the truth about trade

Transcription

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April 11, 2016
$4.99
S TEVEN F. H AYWARD :
Trump Is No Goldwater
T HE E DITORS :
Cruz for President
J AMES K IRCHICK :
Among the Identitarians
?
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THE
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SCOTT LINCICOME
www.nationalreview.com
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SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
2016
UNITED
STATES
DISTRIBUTION
NOTICE:
NTRYING TO KEEP UP: Rapid shipments of heavy packages containing Vault Bricks loaded with valuable .999
solid U.S. State Silver Bars are flowing around the clock from the private vaults of the Lincoln Treasury to U.S. State
residents who call 1-866-964-2953 to beat the 7 day deadline.
U.S. State Silver Bars go to residents in 49 states
U.S. residents who find their state listed below in bold get first dibs at just the $57 minimum
set for state residents while all non state residents must pay $134, if any silver bars remain
AL
GA
ME
NV
OR
VA
AK
HI
MD
NH
PA
WA
NATIONWIDE – The phone
lines are ringing off the hook.
That’s because U.S. State
Silver Bars sealed away in
State Vault Bricks are being
handed over to U.S. residents
at just the state minimum set
by the Lincoln Treasury for
the next 7 days.
This is not a misprint. For
the next 7 days residents who
find their state on the Distribution List above in bold are
getting individual State Silver Bars at just the state minimum of $57 set by the Lincoln
Treasury. That’s why nearly
everyone should be taking full
Vault Bricks loaded with five
U.S. State Silver Bars before
they’re all gone.
And here’s the best part.
Every state resident who gets
at least two Vault Bricks is
AZ
ID
MA
NJ
RI
WV
AR
IL
MI
NM
SC
WI
CA
IN
MN
NY
SD
WY
also getting free shipping and
free handling. That’s a real
steal because all other state
residents must pay over six
hundred dollars for each State
Vault Brick.
Just a few weeks ago, nobody knew that the only U.S.
State Silver Bars locked away
in the private vaults of the Lincoln Treasury would be allocated to the Federated Mint
for a limited release to residents in 49 states. Every single one of the 50 U.S. State Silver Bars are date numbered
in the order they ratified the
Constitution and were admitted into the Union beginning
in the late 1700s.
“As Executive Advisor to
the Lincoln Treasury I get
paid to deliver breaking news.
So, for anyone who hasn’t
CO
IA
MS
NC
TN
CT
KS
MO
ND
TX
heard yet, highly collectible
U.S. State Silver Bars are
now being handed over at just
the state minimum set by the
Lincoln Treasury to residents
in 49 states who beat the offer deadline, which is why I
pushed for this announcement to be widely advertised,”
said Mary Ellen Withrow, the
emeritus 40th Treasurer of
the United States of America.
“These bars are solid .999
pure fine silver and will always be a valuable precious
metal which is why everyone
is snapping up as many as they
can before they’re all gone,”
Withrow said.
There’s one thing Withrow
wants to make very clear.
State residents only have seven days to call the Toll Free
Order Hotlines to get the
DE
KY
MT
OH
UT
FL
LA
NE
OK
VT
U.S. State Silver Bars.
“These valuable U.S. State
Silver Bars are impossible to
get at banks, credit unions or
the U.S. Mint. In fact, they’re
only being handed over at
state minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury to U.S. residents who call the Toll Free
Hotline before the deadline
ends seven days from today’s
publication date”, said Timothy
J. Shissler, Executive Director
of Vault Operations at the private Lincoln Treasury.
To make it fair, special Toll
Free Overflow Hotlines have
been set up to ensure all residents have an equal chance to
get them.
Rapid shipments to state residents are scheduled to begin
(Continued on next page)
P7027A OF19555R-1
SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
(Continued from previous page)
with the first calls being accepted at precisely 8:30am today.
“We’re bracing for all the
calls and doing everything we
can to make sure no one gets
left out, but the U.S. State Silver Bars are only being handed over at just the state resident minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury for the next
seven days or until they’re all
gone, whichever comes first.
For now, residents can get the
U.S. State Silver Bars at just
the state minimum set by the
Lincoln Treasury as long as
they call before the order deadline ends,” confirmed Shissler.
“With so many state residents trying to get these U.S.
State Silver Bars, lines are busy
so keep trying. All calls will be
answered,” Shissler said. N
WEIGHTS AND
MEASURES FULL
TROY OUNCE SOLID
.999 FINE SILVER
DATE NUMBERED
IN WHICH THE
STATE RATIFIED THE
CONSTITUTION AND
WAS ADMITTED
INTO UNION
BACK
FRONT
CERTIFIED SOLID
SILVER PRECIOUS
METAL
ALL 49 STATES
LISTED TO THE LEFT
AVAILABLE. 1 STATE
ALREADY SOLD OUT.
COURTESY: LINCOLN TREASURY
PHOTO ENLARGEMENT SHOWS ENGRAVING DETAIL
RESIDENTS IN 49 STATES: COVER JUST $57 STATE MINIMUM
Call
1.
2.
1-866-964-2953 EXT. FMS775 beginning at 8:30am
If all lines are busy call this special toll free overflow hotline: 1-866-964-3394 EXT. FMS775
Residents who find their state on the Distribution List on the left in bold and beat the deadline are authorized to get individual State Silver Bars at just $57 state
resident minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury. That’s why everyone should be taking full Vault Bricks loaded with five State Silver Bars before they’re all gone.
And here’s the best part. Every state resident who gets at least two Vault Bricks is also getting free shipping and free handling. That’s a real steal because all
other state residents must pay over six hundred dollars for each State Vault Brick.
ALL OTHER STATE RESIDENTS: MUST REMIT $134 PER STATE SILVER BAR
1.
2.
No State Silver Bars will be issued to any resident living outside of the 49 states listed to the left in bold at state resident minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury.
If you are a U.S. resident living outside of the 49 states listed to the left in bold you are required to pay $134 for each State Silver Bar for a total of six hundred
seventy dollars plus shipping and handling for each sealed State Vault Brick loaded with five U.S. State Silver Bars. This same offer may be made at a later date
or in a different geographic location. Non-state residents call: 1-877-263-3007 EXT. FMS775
FEDERATED MINT, LLC AND LINCOLN TREASURY, LLC ARE NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, A BANK OR ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY. IF FOR ANY REASON WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM SHIPMENT YOU ARE DISSATISFIED, RETURN THE PRODUCT FOR A REFUND LESS SHIPPING AND RETURN POSTAGE. DUE TO THE FLUCTUATING PRICE IN THE WORLD GOLD AND SILVER TRADES, PRICES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. THIS SAME OFFER MAY BE AVAILABLE AT A LATER DATE
OR IN A DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION. FL & OH RESIDENTS ADD 6% SALES TAX. NO SHIPMENTS TO MN. FEDERATED MINT 7600 SUPREME AVE. NW, NORTH CANTON, OH 44720 ©2016 LINCOLN TREASURY
P7027A OF19555R-1
NA SNEAK PEAK INSIDE SILVER VAULT BRICKS: Pictured left reveals for the very first time the valuable .999 pure fine silver bars inside each
State Silver Vault Brick. Pictured right are the State Silver Vault Bricks containing the only U.S. State Silver Bars known to exist with the double forged
state proclamation. Residents who find their state listed to the left in bold are authorized to get individual State Silver Bars at just $57 state resident
minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury. That’s why everyone should be taking full Vault Bricks loaded with five State Silver Bars before they’re all gone.
And here’s the best part. Every state resident who gets at least two Vault Bricks is also getting free shipping and free handling. That’s a real steal because all other state residents must pay over six hundred dollars for each State Vault Brick.
TOC_QXP-1127940144.qxp 3/23/2016 2:26 PM Page 1
Contents
APRIL 11, 2016
|
VOLUME LXVIII, NO. 6
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Jay Nordlinger on Ted Cruz
p. 22
Page 27
ON THE COVER
The Truth about Trade
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
The economic anxiety propelling Donald Trump reflects very
real problems in America’s labor market—problems caused
36
not by Chinese imports or any other type of creative
destruction, but by multiple government-policy failures and a
John Hillen reviews Playing to
the Edge: American Intelligence
in the Age of Terror,
by Michael V. Hayden.
resulting collapse of labor dynamism. Protectionism not only
would ensure that these problems aren’t fixed but would
actually make things far worse. Scott Lincicome
38
COVER: GETTY IMAGES/ OXFORD SCIENTIFIC/ DAVID FORMAN
REFORM CONSERVATISM’S FUTURE
by Ramesh Ponnuru
43
The GOP must not disregard policy innovation.
17
THE ANTI-GOLDWATER
A DECENTRALIZED POLITICS
by Steven F. Hayward
by Michael Needham & Jacob Reses
44
Power has become too concentrated in national parties.
22
What’s it like when a friend of yours runs for president?
23
BREAKING THE STAINED-GLASS CEILING
46
47
by Andrew Stuttaford
THE ABOLITION OF CASH
FEATURES
THE TRUTH ABOUT TRADE
30
AMONG THE THUGS
SECTIONS
by Scott Lincicome
It has revealed, not created, problems in the American economy.
by James Kirchick
Donald Trump, white nationalists, and the politics of the crowd.
FORWARD WITH SPRING
Richard Brookhiser sees signs
of life.
Governments prefer e-money; citizens should not.
27
FILM: BLACK BOX
Ross Douthat reviews
10 Cloverfield Lane.
by Gerard V. Bradley
A strategy to defend religious liberty.
25
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
Elizabeth Altham reviews
The Chestry Oak, by Kate Seredy.
by Jay Nordlinger
A FRIEND IN THE ARENA
FACING WAR
Arthur L. Herman reviews
Hubris: The Tragedy of
War in the Twentieth Century,
by Alistair Horne.
Donald Trump is fracturing conservatism, not consolidating it.
20
BENEFACTORS WITH
GREAT WEALTH
Martin Morse Wooster reviews
Dark Money: The Hidden
History of the Billionaires
behind the Rise of the
Radical Right, by Jane Mayer.
ARTICLES
16
WE AMERICANS AND
OUR SPIES
4
6
34
35
39
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
Poetry . . . . . . . . James M. Wilson
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Daniel Foster
NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2016. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. Eastern
time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-6797330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to NATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other
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expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors.
base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 3/7/2016 12:33 PM Page 1
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letters_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/23/2016 2:34 PM Page 4
Letters
APRIL 11 ISSUE; PRINTED MARCH 24
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy
Washington Editor Eliana Johnson
Executive Editor Reihan Salam
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty
Chief Political Correspondent Tim Alberta
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz
Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden
Research Associate Alessandra Trouwborst
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster
Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow
Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long
Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy
Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
Managing Editors Katherine Connell / Edward John Craig
Deputy Managing Editor Nat Brown
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Staff Writers Charles C. W. Cooke / David French
Senior Political Reporter Alexis Levinson
Political Reporter Brendan Bordelon
Reporter Katherine Timpf
Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell
Digital Director Ericka Anderson
Assistant Editor Mark Antonio Wright
Technical Services Russell Jenkins
Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt
Web Developer Wendy Weihs
Web Producer Scott McKim
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Linda Bridges / Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W I N S T I T U T E
B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M
Elaina Plott / Ian Tuttle
Contributors
Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen
Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder
Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / D. Keith Mano
Michael Novak / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber
Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman
Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya
Business Services Alex Batey
Circulation Manager Jason Ng
Advertising Director Jim Fowler
Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet
Assistant to the Publisher Brooke Rogers
Director of Revenue Erik Netcher
PUBLISHER
CHAIRMAN
Jack Fowler
John Hillen
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
PAT RO N S A N D B E N E FAC T O R S
Robert Agostinelli
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway
Mark and Mary Davis
Virginia James
Christopher M. Lantrip
Brian and Deborah Murdock
Peter J. Travers
Bush Appreciated
Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for his “43 and His Theme: A Visit with George W.
Bush” (March 14). It’s a shame that Bush didn’t do more, rhetorically, to defend
himself against political assault during his presidency. Nordlinger’s interview
affirms W.’s intelligence, his serious approach to life-and-death issues, and his
human decency. Shame on my lefty (and otherwise intelligent) friends for their
simplistic and simple-minded attacks.
Roger Baumgarten
Mechanicsburg, Pa.
Cheap Oil Foiled
While Mr. Hassett’s discussion was measured and succinct (“Don’t Stop
Worrying about Oil,” February 29), I do believe he may have missed the mark.
Even though the production of oil in this country has not changed appreciably as
a percentage of total world output, the use of oil here has declined, and the rate
of production and the existence of proven reserves now make us able to supply
all of our needs should the price of crude rise to the level at which it would be
profitable to frack and mine tar sands. Even if OPEC were to cease to produce
oil, we could supply our own needs, with only a short period of time required to
restart our domestic industry, which would already be retooling as the price of
crude rose. With Canada as a partner (unless our president has queered that deal
as well), we could be exporting to the rest of the world over and above our
domestic needs. As the flow and the supply worldwide fell, the price would rise
again, returning to the level at which extracting oil in this country would again
be profitable. Consumers would be forced to return to the days of $2.50 gasoline
(I live in an oil state and our price is always low), a lot of people would complain,
and the needs of the oil users in this country would be uninterrupted, while, once
again, the rest of the world descended into chaos.
Jonathan C. Jobe
Via e-mail
KEVIN A. HASSETT RESPONDS: Mr. Jobe raises a clever point that, sadly, collapses
on inspection. Even if the U.S. is self-sufficient in oil production, this does not
insulate us from the impact of fluctuations in world prices. If the world price
is higher than the U.S. price, domestic producers will sell to foreigners instead
of to us. Perhaps we could keep the domestic price higher by introducing trade
barriers, but the economic case against such barriers would, like our borders
in Mr. Jobe’s example, be open and shut.
It is true that my piece did not envision a world without trade. Perhaps, if
Donald Trump is serious about starting a trade war, that is a bigger omission
than anyone could have foreseen.
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
4
|
APRIL 11, 2016
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week--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/23/2016 2:23 PM Page 6
The Week
n Bernie Sanders’s campaign is fading, leaving his supporters
red, white, and blue.
n It is neither a surprise nor an accident that the latest major
Islamist terrorist attack to befall Europe targeted Brussels, the
heart of European multiculturalism. Decades of willful blindness
to the problem of ideological fanaticism left the capital of the
European Union neglectful of serious threats to its security. In
March, the Islamic State exploited that vulnerability, detonating
explosives at Brussels’s Zaventem Airport and a major subway
station during the morning rush hour, killing more than 30 people and wounding at least another 230. It would be dangerously
naïve to doubt that the Islamic State is planning to export its
brand of terror to the United States as well. For this reason,
America cannot repeat the mistakes of Europe, foremost among
them lax borders and irresponsible immigration and refugeeresettlement policies. Inside our borders, we should direct limited
law-enforcement resources toward monitoring likely sources of
radicalization—certain mosques and community centers, for
example—allying, wherever possible, with the many Muslims
who have no interest in seeing their communities co-opted for
jihadist recruitment. Until recently, New York City had a successful, muscular surveillance program of this sort. It should
be restarted immediately, and other cities should follow suit.
Of course, defeating the Islamic State once and for all will
require eradicating it in Iraq and Syria. A decisive air campaign, ultimately backed up by American forces on the ground,
is the only way to rip up the Islamic State by its roots. The
attack in Brussels is a grim reminder that we are at war, and we
require a serious strategy, carried out by leaders serious about
keeping America safe. We fervently hope that they formulate
and execute that strategy before the Islamic State crops up at
JFK and Grand Central Terminal.
ROMAN GENN
n Get in line behind Donald Trump, or you’re responsible for
making Hillary Clinton president: That’s the message coming
from Trump supporters these days. But it’s nearly the opposite
of the truth. Almost all polls find her leading him, often by
large margins. Those margins, now at an average of ten points,
have been heading upward. More than 60 percent of Americans say they have an unfavorable impression of Trump. They
view him as just as dishonest as Clinton. Keep in mind that
Trump has achieved these dismal numbers before the Democrats
have spent any money pummeling him. If they persist, a lot of
Republicans will vote third-party, or just not vote. Guilt-tripping
them won’t work, and wouldn’t get Trump close to victory if it
did. Based on all the available evidence, a vote for Trump right
now is a vote for at least four years of Clinton.
n Mitt Romney stood tall again, blasting Trump ahead of the
Utah caucuses. “Today, there is a contest between Trumpism
and Republicanism,” Romney wrote on Facebook. “Through
6
|
See page 10.
the calculated statements of its leader”—note calculated:
Trump knows what he is doing—“Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and,
most recently, threats and violence.” We would add, ignorance,
protectionism, and Putin-passivity, but this will do for starters.
“I am repulsed by each and every one of these,” Romney continued, and urged Republican voters in Utah and all further contests to support Ted Cruz. His hope is for an open convention;
ours is for an outright Cruz victory. Both are aimed at saving the
GOP from falling into the hands of (to borrow a term of Theodore
Roosevelt’s) a blue-rumped ape.
n Military hero and a man after God’s own heart, King David
marches winsomely through the pages of the Bible and straight
into the scripturally informed imagination of Western culture,
where he looms as a sort of Renaissance man—eloquent, musical, resourceful (nice idea, that slingshot), physically graceful,
and a statesman as well as the slayer of “his ten thousands,”
including Goliath. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty
University, notes cynically that David was also “an adulterer”
and suggests that here the characters of Donald Trump and
David intersect. Let’s compare them. David after he did wrong
fasted and, see Psalm 51, begged God fervently for forgiveness.
Trump: “I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.” As a boy,
David fought his way to the front line so he could avenge a fearsome giant and blasphemer against the God of Israel. Trump?
APRIL 11, 2016
base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 3/22/2016 9:01 PM Page 1
THE WEEK
America waged a war when he was young, and he stayed
home. Avoiding sexually transmitted disease was his “personal
Vietnam,” he snarked. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” David (loosely translated): “Why do you boast about your
cowardice, you effete blowhard?” (Psalms 52:1).
n John Kasich has no chance of winning a majority of delegates
in the first round of balloting at the Republican convention. His
only chance of winning the nomination, a slim one, is an open
convention that begins with no candidate enjoying a majority. Yet
he is doing what he can to make it easier for Trump to get that
majority—contesting states where he has no chance but his effort
likely ensures that some delegates go to Trump instead of Cruz.
Meanwhile, his campaign has failed to field a full slate of delegates in Maryland. Is he running to be Trump’s running mate, or
does he just have no idea what he is doing?
n Senator Marco Rubio quit the presidential race after losing the
primary in his home state of Florida. We were early fans of the
senator, supporting him when he beat the wayward incumbent
Republican governor of his state, Charlie Crist. He was full of
energy, good ideas, and an unusual talent for communicating
them. We parted ways on his deeply misguided immigration
legislation in 2013. That failed effort hobbled his presidential
campaign, especially since his record on other issues was too
conservative to win him heavy support from moderates. And he
never did the organizational spadework that presidential runs
usually require. Toward the end of his campaign, he began speaking out with more and more alarm about the threat posed by
Donald Trump to Republican, and what’s left of republican, government: an honorable stand that will ultimately be vindicated.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
n After dropping out of the presidential race, Dr. Ben Carson
endorsed Trump. His endorsement wasn’t the warmest. Even if
Trump turned out to be a bad president, Carson said, “we’re only
looking at four years.” It was pointed out to Carson that Trump
had likened him to a child molester. Twice. With his famous
serenity, Carson said that Trump “was concerned about the fact
that he couldn’t shake me. I understand politics, and particularly
the politics of personal destruction, and you have to admit, to
some degree, it did work. A lot of people believed him.” Well,
then. Actually, Trump didn’t discredit Carson nearly as much as
Carson is discrediting himself now.
n President Obama has said that Bernie Sanders is nearing the
end of his campaign and that the party must unite behind Hillary
Clinton. Obama spoke off the record to a meeting of Democratic
donors in Austin, Texas, but three of them confirmed his remarks to the New York Times, as did an unnamed White House
official. So Obama has decided that, much as he dislikes the
Clintons, they are his best shot at a third term. It probably follows that the odds of Hillary’s being indicted for her grotesque
mismanagement of government secrets have dropped from slight
to zero. Hillary will have to be beaten by an opponent who will
subject her policies and her behavior to tough, knowledgeable
criticism. How fortunate for her that the GOP front-runner is a
trash-talking ignoramus and Clinton donor.
n Norms of voting have changed over the last 200-plus years.
Eighteenth-century elections were conducted at county seats by
8
|
voice vote; the candidates themselves were often on hand to
thank supporters, while hecklers jeered all who voted the wrong
way. The secret ballot was a bulwark against both flattery and
intimidation. But a recent innovation, in the name of convenience, risks undermining the process. Early voting, sometimes
weeks in advance, insulates voters from last-minute developments and in primaries risks “orphaned” votes for candidates
who subsequently drop out. Make Election Days as convenient
as possible (e.g., with long hours to accommodate 9-to-5 workers). But keep voting an act that is both individual (private) and
communal (roughly simultaneous). The laws that the winners
will enact affect each of us, and all of us.
n Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
Garland is a well-respected appeals-court judge, but we have no
reason to think that he dissents in any significant way from the
left-wing judicial consensus. (No Democratic nominee since the
early 1960s has.) That means yes to unrestricted abortion, and no
to gun rights and religious liberty, regardless of what’s actually
spelled out in the Constitution and the statute books. Senate Republicans have vowed that there will be no confirmation this year,
in the hope that someone without Obama’s anti-constitutional
politics will be in a position to fill the vacancy next year. That
hope may be waning, but the cause remains just.
n On immigration, as on so much else, the Democrats have become the party of Obama—only more so. In a debate co-hosted
by the Spanish-language network Univision, Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders effectively promised an end to American immigration law. Clinton, who had previously affirmed her support
for President Obama’s DACA and DAPA, both flagrantly
unconstitutional amnesties covering together some 5 million
people, promised not only that she would not deport children—
an assurance that every “unaccompanied minor” who has crossed
the southern border in recent years would be permitted to stay—
but also that she would not deport anyone without a criminal
record, period. This would guarantee a permanent home to
almost every illegal immigrant residing in the country and effectively reduce crossing the border illegally to a minor and ignorable infraction. Clinton also reiterated an earlier commitment to
somehow reunite families separated by deportation. Sanders concurred with all this. Donald Trump’s bluster has made it easier for
Democrats to portray Republicans as wild-eyed radicals on the
subject of immigration. But either Democratic candidate would
be a truly radical president, effectively abrogating by fiat a whole
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swathe of American law. The alternative is simple and entirely
reasonable: enforcing laws already on the books, implementing
E-Verify nationwide, increasing penalties for visa overstays,
erecting physical barriers along the border, and cracking down on
sanctuary cities. This is the middle way between the ill-informed
theatrics of Trump and the lawlessness of the Democrats, and it
is imperative that the GOP take it.
n Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency promising to
put the coal industry out of business: to “bankrupt” it, he promised. He didn’t quite get there, but Hillary Rodham Clinton
promises to finish the job, gleefully boasting of her plan to “put
a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado: You have been
put on notice. Mrs. Clinton said this in the context of fantasizing
in public about building a “clean energy” economy—Senator
Obama made the same promise—that will need no coal and will
employ all those coal miners she plans to put out of work, as
though human beings were simply chessmen to be moved from
one square to the next by god-emperors in Washington. Democratic primary voters were shocked to hear a Clinton speaking
the truth, and so the candidate immediately tried to explain
away all that unemployment she dreams of, sending a letter to
Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) largely disavowing her own
words. She still wants to kill coal, she wrote, but not on a timeline that would inconvenience any Democratic officeholders or
their financial patrons. Ted Cruz, who knows a little something
about the energy industry, should remind voters which party it
was that scoffed at drilling our way to $2 gas last time around
and ask the voters whether they’d prefer to pay more or less in
electric bills for the next eight years.
n Gawker, an Internet publication, has lost a huge judgment to
former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan ($140 million and
counting; at issue is publication of a sex tape) and now positions itself as a martyr to the First Amendment. It isn’t: In 2014,
it called for the arrest and imprisonment of “climate deniers,”
meaning those with unpopular opinions on global warming.
