so I am passing it on.” She
liked it, as did editor Harold Ross, who
had a particular fondness for the recollections of famous writers with a sense of
humor—Clarence Day’s Life with Father
and James Thurber’s My Life and Hard
Times first saw print in the pages of his
N
Mr. Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street
Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the
winner of one of this year’s Bradley Prizes. His books
include The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
urbane weekly—and Mencken, knowing
a good thing when he saw one, obligingly
kept the copy flowing.
Soon he had published enough New
Yorker pieces about “the odd and amusing
place” that was the Baltimore of his late19th-century youth to fill a book, and
when Happy Days came out in 1939, it
promptly found its way onto the bestseller
list. The Times Literary Supplement went
so far as to compare Happy Days to
Huckleberry Finn, Mencken’s favorite
American novel, while The Atlantic called
it “a book to be read twice a year by
young and old, as long as life lasts.” Two
more volumes of reminiscential essays,
Newspaper Days and Heathen Days, followed in due course. By the time they
came out, the sour curmudgeon who hated
FDR had been transformed in the public
eye into a charming old codger with a
knack for telling tall but fabulously wellwritten tales.
Mencken’s Days books are no longer
widely read, but those who know his work
more than casually are in universal agreement that they rank among his greatest
literary achievements. So it is wholly
appropriate that they have now been reissued in a single omnibus volume by the
Library of America, superlatively edited
by Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth
Rodgers and accompanied by a 200-page
appendix of hitherto-unpublished notes on
the text that he left to Baltimore’s Enoch
Pratt Free Library with the stipulation that
they not be opened until 1981. In so doing,
Mencken furnished scholars with a treasure house of factual information about
the Days books, all three of which contain
a fair number of what he called (borrowing from Mark Twain) “stretchers.” While
it’s grand to have these notes in print
at last, the point of The Days Trilogy:
Expanded Edition is, it should be needless to say, the books themselves. If you
already know them, they’re as good as you
remember, and if you don’t, you’re in for
the most resplendently satisfying of treats.
Mencken never wrote anything better, or
more likely to last.
Why, then, are the Days books largely
unknown save to specialists? One obvious
reason is that Mencken, being the most
politically incorrect of writers, is not
taught in the academy, meaning that you
have to find out about him on your own.
Another, which is doubtless as much of an
impediment to the postmodern recognition of his literary virtues, is that unlike
your average Daddy-beat-me-black-andblue memoirist, he genuinely enjoyed
his childhood and youth and wrote about
them with the lip-smacking delight of a
man who was as far from alienated (that
came later) as a human being can be.
Here, by way of example—though one
could open The Days Trilogy almost at
random and find an equally stylish case in
point—is how he describes the commencement of his journalistic career in the
opening paragraph of Newspaper Days:
My father died on Friday, January 13,
1899, and was buried on the ensuing
Sunday. On the Monday evening immediately following, having shaved with
care and put on my best suit of clothes, I
presented myself in the city-room of the
old Baltimore Morning Herald, and
applied to Max Ways, the city editor, for
a job on his staff. I was eighteen years,
four months and four days old, wore my
hair longish and parted in the middle,
had on a high stiff collar and an Ascot
cravat, and weighed something on the
minus side of 120 pounds.
How could anyone in his right mind
not keep on reading?
To read further in the Days books is to
encounter countless other reasons why
you’re not likely to run across them in
English 101. They are at all times cheerfully cynical about matters that Americans are now accustomed to discussing
with the longest of faces, such as the proclivity of newspapermen to make stuff up
(the chapter of Newspaper Days called
“The Synthesis of News” ought to be
required reading in every journalism
school) or of politicians to take the odd
bribe. In Mencken’s turn-of-the-century
world, blacks were figures of fun, prostitution a fact of life, and capital punishment no big deal, and he writes about such
matters without ever making ritual obeisance to our wooden god of anachronistic
outrage. Those who make a practice of
striking attitudes of virtue whenever anybody talks matter-of-factly about the way
we were would do better to stick to the
op-ed page of the New York Times.
If, on the other hand, you don’t find it
shocking to read about the bad old days,
you’ll find that every page of the Days
books crackles with the smile-making juxtapositions of highfalutin language and
pure Americanese that were Mencken’s
trademark. You’ll also learn a lot about
what we’re now pleased to call social history, and you’ll learn it painlessly. How
were oysters consumed in the Baltimore
of the Eighties? Consult the fourth chapter of Happy Days and marvel:
Fried, they were fit only to be devoured at
church oyster-suppers, or gobbled in
oyster-bays by drunks wandering home
from scenes of revelry. The more celebrated oyster-houses of Baltimore—for
example, Kelly’s in Eutaw street—were
patronized largely by such lamentable
characters. It was their playful custom to
challenge foolish-looking strangers to
wash down a dozen raw Chincoteagues
with half a tumbler of Maryland rye: the
town belief was that this combination was
so deleterious as to be equal to the kick of
a mule. If the stranger survived, they tried
to inveigle him into eating another dozen
with sugar sprinkled on them: this dose
was supposed to be almost certainly fatal.
