The New Era Of American Weakness

Transcription

2013_10_14 postal:cover61404-postal.qxd 9/25/2013 11:43 AM Page 1
October 14, 2013
$4.99
OREN CASS: A PRO-WORK, ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAM
JAY NORDLINGER: Alcohol on the Reservation
EBERSTADT
ON NOVAK
WILLIAMSON
ON D.C. ARCHITECTURE
Hey, quit it, Vlad!
I told you I’d
be flexible.
The New Era of
American Weakness
$4.99
41
THE EDITORS
0
74820 08155
6
www.nationalreview.com
base:milliken-mar 22.qxd 8/27/2013 12:03 PM Page 1
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TOC:QXP-1127940144.qxp 9/25/2013 3:08 PM Page 1
Contents
OCTOBER 14, 2013
ON THE COVER
|
V O L U M E L X V, N O . 1 9
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
Page 13
Stumbling on
Syria
38
Mary Eberstadt reviews Writing
from Left to Right: My Journey
from Liberal to Conservative,
by Michael Novak.
A superpower should be
trusted by its friends and
feared by its enemies, and we
are neither. The president
cares most about “nationbuilding at home” and is
clearly uncomfortable with the
assertion of American power.
This was unmistakable in his
marble-mouthed case for a
strike in Syria. The Editors
41
THE ROADMAP
Kevin A. Hassett reviews The
Growth Experiment Revisited:
Why Lower, Simpler Taxes
Really Are America’s Best Hope
for Recovery, by Lawrence B.
Lindsey.
42
ARTICLES
15 A DIALOGUE ON DEFUNDING
44
Should opponents of Obamacare be willing to shut down the government?
by Reihan Salam
It has a lot of poor people, and the rich liberals like it that way.
46
by Kevin D. Williamson
FILM: MODERN LOVE
Ross Douthat reviews Drinking
Buddies.
A vituperation against federal architecture.
20 COMIC-BOOK LIBERALISM
STRICTLY IRRATIONAL
Theodore Dalrymple reviews
American Psychosis: How the
Federal Government Destroyed
the Mental Illness Treatment
System, by E. Fuller Torrey.
by Ramesh Ponnuru
17 BILL DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK
THE GOP AT WAR
Colin Dueck reviews Conservative
Internationalism: Armed
Diplomacy under Jefferson,
Polk, Truman, and Reagan,
by Henry R. Nau.
COVER: ROMAN GENN
18 OUR HIDEOUS CAPITAL
A CATHOLIC FOR ALL
SEASONS
by Sonny Bunch
47
Movie studios move rightwardly away from their print sources.
CITY DESK: THE REST
IS SILENCE
Richard Brookhiser discusses the
wall of sound.
FEATURES
23 THE HEIGHT OF THE NET
by Oren Cass
How can an anti-poverty program encourage people to work?
29 DIVESTMENT DU JOUR
SECTIONS
by Stanley Kurtz
Obama endorses a crusade against fossil fuels.
31 HOW WE USED TO DO IT
by Mario Loyola
33 DECISION AT PINE RIDGE
by Jay Nordlinger
American diplomacy in the Yom Kippur War.
The ongoing, awful question of alcohol on the reservation.
2
4
36
37
41
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . Daniel Mark Epstein
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
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letters:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/25/2013 3:07 PM Page 2
Letters
OCTOBER 14 ISSUE; PRINTED SEPTEMBER 26
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Washington Editor Robert Costa
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz
Associate Editors
Patrick Brennan / Katherine Connell
Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Research Associate Scott Reitmeier
Assistant to the Editor Madison V. Peace
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Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Roman Genn
Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg / Florence King
Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin
Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi
Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne
Reihan Salam / Robert VerBruggen
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
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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
A Period Problem
As a faithful reader, I was surprised to see an erroneous reference to “Harry S.
Truman” in “Why Like Ike” (Kevin D. Williamson, September 2). The “S” in
his name is not an abbreviation, but a tribute to both his grandfathers. His
correct name is “Harry S Truman.” I expect such errors from others but not
NATIoNAL RevIeW. The bar is very high for you indeed.
Timothy C. Siegel
Knoxville, Tenn.
KevIN D. WILLIAmSoN RepLIeS: president Truman said that there was no need
to put a period after the “S,” since it was not an initial and did not denote anything. In the 1960s, he was asked how he preferred it, and he said that it usually was written with a period, and that was fine by him. The Associated press
stylebook has called for a period since that time. I myself am a dissenter from
Ap style on this issue—Truman’s preferences be damned, the “S” doesn’t
stand for anything—but was in this matter overruled by NATIoNAL RevIeW
convention. Given that the editors spare me at least three embarrassing errors
a fortnight, I am happy to submit to their preferences in this matter, even
though my own instincts go in the other direction. You might try launching a
petition effort to have the style changed, but I would not invest too much hope
in it: Custom and usage are not lightly subordinated to mere democratic preference.
THe eDIToRS RepLY: Doesn’t the “S” stand for two names, not none? most initials abbreviate the names of the people whose initials they are, and Truman’s
did not, but why should that make any difference for the period?
Alec Torres / Betsy Woodruff
Contributors
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Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune
D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak
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Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman
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The Service You Haven’t
excellent article from mr. Talent (“The Army You Haven’t,” September 16).