When NATIONAL REVIEW raised the alarm about that, the
response was predictable: “Oh, it’s just Gawker. Don’t make
a big deal about it.” The deal got bigger: Robert Kennedy Jr.
came out in support of global-warming prosecutions, the State
of New York began proceedings against Exxon for its political
activism, and now Loretta Lynch—who, incredibly enough, is
attorney general of the United States—has embraced the persecution of global-warming dissidents and critics. Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse (D., R.I.) has been pressing for the prosecution of
those holding nonconforming views on global warming under
RICO, the organized-crime-racketeering statute, and the attorney general not only has endorsed doing so but has referred
the matter to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the
criteria for which we could take action.” This is straight-up
police-state stuff, and Americans should be worried: Exxon
may not be the most sympathetic plaintiff, but they are not
going to stop with Exxon.
n In a series of interviews with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg,
President Obama has unburdened himself of his Big ForeignPolicy Thoughts. Goldberg writes that Obama has rejected
“Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits
10
|
of thought.” That’s for sure. Obama drew a red line in Syria and
then shrank from it. “I’m very proud of this moment,” he says.
For years, Washington made a fetish of credibility. Obama is
proud to be free of it. Also, Goldberg quotes the king of Jordan,
who said, “I think I believe in American power more than Obama
does.” Our president has come to a number of conclusions, says
Goldberg. “The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly
important to American interests.” Unfortunately, the Middle East
has something to say about that. There is one thing that Obama is
absolutely staunch on: “climate change,” and the threat it poses
to mankind. He is a perfect progressive mind.
n Some interesting things happened on the eve of President
Obama’s trip to Cuba. The dictatorship arrested more than 300
people. At sea, the Coast Guard picked up 18 rafters, desperate
to leave the island. Nine had died. The survivors were half
dead. Starwood, an American hotel company, announced a
deal with the Cuban military, which runs tourism in Cuba.
Once he got to the island, Obama posed for pictures in front of
the secret-police headquarters, replete with a giant mural of
Che Guevara. Obama agreed with Raúl Castro that human
rights include economic rights such as health care—which
ordinary Cubans lack in any case. Our president invited FARC,
the Colombian terror group, to a U.S.–Cuba baseball game.
And so on. Obama’s national-security aide Ben Rhodes said
that the purpose of the presidential trip was to make Obama’s
policies toward the Castros “irreversible.” We hope that a better president has something to say about that.
n Finally, after years of atrocities committed by ISIS against
Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in the Middle
East, Secretary of State John Kerry has officially designated the
persecution “genocide.” The word carries weight. In international
law, genocide is the “crime of crimes,” the most abhorrent violation of human rights. That the United States no longer fears
to call it by its true name is a step toward moral clarity, but the
official designation also supports practical measures that the
State Department should now take on behalf of the persecuted.
These include the issuance of U.S. refugee-resettlement visas,
from which displaced Christians and Yazidis have been almost
entirely excluded. Kerry hinted at military action to liberate
ISIS-occupied territory. Many thanks are due to the Hudson
Institute’s Nina Shea. For years, at NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
and elsewhere, she has persistently sounded the alarm in behalf
of the genocide victims and martyrs to their faith.
n Russia has a president in Vladimir Putin who is a master of
old-style power politics. The opportunity to show what he can
achieve came some months ago when Bashar al-Assad appeared
to be losing the civil war in Syria. President Obama had always
insisted on the downfall of Assad but had done nothing to further
it. Putin’s dispatch of troops and aircraft to Syria was unexpected
but decisive: Assad may have lost territory, but his presidency
and indeed his life were saved. Bewildered American officials
and jubilant Russians met in Munich and Geneva for what are
euphemistically described as “closed bilateral talks,” i.e.,
horse-trading. In another unexpected tactical move, Putin suddenly announced that the military had completed its mission “at
least in part.” Some troops have begun to return home but seemingly several thousand continue to occupy reinforced bases in
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Latakia and Tartus. Having shattered the credibility of the
United States and even caused some American-backed groups
to fight one another, Putin has levered Russia to be a regional
power. It is possible that he withdrew some troops only to indicate that Assad is now on his own and dispensable, and he,
Putin, will decide the future of Syria. In view of Russian economic weaknesses and Western-imposed sanctions on Moscow,
the feat is extraordinary; perhaps less so in view of the identity
of the U.S. president.
n A curious number of prominent Russian personalities come to
untimely ends, and Mikhail Lesin is one of them. In November
of last year, the body of this 57-year-old was found in his room
at the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C. His family said
that he had died of a heart attack, but they might have said that
because some people would have wanted to kill them if they
had said otherwise. When Vladimir Putin became president,
one of his first steps was to muzzle free speech. The dirty work
of ruining owners of independent television stations and newspapers fell to Lesin. His nickname was “the Bulldozer,” and his
reward was to become head of Gazprom-Media Holdings, in
effect the propaganda outfit of Putin’s state. It so happens that
Lesin owned property in Los Angeles worth $28 million. The
D.C. medical examiner reports that Lesin died of “blunt force
trauma to the head.” A precedent is Walter Krivitsky, once a
senior Soviet secret policeman who defected and denounced
Stalin. He too was found dead in a Washington hotel. The date
was February 1941, and the crime that even one as notorious
as this has yet to be solved.
n German voters have begun to revolt against Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s open-borders policy. In state elections in
March, the Alternative for Germany party, a new populistright party that favors reduced immigration and an exit from
the euro zone, made surprising gains at the expense of
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its governing
coalition partner. Since Merkel issued an unqualified invitation to asylum seekers last year, some 1 million, many of
them economic migrants rather than true refugees, have settled in Germany. While other European governments have
responded to the migration crisis by instituting border
controls, Merkel has thus far clung
stubbornly to what she insists is
the humanitarian high ground.
“The federal government will
continue the refugee policy with
all our strength, at
home and abroad,”
her spokesman
vowed in the
wake of the elections. She should
expect continued
resistance from
those who stand
to bear its costs.
12
|
n As of March 20, any migrants crossing from Turkey to
Greece will be returned to Turkey, according to a recent agreement struck by Ankara and the European Union. In exchange
for helping stem the flood of migrants that continues to wash
ashore—often literally—in Europe, Brussels has promised that
it will give Turkey financial aid, that it will take in one refugee
for every refugee who returns to Turkey, and that it will let
Turkish citizens travel visa-free in the Schengen commonvisa area. Given the recent attacks in Istanbul and Ankara,
this last concession seems ill advised. The EU needs to establish a tough border, to enforce stricter immigration and asylum controls, and to end the Schengen Agreement—not to
expand it. But the EU has always expressed a preference for
short-term palliatives over long-term cures. If it is to endure,
that approach to its problems can’t.
n Brazil is in crisis: Leftist president Dilma Rousseff faces the
possibility of impeachment, former president (and Rousseff
mentor) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces corruption charges,
millions of anti-government protesters have taken to the
streets, and the political class teeters on the brink as an
economy built on a decade of big spending on social services fueled by high commodity prices sinks into recession. Corruption and graft are the name of the game in
Brazil—billions of dollars are thought to have lined the
pockets of the well-connected through a massive bid-rigging
and bribery scandal at the state-owned oil company,
Petrobras. Lula—the erstwhile leader of the Workers’
party—has been controversially appointed to Rousseff’s
cabinet in a bid to shield him from prosecution (only the
supreme court can hear a case against a government minister), but the move has been blocked for now. Brazil needs
free-market reforms, good government, and strict adherence
to the rule of law from the powerful and the not so powerful.
Come to think of it, that’s good advice for our own country
as well.
n Between 2012 and 2015, the pass rate for Oklahoma’s bar
exam dropped from 83 percent to 68 percent. Since the exam
has not changed much over that period, students at the state’s
three law schools seem to be getting less capable, in line with
national trends. What to do? Step up recruitment? Cut class
size to maintain standards? Close one of the schools? Of
course not. Instead, the state’s supreme court has ordered the
board of bar examiners to make the exam easier, so more people
will pass. Since Oklahoma’s exam was already rated tentheasiest in the nation, the decision’s main effect will be to
increase the Sooner State’s supply of mediocre lawyers—
which, the law schools should teach, is apparently now a
“compelling governmental interest.”
n One might expect that a black transgender woman speaking on campus about “trans liberation, racial justice, and
intersectional feminism” would be treated like a movie star
who had also won the Nobel prize. Yet when Janet Mock, a
triple threat of the type just described, was invited to speak at
ultra-progressive Brown University, student outrage was so
vociferous that she had to cancel the appearance. Why?
Because her talk was scheduled to take place at the campus
chapter of Hillel, a pro-Israel Jewish group. “We do not conAPRIL 11, 2016
TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
THE WEEK
done the use of queer people of color as props to hide occupation,” a petition thundered. Race, feminism, and gender identity are reliable subjects for academic fury, but anti-Zionism
can beat them all combined.
MATTHEW CAVANAUGH/GETTY IMAGES
n In March, the Yale Bulldogs won their first NCAAtournament basketball game in 50 years—but team captain
Jack Montague was forced to watch from the stands. In
February, Montague, a senior, was expelled after a disciplinary panel determined that he had sexually assaulted a
female student in October 2014. Yale refuses to comment on
Montague’s case, citing privacy concerns, but the available
evidence is far from conclusive. The alleged victim, now a
junior, says that Montague forced her into non-consensual sex
when the two were alone; Montague says the encounter was
consensual. According to the independent investigator hired
by the university, the pair had had multiple previous consensual sexual encounters, and the woman contacted Montague
a few hours after the alleged assault and spent the night with
him. Furthermore, the woman never filed charges with the
New Haven Police Department or Yale University Public
Safety, and reported the alleged incident to Yale’s Title IX
coordinator only a year after its alleged occurrence. In fact,
the complaint that spurred the investigation was filed by a university official. Perhaps the Yale panel had access to additional,
more definitive evidence. But dubious verdicts, following
dubious, Star Chamber–style proceedings, are increasingly
the campus norm, thanks to the Obama Department of
Education. Montague plans to sue Yale, beginning what is
sure to be a drawn-out, unpleasant process for everyone
involved. These sorts of suits, ruined reputations, and much
more would be avoided if colleges left criminal investigations to police and prosecutors.
n With the sale of the Orange County Register to Denverbased Digital First, part of the Alden Global Capital investment fund, a peculiar American story comes to a close.
Southern California was for generations home to a tough,
libertarian-leaning Republicanism—the western conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—and the
Orange County Register was the voice of that movement.
The publishing group that became Freedom Newspapers was
founded in the 1930s after the Register’s acquisition by R. C.
Hoiles, a newspaperman for whom the adjective “irascible”
may as well have been invented. Hoiles was a tireless crusader for the moral principles underpinning a free society,
both in print and in fact: Among his other exploits, he directly
challenged Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era wage and
price controls, defying the president by giving his staff an
illegal pay raise. (This might have been the last time an
American newspaper staff received a raise.) In the shadow
of Los Angeles’s unthinking progressivism, the Register
campaigned against taxes, government-run schools—and
the internment of Japanese Americans during the war, a position few others had the courage to take. Poor management and
infighting among the heirs eventually laid Freedom low, and at
the ignominious end it was trying to satisfy simultaneously a
bankruptcy court and antitrust regulators micromanaging the
sale of its assets. The newspaper survives for now, but its
unique voice is lost.
2016
Ted Cruz for President
ONSERVATIVES have had difficulty choosing a champion in the presidential race in part because it has featured so many candidates with very good claims on
our support. As their number has dwindled, the right choice has
become clear: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
We supported Cruz’s campaign in 2012 because we saw in him
what conservatives nationwide have come to see as well. Cruz is
a brilliant and articulate exponent of our views on the full spectrum of issues. Other Republicans say we should protect the
Constitution. Cruz has actually done it; indeed, it has been the
animating passion of his career. He is a strong believer in the
liberating power of free markets, including free trade (notwithstanding the usual rhetorical hedges). His skepticism about
“comprehensive immigration reform” is leading him to a realism
about the impact of immigration that has been missing from our
policymaking and debate. He favors a foreign policy based on a
hard-headed assessment of American interests, one that seeks to
strengthen our power but is mindful of its limits. He forthrightly
defends religious liberty, the right to life of unborn children, and
the role of marriage in connecting children to their parents—
causes that reduce too many other Republicans to mumbling.
That forthrightness is worth emphasizing. Conservatism
should not be merely combative; but especially in our political
culture, it must be willing to be controversial. Too many Republicans shrink from this implication of our creed. Not Cruz.
And this virtue is connected to others that primary voters should
keep in mind. Conservatives need not worry that Cruz will be
C
Senator Ted Cruz
13
THE WEEK
tripped up by an interview question or answer it with mindless
conventional wisdom when a better answer is available. We
need rarely worry, either, that his stumbling words will have
to be recast by aides and supporters later. Neither of those things
could be said about a lot of Republican nominees over the years.
We are well aware that a lot of Republicans, including some
conservatives, dislike the senator and even find him unlikable. So
far, conservative voters seem to like him just fine. We do not wish
to adjudicate all the conflicts between Cruz’s Senate colleagues
and him. He has sometimes made tactical errors, in our judgment;
but conflicts have also arisen because his colleagues have lacked
direction, clarity, and urgency. In any case, these conflicts pale
into insignificance in light of Republicans’ shared interest in winning in November and governing successfully thereafter.
No politician is perfect, and Senator Cruz will find that our
endorsement comes with friendly and ongoing criticism. His tax
plan is admirably growth-oriented but contains too much indirect taxation of employees. He has done little to lay out a plausible replacement for Obamacare, and especially to counter the
idea that replacing it would involve stripping insurance from millions of Americans. His occasional remarks to the effect that the
general election can be won by mobilizing conservatives who
have heretofore been politically quiescent seems fanciful. As
the nominee he will have to adopt a more empirically grounded
strategy, just as he has done in the primaries.
What matters now is that Cruz is a talented and committed
conservative. He is also Republicans’ best chance for keeping their presidential nomination from going to someone
with low character and worse principles. We support Ted Cruz
for president.
2016
Trump: The Prospect of Violence
in March, demonstrators inside and outside the
venue of a Trump rally at the University of Illinois in
Chicago were so numerous that the
Trump campaign called the rally off. The
protesters became aggressive, waving vulgar signs (WE SHUT SH** DOWN), shouting
obscenities at Trump supporters, and throwing bottles (a policeman was hit in the head).
Trump supporters and opponents at the
event shoved one another and exchanged
blows. Days later, other demonstrators
blocked a highway leading to a Trump rally
in Fountain Hills, Ariz., near Phoenix.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the
press are designed primarily to protect political discourse. Free and open campaigning is
more important than nude selfies, avantgarde theater, commercial advertising, or
even the New York Times (or NATIONAL REVIEW). If a citizen running for office and
addressing fellow citizens is silenced or shut
down, it is an attack on republican government. The perpetrators should be arrested if
they have committed crimes in the course of
their mob actions; their intended victims
may also have legitimate legal cases against
Protesters and supporters of Donald Trump clash in Chicago, March 11, 2016.
E
DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
them. The discovery process might be entertaining: How much
rent-a-mob funding comes from George Soros?
So far Donald Trump has taken none of his tormentors to
court. If anything, he seems excited by the scuffling, encouraging his outraged fans to react in kind. At a rally in Cedar Rapids
in February, he told supporters, “If you see somebody getting
ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would
you, seriously. . . . I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
More recently, Trump has turned his zest for combat on the
GOP, opining that if he were to lose the nomination at the
Cleveland convention despite having won a plurality of delegates, “I think you’d have riots. . . . I wouldn’t lead it, but I
think bad things would happen.”
Taking their cue from their prompter, a few hot-headed
Trump supporters have manhandled hecklers. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has gotten into the fun,
sucker-grabbing Michelle Fields, a reporter from Breitbart.com,
as she was about to ask his boss a question.
The aftermath of the Fields encounter was illuminating.
Lewandowski and the Trump campaign denied that any such
thing had happened, even though video showed Fields being
pulled back and Ben Terris, a Washington Post reporter, confirmed her account. Breitbart cravenly refused to stand by
Fields, whereupon she, her editor Ben Shapiro, and two other
Breitbart staffers resigned. Trump asks, Who will rid me of
these troublesome hecklers and journalists? When his minions
do so, he and the Trumpkin media shut their eyes.
Cartoonists, headline writers, and comedians reach for
hyperbole, and Trump is often compared—casually, or maliciously—to the darkest forces of 20th-century Europe. It
would dishonor the victims of totalitarianism to equate their
exterminators with a political grifter. But bad things do not
become good simply because they are not as bad as Hitler.
Trump enjoys bullying and brawling, and blesses it in those
who admire him. Anti-Trump protesters are often worse, but
Trump is shameful.
14
ARLY
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APRIL 11, 2016
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withering
slights
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by florence
The new, complete, and unabridged collection of the popular
monthly NR magazine column by America’s most revered misanthropic writer
T
he hallmark of National Review is that it has been home to some
of America’s very best writers, and few will argue that there are
any of greater style, wit, and caustic wisdom than Florence King,
whose beloved “second” column, “The Bent Pin,” graced the magazine
in every other issue from 2007 to 2012 (her previous column, “The
Misanthrope’s Corner,” held NR’s back page for a glorious decade).
King fans (who isn’t?!) have so craved her timeless works that over
the years NR has published two collections, STET, Damnit! and Deja
Reviews. And now we’re delighted to announce a third treasure trove of
unrivaled prose à la Florence—Withering Slights: The Bent Pin
Collection, 2007 to 2012.
On every page of this brand-new, handsome hardcover book is
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Conservatives, curmudgeons, and anyone who
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From her first “Bent Pin” column in 2007 (“Grosser and Grosser”) to her 2012 adios
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Reform Conservatism’s Future
The GOP must not disregard policy innovation
BY RAMESH PONNURU
FTER Republicans lost the 2012
election, three theories arose
among them about what had
gone wrong and what needed to
change. The course of the Republican
presidential primaries has already invalidated two of them, while probably making the third one impossible to follow in
the short term.
The first theory was outlined in an
“autopsy” report about the election from
the Republican National Committee. It
urged the party to embrace “comprehensive immigration reform,” create an
active presence in minority communities,
talk less about same-sex marriage, and
invest in data analysis.
The second theory, voiced by conservative activists and talk-show hosts,
held that Republicans had erred by
nominating moderates such as John
McCain and Mitt Romney and by
increasing federal spending in the
Bush years: Demoralized conserva-
ROMAN GENN
A
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tives had stayed home. The party needed
to present voters with a purer conservative vision.
The third theory, advanced by a small
group of writers who came to be
described as “reform conservatives,”
argued that voters see Republicans as
narrowly focused on promoting the economic interests of big business and rich
people. That impression had hardened
because the Republican economic agenda—free trade, deregulation, tax cuts
focused on corporations and high earners, and reductions in future entitlement
spending—had grown stale, and no
longer spoke to most people’s concerns.
The answer was to modify and add to
that agenda by applying conservative
insights to today’s circumstances. The
point of the resulting new agenda would
be not just to promise to shrink the government but also to show how shrinking
the government would help people
solve their concrete problems. This was
the argument I made in NATIONAL REVIEW’s post-election issue in 2012.
There was some overlap among these
theories. Someone who favored greater
ideological purity could also want Republicans to make more use of advanced
technologies for identifying persuadable
voters: Senator Cruz’s campaign has
followed both prescriptions. Some Republicans thought it important both to
offer legal status to illegal immigrants
and to modernize the party’s economic
agenda. That ended up being Senator
Rubio’s combination of views.
Most of the reform conservatives,
though, rejected the autopsy’s counsel
on immigration—which proved to be a
dead end even before the primaries
began. The kind of immigration bill
that both parties’ leaders favored drew
too much opposition from Republican
voters for Republican politicians to
cooperate in passing it. The effort
badly divided the party. And it further
alienated the working-class white voters who already saw Republicans as
champions of the boardroom rather
than the shop floor.
Donald Trump’s success in the primaries, meanwhile, has undercut the
purist argument. Trump is anything but a
consistent conservative, and he talks
much more about running the government more efficiently than about downsizing it. He has often talked about
increasing government power—for example, to set prices in health care and to
discourage criticism of him in the press.
He’s not interested in limited government, and a lot of Republicans—a plurality in most contests so far—have not
held it against him. The purist argument,
remember, was that nominating a true
conservative would motivate conservatives who had been skipping elections to
come out and vote. This theory never had
much evidence behind it. But the primaries have delivered a fatal blow. It is
not very credible that non-voters are
more ideologically conservative than
Republican primary voters are.
The reform-conservative theory
about the weakness of the party’s agenda, on the other hand, has held up pretty
well. The theory may even have underestimated that weakness. Reformers
emphasized that Republican economics
left swing voters cold, but it turns out
that a lot of Republican voters are not
greatly attached to it either.
APRIL 11, 2016
We argued that if Republicans did
not supply conservative answers to
voters’ economic anxieties, the political market would supply attractive
but non-conservative answers. We
feared that vacuum would be filled
with mostly bad ideas by the Democratic nominee in a general election; it
has instead also been filled with
mostly bad ideas by Trump in the Republican primaries.
But if some reform-conservative
premises have been vindicated, reformconservative policies have played
almost no role in those primaries.
Senator Rubio did the most to embrace
those ideas. In mid 2014, he started
echoing reformist themes: the need to
Which is not to say that it’s obvious
that Rubio would have done much better if he had run harder on reformist
policies. He may have been doomed
anyway by his lack of an organization,
or by his apparent strategy of being
most Republicans’ second choice. The
primaries have not shown great demand by Republican voters for policy
talk of any type—although there is a
chicken-or-egg question here: Maybe
they do not care about policy in large
part because nobody has tried to show
its relevance to their lives. Be that as it
may, the primaries have certainly shown
that Republican politicians have more
freedom to innovate than they have generally thought.
The primaries have certainly shown
that Republican politicians have more
freedom to innovate than they have
generally thought.
apply conservative thinking in fresh
ways, the potential of conservative reforms to reduce the cost of living and
thereby make a difference in people’s
lives. He came out for an Obamacare
replacement that made it possible for
nearly everyone to purchase at least catastrophic coverage while deregulating
the system. He sponsored legislation
allowing people to finance higher education in new ways. And he advocated
tax relief for middle-class parents, not
just high earners (although his plan also
gave high earners very large tax cuts).
He did not talk about these initiatives
very much, however, perhaps viewing
them as helpful in a general election
rather than in a Republican primary.
Rubio talked about his tax plan twice in
the debates, both times in response to
criticism. He was more associated with
his 2013 immigration bill and a very
hawkish-sounding foreign policy than
he was with any domestic agenda. He
came across less as an innovator than as
a younger, more articulate, and His panic version of George W. Bush. He
ended up doing well among affluent,
college-educated Republican voters
but not connecting with the more economically stressed and disaffected voters
he needed.
That fact could influence the shape of
conservatism in years to come. It could
even be relevant to conservative action
this year. Some conservatives are talking
about running a third-party campaign if
Trump wins the nomination. If the point
of that campaign is merely to give conservatives a candidate for whom they
can vote in good conscience, then it may
as well content itself with copying past
Republican platforms.