Being a journalist, I like Newspaper
Days best. Nowhere has the experience of
seeing your words in print for the first
time been better described: “I was up with
the milkman the next morning to search
the paper, and when I found both of my
pieces, exactly as written, there ran such
thrills through my system as a barrel of
brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity
could not have matched.” But all three
volumes of the Days books are jammed
full of like nuggets, and to start quoting
them is to find it exceedingly hard to stop.
Contrary to popular belief, Mencken
was not a conservative, or even a fullblooded libertarian: He fits no known
ideological pigeonhole. But in one respect
he was perfectly described by Michael
Oakeshott, who probably never read a
word of his but nonetheless hit the bull’seye when he observed that conservatives
have “a propensity to use and to enjoy
what is available rather than to wish for or
to look for something else; to delight in
what is present rather than what was or
what may be.” H. L. Mencken was among
the most furious of complainers when it
came to matters cultural and political, but
in his daily life he had an enviable capacity for enjoying things as they are. The
fancy word for this capacity is “gusto,”
and Mencken had it in spades: He liked a
good chat, a good meal, a good glass of
beer, and a good night’s sleep, and he
understood that in such simple pleasures
lies much, perhaps most of the point of
life. It is that gusto which irradiates the
Days books, and anyone who can read
them without feeling a reciprocal echo of
his joie de vivre is a blue-nosed prig.
51
A Leviathan
That Works
PAT R I C K B R E N N A N
Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal
Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!)
Government, by John J. DiIulio Jr.
(Templeton, 186 pp., $12.95)
T
HERE aren’t enough bureaucrats
in Washington. That’s the argument of John J. DiIulio Jr., a
political scientist and former
Bush-administration official. Before you
laugh: President Eisenhower’s federal
government spent, in inflation-adjusted
dollars, about $600 billion a year, while
directly employing around 2 million civilian workers. President Obama’s federal
government spends about $3.5 trillion a
year, and directly employs . . . around 2
million civilian workers.
DiIulio argues that this is partly the explanation for, and suggests the solution
to, the complete dysfunction of American
governance. When you combine federal
spending with that of state and local
governments, the U.S. spends about
the same share of the economy on government as wealthy European social
democracies do—40 to 50 percent of
GDP—and gets a lot less for its money.
This is partly because Americans like it
that way. They don’t like financing or
employing big government, but they
do like cashing its checks, getting its
health care, and taking its tax preferences. This has entailed debt financing
of our entitlements on a scale not seen in
other countries, and, more important,
massive outsourcing of nearly every
federal-government function, from food
stamps to Superfund cleanup.
It has also meant bizarre allocations of
responsibility: The federal government
52
|
spends huge amounts of money every
year in grants and tax expenditures on
the nonprofit sector without considering what it really gets in return. State and
local governments act essentially as vassals of Washington, relying on federal aid
and hamstrung by federal mandates.
DiIulio describes this dysfunctional
settlement as “Leviathan by Proxy.” (He
once refers to it, more zestily, as “Big
Government in drag,” but the author
being the first head of the White House’s
faith-based-initiatives office, “Leviathan
by Proxy” is the term he sticks with.)
He nicely describes some of its incredible imbalances: Ninety percent of Department of Energy dollars are spent on
contractors. The Department of Defense employs nearly as many contract
workers as it does civil servants. The
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, which disburses more than
$500 billion a year in claims, has just
5,000 employees, as many as Harvard
University, which has a $4 billion budget. Conservatives may not thrill to
the idea of hiring more people for the
agency that’s implementing Obamacare, but DiIulio also cites some problems that might sound more familiar
and urgent to those on the right.
Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Medicaid are quintessential parts of Leviathan
by Proxy: Beneficiaries get nominally
private services, while taxpayers bear all
the inefficiencies and perverse incentives
of government programs. Both make
tens of billions of dollars in improper
payments every year, partly because
there are limited resources in the healthcare bureaucracy to stop them, or even to
measure them.
Remember the EPA official who called
for “crucifying” particular violators of
environmental regulations, making them
into examples? DiIulio doesn’t mention
the case, but he traces that attitude, a zeal
in making an example of violators, to
underfunding of the EPA bureaucracy:
As the agency’s responsibilities have
grown, the ranks of its employees have
shrunk. There are 16,000 legal pesticides
in America, for instance, and just 20 EPA
managers to oversee them. The agency’s
confrontational and legal-battle-based
approach to regulation differs from that
of European environmental regulators,
who enforce rules uniformly and invite
business groups to consult on them. The
EPA, with so few inspectors and regula-
tors, instead relies a lot on outside nonprofits’ bringing suits and on extracting
penalties from environmental scofflaws,
a practice known as “sue and settle,” that
is a scourge of corporations and freemarketeers everywhere. It does seem
that nonprofits and courts are displacing
bureaucrats; but whether the shortage of
EPA officials really accounts for the
agency’s caprice is a tougher question.
So how did we end up with this mess?
It has much to do with general American
skepticism of government, but DiIulio
could have done more on the details.