His analysis is thorough and illuminates the folly of our defunding defense
with minimal fiscal gain and maximal defense degradation. But I have to take
issue with his assertion in the first paragraph that there are “three services.”
What are these three services? There are three defense departments, but I don’t
know which are the three services. The last I counted there are four: (in
seniority order) United States Army, United States marine Corps, United
States Navy, and United States Air Force (the United States Coast Guard is
considered a military service only in times of combat).
Ras Smith
United States Marine Corps (Retired)
Las Cruces, N.M.
JIm TALeNT RepLIeS: You are correct. There are three departments, with three
service secretaries. But there are four services, and that is how I should have
put it. my thanks for correcting the error; it gives me the opportunity to
acknowledge it and send my regrets (and thanks) to you and all those who have
served their country.
CHAIRMAN
John Hillen
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
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week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/25/2013 3:08 PM Page 4
The Week
n Ted Cruz read Green Eggs and Ham to the Senate, and for all
they know it could have been a chapter of the Affordable Care
Act.
n Aaron Alexis, who murdered twelve people at the Washington
Navy Yard before being killed himself, added one more horror
to the list of recent mass shootings—Newtown, Aurora, Tucson,
Virginia Tech. Like his fellow killers, Alexis was mentally
unbalanced. He had been discharged from the Navy Reserve in
2011 for what was blandly called a “pattern of misbehavior.” In
2010, he was arrested in Fort Worth for discharging a firearm
in his apartment because his upstairs neighbor was too noisy; in
2004, he was arrested in Seattle for shooting out the tires of
someone else’s car during what detectives called a “blackout.”
Notwithstanding these episodes, Alexis, an information technologist who worked for a subcontractor, had a security clearance and was able to slip a shotgun—a weapon that not even
ardent gun controllers wish to ban—with him into the Navy
Yard. America’s decades-long experiment with deinstitutionalizing mental patients has brought chaos to their lives and death
to others when the disturbed are violent. Treatment can be more
sophisticated than the warehousing of the old days, but treatment there must be.
ROMAN GENN
n The president wanted to nominate Lawrence Summers as Fed
chairman, but a rebellion in his party forced Summers to withdraw. Obama is weak these days, so an appointment that in previous administrations would have been effectively his alone to
bestow is now out of his control. And the Left feels itself resurgent: Bill de Blasio, a sandalista back in the day, is likely to be
New York City’s next mayor. A man who in the 1990s supported
deregulation in some portions of the financial world, as Summers
did, was not going to get a pass from them. And feminists
wanted a woman. So now Obama is likely to pick Janet Yellen.
Compared with Summers, she has more expertise on monetary
policy and works better with others. She does not appear to share
his view that the Fed has already done everything it can do to promote economic recovery. So the Fed and the country may come
out ahead from this trade, if only by accident.
n Markets had expected the Fed to “taper,” or begin slowing
down its asset purchases, this fall. That expectation had driven
stocks down. The Fed then surprised the world by delaying the
taper, and markets rose. These reactions strengthened the common theory that Wall Street is addicted to easy money from the
Fed. In the past, though, stocks have not always risen when the
Fed has loosened. What the market has been saying in recent
years is that tightening when unemployment is high and inflation
is low would keep the economy depressed longer. The problem
with the Fed’s latest move is that it was a surprise, and a portent
of future surprises: Markets are more in the dark than ever about
the Fed’s intentions. Time for a predictable rule.
4
|
See page 6.
n In the past year, we have learned that the Benghazi installation’s status as a “temporary” facility meant it was exempt from
commonsense security requirements. The mission of the personnel out there—perhaps two dozen CIA, if a CNN report is
accurate—remains unclear, although some reports suggest it
related to reclaiming anti-aircraft missiles smuggled into Libya
during the civil war. We still have no explanation as to why a
German-based Commander’s In-extremis Force was moved to
Italy that night but never deployed to Libya, although last year
CBS reported that State Department “concerns about violating
Libyan sovereignty made a military rescue mission impractical.”
No one on the ground in Benghazi reported a public protest, leaving no clear explanation of how that became the centerpiece of
the administration storyline on the attacks. The State Department’s Accountability Review Board fulfilled its task of creating
a simulation of accountability without tainting any of the higherlevel officials with blame; four mid-level officials were put on
paid leave and then reinstated. No one at the State Department
ever missed a paycheck for his decisions about security at the
Benghazi facility. One year later, none of the murderers of four
Americans has been arrested, jailed, or executed. It is a barbarity
blurred by lies, unavenged.
n While Republican presidential candidates and individual
Republicans in Congress have advanced ambitious plans to
introduce free-market principles into health care, congressional
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THE WEEK
Republicans as a group have not taken them up. So it is good
news that the 175 House Republicans in the conservative
Republican Study Committee have taken on the issue, and especially that they have tackled the tax code’s treatment of health
insurance. The federal government’s encouragement of openended insurance coverage provided by employers is the root of
much of what is wrong with health-care markets, and did a lot to
make the passage of Obamacare possible. The RSC plan levels
the playing field so that people who buy insurance for themselves
get the same tax break as people who join their company’s plan,
and people who buy cheap policies get the same tax break as
people who buy expensive ones. It also allows insurers to sell
across state lines, bypassing state regulators. The plan has its
flaws. It increases federal power over medical-malpractice laws,
for one, and it doesn’t do quite enough to make insurance more
affordable—but it makes a good start. It is certainly better than
Obamacare, and may hasten the day of its demise.
n The Obama administration has been free in handing out
waivers from the health-care law, but it finally said no to a key
ally. Labor unions wanted the law to be rewritten to protect
union-negotiated health-care plans. Obama personally called
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka to make sure the union
would not come out against the health-care law at its September
convention, then turned down the waiver request once the convention was over. The unions should have known how the law
was going to affect them when they were lobbying for it, but we
will be happy to welcome them to the repeal coalition once they
recognize that they have been played.