An independent conservative bid
could, however, adopt a more ambitious
goal. If no presidential candidate gets
270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives determines the winner. The
vast bulk of the polling we have seen so
far suggests that Trump has very little
capacity to keep Hillary Clinton below
that number. If that holds true, then an
independent conservative candidate
would have to win some states that President Obama won last time in order to
send the election to the House.
Which means that this conservative
candidate would have to find a way to
appeal to ideologically conservative voters (as the purists say) while also appealing to less ideological voters who backed
Obama (as the autopsy suggested). That
sounds like a job for reform conservatism, or something like it.
The AntiGoldwater
Donald Trump is fracturing
conservatism, not consolidating it
B Y S T E V E N F. H A Y W A R D
looking for
some bit of consolation in the
prospect of a Donald Trump
nomination have begun to
suggest that Trump’s probable generalelection defeat to Hillary Clinton, though
a disappointment, might portend a new,
invigorated conservatism—much like
Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat to
Lyndon Johnson in 1964. If history
doesn’t repeat itself, as the saying goes,
perhaps it rhymes.
And, indeed, Goldwater’s crushing
defeat is surely the most fruitful loss in
American political history. His campaign
galvanized the conservative movement
and wrested the Republican party from
the grip of its eastern moderate faction,
setting the stage for the ascendance of,
among others, Ronald Reagan. The
chain of causation is straightforward:
no Goldwater, no Reagan “Time for
Choosing” speech; no “Time for Choosing” speech, no Governor or President
Reagan. As George Will said at NATIONAL REVIEW’s 25th-anniversary celebration, which took place just after
Reagan’s 1980 landslide: “Goldwater
won the election of 1964; it just took 16
years to count all the votes.”
As historical analogies go, this one
appears promising on the surface. The
excitement surrounding Trump, the new
or previously disengaged voters he is
drawing out, and the disruption he is visiting upon the previous boundaries of
“acceptable” political discourse might
suggest that he offers a Goldwater-like
opportunity to change the direction of
American politics, even if he loses.
Trump hasn’t just moved the Overton
window on immigration, Islamism,
and several other issues; he’s shattered
the glass and torn out the frame. What
C
ONSERVATIVES
Mr. Hayward is the Ronald Reagan Visiting Professor
at Pepperdine University and the author of
The Age of Reagan.
17
BETTMANN/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, 1979
conventional GOP candidate is capable
of doing that?
But the proposition that Donald Trump
is the second coming of Barry Goldwater
overlooks crucial distinctions between
1964 and today. First, unlike 1964, this
year’s election is winnable, and it’s perverse to suggest throwing away a winnable election. In the mid 1960s, with the
exception of the fledgling American
Enterprise Institute, there was almost
none of the infrastructure that exists
now—no Heritage Foundation, no Cato
Institute, no Americans for Tax Reform,
and few grassroots groups—and conservatives had almost no influence in Congress. A conservative candidate faced
structural disadvantages that are unthinkable today.
And 1964 was particularly difficult. In
fact, 1964 was an unwinnable election for
any Republican presidential candidate.
Barry Goldwater knew that his candidacy
was doomed from the moment of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination. As William F.
Buckley wrote in NATIONAL REVIEW at the
time, three presidents in 14 months is the
kind of thing people go for in banana
republics, not in the United States.
In those circumstances, it made sense
to conduct a campaign to advance conservatism within the Republican party,
which before Goldwater was still in the
“me, too” mode of offering low-budget
18
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liberalism as an alternative to Democrats’
still regnant New Dealism. (In the 1960s,
the “constructive Republican alternative
program” was known on Capitol Hill by
the obvious acronym “CRAP.”) Goldwater understood this. He would later say:
“We knew that the only thing we could
accomplish would be moving the Republican headquarters from New York to
the West Coast, and we did that. We got it
away from the money.”
Again, on the surface this sounds much
like what Trump is doing. It is no doubt
correct to interpret Trump’s support as a
massive rejection of the Republican
party’s current leadership. But does today’s
Republican “establishment” have the
same ideological character as the establishment of 1964? It is one thing to be out
of touch or to have ineffectively opposed
Barack Obama or to have badly misjudged a key issue (immigration). But it
takes a whopping lack of perspective to
conclude that today’s Republican “establishment” is liberal. (The many people
who think Mitch McConnell and Paul
Ryan are “RINO” collaborators with
President Obama presumably will reconsider after a term under President Hillary
Clinton, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.)
Furthermore, in his resistance to the
Republican establishment of 1964, Goldwater ran a campaign of true conservative
principles, articulated in his 1960 bestseller Conscience of a Conservative, in
which he laid out a conservatism that
sought to contest, rather than compromise with, the order that had prevailed
since the New Deal. Trump, by contrast,
shows little acquaintance with the conservative movement or serious conservative thought. Whatever the virtues of
The Art of the Deal, it is no Conscience
of a Conservative.
It seems clear that, instead of besting
a liberal establishment, the Trump
campaign is fracturing the conservative movement.
Goldwater’s campaign prefigured the
coalescence and ascendance of that movement. Goldwater was Moses to Reagan’s
Joshua; Goldwater didn’t get us to the
Promised Land, but he showed the way.
Who would be Trump’s successors?
Who might give a pro-Trump “Time for
Choosing” speech in October? A Trump
defeat would more likely mean an exile
into the political wilderness for a nowfractured conservative movement, and it
would be the Republican “establishment,” not the Tea Party, that would pick
up the pieces of a shattered party. It is
tempting to see a historical precedent in
the election of 1912, when the GOP split
in two and handed the White House to
Woodrow Wilson, who won fewer popular votes than William Jennings Bryan
APRIL 11, 2016
had in 1908. But Republicans may do
better to reflect on the election of 1860,
when the Democratic party split in half
over the unacceptability of Stephen
Douglas to southerners. The Democratic
party, on the presidential level, didn’t
recover for 70 years.
That is likelier with Trump than with
any other nominee Republicans could
choose this cycle. And here one parallel
with 1964 is appropriate. Prominent liberals—from Martin Luther King Jr. to
California governor Pat Brown to reporters at CBS News—eagerly proclaimed Goldwater a “fascist” and said
that the 1964 convention prefigured
“Hitlerism.” About the vitriolic media
coverage, Goldwater later remarked: “If I
had had to go by the media reports
alone, I’d have voted against the sonofabitch, too.” It is not a stretch to
expect this sort of rhetoric from the Left
over the course of the general election—to the detriment not just of Trump
but of conservatives down the ballot.
And given the violence erupting at
Trump rallies, his reflexive authoritarianism, and the nativist sympathies of his
most ardent fans, this charge would be
far more compelling than it was when
directed at Goldwater.
In 1964, Goldwater was the only conservative candidate in a field of liberal
Republicans. This election cycle featured
many worthy conservative candidates,
several of them with significant accomplishments (Governors Jindal, Perry, and
Walker come to mind). It is a peculiarity
of this cycle that Trump has won chiefly
because the conservative vote has been
divided; it is doubtful he’d have won
head-to-head votes against most of the
top tier of this field.
For those looking for a conservative
alternative, Ted Cruz is still standing. The
knock on Cruz is that he’s unelectable,
though most polls show him running
more strongly against Hillary Clinton
than would Trump. But even if you conclude that Cruz would face an uphill
general-election fight, it is better to lose
with Cruz, whose approach to the issues
showcases clarity and depth, than with
Trump, who is inconsistent, unprincipled, and opportunistic.
It is astonishing that after eight years of
Obama, when the normal cycles of politics favor the out-party, the Republican
party—which, as NATIONAL REVIEW’s late
publisher William Rusher liked to point
out, is merely a vessel for conservatism,
as a bottle is for wine—is threatening to
break apart. Goldwater didn’t break the
conservative movement; he consolidated
it. If the conservative movement is reconstituting itself, it would be better to do so
with an authentic conservative candidacy. Harry Jaffa, the man who wrote Barry
Goldwater’s famous line “Extremism in
defense of liberty is no vice,” also counseled, “To prefer noble failure to vulgar
success is of the essence of moral freedom and human dignity.” If you want a
noble conservative beacon who might
herald, in 2016, what Goldwater did in
1964, the junior senator from Texas fills
the order better than the vulgar populist
from Manhattan.
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19
A Decentralized
Politics
Power has become too concentrated
in national parties
BY MICHAEL NEEDHAM &
JACOB RESES
rise of Donald Trump and
the visible chaos within the
GOP presidential primaries
have forced Republicans to
engage in some deep soul-searching.
Many limited-government conservatives, whatever their past frustrations
with the GOP, feel their party slipping
away from them. A world in which
Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee seems to them to be a
world in which there is no limitedgovernment party in American politics.
Without conservative leadership from
the top, they fear, conservative governance seems impossible.
One response to the prospect of such
a transformation of the party has been
for Republicans in Congress to preempt
the presidential nominee’s ability to set
the agenda, by offering a concrete policy
platform of their own. This has been a
principal aim of House speaker Paul
Ryan’s important effort to develop policy task forces, to address the issues of
national security, tax reform, overregulation, health care, and poverty. But the
work on this project has been slow, and
it is unclear that it will produce anything capable of meaningfully influencing the campaign.
That the nomination of a presidential
candidate who has not run on a conservative agenda seems so likely to transform the character of the Republican
party highlights the degree to which
we have come to think of the president
as the agenda-setter-in-chief in our
constitutional system. But that the
House leadership’s response would be
to organize an effort to craft a preemptive, unified agenda of its own highlights an equally important and related
phenomenon: that we have come to
T
HE
Mr. Needham is the chief executive officer of Heritage
Action for America. Mr. Reses is its director of
strategic initiatives.
20
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think that parties are defined by their
leadership’s ability to craft a clear, coherent agenda, present that agenda to
voters, receive a mandate from the people, and carry it out once in power.
This is a top-down way of thinking
about policymaking, and it assumes a
role for the parties that is not obvious, let
alone required by our constitutional
structure. There is merit to this approach,
of course. Agendas can unite us, lift
our sights beyond self-interest, and
rally us to action in moments when
action is sorely needed. When the
stakes of politics are as high as they are
today, such unity of action and purpose
can be quite important.
Still, it’s helpful to contemplate the
origins of and alternatives to this model
of party action, as they may tell us something about how to approach a potential
Trump presidency, as well as about how
to grapple with tensions within the
Republican party that long predate the
2016 presidential campaign.
The vision of party politics that
we’ve adopted in America can be
traced to what political scientists in the
20th century called the “responsibleparty model.” Its proponents were
frustrated by the apparent dysfunction
of American politics inherent in the
tension between what Willmoore
Kendall called the “two majorities,”
one in Congress protecting minority
interests and one in the executive branch
striving for swift action on behalf of
popular majorities. As an antidote to
such dysfunction, “responsible party”
proponents such as Woodrow Wilson
pined for parties unified enough at the
national level to present a clear, coherent agenda to the American people and
achieve an electoral mandate across all
branches to carry out that agenda once
in office. Led from the top by the president and promising unified national
action made possible through the centralization of administrative authority,
such parties would sideline local party
bosses, who had previously held sway
through their mobilization of regional
votes. National parties would instead
mobilize national coalitions along
class lines, prizing a unity of action
made possible only through the neutralization of competing internal
power centers.
The problem for conservatives eager
to implement a party-driven national
agenda of their own is that this model of
politics is inextricably linked to the progressive vision of governance. Conservative scholar James Piereson, reviewing
the work of the political scientist E. E.
Schattschneider, one proponent of responsible parties, observes:
A strong president, administrative centralization, national parties, loose construction of the Constitution, class
politics—this is Schattschneider’s program of party government, but it
sounds suspiciously like the institutional program of the Democratic party
as it was reconstituted by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt.
The Founders had an alternative
approach to parties and government,
one grounded in their fear that national
class politics might devolve into tyranny
of the majority. It was reinforced by the
decentralized governing institutions
that would be dismantled by the progressive revolution. As author Kenneth
Kolson, summarizing the Madisonian
perspective, writes:
In America the only real check against
tyranny lies in the domestication of the
legislature. The best way to do this is to
implant in the legislature many distinct
motors, each tending to carry the body
in a different direction, and thus only
for a short distance. The legislature
must be broken up into many small
parts; that is to say, it must be sown with
the seeds of party.
And so it was. The Framers built a
large republic of diverse interests across
wide regions. They wrote a Constitution that would grant those competing sectional interests their due say in
national questions and channel their
will through a constitutional system of
separated powers capable of only limited action absent consensus on major
questions. Such a system would naturally foster parties that would forge
consensus, particularly in Congress,
across diverse interests, and the constraints imposed by the Constitution
limiting federal authority and protecting the people’s rights would foster a
presumption against federal intervention on any one interest’s behalf to the
detriment of another.
All of this depended on a degree of
decentralization that our politics has
lacked for a long time, a testament to
APRIL 11, 2016
progressives’ success in imposing
their alternative view of political
order. Under the politics of the administrative state, compromise between
interests connected to political power
means that everyone with a seat at the
table gets a little of what he wants, at
the expense of those with no voice in
the process.
But signs of a return to the sort of
decentralized politics the Founders
envisioned have emerged in recent
years. Party establishments can no
longer rig the game of their nominating
contests and no longer hold monopoly
control on fundraising networks. Mass
media are no longer in the hands of a
few brokers of access to the people;
social media, online video channels,
and other new media have displaced the
network news. These trends toward a
politics with fewer barriers to entry for
and remember that “a Congress of
solo practitioners has become a powerful engine of executive-led government growth.”
This outlook is far too pessimistic
about the possibilities presented by a
politics with fewer gatekeepers and
fewer norms of deference to party. It
assumes that the centralizing trends in
politics are here to stay, and that the best
we can hope for is to contain the decentralizing elements that create perverse
incentives for self-interested actors to
expand the administrative state for their
own benefit.
But perhaps it’s the decentralizing
forces that are here to stay—and perhaps
they can be harnessed to break down the
centralized politics on which the status
quo in government depends. Decentralization offers the possibility of a politics that is dominated neither by narrow
sources of authority and against the
agenda-setters when their work looks to
lead us astray. That means that members
who exercise their vetoes on Congress’s
agenda would do so in unison, toward
collective purpose, rather than individually, for personal gain. It means an
approach to policy development restricted neither to committees of jurisdiction nor to individual policy
entrepreneurs with no prospect of seeing their vision carried into law. Decentralization, in short, can allow
elected officials to build new things
together in new ways rather than foster
chaos or gridlock as individuals.
This is the story of the Tea Party and
of institutions such as the House
Freedom Caucus. It’s a story that will
continue regardless of what happens in
2016, or 2018, or 2020. It’s a story of
political change that mirrors the sorts
Perhaps it’s the decentralizing forces that are here to stay—and
perhaps they can be harnessed to break down the centralized
politics on which the status quo in government depends.
those eager to challenge the dominance
of party leaders have enabled the rise of
such politicians as Ted Cruz, Marco
Rubio, Ben Sasse, Mike Lee, and Jim
Jordan. And, yes, they have enabled
Donald Trump, too.
The trouble for conservatives and for
the country is that, under an administrative state never contemplated by the
Founders, individual political actors
can easily use their independence not to
veto federal interventions threatening
local interests but to hold party leaders
hostage to their own corrupt demands,
from pork spending to regulatory
carve-outs. Recognizing the perverse
incentives that the combination of decentralized congressional politics and
big government has created, some conservatives are pessimistic that Republicans will rise above the politics of pork
unless strong party leadership can
bring them to heel. In the wake of the
coup against House speaker John
Boehner, former American Enterprise
Institute president Christopher DeMuth
advised Boehner’s eventual successor,
Paul Ryan, to encourage very conservative party members to line up behind
the next man to take the speakership
parochialism nor by the corruption of
the national special interests that too
often co-opt our national parties’ agendas. It might well open voters’ eyes to
matters of concentrated benefit and
diffuse cost and foster bottom-up
organization of those voters left out of
governing coalitions and squeezed by
those in power, thereby providing a
voice to those who have lacked one in a
system designed to shut them out.
Decentralization offers the possibility
that public-spirited politicians might follow the better angels of their nature without fear of retribution by the ruling class.
It makes a politics of principle possible in
a system designed to run on the most cynical harnessing of self-interest.
A decentralized politics need not be
one of gridlock and dysfunction; it need
not amount to what political scientist
James Q. Wilson called the “atomization” of politics; it need not encourage
and reward self-interested individualism
among officeholders. It might instead be
a politics in which new associations and
collaborations become possible—in
which new, smaller centers of power
emerge in Washington, exerting a
healthy pressure on the centralized
of economic and social changes that
the liberal tradition of Adam Smith has
taught conservatives to embrace: creative destruction, from the bottom up,
of failing top-heavy orders, not for
destruction’s sake but to build something better. Even if the result of a
decentralized politics is sometimes
inaction, inaction is often the right
answer when the alternative is perpetuation or expansion of failing programs. But, given the work needed to
restore federalism and constitutionalism in our government, conservatism
must be about more than opposing
things. How best to channel the current
forces of disruption—to find new ways
to work, together, toward noble purposes—is the great question we face in
politics today.
These forces will frustrate all, no
matter how noble or ill their intent, who
seek to shape politics to conform to
their ideal designs. In a season when the
question of who will lead our parties
seems so important, the disruptions of
recent years should remind us that our
politics can and should be about more
than any one man elected to any one
position. That’s a good thing.
21
A Friend in
The Arena
What’s it like when a friend of yours
runs for president?
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
I
T’S strange enough to have a friend in
the U.S. Senate. There are only 100
of them, in a nation of 300 million–
plus. To have a friend running for
president is even stranger.
When Ted Cruz was elected to the
Senate, I called up another friend, David
Pryce-Jones, in London. He is my NATIONAL REVIEW colleague as well. I said,
“Did there come a time when your classmates at Eton and Oxford began to be
elected to Parliament, and serve in ministerial positions?” “Yes,” he said. “Was it
strange?” I said. “Yes,” he said.
But look: When you go to Eton and
Oxford, you expect your classmates to
rise to the heights. They always have.
And Britain is a small country, relative
to ours. To have a friend become a
U.S. senator and presidential candidate
is . . . something.
I met Ted Cruz on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 2000. I had
taken a leave of absence from NR to
assist that campaign; Ted was a domesticpolicy adviser on it. In no time, he and I
“bonded,” as they say. We had many a
late-night discussion at Earl Campbell’s
barbecue joint and other choice spots.
Did I mention this was Texas? Austin?
It was.
One of the things Cruz and I bonded
over was Reagan: our admiration of. He
and I were both deeply influenced by that
presidency. He was in his teens; I was in
my teens and twenties.
Ted’s father had been a refugee from
Cuba. His son had an unusual appreciation of freedom, and an unusual detestation of tyranny.
He had been fancily educated, Ted had:
Princeton University and Harvard Law
School. He went on to clerk for the chief
justice, William Rehnquist. At the same
time, he had a scrappy, outsider’s heart.
Given his education and ability, he
could have been making millions at a
law firm. Instead, he was toiling on a
22
|
political campaign. When I’ve noted
this in the past, people have said, “Yeah,
because he wanted a leg up on his own
political future!” Okay. But so? If you
want to do political good, it helps to get
elected. Besides which, Ted was advancing, even then, ideas in which he
believes. I have seldom met a person so
devoted to ideas.
Ted knew a lot about the law, of course.
And about domestic policy (again, of
course)—Medicare Part B and all that. He
knew a lot about economics, and was a big
free-marketeer. He knew a lot about foreign policy, and was a hawk. Also, he was
a social conservative. He opposed abortion, for example, and knew why.
Another thing: He was amazingly free
of cynicism. What I mean is, he really believed in America and free enterprise and
all that rah-rah stuff. Other people feel the
need to roll their eyes a bit. Not Ted.
You may have heard that he is not well
liked by the people around him. Well, I
liked him—loved him. But it’s true: Some
people found him too cocky, too brash,
and too ambitious for their taste.
The older I get, the more patient I am
with ambition, certainly if that ambition is
directed to positive ends. I think of William Herndon on his onetime law partner,
Lincoln: “His ambition was a little engine
that knew no rest.”
I also think of a kid I grew up with, Jim
Harbaugh. He was cocky, brash, ambitious—and hugely talented. Ted would
remind me of him. I loved Jim, though
he was not universally appreciated. Certainly he was envied. He went on to be a
quarterback in the NFL, and, after that,
one of the most successful football
coaches in America—at both the college
and pro levels.
But back to the Bush campaign. You
know who else liked Ted? Loved him?
Heidi Nelson, a whiz of an economicpolicy staffer. And a wonderful California
blonde. Like Ted, she had a can-do spirit.
The two were married the next year.
Ted took his wedding party to the
Reagan ranch. There, we gazed on the
great man’s GE appliances, horse saddles,
and so on. It was a totally Ted-like outing.
We were in Reaganite heaven.
In the following years, he had highs, I
had highs; he had lows, I had lows. Ted
was as good a friend in foul weather as in
fair. We talked and talked, usually late at
night (though not at Earl Campbell’s).
We dreamed and schemed. He would run
for office, surely. I wanted to, but couldn’t
see a path. At least I had the satisfaction
of watching him.
In 2009, he prepared to run for attorney
general of Texas. I wrote about him for
the first time. In that piece, I spent a couple of paragraphs noting similarities, and
dissimilarities, between Ted and the new
president. I concluded those paragraphs
with this: “Obama certainly rose quickly
in American politics, very quickly (alas).
Can Ted Cruz do the same? I don’t know,
but it would be good for the country.”
For reasons too tedious to explain,
the attorney-general race did not come
off—because the attorney-general position did not come open. But not long after,
a position came open for sure: a U.S.
Senate seat.
Ted announced in January 2011. “I
hope he goes to the Senate,” I wrote, “and
I hope he goes further than that.” Marco
Rubio had just been sworn in as a senator.
I wrote, “A nightmare scenario for people
like us—I’m talking about Reaganites—
is that Senator Cruz and Senator Rubio
compete in a presidential primary.” I was
thinking 2020, maybe 2024.
Important people told Ted not to bother
to run for Senate. He had no money, no
name recognition, no network. There
were people in line ahead of him—senior
politicians—and he should wait his turn.
He’d make a fool of himself if he didn’t.
Ted was confident he would win. He
told me he would, over and over. And
damned if he didn’t.
On Election Night, I began a blog post
by quoting a Gershwin song: “They all
laughed at Christopher Columbus, when
he said the world was round. They all
laughed when Edison recorded sound.”
The song ends, “Who’s got the last
laugh now?”
A left-wing journalist wrote me a nasty
e-mail, saying, “Columbus didn’t say that!
Your friend is an idiot!” He thought I was
quoting the candidate, Ted. I was insulted
on Ira Gershwin’s behalf. And wistful
about a lost popular culture.
Ted announced for president a year ago.
In due course, I made a disclosure: I was
his friend, I supported him (while admiring Rubio, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and
others), and I would help him, if asked.
Transparency City, as Bush 41 might say.
The first contest was Iowa, as usual. I saw
Ted in Des Moines a few days before.
But on the night of the caucuses itself,
I was back home in New York, workAPRIL 11, 2016
Breaking the
Stained-Glass
Ceiling
A strategy to defend religious liberty
B Y G E R A R D V. B R A D L E Y
M
CASSI ALEXANDRA/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Ted Cruz speaks in Barrington, N.H., February 8, 2016.
ing—covering a performance at the Metropolitan Opera (Maria Stuarda). At intermission, I checked my phone. A friend
had texted to say that Ted was looking
good in Iowa. I could not quite bring myself to believe it.