Beginning in the 1980s, there have
been very specific efforts to control or
reduce the size of the federal work
force, as part of the overall attempt to
make government better, smarter, and
cheaper. The smaller number of direct
employees we’ve ended up with, DiIulio
argues, has made almost no progress
toward that goal.
Of course, everyone knows that
bureaucrats are naturally inefficient. The
problem with resorting to contractors
and proxies instead is that no one
knows whether they’re efficient either.
There was sound theory behind President Reagan’s obsession with privatization, DiIulio admits, but government
contracting in practice is nothing like
privatization. The federal government has
almost never bothered to assess whether
contracted versions of programs are more
efficient than completely bureaucratic
ones. Individual contractors and contracts
are assessed even more rarely—past performance of specific firms is barely even
considered when awarding new contracts.
DiIulio doesn’t argue that contracted
services are hugely wasteful (as, for instance, some liberal critics of private
health insurance do). In fact, at one point,
he takes pains to point out that paying for
the implementation costs of transfer programs—which account for much of what
the federal government does—are quite
low. But the level of fraud and the lack of
efficacy across all federal programs are
also disappointing, and he expects more
of government.
How does he think we can get it? Revitalize good government by hiring
enough people to do all the jobs Americans want government to do. He suggests
hiring 1 million more federal civil servants by 2035; pushing the presidency
to become a less political, more managerial office; rethinking what services
OCTOBER 20, 2014
2014 Caribbean cruise one page:milliken-mar 22.qxd 9/16/2014 6:17 PM Page 1
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subsidized nonprofits are expected to
provide in government’s stead; reforming federal contracting; and freezing and
then undoing many joint federal–state
aid programs.
The idea of splitting up responsibilities
in existing federal–state programs, such
as Medicaid, has been around for a while:
It’s not as original as some of DiIulio’s
others, but it’s no less controversial. Fairminded liberals know that programs with
clear lines of responsibility work better,
and they therefore tentatively support,
say, splitting up Medicaid or devolving
education; but interest groups resist such
proposals. Some conservative legislators
have more-revolutionary ideas: Senator
Mike Lee (R., Utah) has proposed essentially getting rid of federal transportation
spending and leaving the responsibility
to the states.
Similarly, DiIulio is hardly the first
public-policy scholar to say that federal
contracting should be fixed, but some of
his specific proposals are creative, e.g.,
hiring many more federal employees to
oversee and assess goods-and-services
acquisitions, and implementing better
assessment metrics. The latter idea is not
without appeal on the right: The blueprint that Paul Ryan unveiled this summer for reforming anti-poverty programs
included proposals for federal programs
to support evidence-based policymaking.
The book gives space to a liberal, E. J.
Dionne, and a libertarian, Charles Murray,
to respond to DiIulio briefly. Murray
bluntly points out that, if the federalcontracting state is hugely inefficient
and incompetent, so is the purely federal
state. But DiIulio does emphasize that
hiring more bureaucrats should come
with reforms to pay and work rules; he
should do more to make the case for
this idea.
And doesn’t aim to replace the entirety
of Leviathan by Proxy with more bureaucrats. He also wants more bureaucrats to
oversee and procure the huge parts of the
federal government that will still be contracted out. As with DiIulio’s overall
proposal, it’s hard to say whether this
would succeed—whether this really is
the way to fix the appalling federal procurement processes. But reform is absolutely necessary, and DiIulio deserves
credit for admitting that it may be impossible without more resources.
So DiIulio has some interesting, if unproven, ideas. (This small volume will be
followed by a larger book by DiIulio in
2015, in which, one expects, he will lay
out more of his case.) Why should conservatives care about them? We all want
good government, of course, and the
moral case for an efficient, competent
welfare state is a powerful one (perhaps
one that should get more respect on the
right). But is there a reason to think
DiIulio’s suggestions will also help conservatives achieve their broader goal of a
limited, constitutional government?
He says yes: It simply would have
been much harder to extend the federal
government into every aspect of our
lives if the government hadn’t seemed,
in some ways, to remain the same size all
along. He also makes a separation-ofpowers argument: A too-small federal
bureaucracy delegates far too much interpretation and enforcement of our laws
to federal courts and subcontractors,
CALIBAN
Back
to the brain-stem
& blinding
anvil of water
the sun beats
Caliban
come home
fish-spine & palm
murmuring merman
— RICHARD O’CONNELL
54
|
where conservatives certainly don’t think
it belongs. Unfortunately, while both of
these arguments seem plausible, DiIulio
fails to make either of them very convincingly or clearly.
And there are two recent developments that may make the let-a-thousandbureaucrats-bloom proposal less
appealing, especially to conservatives.
DiIulio argues that some of federal
bureaucrats’ worst behavior and biggest
failures are the result of being overworked, and surely that is sometimes the
case. But this explanation rang hollow
for many when, in 2013, IRS officials
tried blaming their targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny on lack
of resources. At the very least, the
episode seemed to suggest that important
parts of the federal bureaucracy are filled
with people instinctively hostile to conservative ideas and organizations.