AP PHOTO/MICHAEL CONROY
n Hobby Lobby, an arts-and-crafts chain, is among the more than
200 plaintiffs suing the Obama administration over its mandate
that employers provide insurance coverage for sterilization, contraception, and drugs that may induce abortion. It is owned by a
Christian family who say that paying for abortion-inducing drugs
violates their religious beliefs. The company won a temporary
injunction from the Tenth Circuit in June against complying with
the mandate. Now the Obama administration has announced it
will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. At issue is whether
the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects for-profit corporations. Appellate judges have been divided on this question. The
Supreme Court has in the past unanimously rebuffed the Obama
administration’s efforts to circumscribe religious liberty, and we
wish the administration the same success this time.
n NATIONAL RevIew sued Newark mayor and aspiring senator
Cory Booker and the city of Newark after our eliana Johnson had
difficulty obtaining a police report on the murder of wazn Miller,
a 19-year-old who was gunned down between two housing projects in 2004. Booker himself has told Miller’s story numerous
times on the stump. As he tells it, he heard gunshots, ran toward
them, and just happened to arrive on the scene in time for Miller
to fall “into my arms.” The mayor held the boy there, tending to
his wounds, until paramedics arrived. But it was too late: “He
was dead,” Booker has said. The police report flatly contradicts
these claims, indicating instead that a woman held Miller until an
ambulance arrived and that the victim did not die in Booker’s
arms but “expired from his injuries” at the hospital. The New York
Post has done more digging, tracking down two witnesses, one
of whom called Booker’s self-described heroics a “ploy” and a
6
|
“big act.” Our bet is that, just as Booker dropped the drug dealer
T-Bone from his speeches, he will never again tell an audience
about catching wazn Miller in his arms.
n Remember the good old days when a candidate’s hesitation to
release his tax returns was treated as a genuine scandal? That was
long ago, in 2012. Rather than release his returns, Mayor Booker
allowed nine reporters hand-picked by his campaign to examine
them in a hotel ballroom in Newark. They had three hours—no
photographs, no copies, no removing the documents from the
room—resulting in what one of the reporters present described
as a mad scramble to record information as the clock ticked to
zero. This, his campaign trumpeted as a “historic gesture of transparency.” Booker is also refusing to release the confidential separation agreement he struck with his old law firm, which netted
him nearly $700,000 around the time the firm raked in over $2
million from two city agencies. Booker’s relationship with those
agencies is, suffice it to say, cozy. He personally sat on the board
of one while his former law partner served as its general counsel.
His chief of staff simultaneously serves as chairman of the board
of the other. Booker owes the people of New Jersey a full and
open accounting of his relationship with the firm. As for that “historic gesture of transparency,” it is a gesture, all right: a not-verypolite one in the faces of New Jersey’s voters.
n Republicans under the leadership of eric Cantor have proposed some modest controls on
the food-stamp program, which
has in recent years seen its client
list double and its spending
quadruple. Post-recession economic weakness—thank you,
Obamanomics—explains only
part of this spike. Cantor’s bill
would place limitations upon
so-called categorical eligibility,
the practice of offering food
stamps to households that are
eligible for some other form of
assistance, regardless of their
incomes. Some states offer food
stamps to households that simply have received a welfarebenefits brochure in the mail. The House bill also would impose
modest work requirements on long-term food-stamp recipients
who are able-bodied adults without dependent children. while
the ledger cost of welfare is enormous, the real cost must account
for the economic impacts of long-term separation from the
work force, which is devastating for individuals and their families, not to mention a drag on the national economy. earlier
welfare-reform programs have seen good results from work
requirements—at least when government is willing to enforce
them—and applying them to food stamps makes sense. The bill
has Democrats telling tales from Dickens, but then they always
are.
n Pope Francis caused a stir with some recent comments in an
interview. He said that the Church did not need to talk about
abortion, homosexuality, and contraception all the time, and
should present its teaching on these issues as part of its broader
OCTOBER 14, 2013
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THE WEEK
Gospel message. Liberals cheered these words, while conservative Catholics noted that they agreed with them—and were
happy to hear the pope restate his strong opposition to abortion
a day after the interview was released. One possible implication of the pope’s comment that the Church should not be
“obsessed” with these issues, though, is that the Church has
been—which would be a calumny. The press may be obsessed
with them, but the average Western Catholic can live a long life,
attending Mass every Sunday, without ever hearing a homily
about contraception. Garnering less attention were more words
pleasing to liberals, this time in off-the-cuff remarks in Sardinia
the same week. He spoke there of economics, and nothing he
said that was intelligible was objectionable. Not everything he
said, alas, was. “We want a just system, a system that lets all of
us get ahead. We don’t want this globalized economic system
that does us so much harm. At its center there should be man
and woman, as God wants, and not money.” What is the pope’s
alternative to “this globalized economic system”? Is it a reversal of the trade liberalization and expansion of markets that has
helped bring an unprecedented number of people around the
world out of poverty? And while money should not be the center of anyone’s life, what can it mean to have an economic system that does not have at its center how men and women get and
use money? Perhaps Francis is exercising his teaching office
Obamacare vs. Work
October 1, open enrollment in Obamacare’s
health-insurance marketplaces is scheduled to
begin. The opening of exchanges, and the beginning of coverage on January 1, will bring many changes to
the health-care and insurance markets in the U.S. My
American Enterprise Institute colleague Tom Miller recently
testified before the House Judiciary Committee about how
the law will discourage new start-ups, encourage insurance
providers to consolidate, and make insurance more costly,
with fewer options for individuals.