After the opera, I repaired to a restaurant across the street. My friend texted me
a photo of her television screen: “Cruz
Wins.” Honestly, I gulped. I was numb
for a moment.
It seemed only yesterday that Ted was
crashing on my couch, with his cowboy
boots to the side. Now he had won the
Iowa caucuses? It was surreal, sobering,
thrilling, and believable, all at once, if
you will excuse that jumble.
At times in this race, I have been Joe
Detached Journalist. But I have done a lot
of living and dying with Ted. When he is
maligned—as he has been—I feel it
keenly. Personally. I don’t claim that he
walks on water, or that the other candidates are villains. Far from it. I can be
Ted’s worst critic. But I’m in deep: I am
with him every step.
“You’re in the arena,” I remarked to
him at one point. He is absorbing blows,
and he is striking blows. He is the target
of jeers and the object of cheers. I’m a
mere spectator, though with a good seat.
Some of my friends and colleagues
can’t stand Ted. And they are not shy
about telling me. Some days, I am serene.
I try to explain, defend, and persuade.
Other days, I bristle, and want to growl,
“Don’t vote for him then.” Whatever the
day, I need to remind myself that, to the
world, Ted Cruz is a presidential candidate. The fairest of game.
Obviously, the Cruz style is not for
everyone. But I can say this, to conservatives (and to anyone else, for that
matter): If he is president, he will do
everything humanly possible to repeal
Obamacare. And to prevent Iran from
going nuclear. And to do other hard, vital
things. I don’t know if these things can
be done. But I feel sure that, if they can,
Ted will do them. He will go the last
mile, and beyond.
Like everyone else, he likes popularity
more than unpopularity. But if popularity
clashes with the right course of action,
popularity will have to go. Ted would do
anything—walk through fire, chew on
glass—to keep this country free.
Pardon the campaign rhetoric, but
it’s true.
At the moment, it looks like Ted has a
steep road to beat Donald Trump for the
Republican nomination. I would not bet
the ranch on Ted. But I would not bet a
cent against him. He has defied odds
before. And no one works harder, and
few work as cannily.
Say he wins the nomination and goes
on to beat Hillary Clinton, taking the
presidential oath of office on January 20,
2017. I will be amazed. But you’ll
know what I mean when I say I won’t
be surprised.
ANY people say that our soci-
ety is facing a crisis of religious liberty. I do not quite
agree. I think rather that,
given the Supreme Court’s redefinition of
marriage and the Health and Human
Services mandate that employers provide
insurance coverage for sterilization, abortifacients, and contraceptives, we are facing the greatest crisis of religious liberty
in American history. Our response must
be commensurate. Sound tactics in political and legal contests must be part of a
bold strategic vision. Otherwise our religious liberty will evaporate, and the place
of religion in our public life will shrink.
The government’s steely resolve to
give believers no quarter has precedent. In
the 19th-century campaign against polygamy, Uncle Sam was willing to drive
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints underground. Also, for a
century before passage of the American
Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978,
the federal government sought to suppress American Indian religions, which it
regarded as bundles of superstitions that
kept Indians in poverty and ignorance.
Present assaults on religious liberty are
different, and worse. In the government
campaigns against Mormons and American Indians, relatively few were affected.
Catholics, too, have always been a minority in America. But denominations
and churches that until a generation ago
taught against homosexual acts and the
use of abortifacients constituted a vast
majority of America’s churchgoers. Most
Americans today still hold that abortion is
wrong and that same-sex marriage is a
contradiction in terms: Given the nature
of marriage, a marital union of two men
(or two women) is no more possible in
truth than would be a marriage between
three-year-olds. And they hold these
Mr. Bradley is a professor of law at the University of
Notre Dame.
23
positions not as rules, standards, or ideals
but as moral truths, knowable by reason
but also divinely confirmed and sanctioned.
The cutting edges of 19th-century conflict were small and precise: If you steered
clear of polygamy and the Ghost Dance,
you would be okay. Now the butcher, the
baker, and the candlestick-maker can all
run from Caesar’s writ of complicity in
abortion and same-sex marriage, but they
cannot hide. I teach at the nation’s leading
Catholic university. In my wallet I carry
the benefits card that the Obama administration obliges Notre Dame to secure
for me so that my wife and daughters can
get free abortifacients. And the civilly
married gay employee and his spouse
count just the same in the university’s
benefits package as do my wife and I.
Our social world is being remapped.
Human activity is being divided into two
basic realms. The first is “public” life,
defined expansively to include law, political affairs, and commercial and social
intercourse. This space is to be governed
by a secular orthodoxy from which only
private reservation is permitted. “Those
who cling to the old beliefs will be able to
whisper their thoughts in the recesses of
their own homes,” as Justice Alito wrote
in his dissent from the majority opinion
in Obergefell v. Hodges.
In the public realm, religion may supply a common stock of phrases, images,
and cultural references but not the reasons or arguments for public policy. In
2006, Barack Obama, then a senator,
explained that “democracy demands that
the religiously motivated translate their
concerns into universal . . . values.”
Religion, he argued, does not allow for
compromise and is not subject to argument or amenable to reason. In other
words, religion is irrational, or at least
non-rational. “To base one’s life on such
uncompromising commitments may be
sublime,” Obama said, “but to base our
policymaking on such commitments
would be a dangerous thing.”
The only harbor in which religion is
safe is the “private” sphere, an ever
shrinking enclave of heart and home.
There it is subsumed under the project of
individual self-definition; it is assimilated
to a person’s “conscience,” “dignity,” or
“identity.” This sphere is suffused with
will and imagination. Here the value of
religion is measured according not to its
objective truth but to its authenticity, its
ability to empower, console, and express
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some subjective truth about one’s self.
Religious liberty in the new dispensation
is really a subcategory of the one Great
Liberty given authoritative expression 24
years ago in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right
to define one’s own concept of existence,
of meaning, of the universe, and of the
mystery of human life.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy in Burwell
v. Hobby Lobby wrote that the free exercise of religion is “essential” to preserving the “dignity” of those who choose to
strive “for a self-definition shaped by
their religious precepts.” This same liberty anchors his opinion for the majority in
Obergefell: “The right to marry . . . dignifies couples who ‘wish to define themselves by their commitment to each
other.’” In Casey, Kennedy declared
that a woman’s abortion decision “may
originate within the zone of conscience
and belief” and must be settled by “her
own conception of her spiritual imperatives.” Senator Obama described religion as a person’s “narrative arc,” which
“relieve[s] a chronic loneliness, . . . an
assurance that somebody out there cares
about them, is listening to them—that
they are not just destined to travel down
that long highway toward nothingness.”
Believers might fare pretty well in this
brave new world when their claims
affect diffuse governmental interests in
security or administrative efficiency,
especially when they represent beliefs
that are marginal and unlikely to elicit
social change. But when a believer goes
up against other persons exercising their
own right of self-definition but in sexual, not religious, terms, the believer fares
poorly, especially when he represents
orthodox Christian beliefs, because
accommodating them would mean that
they could be used to deny to sexual
minorities what the new secular orthodoxy holds to be the requirements of basic
justice. In other words, meeting the moral
requirements of orthodox Christians
would redraw the social map. Meeting
those of prisoners who keep kosher, for
example, would not. And so the government exempts only houses of worship
from the HHS mandate; from the legal
implications of Obergefell, the government exempts only clergy unwilling to
perform same-sex weddings.
As long as religion is defined and valued mainly as a source of personal identity
and as a personal motivation for those in
religious social services, the fight to preserve religious liberty is doomed. Its defenders soon meet a stained-glass ceiling.
Legal and political arguments cast in the
adversaries’ terms of engagement may
produce some victories for some believers, but not many, and none for long.
One reason is that fear of violating
another person’s attempt at self-definition
haunts every orthodox believer. The fear
is propelled by the great political imperative of the day: equality of “dignity,”
which amounts to a right to be respected
for all of one's choices, commitments,
and beliefs defining one's life.
Another reason that religious liberty
grounded in the present terms of engagement is gravely endangered is that the
Christian moral life is marked by what I
call its asymmetry, which is a function
of the Christian’s adherence to some
exceptionless negative moral norms,
such as “adultery is never morally permissible.” (And so on down the line of
the Decalogue and of the moral tradition
that it anchors: no slavery or intentional
killing of innocents or false witness
under oath, ever.) Christians do not reason that performing a few abortions or
one same-sex wedding is okay because
that will keep them in the game to assist
at many live births or to perform a hundred traditional, opposite-sex weddings.
No one may do evil so that good may
come of it, Saint Paul teaches in Romans.
Christians are called to suffer privation—
and, in the limit case, martyrdom—rather
than do evil. This means that the conscientious among them will abandon their
trade or profession, or be purged from
it, when it becomes clear that the price
of staying in is to facilitate abortion or
same-sex marriage.
“Conscience” refers to the good that a
person enjoys when he acts in conformity with his judgments and feelings.
For adherents of theistic religions, “conscience” includes a distinctive additional dimension: harmony with God,
through conforming their actions to his
will. It is appropriate in many cases to
argue for special treatment for those
acting on religious or moral convictions. Remember that the case for
believers is always richer, and stronger,
precisely because it includes “conscience” in both its most basic meaning
(conformity to personal judgments and
feelings) and its special meaning as
conformity to the will of God.
APRIL 11, 2016
The Abolition
Of Cash
Governments prefer e-money;
citizens should not
B Y A N D R E W S T U T TA F O R D
gathers power
sometimes in great swoops,
sometimes by stealth, and
sometimes in slow, sly increments, foreshadowed by position papers,
op-eds, and regulatory tweaks designed
to address an “issue” that a careless citizenry has overlooked.
It’s this slower, slyer approach that is
now in motion as Big Brother’s smaller
brethren take aim at cash. An advance
guard of regulation has paved the way.
Deposit more than $10,000 in cash into a
bank and the feds have to be told. Bring
that amount into the U.S. and Customs has
to be told. Get stopped by the police with
“too much” cash (a conveniently elastic
concept) and you risk watching it disappear into the swamp known as civil forfeiture. meanwhile, the country’s Croesus
bills have long since vanished—$10,000,
$5,000, $1,000, even the $500 that bore
the face of poor murdered mcKinley.
Under the circumstances, they might have
let him keep his mountain.
The cull has further to go. Writing in
the Washington Post earlier this year, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers called for a “global agreement to
stop issuing notes worth more than say
$50 or $100.” He praised a Harvard paper
by Peter Sands, the former CeO of the
Standard Chartered bank, in which Sands
claimed that the arguments for eliminating notes with a denomination above the
equivalent of $50 “could well be compelling at an even lower threshold.” An
even lower threshold: The ratchet turns in
only one direction.
naturally, there are good reasons for
this latest government grab. There always
are. The anonymity of cash makes it the
criminal’s friend, and there are (just to
start with) the wars on drugs and terror to
think of and, of course, tax evasion.
In europe, authoritarian creep creeps
more quickly. Italy introduced a maximum limit of €1,000 for cash transactions
G
FRANCESCO DAZZI/GETTY IMAGES
The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Denver, Colo.
Religious liberty, as its advocates must
never tire of explaining, rests in part on an
understanding not only that religion is
compatible with reason but that much of
religion is knowable through reason. The
American political tradition through
roughly the last quarter of the 20th century
included the affirmation of foundational
divine truths, such as those that appear on
the back of the dollar bill, in the Pledge
of Allegiance, and in countless other testimonies to the existence of a good God
who created all and who remains involved in human affairs, weaving them
providentially into an eternal plan.
From time out of mind, Americans have
affirmed also that, as Saint Paul wrote to
the Christians in Rome, the revealed law is
written on the hearts even of unbelievers.
In our public life today, however, the
concept of natural religion as truths concerning God and knowable through reason—the concept such as we find it in the
Declaration of Independence and in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural—is shattered. “In
God We Trust” has been reduced to a civic
totem. It is no longer accepted as a propo-
sition about the order of the cosmos and
the proper human response to it. “Under
God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is
treated as a “sectarian” invocation, indistinguishable from a truth (such as the
doctrine of the Trinity) known only
through the revealed Word.
Where the overriding constitutional
and legal understanding of religion, conscience, and therefore religious liberty
collapses into an undifferentiated liberty
of self-definition, an action that is informed or motivated by religion but violates another person’s self-esteem and
therefore “dignity” will be judged harmful and undeserving of any protection
under the “objective” law of a pluralistic
democracy. The only way to break the
stained-glass ceiling is to sharply distinguish religion from issues of personal
identity and emphasize its public value.
To that end, proponents of religious liberty
should maintain, in season and out of season, that religion concerns the truth about
reality and that some religions provide a
more plausible account of all that there
is than does any secular story.
OveRnmenT
25
in 2010 (the current prime minister has
proposed raising it to €3,000). By taking
aim at widespread tax-dodging, this was
intended to bolster Italy’s finances during
one of the euro zone’s uglier spasms. It
was also designed to discourage Italians
from withdrawing euros from banks in a
period when there were legitimate concerns about banks’ stability and the possibility that money deposited with them
would be converted overnight from euros
into rapidly depreciating “new lire.”
“Forcing” Italians away from cash would
make it more difficult for them to reduce
their exposure to those dangers. This was
about more than tax evasion: It was about
keeping Italians locked within a crumbling system.
The ratchet keeps turning. Germany
has proposed a €5,000 limit on cash transactions. Mario Draghi, the president of
the European Central Bank, has called for
the scrapping of the €500 bill.
Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, a part of
the world where governments are trusted
and technology is advanced, digital payments are squeezing out cash. In Sweden,
cash is now used in only about 5 percent
of retail sales. Progress is progress: If people prefer to make payments electronically, that’s up to them, and if that entails a
loss of privacy, that’s their choice.
But choice may well be followed by
compulsion. Forget about doing away
with the Benjamins; the technology now
exists to kill off cash altogether. The will
has been there for a while. Now there’s a
way. The Danish government would like
to abandon paper money altogether by
2030. Norway’s largest bank, the partly
state-owned DNB, has called for cash to
be phased out, moaning that 60 percent of
the kroner in circulation are “outside of
any [official] control.” The horror!
Excuse me while I adjust the tinfoil, but
this is not (and will not be) just a
Scandinavian thing: We live in an era
when central banks have driven interest
rates down to levels that bear little connection to economic reality. Certain key
rates are now below zero in the euro zone,
Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and
Japan. This is a terrible idea, and its time
has come. The question is not only how
far negative interest rates will spread, but
how low they will go.
In a speech last September, Andrew
Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief
economist, grumbled about the “constraint physical currency imposes” on
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setting negative interest rates. After considering various ways of dealing with this
nuisance, he concluded that an “interesting solution” would be to “maintain the
principle of a government-backed currency, but have it issued in an electronic
rather than paper form.” This “would
allow negative interest rates to be levied
on currency easily and speedily.” Translation: Make people hold their cash in
electronic form (and thus in banks); they
will then have no means of escaping the
levy on savings that negative interest
rates effectively represent.
Before dismissing this as a form of
madness that only Europeans could
embrace, check out what Harvard’s
Kenneth Rogoff has been saying. Writing
in the Financial Times in May 2014, he
argued that replacing paper money with
an electronic alternative “would kill two
birds with one stone.” It would strike a
blow against crime, and it would free
central banks from a bind that has “handcuffed” them since the financial crisis.
“At present, if central banks try setting
rates too far below zero, people will start
bailing out into cash.” Indeed, they will:
To its credit, the central bank of Switzerland, one of the countries now burdened
with negative interest rates, has made it
clear that it has no plans to junk its
thousand-franc bills. It accepts that these
are used as a store of value, something
that Rogoff, no friend of the saver, might
regard as reprehensible but the sensible
Swiss do not. There has been a 17 percent
increase in the number of these bills in
circulation in the last year.
“Hoarding cash may be inconvenient
and risky,” wrote Rogoff in a related
paper, “but if rates become too negative,
it becomes worth it.” He would clearly
prefer to see that emergency exit locked
and the key thrown away, leaving savers
helpless in the face of whatever central
bankers (and not only central bankers)
might dream up.
An open-minded sort, Rogoff did concede that there might be a problem or
two with such a set-up, including the fact
that “society may want to preserve the
right for individuals to make anonymous
payments in certain activities,” a telling
choice of words. It’s not the rights of the
individual that count, but what “society”
(defined by whom?) “may want.”
Another Alpine nation, Austria, is aware
of the menace to privacy that a cashless
society could be. Its deputy economy min-
ister, Harald Mahrer, has vowed to fight
rules curtailing the use of cash: “We don’t
want someone to be able to track digitally
what we buy, eat, and drink, what books
we read and what movies we watch.”
And this is more than a matter of books,
movies, and meals. It’s worth noting that
the German proposals to restrict cash
transactions ran into opposition across the
political spectrum, from the leftist Greens
to the populist-right party Alternative for
Germany on through to the classical liberals of the Free Democratic party. After
Hitler and Honecker, Germans understand
how totalitarianism works, and they know
too that the slippery slope is all too real.
The abolition of cash is a notion that
we should reject out of hand. It puts too
much faith in technology, and it puts too
much trust in the state. It eliminates privacy to a degree that ought to be unacceptable to any free society, and it leaves
people dangerously exposed to having
their savings confiscated by negative
interest rates or, more traditionally, confiscated by government, by way of a savage wealth tax perhaps. It leaves them
with nowhere to hide.
To those making the case against cash
or high-denomination bills, that, of
course, is the whole point, but it is a point
they are pushing too far. Their tightly controlled, fully tax-compliant society could
easily, given a sufficiently malign government, be as dysfunctional as one where
the “shadow economy” (not to be confused with the “criminal economy”) is
flourishing. The ability to dodge the system acts as a brake on overreach by the
system. For example, there’s no sense in
pushing taxes so high that people decide
it’s worth the risk of not paying them. Tax
evasion should not be endorsed (I write,
nervously aware of the IRS), but the
potential, if somewhat paradoxical, benefit to society from the threat of tax evasion
can be. Make tax impossible (or close to
impossible) to dodge and there’s far less to
hold back the demands of a greedy state.
And yes, there is cash’s role as crime’s
discreet accomplice. Well, as I alluded
to before, government already has a
wide range of powers to combat that. To
ask for much more seems excessive. To
borrow a famous comment a wise man
once made: “Those who would give up
essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nor Safety.”
That wise man? He is on the $100 bill.
APRIL 11, 2016
The Truth about Trade
It has revealed, not created, problems in the American economy
is virtually impossible to tune in to political TV or radio
without hearing presidential hopeful Donald Trump promise
to restore American manufacturing glory by imposing punitive tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, and any other
country that pops into his golden dome. Trump’s shtick, repeated
ad nauseam since he first started toying with a presidential run in
the 1990s, is replete with errors and myths. But buried therein is
an important kernel of truth about America’s labor market and its
distressing lack of dynamism—a problem exposed, though certainly not caused, by free trade.
Imports have inarguably affected U.S. manufacturing companies and workers—no serious free-trader argues otherwise.
But criticism of trade and its impact on American workers has
acquired a sharper edge in the Age of Trump, bolstered in part
by a recent study from labor economists David Autor, David
Dorn, and Gordon Hanson that found that the recent surge in
Chinese imports to the United States has inflicted pronounced
harms on the wages and labor-force participation of U.S.
workers in local markets (e.g., mill towns) that face direct
competition with those imports. Trump fans and longtime
trade skeptics on both the left and the right have seized on this
study as the final “proof” that free trade—in particular, trade
with China—has been a disaster for the United States and its
workers, and that a heavy dose of protectionism, through
I
T
Mr. Lincicome is an international-trade attorney, an adjunct scholar at the Cato
Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Duke University.
Trump’s tariffs or export subsidies, could produce a manufacturing renaissance in America.
Reality, however, begs to differ.
First, even assuming Autor et al. are entirely correct about the
harms of Chinese imports—a conclusion about which George
Mason University economist Scott Sumner has raised legitimate
questions—there remains no evidence that imports are the primary
driver of U.S. manufacturing-job losses, or that the U.S. manufacturing sector is actually in decline. In fact, American manufacturers
began slowly and steadily shedding workers as a share of the U.S.
work force in the late 1940s and in sheer numerical terms in 1979—
long before the North American Free Trade Agreement existed or
Chinese imports were more than a rounding error in U.S. GDP.
By contrast, the United States has gained about 54 million jobs
since 1980, 30-plus million of which came after the creation of
NAFTA and the World Trade Organization in the mid 1990s.
Meanwhile, it is a myth that the United States “doesn’t make anything anymore” or that trade agreements have caused a “giant sucking sound” as investment and jobs go elsewhere. Our manufacturers
continue to set production and export records, and the United States
is the world’s second-largest manufacturer (17.2 percent of total
global output) and third-largest exporter. America also remains the
world’s top destination for foreign direct investment ($384 billion
in 2015 alone)—more than double second-place Hong Kong and
almost triple third-place China. Much of this investment went to
U.S. manufacturing assets, as shiny new BMW, Toyota, and other
foreign-owned plants across the American South attest.
27
ROMAN GENN
BY SCOTT LINCICOME
For these and other reasons, it is widely accepted that U.S. manufacturing “decline” has been limited to employment, and that
these losses were primarily caused by productivity gains, not trade.
Indeed, even the most pessimistic academic studies on imports and
manufacturing jobs have found only a limited connection between
the two. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found in 2013, for example, that
“import competition explains [only] one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment”
between 1990 and 2007. Other studies have been even more sanguine. For example, a recent Ball State study attributed almost 90
percent of all U.S. manufacturing-job losses since 2000 to productivity gains. “Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied
them to 2010-levels of production,” the authors write, “we would
have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we
employed only 12.1 million.” Thus, it is simply wrong to blame import competition for the disappearance of American manufacturing jobs or the supposed destruction of U.S. industrial capacity.
Second, despite its harms to some manufacturing interests, free
trade also has generated broad-based benefits for U.S. consumers,
businesses, and workers. In The Payoff to America from Global
Integration, economists with the Peterson Institute found that past
global-trade liberalization through the WTO and other efforts
generated between $2,800 and $5,000 in additional income for
the average American and between $7,100 and $12,900 for the
average household. The consumer gains from trade disproportionally accrue to America’s poor and middle class. A 2015 study
by Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit Khandelwal finds that these groups,
because they concentrate spending in more-traded sectors such as
food and clothing, enjoy almost 90 percent of the consumer benefits
of trade. These benefits are even more concentrated for Chinese
imports, since poor and middle-class American consumers are
more likely than their richer counterparts to shop at “big box” stores
such as Target and Walmart that carry a lot of made-in-China goods.
American businesses, of course, also benefit. More than half
of all imports (including those from China) are inputs and capital goods consumed by other American manufacturers to make
globally competitive products. Raising these firms’ costs via tariffs would mean fewer employees, if not outright bankruptcy—a
particularly bad outcome given that downstream industries (e.g.,
steelmakers) typically employ far more workers than their
upstream counterparts (e.g., steel users). Non-manufacturers benefit, too—whether they be retailers such as the Gap, transportation and logistics companies such as FedEx, or multinational
firms such as Apple, which assembles iPhones in China but generates most of their final sale price through marketing, design,
engineering, and even manufacturing done in the United States.
(Chinese manufacturers themselves earn only a few dollars from
an iPhone’s assembly.) U.S. exporters such as Caterpillar and
Boeing also gain from trade, and many foreign markets wouldn’t
be open without reciprocal trade agreements such as NAFTA.
According to the Business Roundtable, in 2014, U.S. free-tradeagreement (FTA) partners purchased 13 times more goods per
capita from the United States than non-FTA countries did.
Third, free trade and protectionism raise serious moral issues.