Meanwhile, it’s possible that even the
Veterans Affairs department is understaffed, but it has more civil servants
(over 300,000) than any department
except the Pentagon itself. Yet we
learned this year that corruption and
lack of accountability reigned there just
as they do elsewhere, with deadly consequences.
E. J. Dionne, in his reply to DiIulio,
scoffs at the practicality of his suggestions, including the idea of a managerial
presidency. Some of his ideas do seem
utterly impractical, such as substantially
expanding the federal bureaucracy when
trust in it is at historic lows. But for a
presidential candidate to run on better,
leaner government and the idea of a
manager-as-president is not risible.
Indeed, Barack Obama did a good bit of
the former and Mitt Romney may have
been best when he was doing the latter.
Still, good and efficient public administration is currently way down the average
voter’s priority list.
As the federal government continues
to grow, as our population ages into federal programs such as Social Security
and Medicare, and as fiscal realities
require us to start paying the bills for
big government, maybe good governance will become marginally more
important in the minds of voters. If
that’s what it takes to awaken the citizenry to revulsion toward Leviathan
and appreciation of democratic governance, though, it would come a little too
late for the Right.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
A New Way
Of Life
VICTOR LEE AUSTIN
From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation
of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, by Kyle
Harper (Harvard, 316 pp., $39.95)
T
first thing to say about this
scholarly book is that it is
interesting. This needs to be
said, for even highly interesting topics can be boringly discussed by
academics, a race of people who have
never seen a participial phrase that
they didn’t want to leave dangling, or a
pronoun whose antecedent they felt an
obligation to supply. Yes, there is tendentiously boring writing about sex, but
such writing is not here.
Kyle harper is a young star of the classics faculty at the University of Oklahoma
who commands wisdom and erudition
well beyond his years. From Shame to
Sin draws on the culture of the classical
Greeks and Romans, on their philosophies and their legislators, but also, particularly, on their romances. It draws, too,
on Christian sources, on Scripture and
theologians and great preachers—yet
also, and again particularly, on popular
Christian literature.
With intellectual power and verbal clarity, harper tells the story of the radical
transformation effected by Christianity
upon the sexual morality of the GrecoRoman world of the first six centuries
a.d. It is a story framed by stories. at the
beginning is a classical Greek romance
of the second century, Leucippe and
Clitophon, and at the end, the Life of St.
Mary of Egypt, a Christian penance narrahe
Mr. Austin is the author of Up with Authority
and Christian Ethics: A Guide for the
Perplexed.
tive of the sixth. From Shame to Sin has
received justified praise in high quarters.
It deserves to be widely read.
With regret for the loss of color and
subtlety, I venture the following summary, which is, I hope, only a gross
simplification, and not a gross oversimplification. The Roman empire held
sexual matters within societal controls
that allowed for moderation and release.
Same-sex relations were there—but
approved only for adult men with boys in
the indeterminate period between childhood and manhood, and only if the boy
was not freeborn. among adult males, to
be penetrated in same-sex intercourse
was cause for shame. Shame also surrounded the ideal of marriage. Girls
became marriageable at the age of twelve,
and were normally married in their
teens. Boys, in contrast, typically married in their late twenties. Girls thus
moved from virginity directly to the hallowed status of wife, to avoid shame.
Males were understood to need sexual
outlets both prior to marriage and within; for this purpose there were public
brothels. Recourse to prostitutes was
seen as normal. But to commit adultery
was to bring shame upon a woman of
social status, and likely severe punishment upon oneself.
It is, one will see, a complicated picture. Sexuality was over all else a social
concern, regulated by law and custom
to maintain property and status. and it
is also a picture that entailed the existence of a social institution that Rome
was very good at: slavery. as many as
10 percent of the inhabitants of the
empire were slaves, harper tells us, and
perhaps double that in the cities. The
prostitutes in the brothel, the boys of
indeterminate status in the household,
the outlets for sexual desires that were
seen as natural (and dangerous to deny):
here were the slaves, the invisible persons in this world.
and then Christianity came—at first
naught but a speck on the horizon, as
harper says, “a dark horse in the chaotic,
competitive atmosphere of the high empire.” harper takes us to Corinth with
Paul in a.d. 51, and then to Rome, to see
the apostle laying down the “germ of a
new ideology.” In what we have as the
First epistle to the Corinthians, Paul
extols virginity, permits marriage, and
finds “fornication”—a churchly word
without conceptual match in the classical
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55
mind—beyond the pale. Then, in an
outburst at the beginning of Romans,
Paul describes same-sex intercourse as
unnatural. Obliterated in these “seeds”
that would become Christian orthodoxy
were the classical distinctions between
boy and man, slave and free. New is an
understanding of the freedom of the
individual, a freedom that required liberation from societal constraints and
that made sexual renunciation possible. Instead of society as the framework for sexuality, Christians had the
entire divinely ordained creation, and a
repent of her sin and be saved. That is to
say, a classical world governed by the
concept of shame was replaced by a
Christian world governed by the concept of sin.