As important as the law’s effect on health-care markets
will be, we should not continue to ignore its effects on the
labor market. These are likely to be large. Casey Mulligan,
an economist at the University of Chicago, has recently
documented an important untold story about the Affordable Care Act: It is a historically large disincentive to
work.
The nearby chart shows Mulligan’s estimates of the marginal tax rate on labor income by year for the median nonelderly person filing as a head of household or spouse.
Mulligan’s calculations are quite thorough and factor in the
benefits that a nonworking person loses if he decides to
work. For example, if he gets $50 a week in food stamps
while unemployed but loses them when employed, then the
benefit of working is $50 per week lower than it otherwise
would be.
Mulligan performs the calculations for a hypothetical
person who in 2007 made about $790 per week (the
median wage in that year for a non-elderly household
head or spouse who was working). As is clear in the chart,
the marginal tax rate on labor income increases by about
four percentage points in 2014 alone, with an increase of
about one percentage point the following year. This jump
is due to certain provisions of the ACA that go into effect
in 2014 and 2015, such as the employer-mandate penalties, health-care exchanges, and subsidies.
Mulligan discusses a number of examples that illustrate
the channel through which taxes are increased. If a worker
O
8
N
|
is part-time and does not receive insurance from his
employer, he is eligible for premium support from the
government. If he works harder and becomes a full-time
employee, then he can lose this subsidy and his extra labor
is therefore implicitly taxed. If he were to work fewer hours
per week—say, moving from 35 to 29 hours per week—he
might make slightly less money, but he would be eligible
for the health-care subsidy if he lost employer insurance,
and he would have more leisure time. Mulligan finds that
workers may often be able to increase their after-tax
income by working less.
Labor-force participation is already lower than at any
point since 1980, and the number of workers as a proportion of the population has remained persistently low since
the start of the Great Recession. The health-care law will
make an already grim situation worse. The rewards for work
are about to plummet, and one can be sure that the fraction
of Americans working will drop as well.
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Marginal Labor-Income
Tax Rates over Time
(Average among Heads of Household and
Spouses with Median Earnings Potential)
52%
50%
48%
46%
44%
42%
40%
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
SOURCE: MULLIGAN, CASEY B., 2013, “AVERAGE MARGINAL LABOR INCOME TAX
RATES UNDER THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT,” NBER WORKING PAPER NO. 19365
OCTOBER 14, 2013
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THE WEEK
very subtly indeed, reminding Catholics that the Church does
not teach that the pope is generally infallible.
effects on the planet’s atmosphere. All cost, no benefit: That is
the Obama administration’s energy policy.
n The Catholic bishops of the U.S. are urging their parishioners
to support the Senate immigration bill. We should “welcome
the stranger,” they say, and treat newcomers with justice and
compassion. That is surely true. The Church also, however,
urges policymakers to be mindful of the needs of the poor. A
massive increase in immigration seems likely to put pressure on
the wages of low-income workers, natives and newcomers
alike. It would retard assimilation, which makes it harder to
give the stranger a true welcome. And offering legal status to
illegal immigrants before making sure that the law can be
enforced in the future undermines the government’s ability to
secure the borders, a duty the Church acknowledges. On some
issues, notably abortion, the policy implications of the moral
norms the Catholic Church defends are fairly simple and
straightforward: If unborn children are human beings made in
the image of God, then it cannot be right to let them be killed
with impunity. Illegal immigrants, too, are human beings made
in the image of God, but the crucial questions of public policy
the U.S. is weighing do not involve any dispute over that truth.
Faithful Catholics can certainly reach the conclusions favored
by the bishops. Both they and other people of good will can also
reject those conclusions, which seems much the wiser course.
n The indefensible persecution of former House GOP leader
Tom DeLay has come to a close, with an appeals-court panel
reaching the obvious conclusion: He committed no crime, did
not come close to committing a crime, and was in fact attempting in good faith to comply with the law when a politically
ambitious Democratic prosecutor in Austin railroaded him. The
prosecutor had to convene three grand juries and keep them in
the dark regarding the specifics of the law in order to obtain his
indictment and subsequent conviction. DeLay was accused of
violating a law that had not been passed at the time he was
alleged to have broken it, and when that indictment was thrown
out, he was accused of money laundering—even though under
the law there can be no money laundering if the money in question is not the result of a violation of the law. For this reason,
the appeals court threw out the conviction. Tom DeLay has
been vindicated, but the American criminal-justice system has
been indicted.