Protective tariffs force American families and businesses to subsidize—through hidden, regressive taxes—the small share of U.S.
manufacturers and workers (and the tiny portion of the total economy and work force) that compete directly with the imports at
issue. For this reason, labor unions such as the United Steelworkers
expend considerable financial and in-kind resources lobbying the
28
|
federal government to insulate them from foreign competition, at a
huge cost to American consumers. When the Steelworkers convinced President Obama to impose 35 percent tariffs on Chinese
tires in 2009, the result was, even under the best assumptions, a
few unionized jobs saved at a cost to U.S. consumers of $900,000
per job—precisely the type of crony-capitalist boondoggle that, in
any form other than that of a hidden tax targeting a foreign “adversary,” would engender hostile political opposition from the right.
Finally, even if it were morally and economically advantageous
for the United States to embrace protectionism, it’s almost certainly
impossible for it do so. U.S. manufacturers have evolved over
decades to become integral links in a breathtakingly complex global value chain—whereby producers across continents cooperate to
produce a single product based on their respective comparative
advantages—that could not be severed without crippling both
them and the global economy. According to the WTO, for example, almost 40 percent of all U.S. exports are involved in global
value chains; almost 31 percent of exports from China, Canada, or
Mexico contain U.S. inputs; and almost 34 percent of U.S. exports
contain inputs from these same three countries. Perhaps the automobile industry, more than any other, makes this point clear: The
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that the
American “Big Three” automakers produce only five of the top 20
most “domestic” cars (defined by their total share of U.S. and
Canadian auto parts) sold in the United States in 2016. Killing the
“virus” of global trade integration would surely kill the host, too.
G
IVEN these realities, even the authors of the protectionists’
favorite new study reject protectionism and instead point
to problems in the U.S. labor market that keep it from
adjusting adequately to the effects of trade or other disruptions. In
releasing a previous study of trade with China, David Autor in 2012
stated, “I’m not anti-trade, but it is important to realize that there
are reasons why people worry about this issue.” He elaborated:
“We do not have a good set of policies at present for helping workers adjust to trade or, for that matter, to any kind of technological
change.” His co-author Gordon Hanson told the New York Times
earlier this year: “The problem is not trade liberalization. . . . The
problem is that labor-market adjustment is too slow.” Indeed, the
very study on which nouveau protectionists rest their hats states
plainly that the problem is not simply (if at all) the impact of
Chinese imports but rather that “adjustment in local labor markets
is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates
remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated
for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences.”
They find “ultimate and sizable net gains” from trade, but these are
“realized only once workers are able to reallocate across regions in
order to move from declining to expanding industries.” Thus, the
paper recommends that trade and labor economists focus on raising
“the speed of regional labor-market adjustment to trade shocks.”
U.S. labor-market data attest to this problem—one that exacerbates job dislocations arising from trade, technological innovation,
or any other disruptive but ultimately beneficial phenomenon.
Total non-farm job openings, for example, are at their highest
point on record (including well over a million unfilled jobs in
“blue collar” fields such as manufacturing, construction, and
transportation) and continue to outpace hirings. Workers have
recently appeared more willing to quit their jobs and seek others,
but the civilian labor-force-participation rate has hovered near its
APRIL 11, 2016
lowest point (62.5 percent) since the late 1970s—a problem
caused in part by the fact that workers have become less likely to
move to areas with better employment opportunities, choosing
instead to remain in places hit hard by the Great Recession and
to drop out of the labor force entirely.
More-complex measures of labor dynamism corroborate the
aforementioned numbers: The Goldman Sachs Labor Market
Dynamism Tracker, which synthesizes various labor reports, shows
that, after remaining positive through the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. labor
dynamism—the natural, beneficial replacement of old jobs with
new ones, owing in part to the willingness of workers to seek new
jobs and their ability to obtain them—dove into negative territory
in 2001 and has remained there ever since. A recent study by
Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger found that the “U.S. economy
experienced large, broad-based declines in labor market fluidity in
recent decades,” and that this reduction in fluidity had “harmful
consequences for productivity, real wages and employment.”
S
OME of the troubling decline in U.S. labor dynamism is a
matter of an aging work force disproportionately composed of Baby Boomers—older workers are far less likely
than their younger counterparts to change jobs. However, three
types of distinct government policy failures have amplified the
problem. First, state and federal policies prevent Americans from
saving enough wealth to cope with unexpected financial calamities or to enable them to take professional risks. Over 60 percent
of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts, and
economists on the right and the left agree that our current tax and
entitlement policies discourage private savings—unlike, say,
those of Canada, which has a highly successful and popular system of tax-free savings accounts.
Meanwhile, the costs of health care, child care, and education—
all highly subsidized, protected, and regulated—have risen far
faster than the rate of inflation, and there is little doubt that government intervention has played a role in this trend. The New York Fed
in 2015, for example, found a strong link between federal student
aid and the skyrocketing cost of tuition. Such cost increases disproportionately harm poor and middle-class Americans and force
them to spend more of their stagnating wages on these essential services—money that could have gone into a savings account. Indeed,
the rampant inflation in these sectors stands in stark contrast to the
declining prices of other goods, such as clothing, toys, and electronics, that are less subsidized, more open to competition (foreign
and domestic), and less subject to onerous government regulation.
Second, government policy actively discourages Americans
from finding work in burgeoning fields. Perhaps the most brazen
example of such policies is the federal tax code’s business deduction for work-related education, which permits a worker to deduct
education and training expenses from his taxable income, but
only if they relate to his current job. Thus, a textile-factory worker
can get a tax benefit for new training on the latest garment
machine, but he cannot get the same benefit for night classes to
become a certified IT specialist. Such a system discourages workers in dying fields from preparing themselves for a new career.
An assortment of other government policies also undermines
a worker’s ability or willingness to change jobs. In their aforementioned study on collapsing U.S. labor dynamism, Davis and
Haltiwanger identified five specific contributors: employmentprotection laws (which protect employees from being fired
because of certain actions or immutable characteristics) that “suppress labor market flows, sometimes to a powerful extent”; laws
that erode the employment-at-will doctrine (which permits
employers to fire employees without cause); occupationallicensing laws and other labor-supply restrictions; minimumwage laws; and the tax code’s preference for employer-provided
health insurance. At the same time, the United States has witnessed a distressing collapse in business dynamism—the creation
and destruction of firms—which has had the consequence of
entrenching workers in large, existing firms while reducing job
openings in new and innovative ones. According to one recent
study, a big cause of the recent collapse of business dynamism is
the federal government’s response to the Great Recession, which
involved “defensive policies to protect large firms and existing
employment, rather than proactive policies to encourage entrepreneurship and new venture/job creation.” None of this is good for
people looking for a job or considering a career change.
Finally, current government policy has failed to help displaced
workers when disaster strikes, and has very likely made things
worse. Most notably, the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)
program, intended to subsidize U.S. workers affected by import
competition, is a notorious failure: Not only are TAA’s costs too
high and its eligibility criteria too loose, but multiple studies
commissioned by the Labor Department have found that TAA
participants are worse off, as measured by future wages and benefits, than similarly situated jobless individuals outside the program. (TAA also breeds the misconception that trade is somehow
different from, and worse than, other forms of beneficial economic disruption, such as automation.)
Other federal job-training programs are similarly inefficacious.
A 2011 Government Accountability Office study, for example,
found that the federal government had 47 different, often overlapping job-training programs spanning nine federal agencies at
a cost of $18 billion per year. Only five had been subject to any
sort of impact analysis since 2004; thus, “little is known about
the effectiveness of [the] employment and training programs”
identified. A 2014 reform of this system, the Workforce
Innovation and Opportunity Act, eliminated 15 programs (while
maintaining the rest, despite their long history of subpar results)
but failed to impose any sort of rigorous multi-site evaluation
and accountability system. Without these simple reforms, or
other, more radical ones, there is no way to ensure that the
“reformed” federal job programs won’t continue their long record
of failing American workers and taxpayers.
Unfortunately, the private sector has not succeeded where our
problematic government job-training system has failed, and government policy may actually deter it from attempting to do so.
Private-sector job-training programs, for example, seem to be disappearing: The Labor Department estimates that “formal programs that combine on-the-job learning with mentorships and
classroom education fell 40% in the U.S. between 2003 and
2013,” and the 2015 Economic Report of the President found
substantial declines in the percentages of American workers
receiving employer-paid training (19.4 percent to 11.2 percent)
or on-the-job training (13.1 percent to 8.4 percent) between 1996
and 2008. There are legitimate concerns that such programs have
simply been sloughed off in favor of ineffective government programs. Tax and regulatory costs might also play a discouraging
role: According to one analysis, a $14-per-hour worker has a true
cost to his employer of almost $20 per hour because of federal and
29
state taxes plus an array of mandated and voluntary benefits and
job training. As labor costs continue to rise, companies are more
often looking for skilled workers whom they don’t have to train.
Federal unemployment benefits also have the potential to discourage workers from searching for and obtaining a job. Most
troubling is the current Social Security Disability Insurance
(SSDI) system, which, because of its generous benefits, lax eligibility criteria, and lack of rigorous enforcement, has become,
according to the Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship, “a permanent dole for a rising number of adults with limited earning potential who clearly are physically able to work.” The numbers bear
this out: Between 1990 and 2014, the percentage of working-age
individuals who receive SSDI benefits more than doubled, from
2.3 percent to 5.1 percent. Basic unemployment insurance also
raises concerns: Four economists examined the effects of North
Carolina’s 2013 cuts to unemployment benefits and found that previous benefit extensions had had a significant negative effect on
the state’s employment level, number of job openings, and laborforce-participation rate—harms that “dominate any potential stimulative effect that some ascribe to such policies.” The same
economists found similar discouraging results at the national level.
F
REE trade—with China or any other country—has demon-
strable benefits for American families and businesses. To
the extent he denies this, Donald Trump is entirely wrong.
However, the economic anxiety propelling Trump reflects very
real problems in America’s labor market—problems caused not
by Chinese imports or any other type of creative destruction but
by multiple government-policy failures and a resulting collapse
of labor dynamism. The solutions to these problems are complex and deserving of substantial debate. But the analysis I have
presented should provide some clues. Most simply, U.S. workers
should receive the same tax benefit for job training unrelated to
their current job as they do now for training related to it. SSDI and
unemployment-insurance eligibility requirements should be
tightened and redesigned to ensure that able-bodied adults are
looking for, and accepting, available work. Occupational-licensing
reform should be a priority, particularly at the state level. Federal
job-training programs should be consolidated, if not eliminated
outright—perhaps through a simple voucher for dislocated workers to use at accredited community colleges or vocational schools,
or a single block grant to states for local experimentation with
programs that support, instead of crowd out, private-sector training initiatives such as apprenticeships.
More broadly, tax-free savings accounts, similar to those in
Canada, also should be explored, as should ways to increase the
portability of health care and other benefits currently tied to people’s jobs. (Eliminating the tax preference for employer-provided
health insurance would be the most obvious solution.) Finally,
the federal government should more seriously consider, and
attempt to rectify, the inflationary harms caused by its subsidization and overregulation of basic essential services such as health
care and higher education—opening them to global competition
would be a great place to start.
None of these ideas is a silver bullet, but the problems they would
seek to address, and the palpable economic anxiety of Americans, clearly show that reform is needed. Protectionism not
only would ensure that these problems aren’t fixed but would
actually make things far worse.
30
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Among
The Thugs
Donald Trump, white nationalists, and
the politics of the crowd
BY JAMES KIRCHICK
DENTITARIANISM” is a newfangled euphemism for
white supremacy. Coined around the start of the 21st
century by the intellectual wing—such as it is—of the
French far right, it has since been adopted by white
nationalists the world over. Last October, I attended a conference in Washington convened by the identitarian movement’s
American division, the National Policy Institute (NPI). It was
fitting that the gathering would occur on Halloween, as about
150 ghouls filled the ballroom of the National Press Club. The
crowd was almost entirely male, many of them (apparently
taking advantage of the under-30 registration discount) young.
A conspicuous number sported the Hitler Youth–inspired hairdo known as an “undercut,” short on the sides with a long part
on top. In between encomia to the recently deceased antiSemitic newspaper publisher Willis Carto and a recitation of
pagan reveries by a white-separatist folk musician, attendees
perused bookstalls featuring the conspiracy-mongering
American Free Press newspaper and the Holocaust-denying
Barnes Review.
What drew me to spend an otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon among a group of white supremacists was the buzz that
Donald Trump’s then-nascent presidential campaign had stirred
within the movement. Trump’s politics of resentment thrives on
a sort of coded groupthink—namely, white groupthink.
Whether Trump himself, in his heart of hearts, is racist is
almost beside the point. Like demagogues throughout history,
he is taking advantage of an adverse economic and political situation and playing to the populace’s most sordid fears in furtherance of a lust for power. Conservative intellectuals, who
like to think of themselves as immune to groupthink, have
been flabbergasted at his rise. That has been all to the amusement of NPI director Richard Spencer, a former editor of The
American Conservative whose drift into the fever swamps of
racial politics apparently became too much even for Pat
Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos to stomach. Although it
was months before Trump would cynically dodge questions
about former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke’s endorsement of his campaign, the well-coiffed racists at the Press
Club were giddy about Trump’s nativist rhetoric and policy
proposals; Spencer described him as an “icebreaker” in the discussion of identitarian issues.
‘I
Mr. Kirchick is a fellow of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a correspondent for the
Daily Beast, and a columnist for Tablet magazine. His first book, The End
of Europe, will be published by Yale University Press this fall.
APRIL 11, 2016
Duke, Spencer, and others in the identitarian fold may be
moral cretins, but they are not (at least not all) political idiots.
Identitarians are right to detect something significant in
Trump’s rise: namely, that he has mainstreamed white racial
grievance to a point unprecedented in post–Civil Rights Era
America. That it has taken this most improbable of figures—a
thrice-married, multimillionaire New York real-estate magnate
and celebrity television star with an Orthodox Jewish daughter—to achieve what no hooded Klansman or backwoods neoNazi could ever have hoped of doing makes his feat all the
more astonishing.
True to their name, identitarians premise their reductive
worldview on the exhausted nostrums of identity politics. For
all their complaints about “cultural Marxists” and their selfsatisfied glee in traducing the prudish dictates of “political correctness,” identitarians neatly mimic the language of their
censorious adversaries on the left. Crude expressions of bigotry are generally frowned upon; today’s white supremacists
sound much like the campus social-justice warriors they claim
to despise, the major difference being their disagreement as to
which racial group is most deserving of top-victim status. You
need simply substitute “white men” for “African Americans,”
“women,” “transgender,” ad infinitum in leftist jeremiads
about the plight of “marginalized” peoples and you pretty
much have the entirety of identitarian talking points. The language of “oppression” is much the same, regardless of who is
complaining about it.
For instance, Spencer compares identitarians to visionaries of
other, once-downtrodden social movements that claimed their
stake upon a distinct identity. The gay rioters at Stonewall, the
determined Zionist pioneers who made the desert bloom—
these are the models for his burgeoning white-nationalist undertaking. It is a mark of their fine-honed appreciation for the
zeitgeist that identitarians reference Jews and homosexuals—
groups not typically looked favorably upon by white supremacists—as their inspiration.
Sometime Klan lawyer Sam Dickson pressed me on the
necessity of a “separate state” for whites: “The blacks could be
given Manhattan and we would take Iowa,” he elaborated.
Though today’s propagators of racial apartheid might be
expected, like their forebears, to frame arguments in terms of
their own group’s inherent superiority, Dickson makes his
appeal using the traditionally left-wing language of the perpetually put-upon victim: In the America of the not-so-distant
future, whites will be an endangered species and a vulnerable
class deserving of protection. “White people, as we become a
minority, will not be able to live except in a state of severe
repression and discrimination,” he complained. Speaking as if
he were the chieftain of a vanishing Native American tribe or
an earnest nature preservationist, Spencer elaborated: “You
can’t get away from the great erasure—that is, this general tendency to delegitimize the white man.”
Spencer very much likes play-acting the role of a rogue
intellectual, bumptiously describing himself on Twitter as an
“international thought criminal.” When asked why the identitarian movement is gaining new followers, he replied that
“people are being red-pilled by life, they’re being red-pilled
by reality.” This reference to the 1999 blockbuster sciencefiction film The Matrix—wherein our hero can choose to take
either a blue pill, representing the “ignorance of illusion” that
is the fabricated reality of the Matrix-generated world, or a red
pill, allowing him a painful but gutsy escape from its imperceptible yet omnipresent cage—is a pet analogy among the rising generation of pop-culture-savvy white supremacists. They
are some of the most vocal figures in the larger “alt right”
(“alternative right”) movement, which loathes mainstream
conservatism for its alleged selling out to the “establishment.”
It was in the darker recesses of the alt right’s online message
boards and social-media accounts that the now-ubiquitous epithet “cuckservative”—an amalgamation of “cuckold” and
“conservative,” hurled at any male right-of-center writer or
activist who doesn’t prostrate himself before the altar of
Trump—was devised.
According to Spencer, the past several years have witnessed
a steady deterioration in American race relations, visible in
everything from the growing assertiveness of organizations
such as Black Lives Matter to increasing ethnic diversity in
television-show casts to a newly emboldened and hypersensitive campus Left. This accumulated set of trends, Spencer
says, constitutes the “red pill” of reality that more and more
whites are beginning to swallow. Whereas mainstream culture
and politics have dismissed the cultural concerns of racially
conscious whites, Donald Trump sympathetically addresses
their anxieties.
I
DIDN’T think much about NPI at the time, viewing its
followers—and their preferred presidential candidate—
as little more than oddities in the great theater of
American politics. By the time the organization reconvened
four months later, in early March, however, a great upheaval
was under way. This time I found myself in a far tonier setting,
in a room atop the Ronald Reagan building in Washington,
D.C. The better digs were emblematic of the group’s upbeat
fortunes. Just a week before, Trump had offered his KKK
feint, and the candidate’s newfound popularity among identitarians had become the subject of mainstream-media interest.
While last time it was only colleagues from the Huffington Post
and Daily Beast who shared my curiosity about this seemingly
marginal group, this time there was an NBC reporter with a
camera. Like the title of its Halloween conference, “Become
Who We Are” (an explicit appeal for whites to take the red pill
and embrace, in Spencer’s words, “racial realness”), the name
of NPI’s latest confab, “Identity Politics,” brazenly aped leftist
language. Trump, the program boasted, is someone who has
“taken celebrity culture and turned it into nationalism.” (As
proof that God has a sense of humor, the conclave took place
across the street from a hotel hosting the Black Entertainment
Television Awards.)
Holding a drink and standing by himself was Bill Regnery,
a co-founder of NPI and the black sheep of the Regnery publishing clan. A mildly enthusiastic Trump voter, he bemoaned
the conservative movement for having “too much involvement
with the mechanics of the old America, the Constitution, bromides . . .” Asked to elaborate, Regnery replied that “the Brits
have done pretty well without a constitution and maybe this
country would do well without a Constitution.”
I was rather surprised by this open disrespect for America’s
founding document, especially from someone to the right of
Genghis Khan. But it turns out that the Constitution is largely
31
unloved, if not outright disdained, among identitarians, who
despise it primarily for extolling the virtues of egalitarianism.
Writing on the website of Spencer’s Radix journal, a contributor denigrates the Constitution as a “primitive article of
antiquity” that “will not solve the problems we face in the 21st
century.” Proposing that “cuckservatives” who speak reverently of the Constitution be denigrated as “paper worshippers,” “vellum supremacists,” and “parchment fetishists,” he
argues that the object of their admiration “has ceased to be a
vehicle for progress and has instead devolved into a major
obstacle to our future.”
It’s ironic that self-identified right-wingers would proclaim the obsolescence of the Constitution as a “vehicle for
progress,” since that’s precisely the way many liberals see its
role in American society. Spencer, “fresh from a Russiantelevision” interview, let it rip when I asked what distinguishes
him and his movement from the conservatives with whom he
used to associate. “I’m more interested in identity . . . than they
are in protecting capitalism or adhering to the Constitution or
whatever gobbledygook conservatives believe,” he explained.
“Conservatives have been damaging to the world” and “are
economic agenda seems to be socialism for a select group of
people—in other words, National Socialism. Identitarians
sometimes sound like hard leftists who have exchanged multiculturalism for white supremacy. Spencer’s entire political
program is based upon a flimsy sense of “white identity”—the
sort of imagined community that cannot exist except in the
minds of racists—which he speaks of in reverential, almost
mystical tones. “White identity is part of an historical experience. . . . It’s genetic, a spirit.”
F
OR all their talk about the accomplishments of European
civilization, however, identitarians do not concern
themselves much with the great figures of the West,
whether Plato or Shakespeare, Goethe or Locke (never mind
Freud, Einstein, Spinoza, or the countless other Jews who
played a vital part in the advent of Western civilization). Nor
are they particularly interested in propagating classical Western ideas such as individualism, liberty, or rationalism. The
intellectual achievements of the Western Enlightenment tradition go practically unmentioned among identitarians, whose
Richard Spencer is ‘tired of a bunch of boring fatsos
talking about how much they love the Constitution,’ the
word ‘boring’ dripping from his lips with especial scorn.
fundamentally boring. I really want something that is more
dynamic, about our identity.” Spencer relishes the rise of a new
conservative movement because—and it was at this point in
his disquisition that he became most visibly excited—he’s
“tired of a bunch of boring fatsos talking about how much they
love the Constitution,” the word “boring” dripping from his
lips with especial scorn.
Given the grand political projects mankind has wreaked
upon humanity in the last century, perhaps one of the best
things that could be said for conservatives is that they’re “boring,” preferring steady, gradual compromise to rapid, sweeping change. It is telling that Spencer considers this word a
slur. In his short treatise “The Doctrine of Fascism,” Benito
Mussolini used the word “action” nearly 20 times; Fascism,
he wrote, is a spiritual force that “dwells in the heart of the
man of action.” Surveying this ideology’s destructive legacy,
Umberto Eco once listed “the cult of action for action’s sake”
as one of 14 key elements constituting what he called “UrFascism” or “Eternal Fascism,” the reactionary philosophy
broadly encompassing Mussolini’s National Fascist party
and German National Socialism. “Action being beautiful in
itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous
reflection,” Eco observed. If there’s one thing fascists are not,
it’s “boring.”
This penchant for action—for not being “boring”—and for
radically refashioning society is but one of the many areas
where the hard Left and the hard Right converge. Listening to
Spencer and his acolytes bemoan the docility of the mainstream
American Right, one realizes why they hold conservatives in
such contempt. Identitarians are reactionary revolutionaries:
fascists. To the extent that they have one, their protectionist
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tenuous identification with “the West” boils down to something as nebulous and immaterial as skin color. In a moody promotional video that’s part Scientology recruitment film, part
Mein Kampf, and part motivational poster from a shrink’s
office, Spencer inveighs against “abstractions and buzzwords”
such as “democracy and freedom.” “A nation based on freedom is just another place to go shopping,” he says dismissively.
“It’s a country for everyone, and thus a country for no one. A
country in which we ourselves have become strangers.”
Conservatives, and, more broadly, all those who define
themselves as liberals in the classical sense of the term, venerate the Western European tradition for its values and ideals, not
for the race of the people who propagated them. Indeed, the
great thing about the Western canon, what makes it truly
unique and worth passing on, is that anyone can embrace it. For
me, the loftiest expression of this sentiment remains a speech
delivered in 1990 by V. S. Naipaul, fittingly entitled “Our
Universal Civilization.” A Trinidadian-born citizen of Great
Britain who is of Indian and Nepalese extraction, Naipaul is
one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world, and
the sort of cosmopolitan figure unique to that world. The West,
he said, “is an elastic idea; it fits all men. . . . So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice,
the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility
and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be
reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it
is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems
in the end blow away.”