The literary analogue of this insight of
inner freedom was the Christian transformation of the classical romance into
the story of the redeemed prostitute.
In classical romance, the endangered
woman managed, through techniques of
plot and wit, to avoid shame: The narrative conventions required her to come
through her trials undefiled, still virginal,
about much more. “Just as Christian lawmakers, suddenly anxious about the
‘necessity of sin,’ broke with immemorial tradition and extended succor to
society’s most vulnerable,” Harper
writes, “Christian litterateurs created
stories in which sexual dishonor is the
product of sin rather than circumstance,
choice rather than destiny.” They have
given us a mixed inheritance, more complex than we imagine. Christianity was
hardly a repressive movement that bore
down upon ancient libertinism, for classical culture had its own rules and
For us who live at the end of late modernity, when the
shackles of the Christian centuries have been released,
Harper’s is a cautionary tale.
God in heaven before whom every soul
would be accountable.
They could scrap the entire sexual
arrangement because these early Christians saw themselves as outside society,
rescued from the world. It was Clement
of Alexandria who first systematized the
emerging Christian sexual orthodoxy.
He spoke of sin and flesh and fornication
in ways “that were simply alien to the
classical intellectual tradition.” Desire
was the problem in sex, and Clement
would teach Christians how to stamp it
out. Marriage was licit, but for the sake
of children “and the completion of the
universe,” and not for any ideals of companionship or pleasure in bed. Marriage
was better than fornication, that catch-all
Christian term for any nonmarital sex,
which led to damnation; but virginity
was better. And virginity was possible
because, the early Christians held, everyone had a free will.
Even—although it took time to realize
this—slaves; even, that is to say, persons
who had no freedom over what happened to their bodies. Once Christianity
became the religion of the emperor and
began the process of taking over society,
it had to confront the lack of agency in
many violated and oppressed people.
What Christians came to see was that the
soul has an interior freedom, however
compromised by original sin, still accessible to grace—a freedom that remains
despite whatever happens to the body. A
raped woman was not, for the Christians,
shamed, and a willing prostitute could
56
|
still marriageable. In the Christian alternative, the woman, in danger of Hell
because of her sin, repents and is saved,
and lives the rest of her life in penance
and purity.
Mary of Egypt—in what Harper refers
to as the quintessential tale of this type—
left her parents at age twelve and went to
Alexandria full of lust. For 17 years she
sought out sexual encounters, even refusing pay for them; she was the agent of
her life. One day she was standing outside the Church of the True Cross in
Jerusalem, “hunting fresh prey.” But there
is a force that prevents her entry. She
looks up and sees an icon of the Virgin
Mary. She prays: “I have heard that the
God who became man did so on this
account, that he might call sinners to
repent. Help me, for I am alone, and I
have none to help me.” The profligate
Mary promises to change her life entirely if she can enter and see the relic of
the true cross, and the Virgin Mary grants
her prayer. The monk Zosimas finds her
in the desert 47 years later, during which
time “she has eaten a total of three
loaves of bread.” She tells him her
story. He writes it down. She has had
three decades of peace. He brings her
Eucharist in a year, according to her
request. He comes the following year,
and finds her corpse “turned to the east.”
Harper tells us: “He weeps over her,
soaking her feet with his tears, inverting
the biblical trope.”
The Christian transformation of the
pagan world was focused on sex but was
taboos, and relied upon the procurement of a steady supply of slave bodies. Yet as it brought the liberation of
the free will into common narrative—
what the Christian philosopher Robert
Spaemann has called the discovery of
the “heart”—Christianity also exterminated any idea that “eros makes us part
of nature and constitutes a mysterious
source of the self.”
For us who live at the end of late
modernity, when the shackles of the
Christian centuries have been released,
Harper’s is a cautionary tale. Eros is
back. In the lobby of the Time Warner
Center on Columbus Circle in New
York City, a large bronze statue of Adam
stands to greet the day’s shoppers. His
conical penis stands out from the rest of
his body, having been well rubbed by
the hands of visitors who, grasping it,
smile for their friends’ cell-phone cameras. A Roman, one thinks, would be at
home in our eroticized city. Yet like the
early Christians, and unlike the Romans, we abhor adult sexual relations
with children and we criminalize coercion in sexual matters. Still, unlike the
Christians and like the classical world,
we tolerate serial marriage and divorce.
And unlike both the pagans and the
early Christians, we are legalizing
same-sex relations without differentiating active and passive, or male-male
and female-female. The reemergence of
eros seems good to most of us. Sex really
is interesting. But what might it be that
we are not seeing?
OCTOBER 20, 2014
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Film
Old
School
R O S S D O U T H AT
UNIVERSAL PICTURES
T
he year is 1993. The big Oscarseason movies are Schindler’s
List, which makes a grave hibernian named Liam Neeson
famous, and Philadelphia, in which Denzel Washington tacks another critical
success onto a résumé that already
includes such prestige movies as Malcolm X and Glory. Meanwhile, the biggest action stars of the 1980s, both in
their mid 40s, release winking or selfparodic movies—The Last Action Hero
for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demolition
Man for Sylvester Stallone—that suggest
they know their time is running out.