10
|
n Somali terrorists attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi,
Kenya, murdering over 60 victims (the death toll was not
clear at press time). The Kenyan army, reportedly helped by
the FBI and Israeli special forces, took days to capture or kill
the attackers. It was the worst terrorist violence in Kenya
since al-Qaeda blew up the American embassy in 1998. The
terrorists, called al-Shabab, have been fighting for control of
the southern end of the collapsed state of Somalia; Kenya
helped drive them from the port of Kismayo last year. AlShabab is allied with al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate; its killers
are a crowd of pious malcontents, many drawn from the
Muslim diaspora. Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, who
lost a nephew in the attack, called al-Shabab “a criminal
bunch of cowards” and vowed to “punish the masterminds
swiftly and indeed very painfully.” The United States should
do all it can to help him, and be on the watch for copycat plots
here (one target for al-Shabab recruiters is Somali immigrants in Minnesota).
OCTOBER 14, 2013
AP PHOTO/CLIFF OWEN
n The Environmental Protection Agency has announced
new standards for electricity generators: standards that will
in effect forbid the construction of traditional coal-fired
plants and could force the closure of existing plants if, as
planned, the new standards eventually are applied retroactively to them. The legal basis for this action is questionable,
based on a willful misreading of the Clean Air Act, while the
economic basis is more questionable still—and the environmental basis is nonexistent. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy says that these new standards can be met through the
installation of new carbon-capture equipment—which currently is in use in no commercial facility anywhere in the
world—and that they are necessary to combat the menace of
global warming. The Clean Air Act requires a cost-benefit
analysis of new rules
issued under it, and it is
impossible that a robust
analysis has been conducted, since the costs
cannot be known, given
that the technologies
are not in commercial
use, their effectiveness
and operating expenses
untested in the real world.
As for benefits: There
are many greenhouse
gases, and carbon dioxide, at issue here, is only
one. About 85 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally are
from non-U.S. sources, and power generators are responsible
for only about a third of U.S. emissions. Given that global
warming is, if it is anything, global, even substantial reductions
in the emissions of new U.S. power plants will have negligible
n Last month, members of the Kenosha Education Association,
Wisconsin’s third-largest teachers’ union, voted against recertifying the union as a bargaining entity. According to news
sources, only about 37 percent of the district’s teachers voted to
remain in a union, a result in line with what Governor Scott
Walker predicted when he moved in 2011 to rein in publicsector collective bargaining. According to the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin Education Association Council—the state’s primary teachers’ union—has lost more than 50
percent of its 98,000 dues-paying members since Walker implemented collective-bargaining reform. The powerful Wisconsin State Employees Union is now down from 22,000
members to between 9,000 and 10,000, according to the
union’s president. During the high-profile protests that consumed the state for much of 2011, public workers surrounded
the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison and unceasingly
chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!” Now that
workers are voting themselves out of forced unionization,
organized labor is finally getting a taste of the genuine democratic process at work.
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THE WEEK
n Everything is in place for Hassan Rouhani, president of
Iran, to take the U.S. by storm. The mullahs have mastered
the arts of diplomacy and publicity. For weeks now, Rouhani
has been throwing out hints of the deals he aims to strike with
President Obama. No need for details, naturally. The tone,
the novelty of friendliness, is quite enough to unite the media
in an immense chorus of relief and admiration. “Moderate” is
the adjective he attracts for what is described as a “charm
offensive.” It is poor taste to point out that the president of
Iran does the bidding of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah
Khamenei, and himself has no independent policy. It is in even poorer taste
to point out that the previous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
created nothing but suspicion
and hate, so it is time for another
tactic, and Rouhani is just the man
for it. He’s had a lifetime career in
the Iranian defense establishment.
We would say that President
Obama should have no
illusions about him, but
why should Rouhani
be an exception to
his general Mideast
policy?
AP PHOTO/SETH WENIG
n The well-named Court for Urgent Matters in Cairo has
banned the Muslim Brotherhood and all organizations associated with it, and has frozen its assets. This exclusion from the
political and social life of Egypt is indeed an Urgent Matter,
because the Brotherhood’s ideal of an Islamist state is an end
whose achievement justifies all available means of violence
and terror. In their watchword, they have “the desire for death
through self-sacrifice.” Most Egyptians understood quickly
and very clearly that it had been a catastrophe to vote in the
Muslim Brotherhood rule of former president Mohamed
Morsi, which is why they have turned to the army for rescue.
The showdown between the Islamists and everyone else
could very well develop into civil war. General Abdul Fattah
Sisi first ordered the dismantling of Muslim Brotherhood
barricades at the cost of about 1,000 dead, and then mass
arrests of its leaders. Those who are still at large boast that,
in its history, the movement has often been banned but only
grown stronger underground. Meanwhile the Brotherhood’s
strategy is to go all out, setting improvised explosives, preparing suicide squads, and threatening to burn Christians alive.
Their spiritual leader, the elderly Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, has
a refuge in Qatar and, according to reports, faces certain arrest
for inciting armed rebellion if he should return to Egypt.