Read their manifestos, listen to their speeches, attend their
conferences, and you won’t hear much, if anything, from the
identitarians about these ideals. That’s because they wholeAPRIL 11, 2016
heartedly reject the Enlightenment, as did fascists and Communists before them.
Perhaps it was inevitable that, in a society that validates
minority identity politics and the aggressive tactics of its
practitioners, a political movement based upon white resentment would arise. Like all reactionary movements, the one
Trump has mobilized (in general) and identitarianism (in particular) are by definition reactions to something—in this
case, multiculturalism and political correctness gone awry.
Trump “is standing up for the people who are tired of being
told the divisions in American society are all their fault,”
Molly Ball, an Atlantic staff writer who has covered Trump
across the country, observes. This is hardly a phenomenon
exclusive to America; ethno-nationalism is ascendant once
again across Europe.
Needless to say, black people in America have faced tremendous legal, societal, and institutional racism in a way that
white people never have, which makes not only the solutions
offered by identitarians misguided and dangerous, but their
grievances fundamentally phony. Attributing the entire Western tradition to the skin color of its progenitors and substituting
racial consciousness for universal values also goes a way in
explaining why identitarians are so giddy about Trump’s dictatorfriendly foreign policy. The “Trump–Putin understanding,”
Spencer told me, forwards “a vision of a white world that is not
at war,” the sort of entente that, retroactively, would amount to
“a cancellation of the 20th century.” According to Spencer, that
tens of millions of white people killed one another on the
European continent in the two greatest bloodbaths of human
history was all a giant misunderstanding. If only the Soviets
and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Jews
(well, maybe not the Jews) had recognized their common skin
color, neither of the two world wars would have happened.
W
HICH brings us to Trump and his reintroduction of
a baleful phenomenon long absent in American
politics: violence. The United States has hardly
been immune to the ravages of men who prefer to settle disputes not in representative chambers but by brawling in the
streets. From the Founding Fathers (who fought a war against
the world’s mightiest empire) through the era of political
dueling to the anti–Vietnam War protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, violence has been a
recurring feature of American political life. But for the better
part of the past half century, we have thankfully been spared
its depredations.
Like our basic notions of decorum, civility, common sense,
and much else that makes America great, the laudable facility
for restraining one’s pugnacious impulses in the clash of political differences has been thrown out the window in this campaign season by the utterly debased personage of Trump. For
months, the Republican front-runner has directly encouraged
individual acts of violence at his rallies and refused to condemn supporters who act upon his urgings. “I’d like to punch
him in the face” was a typical Trump remark about a protester,
groups of which now inevitably appear at his public events.
After a number of Bernie Sanders supporters crashed a Trump
rally in Chicago, Trump threatened via Twitter: “Be careful,
Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!” Thanks to Trump
and the left-wing agitators that his aggressive rhetoric deliberately incites, the great tradition of the American town-hall
political meeting has begun to resemble rowdier sessions of
the Ukrainian parliament.
For those who previously dismissed the threat Trump poses
to basic American values and our peaceful way of life, the
extent to which he is playing with fire became indubitably
clear on March 16. That was the day Trump announced that
his thuggish backers might direct their ire not at Sanderssupporting hippies or Black Lives Matter activists, but fellow
Republicans. Asked what might happen at this summer’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland if he does not win
the number of delegates necessary to secure nomination on the
first ballot, Trump implicitly threatened carnage.
“I think you’d have riots,” said the man who, in discussion
of his foreign-policy views, has described himself as “the most
militaristic person” in the GOP field. “I’m representing a
tremendous many, many millions of people. . . . I think you’d
have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad
things would happen.” This is the bravado of the racketeering
Mafioso kingpin: Nice political convention you’ve got there;
shame if something bad were to happen to it.
The Trump movement’s tactics of violent intimidation are
the logical extension of Trump’s personality, even if, as with
all cowards, it’s others who execute his pugnacious fantasies.
And it should hardly surprise us that people who view the
Constitution as a bothersome hindrance in their quest to
divide America into racial bantustans, and who denigrate
those who revere our nation’s founding document as “boring,”
would find so much to like in the campaign of Donald Trump.
They, like Trump, seem to prefer a society ungoverned by
laws, tradition, or the accumulated wisdom of the human experience. Feigned erudition and wonkishness aside, identitarians
are, at the end of the day, thugs. And thugs are easily susceptible to the lure of the crowd.
In researching his searing 1990 sociological study-cummemoir of British soccer hooliganism, Among the Thugs, Bill
Buford immersed himself in this riotous and debauched
milieu. After spending time with partisans of a particular club,
he compiled a list of their “likes,” which ranged from “lager in
pint glasses” and “lager in two-liter bottles” to “the Queen”
and “goals.” At its essence, however, the determinant value of
the hooligan is tribe. “That was the most important item: they
liked themselves, them and their mates,” Buford writes.
Understandably, this atavistic and clannish attitude lent its
bearers to recruitment by the National Front, a fascist party
that enjoyed its heyday in the late 1970s. “They understood
something about the workings of the crowd: they respected
it,” Buford wrote of the Front’s leaders. “They knew that its
potential—its rare, raw, uncontrollable power—was in all of
us, even if it was so persistently elusive.” Trump is certainly
not the first figure in American politics to summon the awesome powers of the crowd (Barack Obama did a fine job of
that in 2008). But he is the first demagogue to do so in at
least a generation. Watching Trump’s rallies and listening to
the rhetoric of his supporters with increasing unease, I recall
Buford’s ruminations on the 1989 Hillsborough soccer tragedy, when 96 people were crushed to death in a stadium stampede. The carnage, Buford wrote, was “relentlessly logical,
even overdue.”
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The Long View
***Saturday Panel, 4 P.M., as we head
to sea. Join us for an opening session:
“Former NATIONAL REVIEW editor-inchief Rich Lowry and new NATIONAL
REVIEW publisher Donald J. Trump in
conversation: Whither Conservatism?”
FINAL BULLETIN
The 2016 NATIONAL REVIEW
Post-Election Cruise,
Official Program
Thanks for signing up for the 2016
NATIONAL REVIEW Post-Election
Cruise aboard Holland America’s
luxurious cruise ship MS Nieuw
Amsterdam. We will be traveling
through the crystal blue waters of the
Caribbean Sea, stopping along the
way at secluded beaches and colorful tropical ports of call. During the
day, you’ll be treated to panel discussions, presentations, and conversations about Election 2016, its
implications for the future, and its
fallout for conservatives.
The following is the most up-tothe-minute program of events, as of
Thursday, November 10, 2016.
Please note: All events are scheduled
to take place in the ship’s theater, the
Showroom of the Sea, unless otherwise stated.
***DENOTES CHANGE FROM
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
***Saturday, 2 P.M., as we embark:
Meet Your Low-Income, LowInformation, Unemployed White
Working-Class Roommate! NR
Cruisers will be matched with a roommate from one of the forgotten and
neglected socioeconomic cohorts who
will live with them throughout the
cruise in an effort to avoid a repeat of
2016. Please note: Do NOT give your
roommate charge privileges to your
ship’s account.
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***Sunday, 10 A.M., Culinary Center: Ecumenical Sunday worship service of reconciliation. Editors of and
contributors to NATIONAL REVIEW
gather with past candidates and the
new publisher to “turn the page” on the
divisive and difficult past year, agreeing to face the future with a more unified and “big tent” attitude. Service
will be non-denominational and interfaith and will feature the severed head
of Jerry Falwell Jr. on a pike, held aloft.
(Dress: pagan)
***Monday, 12 P.M., Culinary
Center: “Wellness at Sea: Making the
Right Heart-Healthy Choices at the
Buffet and in the Dining Room,” by
Ben Carson, M.D. Join the newest
crew member of the Nieuw Amsterdam
as Dr. Carson helps us make heartsmart decisions when faced with the
tempting choices of Holland America’s culinary team. Dr. Carson is also
available throughout the week in his
office on Deck 2.
***Tuesday night, at sea. Cognac
and cigars under the stars. Lido deck.
Cigars courtesy of H. Upmann.
Cognac provided by Martell. Enjoy
the companionship of your fellow
NR Cruisers as we enjoy fine cigars
and cognac amid the gentle breezes
of the ship at sea. As the moon sets
across the Caribbean and the cognac
takes effect, those in despair who
wish to feel the peaceful and watery
embrace of King Neptune will be
helped overboard. Those who wish to
stay and fight will be treated to the
ritual slaying and dismemberment of
Ohio governor John Kasich, who will
join the cruise that day in St. Thomas,
for what he thinks will be a keynote
address entitled “Conservatism after
President Hillary: The Way For-
BY ROB LONG
ward.” (Please note: We expect
Governor Kasich to struggle. Please
dress in loose, comfortable clothing,
the way you might for a day hike or
Saturday yard work.)
***Wednesday, 4 P.M., amidships,
Lifeboat Station 10, Deck 3: The keelhauling of New Jersey governor Chris
Christie. (Dress: waterproof)
***Thursday, additional session
at the end of the day, approximately
5 P.M.: Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas)
is untied and allowed to speak.
PLEASE DO NOT COME LATE!
The senator is scheduled to be re-tied
and re-suspended above the stage at
5:45 P.M. PROMPTLY!
***Friday Night, B. B. King’s
Blues Club: An additional “Night
Owl” presentation. Florida senator
Marco Rubio presents “Side by Side
by Marco: A Celebration of the
Work and Vision of Stephen
Sondheim.” Cruisers will be treated
to the lighter side of one of conservative America’s favorite young talents. (Dress: sexy elegance)
PLEASE REMEMBER! Place the
appropriate tags on your luggage
Saturday night for fast and troublefree luggage transfers to the Ft.
Lauderdale and Miami airports. If
you have any questions, please ask
Customer Service Representative
Chris Christie for help.
Last-minute itinerary change:
Since the official announcement on
Wednesday, November 9, that
President Barack Obama, immediately following the swearing in of
President Hillary Clinton, will assume
the office of El Presidente de la
República de Cuba, the MS Nieuw
Amsterdam will make a stop in the
Port of Old Habana in order to enjoy
the Old World charm of this storied
city before it comes under the yoke of
a Communist dictator. (Please wear
sturdy shoes.)
APRIL 11, 2016
lileks--READY_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/22/2016 10:36 PM Page 35
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
The Buena Vista Socialism Club
SANDERS will be a footnote in the long
sweep of electoral history—a black-socked
footnote in Birkenstock sandals, if you wish—
but he did clarify the views of many progressives when it comes to the free market. You might recall this
piercing revelation:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray
deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children
are hungry in this country.”
If we lived in a society where the Department of Armpits
regularly wrested away government grants from the National Urchin Association, Sanders might have a point,
but it’s not as if spray-deodorant money—R&D, marketing, production—could be diverted to hungry children
unless the government nationalized the company that
makes AXE body spray and handed it out to the bedraggled children at the factory gates.
On the other hand, you know what he’s saying, and
it’s this: “I have no idea how things work. Let me run
everything.”
Here’s how things work in the Latin American paradises
Mr. Sanders so admires.
1. Wasteful, duplicitous deodorant factories are nationalized by the state and converted into one brand, which
is quickly known for shoddy nozzles and insufficient
aerosol propulsion.
2. This brand becomes hard to find; other brands from
neighboring states appear on the black market.
3. The Leader makes a speech on TV in which he praises
“the earthy, honest aroma of our people striving for justice” and announces that police dogs are being trained to
sniff out non-state brands.
4. Sean Penn denounces the body-spray–industrial complex.
Or something like that. Use any commodity you like.
Venezuela, we’ve been told, regularly runs out of toilet paper.
The whole country. People who traveled in the United States
in the 1970s may recall the quality of bathroom tissue in gasstation lavs—it was a strange, lacquered, bi-folded sheet that
had the same efficacy as Saran Wrap. It’s gone now, by popular demand, but if you showed up in Caracas with a container
cart of that stuff you’d walk away a millionaire.
Why bring up old Bernie’s cranky mutterings? Because
there’s another collectivist paradise in the news thanks to
the president’s visit there: Cuba. Obama had his photograph taken in a plaza with a big picture of murdering psycho
Che in the background, and that knocking you heard was
Kennedy’s skull banging against the inside of his coffin.
The Left always gets misty over Cuber because they have
free health care and 99.8 percent literacy. Surely even the
dissidents are happy about that, no?
“Yes, the secret police burst into my hovel on a tip from the
neighborhood block captain, who suspected me of anti-state
B
ERNIE
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
activity because I had sighed loudly on National Glory Day
three years ago. They tore apart my room and found the
seditious novel I have been writing for 30 years, using ink
made of old shoe polish. They beat me with stout truncheons, but my bones were set for free, and thanks to a program of universal literacy, the arresting officer could read
my novel on the spot and offer a critique of some of my literary devices. Long live the revolution.”
We are told that closer ties will moderate the junta’s
behavior, but unless they’re saving that for a big tenyear-anniversary surprise (“Ten percent of the political
prisoners will now get ice cream once a week!”), there’s
no sign they’re changing their behavior. Why should
they? They will have defenders in the West forever. Just
as their repression was once excused because of the
embargo, it will now be excused because of the lingering
effects of the embargo. In 20 years, the Cuban government might sue for reparations. First-world slum-tripping
to Cuba will be a sport for a while—Oh, haven’t you
gone? You simply must, the ruins are like something out of
a fashion shoot—but as more people on the left see evidence that Cuba was a prosperous nation forcibly impoverished, perhaps they will realize they were defending a
prison just because they found the warden so charming.
Let’s review: The Worker’s Paradise, the USSR, went
out of business, because it didn’t have any. Venezuela is no
longer admired by the Left because the people, previously
respected for voting in a confiscatory caudillo, had the gall
to vote in people who promised to repair the disasters of
socialism. Post-embargo, Cuba’s no longer a cause célèbre,
and the repression of the state—heretofore justified
because the United States declined to sell them things, like
23 varieties of deodorant—will be an embarrassment,
which means it’ll be forgotten.
These people need a new ideal state to worship. Nordic
countries might fill the bill, but they’re so . . . white, and
lately they seem mulish about importing lots of people
who have contempt for their culture. Which is so
strange! Denmark is awesome! They pay for sex changes
and everything.
Perhaps President Trump will make Cuba great again
and reassure the Left that it still has potential. No doubt the
Donald believes our Cuba deal was (ALL TOGETHER NOW) a
disastah, and he will renegotiate it so we win. The regime
gets a new casino, we get a cut of their North Korea bribes.
It would be worth it just to see the New York Times run a
story about a Batista-era-themed casino opening in Havana,
with the headline “Amid the Glitter, a Nation Finds a Way
to Heal.”
But it’s more likely Trump would give it a Castro theme.
Hey, Castro was a strong leader. Tremendous leader. Sure,
he did things, but you know, sometimes you got to do
things, okay? Say what you want about Che, but the man
knew the power of a good brand.
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Books, Arts & Manners
We
Americans
And Our
Spies
JOHN HILLEN
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in
the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden
(Penguin, 464 pp., $30)
E
though General Michael
Hayden is seven years re moved from being director of
the CIA, and almost eleven
removed from being director of the
National Security Agency, his ghost
hung heavily over a recent Republican
primary debate in Detroit.
The previous week, Hayden had made
news by pointing out that candidate
Donald Trump was suggesting a range
of illegal orders (concerning torture
and the targeting of non-combatants)
that the military and the intelligence
community would be duty-bound to
disobey. When confronted with this
during the debate, Trump doggedly
and condescendingly twice insisted
that the military would do whatever he
told them to do. Faced with a postdebate uproar (not, it should be noted,
among his supporters), Trump walked
back his embrace of issuing illegal
orders and expecting blind obedience
to them.
At the same debate, Ted Cruz, who initially, in 2013, took a very libertarian
view of Edward Snowden’s leak of the
36
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NSA’s metadata programs designed to
capture overseas-terrorist links to Americans’ digital communications, but now
says Snowden is guilty of treason, referred to those programs as “the United
States government engaging in massive
surveillance on American citizens.” This
was a factually debatable statement, but it
was said with the charged sort of language
used in paranoid circles. This kind of
emotive and imprecise language is meant
to imply to the uninformed that the content of Americans’ domestic communications is being swept up and analyzed by
the NSA. In actuality, the various programs (some of which were ended by
Congress last year) tracked anonymous
phone numbers and digital addresses,
kept databases to query phone numbers
connecting to phone numbers, captured
almost no content (except in a very few
cases in which a court order was issued
separately, in the process of an investigation), and collected patterns of data that
could show direct communication from
Americans to overseas terrorists.
General Hayden was a central player in
the decisions leading to the programs that
underlay the debate questions. He took
seriously, and even personally, the gaps in
U.S. intelligence strategy that had passively abetted the 9/11 attacks, and he
moved in a time of war to close those gaps
against the terrorist threat.
The general criticism of the intelligence
community about the surprise of 9/11 was
that it had failed to “connect the dots.”
Hayden undertook a frantic effort, lasting more than seven years, to put into
place programs, laws, and technology
that would connect the dots.
If you have watched the recent Showtime documentary The Spymasters: CIA
in the Crosshairs, you’ll remember the
on-camera scenes with General Hayden.
The documentary features interviews
with all twelve living CIA directors. I
have met with or gotten to know eight of
these dozen men over the years, including
Hayden, but I was still surprised at how
Hayden stands out from the rest—in his
directness, his ability to clarify very complex issues without losing any important
nuance, his folksy-yet-eggheaded communication style, his fair-mindedness,
and his toughness.
Hayden’s memoir gives one the same
impression. Written by a career intelligence professional and wonky, in some
places, as a result, the book comes across
nonetheless as down-to-earth, simple,
and direct. Some of the post-9/11 intelligence-world issues are virtual halls of
mirrors in their legal and institutional
complexity. Hayden explains them in a
clear and direct way. His upbringing as
a lower-middle-class Catholic kid in
Pittsburgh grounded him, and he has
kept that perspective.
In 1999, Hayden inherited a technologically backward NSA. After 9/11, he
transformed it very quickly into an
action-oriented agency. He pivoted the
mission to active signals intelligence and
away from reliance on passive intercepts
in which the NSA “hop[ed] for a transmission” that would “serendipitously hit
our antennas.”
He ended up spending much of his
time and energy—and not just after
queries from Congress or leaks to the
press—thinking through the balance
between intelligence-gathering and civil
liberties. In many ways, this theme dominates his book. In a speech to the NSA just
two days after 9/11, he emphasized protecting Americans’ liberties. As new programs were put into place to plug the
holes that had led to 9/11 and take advantage of new technology, he challenged his
lawyers at the NSA to think constantly
about, and indeed to lose sleep over, questions about the Constitution and the
Fourth Amendment.
While the Dr. Strangelovean caricature
many Americans have of our spy agencies
is that the intelligence community cares
nothing for civil liberties, Hayden has
thought about these issues more seriously
than most so-called privacy experts. Alan
Dershowitz has even been his debateteam partner in some of these discussions of civil liberties.
On these issues and others, Congress
comes off poorly in this book—as dedicated largely to unintelligent Mondaymorning quarterbacking of risky
intelligence programs and bailing out
when the going gets tough. Hayden
writes that “most American intelligence
professionals are well acquainted with
the broad cultural rhythm connecting
APRIL 11, 2016
American espionage practitioners and
American political elites: The latter
group gets to criticize the former for not
doing enough when it feels in danger,
while reserving the right to criticize it for
doing too much as soon as it has been
made to feel safe again.”
Hayden writes that the NSA terroristsurveillance program Stellarwind “covered a quadrant where we had no other
tools.” And yet, after it was leaked and
became controversial, congressional
leaders who had been briefed earlier on
the necessity of the program as part of
a mosaic of intelligence-gathering
efforts wanted it only if it produced an
intercept that led to “our tackling a
sniper on a roof just as he was chambering a round. Anything short of that
was unconvincing.” Most members
simply did not understand the nature of
intelligence work—the building of a
composite from thousands of pieces of
data from many sources, the risks inherent in acquiring intelligence from
shadowy enemies.
In the face of this widespread incomprehension on the Hill, Hayden was at
pains to explain “the near-absolute
inappropriateness of applying lawenforcement models” to intelligence
work: “What might be admirable for a
court system is unconscionable for an
intelligence agency.”
Hayden, more than any other NSA or
CIA director, sought out Congress and
the public to try to build a political
consensus around the more controversial intelligence programs. The shortlived and seldom-used (a total of three
detainees were waterboarded) CIA
enhanced-interrogation program was
shut down before Hayden even became
CIA director, and yet he still sought to
build political and public consensus
for it—persuading President Bush to
speak about it in a televised address in
September 2006. He believed that since
the intelligence community “was serving an executive with a bolder view on
how to conduct the conflict than many
in the legislature,” such a consensus
was necessary.
That did not work, even when Hayden
was prepared to pare down some operational capabilities to gain some political support:
I could afford to give up some things,
especially if that led to the kind of
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
political consensus we were seeking. I
wanted Congress to be part of that consensus. That required a serious discussion with them. That discussion never
happened. The members were too busy
yelling at us and at one another. . . . In
the end, the Congress of the United
States had no impact on the shape of the
CIA interrogation program going forward. Congress lacked the courage or
the consensus to stop it, endorse it, or
amend it.
His stories of the inane questions of
some (kindly unnamed) members, and the
duplicity of, in particular, Nancy Pelosi,
Dianne Feinstein, and Jay Rockefeller, are
depressing, if unsurprising.
There was a similar problem with the
press. For a long while, Hayden and his
colleagues had succeeded in keeping
some programs known by the press
from being revealed, by engaging in a
constant dialogue with editors and publishers of the major newspapers about
the age-old tension between the watchdog role of a free press and legitimate
government secrets whose revelation
would endanger sources and methods.
There too, the story ends ignobly,
with the New York Times, for instance,
leaking word of the SWIFT terroristfinance-tracking program in 2006. The
editor, Bill Keller, actually said outright
that the president was now politically
weaker than he used to be and that it
was therefore now more feasible to leak
word about SWIFT. The paper of record
subsequently ran an editorial bemoaning a “seemingly limitless stream of cash
flowing to terrorist groups.” Hayden
writes: “Thanks for the suggestion. Talk
about hypocrisy.”
Hayden attests throughout the book
to the operational utility of all these
Bush-administration programs and
dis cusses the attacks that they most
certainly prevented. Even so, the Democratic Congress elected in 2006 chipped
away at them until, by the end of the
administration, “we had finally succeeded in making it so legally difficult
and so politically dangerous to grab and
hold someone that we would simply
default to the kill switch to take terrorists off the battlefield.”
It got worse, of course, with the transition of administrations and Candidate
Obama’s campaign pledges to end the
wars and close the detention center at
Guantanamo. For the ensuing seven years,
the U.S. has been conducting what
should be largely an intelligence war with
no viable detainee policy. The Obama
administration has defaulted to simply
killing most low-level terrorist operatives
with drones.
Even that, the president hoped to stop:
He wanted to end what his top advisers
called “the Forever War.” He gave a
speech in May 2013 basically announcing a victory over al-Qaeda and the end
of the War on Terror. In the meantime,
the horror of ISIS was on the horizon; a
few months after this speech, the president dismissed ISIS as “the JV team.”