Neither movie does that well at the box
office, both Arnie and Sly look pretty
creaky underneath all their bulk, and you
wonder, naturally enough, what the future
of action movies holds. Fortunately, you
happen to have a Magic 8 Ball on hand,
so you hold it up and ask: Who will be the
biggest action stars 20 years from now?
The 8 Ball shakes, the answer floats
to the surface: Well, Arnie and Sly will
still be at it . . . but they’ll have ceded
the title to those guys from the prestige
movies: a 62-year-old Liam and a 59year-old Denzel.
Strangely, very strangely, so it has come
to pass. Washington has a hit this month
with The Equalizer, an update of an ’80s
vigilante TV show that’s the latest in a long
list of post-2000 action flicks he’s headlined. Neeson, meanwhile, is out with yet
another installment in his fist-swinging,
heat-packing, wolf-pack-confronting oeuvre, playing the P.I. Matthew Scudder,
from Lawrence Block’s crime novels, in
A Walk among the Tombstones.
A Walk is a little less over the top, a little more restrained and arty, than some of
the other recent Neeson vehicles. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s done a little
worse at the box office.) As Scudder,
Neeson uses his wits more than his brawn
until the final set piece, and the movie as
a whole has a lot more going on than, say,
the Taken movies or this spring’s NonStop. There’s a sentimental thread, in
58
|
which Scudder befriends a homeless, precocious black kid (Brian Bradley, stage
name “Astro”) who wants to become the
detective’s aide-de-camp; there are various plot complications and misdirections;
there’s some showy, trying-too-hard stuff
with the score and voice-overs (a recitation of AA’s twelve steps over third-act
scenes of violence, for instance); and then
there’s a lot of ’70s-style New York seediness (the film is set in the late ’90s, but
the atmosphere is high Decay) that owes
a strong debt to Paul Schrader and his various collaborators.
But still, Neeson’s craggy physicality,
the air of mature, rueful death-dealing
capability that he projects, is as central
to this film as it is to his other action
movies. he may not be young, may not
be that quick, may not have rippling
muscles or heavy weaponry—but when
the bad guys come calling, he’s the guy
you want to put in charge.
here the bad guys—a pair of sickos,
one garrulous and one reserved, played
Scudder, naturally, has his own demons:
he’s an alcoholic who retired from the
force after the drinking led to some careless, tragic gunplay. But they aren’t the
kind of issues that prevent him from getting his men, in basically the way that
moviegoers have learned to expect from
any story in which the forces of evil are
foolish enough to trifle with the man who
once was Oskar Schindler.
Why we like Neeson—or Wash ington—in these parts is a fascinating
question. They’re well-preserved enough,
of course, but they aren’t drinking from
the fountain of youth; indeed, it’s the hint
of weariness about their gun-pulling and
punch-throwing that somehow makes
the whole thing work. That weariness
conveys gravitas, which conveys maturity, which conveys, well, manhood in a
way that under-40 (or even under-50?)
male stars can’t quite match. Male adolescence lasts a long time in our culture, and maybe it lasts even longer in
hollywood . . .
Liam Neeson in A Walk among the Tombstones
by David harbour and Adam David
Thompson—are really just the worse
guys, since they get their twisted kicks by
victimizing drug dealers, whose wives
and girlfriends they kidnap, knowing
the dealers have money and probably
won’t call the cops. When the money is
delivered, the sickos deliver in their
turn—“returning” the women as dismembered, violated corpses.
When this horror happens to a dealer
named Kenny (played by Downton
Abbey’s golden boy, Dan Stevens, remaking himself as a burning-eyed ghost), he
gets his junkie brother (a twitchy Boyd
holbrook) to put Scudder on the case.
. . . or maybe our young male stars, with
a few exceptions, just don’t get a real
chance to grow up on-screen, because if
they show promise and charisma and
have an impressive physical presence,
the first thing the studios do is sign them
to a five-movie deal as one superhero or
another, disappearing them into a costume at exactly the moment when they
should be acquiring the gravitas that older
masters such as Neeson and Washington
casually exude.
Whether action movies are the best
way to deploy that gravitas is, of course,
another question—but I’ll take Matthew
Scudder, P.I., over Aquaman anyway.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
City Desk
Setting
The Table
RICHARD BROOKHISER
B
ecause I eat in a handful of
restaurants I have come to
know the various owners.
seeing them in their little
kingdoms gives me a view of their ways
and concerns: why menus change (always
for the worse, but that is the curmudgeon’s view); internal kitchen politics
(bad as donkeys vs. elephants); dealing
with the public (worse than donkeys vs.
elephants); internal kitchen sex politics
(just keep it from becoming an epidemic,
like ebola). every restaurant has its regulars, from faithful clients to faithful nuisances. I try to be a faithful listener.
One thing I hear about is economics.