What’s at stake here is the future not just of Egypt but of
Islamism.
n An impressive number of German voters have just agreed
that Mutti knows best, handing Angela Merkel a third term as
chancellor and, added a few wags, another stint as empress of
a few beggar nations besides. But a shadow was cast over
12
|
Merkel’s triumph by the eclipse of the free-market(ish) FDP,
the third leg of the outgoing governing coalition. The FDP’s
inability to cross the threshold needed for its return to the
Bundestag means that Merkel needs to land another partner if
she is to secure a parliamentary majority. At the time of writing, the most likely candidate was the center-left SPD, promising a rerun of the 2005–09 “Grand Coalition.” This is not
wunderbar. A feature of the Merkel years has been her failure
(no Iron Lady, she) to build on the supply-side reforms introduced at the beginning of the century, a failure that may be
beginning to take a toll. The return of the SPD to government
will act as an additional brake on reform. And then, of course,
there’s Europe: The SPD will push Merkel in the direction of
looser budgets and a tighter Europe. The politicians have not
solved the continent’s economic crisis, and neither have the
voters.
n Charles Xue is a Chinese-American entrepreneur, and he has
also been one of China’s best-known and most popular bloggers. In late August, Chinese authorities arrested him for soliciting a prostitute. Whether he did or not, no one can say—that’s
the way the law works in a police state. Xue was then made to
appear on television, wearing handcuffs. He issued a brutal
self-criticism, saying he had been “irresponsible” in writing
about the government and society online. He said that people
like him needed to be cracked down on, for the good of all.
Such an episode may shock people in free countries who know
little of the coercion—the physical coercion—that the Chinese
state can bring to bear. But it surprises no one with experience
of police states. The dictatorship in Beijing is doing all it can
to make any criticism of it a crime. And it can do a lot.
n On British television, Doctor Who has been running for a
half-century. Many actors have played the title character: eleven
of them. A twelfth was recently hired. And some people aren’t
happy about him—because he’s a him, and, worse, a white
him. Said Dame Helen Mirren, famed for playing Elizabeth II
and other memorable characters, “I do think it’s well over time
to have a female Doctor Who. I think a gay, black, female
Doctor Who would be the best of all.” The show’s producer
said, “I would like to go on record and say that the queen
should be played by a man.” Blimey, there’s lead in the British
pencil yet.
n Discussing Immanuel Kant has always been dangerous in
Russia. In the 1790s Ludwig Mehlman introduced the philosopher’s work at Moscow University, and for his troubles he was
charged with mental illness, fired, and banished by the czar.
Then just recently, in Rostov-on-Don, two men were discussing Kant while waiting in line to buy beer at a municipal
festival, and when a disagreement developed, one of them felt
a categorical imperative to shoot the other. He used an air gun
with rubber bullets (presumably in case he later discovered a
flaw in his reasoning), but his fellow debater was hospitalized
nonetheless, and the shooter now faces up to ten years in
prison—time enough, if he applies himself, to finally finish
reading the Critique of Pure Reason.
n Since 2004, Constitution Day is celebrated on September 17
every year, and it’s not uncommon for people to pass out
OCTOBER 14, 2013
n In the spirit of open academic discourse, mobs were convened at the City University of New York to scream obscenities at General David Petraeus, who is teaching a course there.
The screams ranged from accusations of war crimes to oldfashioned profanity, and the mobsters promised to show up
every time Petraeus showed up to teach his class. On the occasion of the general’s second appearance, police barricades had
to be set up, and the students conducted a riot. This is an
attempt to bully a visiting professor off of campus for holding
views at odds with those of the lightly educated young ladies
and gentlemen of CUNY, and no self-respecting university
would put up with it.
n “America’s imperialism” was the reason that students at
Middlebury College gave for pulling up the 2,977 American
flags that had been planted in front of the chapel and library to
commemorate the Americans who lost their lives in the attacks
of September 11, 2001. The protesters objected that what they
believe is a sacred Abenaki burial site was being desecrated.
College administrators are not known to be unsympathetic to
calls for greater sensitivity to the heritage of ethnic minorities.
The protesters could have met with them to present their concern instead of acting out their late-adolescent high spirits and
dragging the Abenaki people, whom they presumed to represent, into their desecration of the 9/11 memorial on their college campus.
n Mariano Rivera is retiring. The Yankees closer and all-time
leader in saves is a throwback to an era when class meant
something in baseball. Noted for his excellence and composure on the field and for his Christian service off it, he did the
pinstripes proud.
SYRIA
Stumbling on Syria
RESIDENT Obama says that his Syria policy is lacking
only on “style.”
That is one way to put his repeated drawing of red
lines over the use of chemical weapons, his crabwalk toward
war, his about-face decision to seek congressional authorization for force, his utter inability to make the case for that
authorization, and his desperate grasp at a Russian diplomatic initiative that took advantage of a gaffe by his secretary of state.
If this had been messy improvisation issuing in a glorious
outcome, it would be one thing. But the substance is as dubious as the process. We are currently negotiating with the
P
Russians on the exact parameters of the deal for the Syrians
to give up their chemical weapons. If prior entanglements
with rogue states over weapons of mass destruction are any
guide, the negotiating will never end. The Syrians will niggle
and delay to frustrate inspectors for years.
The accomplishment here is that Bashar Assad probably
won’t again use his chemical weapons. But the deal puts any
larger strategic goals out of reach. Our engagement with
the regime to try to get it to carry out its stated obligations
will make us its perverse quasi-partner. The more Westernoriented rebels feel betrayed, and there are signs that they
are collapsing as extremist elements continue to gain.
Meanwhile, Iran is not hesitating to train fighters for the
proxy war in Syria that it intends to win. Iran and Hezbollah,
along with their fellow traveler Russia, look even likelier to
achieve their goal of preserving Assad than they did a month
ago.