Hayden writes:
A president who at that point had conducted 85 percent of all secret drone
strikes in human history called for limits,
transparency, oversight, and the near
elimination of collateral damage from
such strikes. A president who had been
conducting global war for more than
four years then called on Congress to
refine and eventually eliminate his
authority to conduct that war by withdrawing and then reissuing a much more
confining Authorization for the Use of
Military Force.
Bemoaning the pendulum swing of the
past 15 years and yet recognizing the
constantly changing dynamics of public
opinion, political support, and strategic
circumstances, Hayden writes: “What we
need here is a dial, not a switch.”
Hayden is not entirely optimistic that
an open, democratic society with a
yearning for transparency and instant
gratification can sustain difficult, risky,
and controversial intelligence programs
that “play to the edge”:
American intelligence routinely assumes
that it is operating with at least the
implied sanction of the American people. Its practitioners believe that if the
American people knew everything it was
doing, it would broadly have their support. We have always believed that we
worked with some manner of consent of
the governed. Now the governed are
reconsidering how they want to grant
that consent.
Hayden believes that the intelligence
community needs to welcome a more
“cogent” and “complete” description of
the terrorist threat and the countermeasures to it. His book is an important step
in that direction.
37
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Benefactors
With Great
Wealth
MARTIN MORSE
WOOSTER
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the
Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by
Jane Mayer (Doubleday, 464 pp., $29.95)
W
John D. Rockefeller
gave $100,000 to the
American Board of Foreign Missions in 1905 to
support Congregational ministries overseas, his critics seized on a piece the
Congregational Church’s moderator, the
Reverend Washington Gladden, had written a decade before, in which he had
denounced giving by the rich as “tainted
money.” These fortunes, Gladden had
charged, were acquired “by methods as
heartless, as cynically iniquitous as any
that were employed by the Roman plunderers or robber barons of the Dark Ages.”
“Is this clean money?” he asked. “Can any
man, can any institution, knowing its origins, touch it without being defiled?”
Liberals waged war against Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and other great
philanthropists. The critics’ greatest triumphs came when they persuaded these
donors to create perpetual foundations
with no restrictions on how the fortunes
could be used; when the founders died,
the liberals seized outright control of
these foundations.
In the 1970s, conservative donors began
to be smarter and exercised tighter control
HEN
Mr. Wooster is the senior fellow at the Capital
Research Center. The Bradley Foundation funded his
book Great Philanthropic Mistakes, and he has
written for the Pope Center.
38
|
of their foundations. Some, most notably
John M. Olin, created foundations with
term limits, ensuring that their foundations would not be captured and used by
the Left after their deaths. As conservative donors changed their tactics, liberals
responded by attacking the legitimacy of
their donations. The latest to do so is New
Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer, who has
been writing pieces for most of this
decade critical of such conservative
donors as Charles and David Koch and
North Carolina’s Art Pope. Dark Money
expands on her previously published work
with additional material about wealthy
conservatives’ donations to philanthropic
causes and to political campaigns.
The subtitle of her book contains two
errors in 13 words. The history she describes is not hidden and the people she
writes about are not radicals.
Mayer believes that the entire conservative movement is politically illegitimate.
She refers to conservatives as “ultraconservatives” and libertarians as “extreme
libertarians.” Her definition of “extremist” includes all writers for and editors of
this magazine. Here is how she describes
the Bradley Foundation in the 1990s: “a
righteous combatant in an ideological
war.” The foundation was “an activist
force on the secondary-school level, too,”
she says. “The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national ‘schoolchoice’ movement, waging an all-out
assault on teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to
‘wean’ Americans from government, the
foundation militated for parents to be
able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools.”
But what did the Bradley Foundation
actually do? It funded early research on
school choice, including John Chubb
and Terry Moe’s influential 1990 book
Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.
It awarded substantial grants in Milwaukee to pay part of the tuition of students in private schools, and other
grants that allowed these schools to
expand and to admit even more students
with vouchers. The result, according to
the Philanthropy Roundtable, was that, as
of 2015, 30,000 students in Milwaukee
used vouchers to attend private schools
(there were smaller voucher programs in
Racine and statewide).
Note how Mayer salts her description of
Bradley’s activities with military metaphors (“all-out assault,” “an activist
force”), as if the organization were an
occupying army instead of a mediumsized charitable foundation. She does this
as an attempt at misdirection: She is
unable to provide any examples in which
program officers of any conservative
foundation forced grantees to take positions they would not have taken if they
hadn’t gotten foundation money.
Since she can’t show that the Koch,
Bradley, and Scaife foundations control
the conservative movement, she quotes
several sources (such as conservativeturned-liberal David Brock) about how
terrible these foundations are. These
sources provide no evidence of oppressive
foundation control. Her highest-ranking
source is Ed Crane, who served as president of the Cato Institute between 1977
and 2012, when he lost a vicious power
struggle and was forced to retire.
According to Mayer, Crane said that
Charles Koch, Cato’s most generous
donor, “thinks he’s a genius. He thinks
he’s the emperor, and he thinks he’s wearing clothes.” But Crane offered no evidence that Koch forced Cato fellows or
authors to come up with conclusions dictated by the donor.
Mayer also loves quoting anonymous
sources for rumors that are too good to
check. She claims, based on the account
of an unnamed “family acquaintance” of
the Kochs, that Fred Koch, Charles and
David Koch’s father, was so in love with
Germany that he brought back a German
governess to watch over his two oldest
children, Frederick and Charles. The terrifying Teuton, she says, enforced “a rigid
toilet-training campaign” and delighted
in reading the Koch children scary German fairy tales. Mayer claims that this
woman stayed with the Koch family until
1940, when she returned to Germany in
ecstasy over the Nazi occupation of
France. Her legacy, according to Mayer,
was inspiring in Charles Koch (born in
1935) a “lifetime occupation” of “crusading against authoritarianism.” It should
be noted that Mayer does not know the
purported governess’s name.
Mayer’s prejudices cause her to focus
on shallow questions rather than deep
ones. For example, she is opposed to all
conservative foundations’ funding of colleges and universities. But she completely
ignores the funding of professorships of
free enterprise, because these chairs are
funded by legions of smaller donors, and
the existence of these donors disproves the
APRIL 11, 2016
idea that it is only a few mandarins who
fund the Right. And yet: Free-enterprise
professorships raise legitimate concerns
about whether their existence abridges
academic freedom, since donors want
them to go to supporters of the freeenterprise system. It is because donors
dictate what free-enterprise professors
may teach that Milton Friedman was able
to say (in a conversation with me for a
Wall Street Journal piece I wrote in 1990),
“I am opposed to chairs of free enterprise,
as I am to chairs of Marxism or socialism.”
As for her book’s being a “hidden history” of foundations, Mayer relies for the
most part on four readily accessible secondary sources, supplemented by articles
in periodicals. Her history of the Bradley
Foundation is based primarily on John
Gurda’s authorized history, published in
1992. Her chapters on the Olin Foundation are based on John J. Miller’s authorized history A Gift of Freedom (2005).
Her major source on Richard Mellon
Scaife is a multi-part series published by
the Washington Post in 1999. Much of
her knowledge of libertarianism and
some of her material on Charles and
David Koch comes from Brian Doherty’s
Radicals for Capitalism (2007).
Her original material, besides interviews that provide much in the way of
indignant rhetoric but little evidence,
includes one minor and one major source.
Late in his life, Richard Mellon Scaife
wrote an autobiography, which was privately printed and never made publicly
available. Mayer obtained a copy, but
judging from the quotations she provides, the book offers limited insights
into Scaife’s intentions.
Her major discovery comes as a result
of lawsuits between members of the Koch
family. Fred Koch, who founded the company that became Koch Industries, had
four children, who inherited the privately held company when their father
died in 1967. In 1983, Charles and
David Koch bought out their brothers,
Frederick and Bill Koch, for $800 million. Bill Koch, thinking he had been
cheated, launched lawsuit after lawsuit
alleging that Koch Industries had committed environmental crimes. He also
hired opposition researchers to investigate his brothers. In 2001, the Koch
brothers agreed not to disparage one
another, and Bill Koch had to settle for
being a billionaire instead of a megabillionaire. But all of the material Bill
Koch obtained prior to 2001 ended up in
Mayer’s hands, and she eagerly uses it to
disparage Charles and David Koch.
But the Bill Koch material includes
little that concerns the Koch brothers’
charitable giving. The major—and accu-
WOMAN AT A MOTEL WINDOW
Frost from her breath on glass,
Thin arteries made dark
By a slow finger’s pass,
Are the hand’s speech, and mark
As something to be said
Her waiting emptiness.
She writes; behind her, a bed,
On which her form’s impressed.
There’s no one to watch her letters
Take form a moment only.
What secrets she has set there
Are legible to her only.
Is it the fear of dawn
Or something from the past
Still present that she’s drawn
There, where it will not last?
Each night’s a rented room,
Each thought a humid blur,
And dawn lies in a tomb
Scratching to be disinterred.
—JAMES M. WILSON
rate—charge based on that material is
that in 1933 Winkler-Koch, the company
that became Koch Industries, built an oil
refinery that became Nazi Germany’s
third-largest. Koch Industries’ response
is to note that many American companies were doing business in Germany at
the time. Mayer also notes that, during
World War II, Winkler-Koch developed
improved forms of aviation fuel that
helped B-17 bombers smash German
industry. Mayer does show that Koch
Industries was fined several times for
pollution violations.
In short, Dark Money does little to
prove its case about the nefarious influence of charitable giving. It is a failure
because it has too much prejudice against
conservatives and the conservative movement, and provides very little evidence of
wrongdoing. That does not mean conservative foundations should escape scrutiny.
Foundations get far too little attention
from the press. But journalists should look
at what charities are doing, and whether
their policies help or hurt our country, and
not just search for hidden manipulators.
Above all, journalists should realize
that conservative foundations and their
liberal counterparts are quite similar, except that liberal foundations are far larger than conservative ones. The Bradley
Foundation has assets of almost $902 million. According to the Foundation Center,
a nonprofit that compiles authoritative
statistics on foundations, that makes it
the 96th-largest foundation in the U.S.
By contrast, the ten largest foundations,
including such liberal stalwarts as the
Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, Hewlett,
Kellogg, Packard, and MacArthur foundations, each have assets of over $6 billion.
In some regards, liberals would do better to emulate the Right than to try to annihilate it. Mayer quotes Yale University
Press director Steve Wasserman, who
explained that he tried to get left-wing
donors to fund serious books but couldn’t
do it because they were too busy trying to
get noticed in Hollywood. “On the right,
they understand that books matter,”
Wasserman said—but the Democrats he
talked to weren’t interested in funding
scholarship because they were “hostage to
star personalities and electoral politics.”
Ideas have consequences, and that
conservatives are willing to invest in the
development of ideas is a credit to them
and something for which public-spirited
citizens should be grateful.
39
two page Caribbean 2016 cruise APRIL 11 ISSUE_Panama cruise.qxd 3/22/2016 11:20 AM Page 1
THE
NATIONAL
REVIEW
Sailing November 13–20 on
Holland America’s Nieuw Amsterdam
2016 Post-Election Cruise
Join Victor Davis Hanson, Allen West, Bing West, Heather Higgins, Steven Hayward, Dinesh D’Souza,
Jonah Goldberg, Andrew McCarthy, John Podhoretz, Neal Freeman, James Lileks, Kathryn Lopez,
Eliana Johnson, Charles Cooke, Kevin Williamson, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jim Geraghty,
John Yoo, Kat Timpf, Rob Long, John J. Miller, John Hillen, David French, Ed Whelan, Reihan Salam,
and Charmaine Yoest as we visit Ft. Lauderdale, Half Moon Cay, Cozumel, Grand Cayman, & Key West
t’s time for you to sign up for the National Review 2016
Post-Election Caribbean Cruise, certain to be the conservative event of the year. Featuring an all-star cast, this
affordable trip—prices start at $1,999 a person (based on double
occupancy), and just $2,699 for a single—will take place
November 13–20, 2016, aboard Holland America Line’s beautiful MS Nieuw Amsterdam.
From politics, the elections, the presidency, and domestic
policy to economics, national security, and foreign affairs,
there’s so much to debate and review, and that’s precisely what
our conservative analysts, writers, and experts will do on the
Nieuw Amsterdam, your floating luxury getaway for fascinating
discussion of major events, trends, and the 2016 elections.
Our wonderful speakers, on hand to make sense of politics,
elections, and world affairs, include historian Victor Davis
Hanson, former Congressman Allen West, terrorism and
defense experts Bing West, Andrew McCarthy, and John
Hillen, Independent Women’s Forum chairman Heather
Higgins, conservative author and moviemaker Dinesh
D’Souza, best-selling author and policy expert Steven
Hayward, pro-life champion Charmaine Yoest, conservative
legal experts John Yoo and Ed Whelan, NRO editors-at-large
Kathryn Lopez, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, former
NR Washington Editor and WFB expert Neal Freeman, NR
senior editors Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger and Ramesh
Ponnuru, NR essayists David French, Charles C. W. Cooke,
Kevin D. Williamson, and Reihan Salam, NR Washington
I
Editor Eliana Johnson, NR columnists Rob Long and James
Lileks, ace political writers Jim Geraghty, John Miller, and
culture-scene reporter Kat Timpf.
No wonder we’re expecting over 500 people to attend (so
far over 150 cabins have been booked!). They’ll enjoy our
exclusive event program, which will include
•
•
•
•
•
eight scintillating seminars featuring NR’s editors and
guest speakers;
two fun-filled “Night Owl” sessions;
three revelrous pool-side cocktail receptions;
late-night “smoker” featuring superior H. Upmann cigars
(and complimentary cognac); and
intimate dining on at least two evenings with a guest
speaker or editor.
Surely, the best reason to come on the National Review
2016 Post-Election Caribbean Cruise is the luminary lineup. But talk about accentuating the positive: As we did in
2014, we’re planning to expand the cruise experience by
adding even more conservative superstars to our overall event
package. On the night before the cruise—November 12th to
be specific—we will be hosting a special gala at the Ft.
Lauderdale Marina Hotel featuring a number of conservative
titans who will be joining our editors for an exclusive (NR
cruise attendees only, and at that, limited to 300 happy people
on a first-come, first-served basis), intimate, and sure-to-be
memorable discussion of the
election results and their impact
JO I N U S F OR SE V EN B A LM Y DAYS A N D C OO L C O N S E RVAT I VE N I GH T S
on America; all of that followed
D AY / D AT E
PORT
ARRIVE
D E PA R T
SPECIAL EVENT
by a wonderful reception.
SUN/Nov. 13
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
4:00PM
evening cocktail reception
Stay tuned for more information. But be assured it will be a
MON/Nov. 14
Half Moon Cay, Bahamas
8:00AM
4:00PM
afternoon seminar
“Night Owl” session
spectacular night.
To be followed by a spectacuTUE/Nov. 15
AT SEA
morning/afternoon seminars
lar
week of world-class cruising
WED/Nov. 16
Georgetown, Grand Cayman 8:00AM
4:00PM
afternoon seminar
on the beautiful and luxurious
Nieuw Amsterdam, as it sails a
THU/Nov. 17
Cozumel, Mexico
11:00AM
11:00PM
morning seminar
Western Caribbean itinerary that
late-night Smoker
will include Ft. Lauderdale,
FRI/Nov. 18
AT SEA
morning/afternoon seminars
Grand Cayman (always an ideal
“Night Owl” session
place to snorkel—you must visit
SAT/Nov. 19
Key West, FL
8:00AM
5:00PM
afternoon seminar
Sting Ray City, or catch the
other rays on Seven Mile Beach),
SUN/Nov. 20
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
7:00AM
Debark
Half Moon Cay (Holland
two page Caribbean 2016 cruise APRIL 11 ISSUE_Panama cruise.qxd 3/22/2016 11:21 AM Page 2
NEW SPEAKER—JOHN YOO!
OVER 150 CABINS BOOKED!
America’s private island, home to a most pristine blue lagoon and
tons of fun), Cozumel (your gateway to the Mayan ruins at
Tulum), and Key West (with its beaches, beaches and
beaches—and of course lime pie).
And for those times when we are “at sea,” or you feel like staying on board, the Nieuw Amsterdam (need I say it offers wellappointed, spacious staterooms and countless amenities, and
hosts a stellar staff that provides unsurpassed service and sumptuous cuisine?) has a classy, terrific spa, a must-attend Culinary
Arts Center, pools, luxury boutiques, plenty of nooks and crannies to hide in with a good book, and, oh yeah, a casino!
NR’s 2016 Post-Election Cruise will be remarkable, and
affordable. Prices start as low as $1,999 a person, with “Single”
cabins starting at only $2,699 (in many cases our rates are lower
than we charged in 2012!). And they can go even lower: Get a
friend or family member to reserve a cabin (a single or a couple
who are first-time NR cruisers), and you’ll receive an additional
$100 discount (and so will they).
If you’ve always wanted to go on an NR cruise but could never
pull the trigger, couldn’t send in the application, chickened out,
for whatever reason, you’ve just got to give in. Make the
National Review 2016 Post-Election Caribbean Cruise, the
one where you finally yes. You will not regret that decision: Take
the trip of a lifetime with America’s preeminent intellectuals,
policy analysts, and political experts. Reserve your cabin online
at www.nrcruise.com. Or call The Cruise Authority (M-F, 9AM
to 5PM EST) at 800-707-1634. Or fill out and mail/fax the application form on the following page.
(Single and worried you’ll be a fifth wheel? Don’t: About a
third of our contingent, a most happy and welcoming crowd, are
single travelers.)
We’ll see you—in the company of Victor Davis Hanson,
Allen West, Bing West, Heather Higgins, Steven Hayward,
John Yoo, Dinesh D’Souza, Jonah Goldberg, Andrew
McCarthy, John Podhoretz, Neal Freeman, James Lileks,
Kathryn Jean Lopez, Eliana Johnson, Charles C. W. Cooke,
Kevin Williamson, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jim
Geraghty, Jillian Melchior, Rob Long, John J. Miller,
Charmaine Yoest, David French, Ed Whelan, and Reihan
Salam—this November 13-20 aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam on
the National Review 2016 Post-Election Caribbean Cruise.
For more information or to apply online go to
www.nrcruise.com
or call The Cruise Authority at
1-800-707-1634
New Amsterdam
RATES START AT JUST $1,999 P/P!
Superior service, gourmet cuisine, elegant accommodations, and
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DATE
Facing
War
ARTHUR L. HERMAN
Hubris: The Tragedy of War in
the Twentieth Century, by Alistair Horne
(Harper, 400 pp., $28.99)
S
Thucydides, historians
have looked for a moral pattern in the dynamics of war in
their own time, with decidedly
uneven results (see, for example,
Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly).
For Thucydides the war in question
was the Peloponnesian War. Although
Iraq and Afghanistan barely get a
mention in distinguished historian
Alistair Horne’s new book, they evidently cast an enormous shadow over
his approach to understanding the relationship between success and failure
in military conflict. Unfortunately, the
book’s thesis—“Wars have generally
been won or lost through excessive
hubris on one side or the other”—simply
doesn’t bear up to close examination.
One man’s hubris, after all, is another’s
self-confidence.
And the examples Horne cites, from
the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05 to
the Korean War, don’t always seem to
fit even his secondary theme, that “the
exuberance that follows victory all too
easily leads to the wrong decision.”
Exuberance doesn’t seem actually to
have played much part in the decision
by Russia to send a fleet of 50 warships
on an 18,000-mile voyage from the
Baltic to the Pacific to defeat the
INCE
Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson
Institute and the author of the forthcoming book
Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior.
Japanese fleet in the Tsushima Straits
between Korea and Japan, only to lose
one of the most lopsided sea battles in
history. On the contrary, Russia’s situation was desperate: Its Pacific fleet at
Port Arthur had already been destroyed
by the Japanese under the gifted admiral
Heihachiro Togo, Russian land forces
had suffered a crushing defeat at the
battle of Mukden, and Port Arthur itself, Russia’s most important Asian
outpost, was being strangled by a seemingly unbreakable siege.
Sending the quickly assembled Russian fleet, with its untrained crews and
untested ships, was a last roll of the
dice. As Horne tells the story, it seems
obvious that the fleet’s real problem
was a prolonged run of bad luck almost
from the moment it left St. Petersburg
If this seems a somewhat strained
example of hubris in action, Horne
looks to be on firmer ground in his discussion of Hitler’s invasion of the
Soviet Union in June 1941. As Horne
points out, Hitler assumed that the
blitzkrieg tactics that had led to such
stunning, swift success in France the
previous year would crush the Soviet
Union in a few short months. Instead,
the German war machine got bogged
down in the vast distances of Russia
and with the onset of winter ground to a
halt at the gates of Moscow, in time for
Stalin’s armies to recover and administer the first decisive defeat of German
forces—more decisive in the long run,
Horne argues, than the later defeat at
Stalingrad. As 1942 started, he writes,
“the myth of the invincible blitzkrieg
Unfortunately, the book’s thesis
simply doesn’t bear up to close
examination. One man’s hubris, after
all, is another’s self-confidence.
harbor, plus the fact that Togo was a
true admiral of genius, a Japanese
Nelson who managed to sink all eight
of Rozhestvensky’s battleships and destroy or capture 20 other Russian vessels, with only three torpedo boats lost,
117 sailors killed, and 583 wounded—
all but wiping out Russia as a major
maritime power.
Horne’s description of the battle is
gripping: “As twilight set in and light
began to fail, Togo decided . . . to pursue Rozhestvensky’s crippled fleet with
his plentiful torpedo boats. They circled like prairie wolves bringing down
a great buffalo, scurrying about at high
speed and with all the precision of
months of hard training for this one
engagement.” And he does argue forcefully, if not entirely convincingly, that
Togo’s overwhelming victory went on
to inspire Japan to launch a 35-year
career of empire-building that led ultimately to a long, costly land war in
China, and to an even more disastrous
sea war with the United States. (Horne
reminds us that one of the young lieutenants at Tsushima was Isokoru
Yamamoto, the future architect of the
attack on Pearl Harbor.)
had been shattered,” while Hitler’s decision to take personal command of the
conduct of the war, down to deciding
the disposition of individual divisions,
only set the hubristic stage for further
disastrous decisions that finally doomed
Germany in the war.
Still, it’s worth noting that if the invasion of the Soviet Union had started in
April or May, as originally planned, instead of late June, Hitler’s armies could
have surrounded Moscow well before
the snows fell and before the offensive
lost its initial momentum. But Hitler’s
attention that spring was diverted instead to Yugoslavia and Greece, where
he had to send his Panzers to salvage
Benito Mussolini’s deteriorating position there, forcing the fateful delay. The
real failure of Operation Barbarossa
might have had less to do with Hitler’s
hubris than with misplaced loyalty to a
fellow dictator.
But it’s when Horne takes up
Douglas MacArthur’s conduct in the
Korean War that his case seems weakest. Unfortunately, Horne falls for the
standard view about MacArthur in
Korea—purveyed by, among other
sources, William Manchester’s uneven
43
and outdated biography—as a vain,
pompous “American Caesar” who,
after his stunning success with the surprise amphibious landing at Inchon in
September 1950, which led to the collapse of North Korean forces, rashly
decided to pursue the enemy across the
38th parallel and up to the border with
Red China, despite warnings that this
might precipitate Chinese intervention.
That intervention swiftly came in
November and December, forcing a
disastrous headlong collapse of U.N.
forces—so the conventional story
goes—until finally the new commander of MacArthur’s Eighth Army,
General Matthew Ridgway, managed
to stem the tide and MacArthur himself
was removed from command.
In point of fact, virtually every part
of the conventional story is untrue.