The city is full of restaurants. Young residents, raised on grazing and portable
info-screens, don’t know how to cook;
small kitchens make it irksome even for
those who do. so restaurants—rent-acooks with seating—proliferate. Yet the
failure rate is sky-high.
For decades Mickey made money
hand over fist. His alien roots—FranceIsrael—gave him an accent mellowed by
three continents. His food was always
interesting (Franco, thank heaven, not
Israeli). His eye made an interior that was
both exotic and homey. Though he could
fight with his staff, for he was temperamental, he was more often warm. as a
result his staff was warm too. He kept
people a long time, and after they left they
often came back. He was the perfect host,
the star of his own floor show, always on,
always hospitable. His place was where
my wife went when I was having abdominal surgery for cancer. as a reward for his
labors he acquired a spider Veloce, apart-
ments here and in Florida, a mid-century
ranch house in the Hamptons.
His bane unfolded in two acts. The
first act was his impatience with his
landlord. He had opened in a nondescript
mid-block of little old buildings in the
then-unfashionable east Village. Then
the centurion mayor began the great
cleansing, and the downtown university,
founded by one of Jefferson’s cabinet
secretaries and plugging along dutifully
ever since, became ambitious, then hot.
Neighbors went out and about more; foreigners—i.e., those who lived above 14th
street—came to visit; kids swarmed into
tenements to invent dotcoms and taste
la vie bohème. The new traffic sought,
and was stimulated by, an array of
quirky businesses, of which Mickey’s
was a standout. But, as in every boom,
everyone wanted a piece, and his landlord looked to raise his rent.
It was never clear whether the landlord
wanted more money, or wanted to empty
his little buildings to sell them to some
megalandlord who would tear them down
and build an apartmentsaurus over their
footprints. since the rebuilding never
happened, I suspect that the landlord was
dickering about money and that Mickey,
had he shown a better poker face, could
have made a deal. Temperament took
over, however, and he moved his whole
show into a new space, which was on a
well-established avenue and almost twice
as large. The food, the look, the staff, the
charm were all there, but the monthly nut
had become nutsaurus. He poured his savings into the fray, like Napoleon ordering
the Old Guard to charge at Waterloo. It
didn’t work for Mickey either. His restaurant went dark four years ago.
Mickey’s explanation for his story is
ethnic. “I had two landlords, both Iranians. One was a Jew and one was a
Moslem; they were both terrorists.” But
the real explanation is the peril of the
restaurant business, in which even such a
high flyer can crash with one missed
wingbeat. He has no plans to reopen anywhere anytime soon, but he keeps his
hand in by working as a waiter on Long
Island in the summer. His manner has not
deserted him; wherever he works, customers imagine he must be the owner.
I also know a trio of models, who
opened a place on the square. It was a
pretty funky square back then—a dead
department store, an old bank, cheap
offices populated by photographers and
artists. (The famous New Yorker artist had
a studio there, and drew the denizens—
winos with mouths like grillwork; hookers with booty, boots, and cat heads.) The
models bought a coffee shop, changed it
from Gotham Greek to Brazil North, and
staffed it with young, lightly dressed
women. The menu was pleasant, the place
was fun, they too made money hand over
fist. The square turned from an urban
armpit into a little jewel. The city watered
the grass, replanted the bushes, took care
of the stately trees. The transformation
was sealed by tragedy. after 9/11 the
square, far enough from the attack not to
be sealed off, close enough to smell it,
became the scene of talk, mourning, collective urban psychoanalysis.
Now the old artist—he died years
ago—would have to work hard to make
the square grotesque. It is populated by
nannies with strollers, shoppers at the
farmers’ market, guys offering to play
chess, white collars on lunch break,
foreigners—i.e., people from foreign
countries—studying guidebooks. The odd
runaway or Hare Krishna seems like a
condiment. This summer the new thing
was young men at dusk selling little lighted
twirlies that you shot up into the air and
watched descend like happy drones.
and naturally it is time for these landlords to reap their reward. The models got
a lease with a raise of 50 percent. Who can
pay that money? I asked. chains, willing
to take a loss in order to have a spot on the
new omphalos. The models say they are
sticking it out, at least for a while. If they
don’t I will starve.
But still, people strive and dream. The
models’ maître d’ is a young Dominican,
for whom slim fit was made. He told me
recently he and his girlfriend were thinking of opening a pizzeria. Really? They
were making dough the other night, they
had the best tomatoes, it was so good . . .
Not fare well, but fare forward,
voyagers.
59
backpage--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/1/2014 2:23 PM Page 60
Happy Warrior
BY DAVID HARSANYI
Threescore Years and Fifteen
WAnT to live forever. Or, if that’s impractical, as long
as science can keep me operational. now, obviously,
this means elevating my game—more salubrious
foods, calisthenics, steering clear of second-hand
smoke and what have you. But if my efforts fall short—and
I’m inclined to believe that at some point they might—I
expect technology to pick up the slack. If this entails replacing my limbs with bionic parts, so be it. If it necessitates pumping me full of experimental pharmaceuticals or
plugging me into contraptions that keep vital organs functioning properly, go for it. nanotechnology? Whatever that
is, I’m all in. And, if all else fails, please upload my consciousness into a freshly grown clone—though, if it’s not
too much trouble, let’s make this one more athletic.