Vladimir Putin took to the pages of the New York Times to rub
our noses in it. In an op-ed combining cynicism and sanctimony
in a stomach-turning stew, the Russian president invoked the
pope and international law to oppose U.S. intervention in Syria,
never mind his arming of Assad in a civil war that has killed
more than 100,000. He concluded with a jab at American
exceptionalism, warning that no country is exceptional. He was
too modest—Russia has proved exceptional over the centuries at centralizing unaccountable political authority and
trampling individual rights.
The Syria episode is not that consequential in itself, but it
nonetheless may be an inflection point in our standing in the
world. A superpower should be trusted by its friends and
feared by its enemies, and we are neither. Our position in the
Middle East is collapsing, while the much-touted “pivot to
Asia” looks more like a slogan than a strategy. The president
cares most about “nation-building at home” and is clearly
uncomfortable with the assertion of American power. This
was unmistakable in his marble-mouthed case for a strike in
Syria.
Credibility can seem an elusive commodity, but it is the
coin of the realm in international relations. When we eroded
our deterrent with ill-advised statements or acts of weakness, we got the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. When our deterrent was at a
high point in the immediate aftermath of our toppling
13
AP FILE PHOTOS
Constitutions on that day. Yet when Robert van Tuinen of
Modesto Junior College in California began handing out
copies of the Constitution, a campus police officer informed
him that he needed permission to distribute materials on campus. Only after requesting permission a few days in advance
would he be able to pass out any materials, and even then he
could do so only in a designated “free-speech zone.” Upon
being told this, Tuinen asked the officer, “Isn’t that a violation
of my First Amendment rights?” The cop responded, “I don’t
think so.” Well, officer, perhaps there’s something you should
read . . .
THE WEEK
Saddam Hussein, Libya gave up its nuclear program and,
evidently, Iran temporarily stopped its uranium enrichment.
The price for our weakness will inevitably come.
OBAMACARE
Replace the Law,
Replace the Strategy
enaTor Ted Cruz (r., Texas) and his allies are right
about obamacare. They’re right that it’s bad for our
economic prospects, our health care, and the relationship between our citizens and the federal government. They’re
right to make the case against it—as Senator Cruz did for 21
hours standing on the Senate floor, in a magnificent performance that makes us glad to have backed his primary campaign. They’re right, finally, that republicans need a strategy
for repealing it. and they’re right that republican leaders have
not come up with one.
We wish we could say that Cruz and his allies have
devised a workable strategy of their own. Instead, they want
republicans to refuse to vote for any legislation to fund the
government unless it includes language denying funds to
obamacare. and if Democrats reject that condition and the
government shuts down, republicans should blame them
for the shutdown and make the case against obamacare
until the Democrats relent. The history of the shutdowns of
1995–96—the real history, that is, not the revisionist version
that some advocates of this strategy have persuaded themselves to believe—suggests that this plan is unlikely to work.
It could even help President obama, whose numbers have been
falling all year, to make a comeback that will give a lift to his
entire agenda.
Senator Cruz warns that once obamacare’s subsidies start
flowing, the program will be impossible to dislodge. This
seems to us too pessimistic. The Congressional Budget
office suggests that 2 percent of the public will be getting
subsidies in 2014. Many of them will still be paying more.
and even those who come out ahead won’t see the subsidy
themselves, since it goes to their insurer. Meanwhile, we
can expect many of the larger number of people who
encounter higher premiums, or a reduced choice of doctors,
or involuntary movement to part-time work, to blame
obamacare.
It will certainly be hard to repeal obamacare. Getting it
passed took decades for the Democrats, along with control
of the White House and both houses of Congress. opponents
of the law are going to have to win some elections to undo
their work.
They also need to have a realistic sense of public opinion.
More americans oppose obamacare than support it, and those
numbers have been moving in the right direction since the law
passed. But the polls on repealing the law in full are less consistent, and often show only minority support for the conservative
position. Part of the explanation is surely status quo bias and
wishful thinking: People who have not looked into the issue in
detail may be under the illusion that the law can be “fixed,”
when in fact its flaws are inherent in its basic structure. Too-low
support for repeal almost certainly also reflects the public’s
concern about the problems that obamacare is supposed to
address, and its lack of confidence that opponents of the law
S
14
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have better solutions to them.
The defunders make an excellent point when they say that
republicans should work to change public opinion and not just
accept it, even if a shutdown is not the best context in which to
try. The good news is that we are pushing on an open door:
People are already predisposed against obamacare. republicans need to make it clear that there are better ideas on how to
put health insurance within reach of more people, and how to
care for people whose preexisting conditions lock them out of
the market. Individual republicans—representative Paul
ryan (Wis.), Senator Tom Coburn (okla.), and others—have
advocated such solutions, but the congressional party as a
whole has ignored them. The good news is that the 175 House
conservatives in the republican Study Committee have recently
proposed a replacement for obamacare that makes real
progress on this front. The members of the rSC—who are, like
other conservatives, divided over the shutdown strategy—are
showing their fellow republicans some of what they must do
once it fails.
PUBLIC POLICY
Leading on Tax Reform
Mike Lee, the Utah conservative, announced
an ambitious plan to reform taxes—much the most
attractive one we have heard from any republican
for a long time.