Horne writes, “How different world
history might have been if MacArthur
had had the good sense to stop at the
Thirty-Eighth Parallel.” In truth, there
was almost no one in the Truman
administration at the time who didn’t
want MacArthur to cross the parallel
into North Korea, to finally destroy the
remaining Communist forces and to
complete the unification of the peninsula under South Korean president
Syngman Rhee. It was Secretary of
Defense George Marshall himself who
gave MacArthur permission to conduct the rest of the campaign as he saw
fit, including moving his forces as
close to the Chinese border as he
thought practicable—although he was
supposed to use only South Korean
troops for the advance toward the Yalu.
(MacArthur did, but they were the first
to collapse when the Chinese flooded
across the border.)
Nor was it MacArthur’s move toward the Yalu that precipitated Mao
Tse-tung to enter the war. As we now
know from Chinese sources, Mao was
preparing for a full-out war with the
United States from the moment the
first American troops arrived in South
Korea to halt the North Korean invasion, in late June 1950. Mao wanted his
generals to attack as early as August,
when American forces were still well
south of the 38th parallel, but they,
rightly mindful of American military
power, stalled. Mao was forced to wait
until November before delivering what
he assumed would be the fatal knock44
|
out blow to the Americans, with no
fewer than four Chinese armies pouring into Korea.
MacArthur’s retreat back down the
Korean peninsula, which Horne describes mistakenly, as many historians
do, as “the Bug-Out,” actually gave
his forces time to regroup and later
resume the offensive—which they did
under Ridgway, whom MacArthur had
appointed to head the Eighth Army and
who, like MacArthur, saw final victory
over both China and North Korea as a
realizable goal until the Truman administration yielded to European demands
for a negotiated settlement and a divided Korea. It was MacArthur’s outspoken criticism of a policy that traded
victory for stalemate that finally cost
him his job, not incompetence—let
alone hubris.
Indeed, if anything displayed fullfledged hubris on MacArthur’s part, it
was his highly successful landing at
Inchon in September. Operation
Chromite, as it was called, was done in
defiance of the best judgment of all the
experts, including the Joint Chiefs and
even the generals and admirals in
charge of the operation—even, one
could argue, in defiance of nature herself. (Inchon harbor had extremely variable tides, which, if the timing of the
landing had been delayed by a couple of
hours, could have left American forces
stranded in the mud.) Yet Inchon was a
great triumph, as Horne concedes. It
triggered the collapse of the North
Korean army and temporarily shattered
Kim Il-sung’s regime, as U.N. forces
occupied Pyongyang. If MacArthur’s
strategy of carrying the fight across the
border into Manchuria had been pursued, the war might have spelled the end
of Mao’s Communist regime as well.
The British historian F. W. Maitland
once remarked that “it is very hard to
remember that events now long in the
past were once in the future.” This is
equally true of actions in the recent
past, including the decisions to invade
Iraq and Afghanistan. Retrospectively
assigning the quality of hubris in order
to explain them seems to ignore Maitland’s salutary warning. Alistair Horne
is a great and gifted writer, and fans of
his work (including this reviewer)
would want this book, his 24th, to be
the best of all. Sadly for all of us,
Hubris is not.
There and
Back Again
E L I Z A B E T H A LT H A M
The Chestry Oak, by Kate Seredy
(Purple House Press, 254 pp., $12.95)
A
S I think back on all the years
during which, as a child, I
loved good stories, and all the
years during which, as a
mother, I sought the best stories for my
children, and all the years during which,
as a teacher, I have done the same for
other people’s children, I do not find a better story than Kate Seredy’s The Chestry
Oak, first published in 1948. Yes, it is
quite as good as, though different from,
the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis, the best
of Hilda van Stockum, and good old
Charlotte’s Web.
In recent years, Puffin had the sense to
reprint some of Seredy’s other excellent
books, but somehow Chestry remained
out of print for decades, and the price of
old hardcover editions rose above $300—
perhaps in some cases on account of the
book’s investment value, but for other
reasons, as well. At last, Purple House
Press (its website is worth a visit) has
reprinted this splendid book. Intelligent,
critical-minded, well-read adults are crying and laughing over it, all over again. As
I write, the boys in my junior-high
English class are doing that, too; and
many of the students in our high school
are wishing they could read it again. (Of
course they can, once they get through
their AP exams, this spring.)
Elizabeth Altham is a writer and an instructor at
Sacred Heart Academy in Rockford, Ill. She is a
former editor of Sursum Corda and the author of
The Misplaced Spy, a young-adult spy story of
the Cold War.
APRIL 11, 2016
The story begins in Hungary just
before World War II, when Michael, a
hereditary prince, in line to rule a
small valley, is very young indeed. His
nurse, Mari Vitez, a splendid and
important character, tells him again,
for it is one of Michael’s favorite stories, of the night he was born.
Michael’s father, the Prince, chose her
to be Michael’s nurse, that night,
because she put into words the strength
of the people of the valley: “Look upon
us and listen. We are the furrow and the
harvest; we are the spring. . . . We are
the roots and the mighty tree. We are
the bedrock and the stones that made
the castle. . . . We are the sword, the
plough, the cross upon the spire of
the church.”
Very early in the book, Nazi officials
make Chestry Castle their headquarters
In a fearful chapter, Michael is lost,
escaping from an air raid that kills the
Nazis in Chestry Castle and destroys the
castle. He goes from camp to camp of displaced persons, and is adopted at last by
a farm family in northern Vermont. (Here
the new edition’s jacket detail is wrong:
“God’s Country” means the Northeast
Kingdom of Vermont, not the Hudson
Valley of New York.)
As the son of a prince first beloved
and then hated, and then as an orphan,
and then as an adopted son on an
American farm, Michael confronts
the perennial literary theme of paternity, identity, and destiny. Also, since
Sugarloaf Mountain in Vermont resembles Chestry Hill, and the beautiful
farmland of the Northeast Kingdom
resembles Chestry Valley, Michael
finds the old theme of there-and-back-
JAY NORDLINGER’S
CHILDREN
of MONSTERS
An Inqui ry i nto th e S ons
and D aught ers of D ic tat ors
The prose is perfect:
vivid and often poetic.
for the occupation of Hungary and even
for the direction of the invasion of
Russia; Michael’s father is universally
considered a collaborator. Michael’s
beloved French and English tutors are
replaced by a German officer, who participates in the rule of the castle. An
elderly servant, Antal, grieves that
Michael’s mind is being poisoned; Mari
Vitez assures him: “There is nothing
they can do during the day that I cannot
undo at night.”
Among the matters the Nazis cannot
undo is the old, old story of the first
Prince of Chestry, who was given his
title and his land by Saint Stephen of
Hungary, in the shade of the now venerable tree, the Chestry Oak, in A.D.
1000. Seredy has Michael tell that
story to another old retainer, just as a
young boy would tell it, and of course
English teachers rejoice at the chance
to identify the theme of the past alive
in the present.
Each Prince of Chestry is bound to
plant an acorn of that tree on his seventh
birthday, but Michael’s acorn will not
be safe, if planted during the war; moreover, it flies from the old oak onto
Michael’s saddle with “wings,” oak
leaves, and Mari says this may mean
Michael will have to plant his acorn far
from the valley.
again, in a chapter titled “My Valley
Found Me.” Michael finds again the
English language that he loved as a
child, as well as the GI who met him in
a displaced-persons camp and sent
him to a new home; the theme of lostand-found is very strong. I refuse to
spoil the story by mentioning how
beautifully Seredy brings in the theme
of redemption.
All of this makes for an excellent book
to teach to children, as I have done with
this volume many times. But the book is
actually much better than that would
suggest: Even the minor characters are
beautifully drawn, and the major ones
are inspiring, both heroic and believable.
Seredy gives them humor, too—often
the humor that freedom-loving people
use to assert their humanity, and their
sense of reality, in the face of tyranny.
When Michael’s Nazi tutor pins to the
castle bulletin board the 40th report that
heroic German forces have again taken
far more of Stalingrad in street-to-street
fighting, Mari Vitez observes that Stalingrad must be a very large place, larger
even than Russia.
The prose is perfect: vivid and often
poetic. Seredy is making the boys in my
junior-high classroom believe in the
Chestry motto: “Fear none but the Lord;
harm none but evil.”
I
t’s a fascinating question: What’s it like
to be the son or daughter of a dictator?
The offspring of a . . . Stalin? Or Mao?
Or a tin-horn dictator from an African hellhole? Jay Nordlinger’s answers to these and
other questions are engaging, witty, insightful, and make for a hell of a good read.
Here’s praise from outstanding historians for
Jay and his outstanding book:
MARK HELPRIN: “A magnetic pageturner that nonetheless is complex and
deep. The fascinating and horrific details
Nordlinger unearths flow together to pose
important and disturbing questions about
love, loyalty, history, and human nature.”
ANDREW ROBERTS: “This extraordinary book makes us all ask of ourselves:
What would we do if we realized that our
beloved father was also a blood-stained
tyrant? . . . Jay Nordlinger’s exceptional
investigation into the children of 20 modern dictators grips and convinces.”
PAUL JOHNSON: “Jay Nordlinger is
one of America’s most versatile and pungent writers.”
The late ROBERT CONQUEST: “Few
writers are well qualified to write about
the world’s cultures, and none more so
than Jay Nordlinger.”
BERNARD LEWIS: “Nordlinger
offers a unique combination of depth
and accuracy of knowledge with clarity
and elegance of style. It is a pleasure to
read sophistication without affectation.”
ORDER TODAY AT
AMAZON OR AT YOUR
LOCAL BOOKSTORE
45
Film
Black
Box
R O S S D O U T H AT
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Y
seen this movie before. An attractive young
woman, one of those ingénue
actresses you kind of recognize but can’t quite place, decides to run
out on her fiancé. Maybe he’s abusive,
we’re not sure, but we watch her clearing
her things out of their apartment in a
rush, leaving her engagement ring on
the counter, grabbing a bottle of Scotch
(remember that bottle) on the way out
the door, and then driving, driving, out
of a city and into the deep country:
woods, fields, nobody to call, nobody to
help—the dark territory of Norman Bates
and Leatherface and the other monsters
of our national gothic.
She stops at a gas station, a truck looms
up beside her, she shrinks from its headlights. She drives on, her phone buzzes,
her boyfriend begs and pleads—and then
wham, something hits her, her car spins
off the road, and she blacks out.
When she wakes up she’s in a bare,
windowless, concrete room, stripped to
her white undershirt, hooked up to an IV,
and chained to the wall. Her cell phone
is there, but there’s no signal. All she can
do is wait, helpless and alone, for her
captor to appear.
Except that when he does appear, the
movie that you expect 10 Cloverfield Lane
to be from its opening sequence—a conventional horror movie, pitting a fetching
young woman against some kind of rural
malevolence—collapses into something
considerably more interesting. The captor, it turns out, doesn’t think he’s a captor at all: He’s our heroine’s rescuer, he
tells her (along with his name: it’s
Howard), because they’re in his survivalist bunker and the entire world outside
has been nuked or carpet-bombed or poisoned or otherwise rendered unfit for
human habitation.
Is he telling the truth? The facts that
he’s clearly paranoid, that he controls all
the means of communication into and
out of the bunker, and that he’s played
by a scowling, bearded John Goodman
46
OU’VE
|
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane
all suggest that the answer might be a
strong H-E-double-hockey-sticks no.
Which is why our heroine (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a name you’ll probably
recognize next time) spends her first few
hours underground plotting her escape,
assuming that she’s been taken by a madman for whom the apocalypse is just a
cover story.
But wait: She’s not actually alone
with him, there’s another bunker-dweller,
the drawling, friendly Emmett (John
Gallagher Jr.), a local boy who helped
Howard build the thing, who concedes
that their host is a little crazy, but who also
saw something crazy happening—lights
in the sky, etc.—which is why he ran
for shelter and begged Howard to take
him in. Is Emmett on the level? If not,
the men are running a pretty complicated
plot. And what about those reports on the
radio as she was driving, about blackouts
along the Gulf Coast? And when she
finally makes it to the bunker door, what
she sees outside . . .
Best to stop there, because of course
the suspense about What’s Out There is
crucial to the movie, and 10 Cloverfield
Lane is good enough that its mysteries
deserve respect. The title suggests some
connection to 2008’s Cloverfield, the
found-footage Godzilla movie about a
collection of whiny Millennials scampering through the destruction of New
York, and there is a connection: They
share a producer, J. J. Abrams, and this
movie was conceived (or reconceived,
actually, since it derived from a preexisting script) as a spiritual successor to that
hit, not a sequel but a kind of anthologyseries sibling, with the same kind of
teasing marketing campaign, the same
promise of a big reveal.
Without spoiling that reveal, I’ll just
say that (as so often with Abrams’s sci-fi
twists and narrative black boxes) the ending isn’t the best part of the movie, and
if you’re expecting something mindblowing that basically rewrites everything you’ve seen—well, don’t.
The twist is fun enough, it’s worth
waiting for, but the wait itself is actually
what makes 10 Cloverfield such a strange
and interesting trip. Whatever lurks
beyond the bunker door, the movie’s
strength lies in the slow unpeeling of the
layers of crazy underground, the development of Goodman’s character from an
apparent psycho to a semi-sympathetic
prepper to, well, just watch the movie and
you’ll find out.
The cast is very good: Winstead’s cool
watchfulness once her character’s panic
subsides, Gallagher’s weirdly off-kilter
charm, and the lumbering, ugly charisma that Goodman always brings to bear.
Imagine being trapped underground with
Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski,
with only his word to go on about the fate
of all of human civilization. That’s 10
Cloverfield in a sentence, and if it doesn’t
tempt you to see it, nothing will.
APRIL 11, 2016
Country Life
Forward
With Spring
RICHARD BROOKHISER
M. DURIVAGE
S
NOWDROPS and crocuses flower
so briefly we forget them, until
next year they return, sprouting
through the dead-leaf paper
that is earth’s end-of-winter floor covering: dozens of bright beings, each saying
Me again.
But these early bloomers are gardeners’ exotics, which first grew in Europe,
Turkey, or central Asia. They are immigrants, doing jobs American wild flowers won’t do. In this part of the world,
the homegrown herald of spring is the
skunk cabbage.
In the country there are three kinds of
roads—state roads, county roads, and
roads. One of the last, named for a longgone mill, dives down off the state road,
crosses a sluggish brook, then rises again
to run between two fields before arriving
at the surprising waterfall—30 feet if it is
an inch—where the mill must have stood.
Halfway along this course there is a roadside ditch, thick with skunk cabbages.
The name of the plant describes its
mature splendor. The leaves are quite
gaudy for something that is not tropical—two or even three feet long, over a
foot wide. They spread and flare a bit
more than true cabbage leaves, as if offering to fan some woodland Cleopatra.
She better not put them in her salad,
though: Crush them and they smell, chew
them and her mouth and throat would
burn—whence “skunk.”
The big leaves come later. Skunk cabbages first appear as small hoods, only a
few inches tall. My wife and I noticed
them last winter, which was not severe but
exceptionally long and stubborn. There in
the ditch, poking through the snow crust,
were these short, stout points, like the
domes of tiny Eastern Rite churches.
Skunk cabbages generate their own heat,
30 degrees above the surrounding temperature. They rise through the freeze, if there
is any. Their warmth attracts flies and spiders, the first bugs to stir. So does their
smell, and their color—a dark streaky red,
as of something recently alive.
To pollinate, they play dead: Liebestod.
The helpful bugs enter the hood through a
convenient crack and find the flowers, a
cluster of nubs shaped like a small mic. We
turn away so as not to see them become
NSFW. Then snow becomes a stream (it is
easy to see how the ditch became a skunkcabbage community: spring after spring
the seeds flowed downhill). The leaves
sprout and flourish in May. By August,
they shred, turn black and slimy, and rot
away; the plant is lost from sight.
A question that naturally occurs upstate—land of off-grid refugees—is, Is
any part of the skunk cabbage edible?
Would boiling or drying forestall the
burning sensation? When the Koch brothers wither, can we feed ourselves? I took
a course once in eating the woods. It turns
out that quite a number of wild plants can
be eaten, though the number that can be
enjoyed is smaller. Dandelion leaves, if
you get them young, are worth the trouble;
morels, if you are lucky enough to find
them in an old apple orchard, are definitely
worth it. Beyond that, you come pretty
quickly to menu placeholders. We are
stuck with meat and the market, it seems.
Many wild plants were also reputed to
have medicinal uses. Some undoubtedly
do, though I also doubt many of the claims
that were made in old-time herb books
and pharmacopeias: The lists of the ailments that plants cured strike me as lists
of the ailments that settlers had (coughing, stomach ache, toothache). Hope
sprang from need, and the most common
cure, not listed, was probably whiskey.
Many a wild meal or medicine also
required a lot of preparation (see boiling
and drying, above), which was fine, if you
were a pioneer wife with ten children. For
the record: Leave skunk cabbage alone.
A question that naturally occurs to
upstate second-homers is, Can we have
one of our own? We have a stream; could
we have our own skunk-cabbage processional? Easier said. The roots are deep
and tenacious. A gardener friend managed to extract one from his property and
re-root it on ours. It survived the move,
but so far seems content not to propagate. For the springtime floor show we
will have to take the mill road.
Winter kept us warm, wrote Eliot, in
one of the sadder lines of a deeply sad
poem. So it does, if you work at it, as we
all do. We bundle up, set the thermostat,
buy cars with programmable fanny warmers in the seats. When I was a little boy,
still in pajamas with feet, I would crouch
by the vent in the bathroom when the furnace came on, like some puppy in a box
with a clock. You tamp down, you burrow in. You are thrown back on yourself,
and on your family and friends. Horace
and Milton both wrote about having a
drink by the fire when it’s lousy outside.
“Broach the cask which was born with
myself in the year / Of the Consul
Torquatus.” “Now that the fields are dank,
and ways are mire, / Where shall we
sometimes meet . . . ?” Tolkien and friends
called themselves Coalbiters, meaning
they sat with their feet by the fire to recite
the sagas. If you have to go outside to get
firewood, you glance at Orion and hurry.
Then earth turns over. Nothing is said,
but everything knows. It doesn’t snow, it
rains; when it rains, it doesn’t sting. The
wind rushes, but it does not slap. Your
hat sits in your coat pocket, unused. The
pine boughs in the window boxes look
old; you take them out and burn them.
The birds that wintered over are louder,
brighter. The moon’s sharp edges are
fuzzed with mist. Commerce and law
follow creatures and weather. In supermarket displays, leprechauns give way to
chocolate rabbits; clocks spring ahead,
your devices and your TVs automatically,
everything else by hand (your hand).
We are alive again together. There
was a spring peeper on my front door:
Jehovah’s witness.
47
backpage--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/23/2016 2:25 PM Page 48
Happy Warrior
BY DANIEL FOSTER
The Trump Trainwreck
G
IVEN that there appear to be about 17 Buckleyite
conservatives left in the smoldering ruin of
the Republican party presided over by Herr
Trump, let’s pause and take a moment to reflect
on how impressive it was that we happy few managed to get
so many of them to vote with us for so long.
Forty-odd years of marshaling these millions of Trump
voters to the causes of lower taxes, freer markets, and
strong global leadership? That’s nothing to sneeze at, people. Let us recall our modest policy victories fondly as the
Trump goon squads level their T-shirt cannons at us—the
Trump-goon-squad weapon of choice is the T-shirt cannon, you see—and the rhythmic chants of “You’re fired!”
fill the air.
If I sound like I’m condescending to Trump voters it’s
because I surely am. I have never pretended to be free of
elitism, and in some matters I am a proud snob. But the
relentless fervor of the Trump plurality in the GOP has left
me feeling dangerously like Pauline Kael, the New Yorker
critic who, lore has it, was shocked by Richard Nixon’s
victory because she didn’t know anybody who had voted
for him.
There are a lot of us chatterers who are only too late
coming to realize, like Stephen Stills, that there’s something happening here and what it is ain’t exactly clear. I
just read David Brooks, for instance, lament at column
length that maybe he doesn’t understand the American
people as well as he thought he did. And while I hold to
the only slightly self-deluding conviction that my origins
are surely earthier and more picaresque than Brooks’s, I
know exactly what he means.
Nor is my bewilderment limited to my conception of the
abstracted “ordinary American.” Even more confusing is the
susceptibility of people I know, admire, trust—even love—
to the Trumpian phage.
Jonah Goldberg has described this abiding, confusing
alienation of watching one’s friends and peers succumb to
Trump as akin to living through Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. It’s apt.
I only really use Facebook, unlike Twitter, to keep up with
friends and family. And so I usually keep it free of politics.
But I recently posted a perfunctory announcement—one I
was sure was redundant—that I counted myself among the
Never Trumpers. Several members of my immediate family
quickly responded with comments of this sort: “Really?”
“That’s surprising, why not?” “Curious to hear your reasons.”
Et tu, Auntie Marge?
Truth is, in my darkest moments, I wonder whether they
were right about us all along.
There’s a certain class of left-of-center commentators
who relish Trump not because he will midwife the third
Clinton presidency—though I’m sure they don’t mind that
bit either—but rather because he seems to prove a central
plank of their theory of the GOP: that the rank and file are
48
|
kept in thrall of economic policies they don’t support by the
elites’ half-hearted and insincere prosecution of the culture
war. And that as soon as the curtain is pulled on the latter,
the jig is up for the former.
So as we movement conservatives shout from the rafters
that Trump’s policies (such as they are) are statist and antimarket, as we warn that his most ardent supporters are motivated, to put it charitably, by white identity politics, these
commentators reply: “Precisely.”
Is that us? Is the market for conservative ideas really so
small, and the pull of racial grievance really so strong? I
don’t think so. I don’t think most elites are so insincere about
culture, or that most Republican voters are so indifferent to
limited government. I’ve written before that Trump’s coalition is too stochastic, too ideologically helter-skelter, for
there to be some neat ideological explanation of the facts
we’re seeing unfold on the ground. (According to most exit
polls, they favor amnesty, for goodness’ sake!)
Maybe it’s just that people are easy marks. That just like
the femme fatale and the gigolo, the mooch and the Yes
Man and the quisling, con men such as Donald Trump
exist for strictly Darwinian reasons, because there is a
niche that they expertly fill, a flaw in our B.S. detectors
that they expertly exploit.
Indeed, a big part of what pisses me off about Trump is
how easy it is for him. How little he’s had to sweat. How
little he’s even bothered to try to make it look good. His
campaign manager is caught on tape manhandling reporters
and protesters, and Trump responds, “Nope, didn’t happen,” and everyone just sort of nods and says, “Okay, good
enough for us.”
But I don’t think my Auntie Marge is a mark. I think she’s
a deeply generous, deeply Christian woman of intelligence
and industriousness, a great mother and a patriot. And so too
must most Trump supporters be decent.
But if Trump isn’t the result of a coherent ideological
revolt or a confidence game executed at spectacular scale,
that leaves us with the possibility that Trump’s popularity is
rooted—as the Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles has put it—in
the fact that he’s Donald Trump. That Trump is sui generis,
and people either dig his style or don’t. That it isn’t really
political at all.
Of course, supposing that Trump is the product of forces
outside the usual dominion of politics makes him no less
frightening or portentous a political force. Anton Chigurh,
the dread-inspiring force at the center of Cormac McCarthy’s
No Country for Old Men, shows us that there is as much
evil in the cold inertia of the universe as there is in any
mustache-twirling mastermind.
When Chigurh asks a young woman to call a coin toss for
her life, the victim protests. “The coin don’t have no say.
It’s just you.” Chigurh replies with a pitiless logic: “I got
here the same way the coin did.”
Maybe Donald Trump did, too.
APRIL 11, 2016
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