In his now-infamous Atlantic essay “Why I Hope to Die at
75,” Ezekiel Emanuel, 57, subtly disparages people like me
as “American immortals.” I take no offense. Emanuel, after
all, is the director of something called the Clinical Bioethics
Department at the U.S. national Institutes of Health. He also
finds time to run the Department of Medical Ethics and
Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Or, in other
words, there are people blessed with dazzling intellects who
strive to unlock the secrets of the universe or devote their
careers to making life more tolerable for the weak, sick, and
elderly. And then there are people who crunch numbers to
concoct arbitrary human expiration dates.
Old age, says Emanuel, leaves us faltering, declining,
feeble, ineffectual, pathetic, and uncreative. Without even a
single Ph.D. to my name, I’ve arrived at a similar conclusion. Growing old sucks. It can be depressing for the individual. A heart-wrenching burden for many families. And,
also, better than most alternatives. This is why we humans
have initiated a successful sweeping project to lengthen the
Third Act—one of our most meaningful and moral undertakings, actually. This disturbs Emanuel, who claims that
though proles live longer these days, they do not live more
fulfilling lives. And while this might be true (though I doubt
it), the most problematic part of Emanuel’s contention is his
failure to answer the most vital question raised by his
proposition: What kind of life is worth living?
Why am I alive? Maybe it’s an evolutionary need to be a
father or maybe it’s an intellectual need to mock people
who are by every calculable metric a lot smarter than I am.
I don’t pretend to have the answer—probably because
everyone’s answer is unique. What I think I do know, however, is how not to quantify life.
Life, for example, is not about being a cog in the collective. This is the basic rationalization Emanuel offers for his
deadline—complete with a chart that plots the purpose of
human existence. If you’re a productive person with high
creative potential, your “first contribution” (interning at
a nonprofit, perhaps) will be made in your mid 20s. Your
I
Mr. Harsanyi is a senior editor of the Federalist.
60
|
“best” contribution (running for office or working for the
Department of Zzzzzz) will be made in your late 30s. And
your “last” contribution (authoring a memoir celebrating a
life in public service) will be made in your early 60s. After
that, well, what’s the point, right?
There are outliers, of course—Abraham didn’t father
Isaac until he was 100, and Ronald Reagan wasn’t elected
president until he was nearly 70—but we should concede
that research proves the older you are, the more likely it is
that you’re engaged in piddling digressions such as visiting
your grandchildren or binge-watching Murder, She Wrote.
The chances of your authoring a white paper on a carbon tax
or engaging in undertakings deemed beneficial by technocrats is rather low. Thank God.
Emanuel also advances the ugly idea that an uncomfortable life is not a life worth living. Half of Americans
over 80 will be saddled with some functional limitations,
he points out. A third of Americans over 85 will suffer
from Alzheimer’s. Hips will hurt. Memories will fade.
This is often tragic. But don’t millions of Americans live
their lives with physical and mental limitations? Is their
earthly existence worth the same as that of a 76-yearold—nothing? Emanuel says his proposition is a personal
one, but if he believes his life—one we imagine he values
more than most—isn’t worth extending past 75, what
about others who fail to meet his criteria? This question
goes unanswered.
Emanuel denies his piece is a stealth proposal to “save
resources, ration health care, or address public-policy
issues arising from the increases in life expectancy.” The
stench is there, though. For decades an ugly Malthusian
compulsion has infected the Left, leading it to think we
should measure the value of life by its impact on the environment or its productivity. The implication is stupefying, anti-humanist, and immoral.
Emanuel preemptively claims that there will be spiritual
reasons for people to reject his pseudoscientific trolling.
Well, even skeptics who believe that existence is happenstance, that life serves no grand purpose, and that there is no
afterlife to look forward to should be insulted. I’m reminded
of an interaction in one of the most underrated Woody Allen
films, Love and Death, in which the character Sonya asks:
“But, if there is no God, then life has no meaning. Why go
on living? Why not just commit suicide?” Woody Allen’s
doppelgänger, Boris, retorts, “Well, let’s not get hysterical. I
could be wrong. I’d hate to blow my brains out and then read
in the paper that they found something.”
There’s no need to cash out on Pascal’s wager too
early, especially when we don’t know what sort of technological developments are on the horizon. My selfish
hope is that we make tremendous strides in this department in, say, the next 30 years. If I don’t become a supercentenarian, it’ll be the fault of society. Mostly of people
like Ezekiel Emanuel.
OCTOBER 20, 2014
Indiana’s school choice program is helping me provide my kids with an excellent education.
The teachers’ unions sued to shut the program down.
But I fought back to protect school choice.
And I won.
I am IJ.
Heather Coffy
Indianapolis, Indiana
www.IJ.org
Institute for Justice
School choice litigation
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Jay Nordlinger - National Review

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