The plan would cut tax rates, simplify the tax code, and rid
it of several features that distort our economy and society.
The tax increases that have taken place under President
obama would be undone. The mortgage-interest deduction
would be scaled back. and the deduction for state and local
taxes would be eliminated: Low-tax states would no longer
subsidize high-tax ones, and the federal government would
no longer soften voters’ incentives to elect less-profligate
state politicians.
Senator Lee takes aim at another form of redistribution as
well: the way the federal government transfers resources
from larger families to smaller ones. Social Security and
Medicare, he argues, reap benefits when adults make the
financial sacrifices necessary to raise children, but they tax
parents as though that contribution did not exist. expanding
the tax credit for children by $2,500 per child would begin
to rectify that unfairness. It might also make it possible, he
notes, for some parents to scale back their work hours to
spend more time with their children. or parents could use
the additional money to help their families in other ways, as
they see fit.
Senator Lee makes a strong case on the merits for his plan,
but its political advantages do not escape him. The promise
of middle-class tax relief has helped free-market politicians
get elected in the past but has not featured much in republican platforms in recent years. In part that is because of
our fiscal predicament, of which the senator is certainly
mindful: It’s why he has in the past also proposed specific
spending cuts, and why his plan ends tax breaks as well as
cuts taxes.
With this plan, the senator has taken an important step
toward limiting government, promoting growth, and creating a conservative electoral majority.
S
enaTor
OCTOBER 14, 2013
Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Mike Lee (Utah)
A Dialogue on Defunding
Should opponents of Obamacare be willing to shut down the government?
BY RAMESH PONNURU
O why are all the Republicans
in Washington, D.C., yelling
at each other right now?
A bill, called a continuing
resolution, has to be enacted for all the
operations of government to be funded.
Without it, there will be a partial government shutdown. One group of Republicans, led by Senators Ted Cruz (R., Tex.)
and Mike Lee (R., Utah) and including a
minority of House Republicans, thinks
that Republicans should refuse to pass
any such bill unless it takes funding
away from Obamacare. They argue that
if they hold firm long enough, they will
win. Most Republicans say that it won’t
work: The public will hold a shutdown
against Republicans, they won’t be able
to sustain their position, and the battle
will end with Republicans discredited
and Obamacare more entrenched than
ever. The defunders call the Republicans
who disagree with their strategy the “surrender caucus.”
Can a budget bill defund Obamacare
like that?
Yes. Some opponents of the strategy,
early in this debate, argued that Obama care funding keeps going even if there’s
no budget bill, because a lot of its fund-
S
ing does not depend on yearly budget
bills. Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.)
even commissioned a report from the
Congressional Research Service to buttress this argument. It’s right but also
beside the point. There’s no doubt that
Congress has the power to attach an
amendment to the budget law that says
no funds may be used to implement
Obamacare. (For that matter, they could
attach an amendment that repeals the
law altogether.) The defunders know
that Obamacare does not need a budget
bill to keep going. They think that voters
want the government to stay open and
want Obamacare to go away, and that by
tying these outcomes together they can
force Democrats to accede.
Is it true that voters want to get rid of
Obamacare?
Polls consistently find that more
Americans oppose it than support it.
More people think it will raise health
costs than think it will reduce them. Most
polls find, however, that opposition to
the law runs ahead of support for repealing it. Some polls find a small majority
for repeal; others do not, especially when
they add the option of modifying the law.
If most Republicans are against the
defunding strategy, why did House Republicans vote for a defunding bill?
Three groups of Republicans voted for
that bill. The first group are the 15 to 20
Republicans who believe in the strategy.
The second are the 20 to 25 who are
afraid of being called pro-Obamacare if
they don’t support the strategy. The third
group voted for the bill because they
wanted to show that a world without
Obamacare is the outcome they would
prefer, and also because they realized
that the first two groups were not going
to vote for a budget bill unless it
defunded Obamacare: This third group
is a large majority of House Republicans, but it is not large enough to pass a
bill through the House. If 7 percent of
House Republicans won’t vote for a bill
and neither will almost any of the Democrats, nothing can pass.
Why couldn’t the majority of Republicans just leave out the defunding
language from their bill? Wouldn’t they
get enough Democratic support to make
up for those lost Republicans?
No. The Democrats don’t just want to
keep Obamacare going. They want higher
spending levels, too. And they want to
see Republicans fight one another and to
make it as hard as possible for them to
pass anything.
The Republicans who want to avert a
shutdown: What have they been doing
about Obamacare instead?
The top House Republicans, John
Boehner and Eric Cantor, have had Republicans reaffirm their opposition to
Obamacare by holding votes on bills to
repeal it, bills that have passed the
House. They have also held votes on
delaying the individual mandate, to
show that even Democrats have serious
concerns about the law. (Twenty-two of
them voted with the Republicans.) And
they tried to take other steps to weaken
the pro-Obamacare coalition but failed.
They have not, however, articulated an
overall strategy against the law. One reason the defunders are enjoying some
success is that they have something that
appears to be one. They say that what the
Republicans have done up to this point is
just hold “show votes,” which are “meaningless” and “symbolic.”
What makes them meaningless and the
defunders’ ideas meaningful?
The difference the defunders see is
that Obama and the Democrats had no
reason ever to sign a repeal bill, but will
15
AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
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have a reason to go along with defunding—keeping the government open.
They say, as well, that anyone who votes
to let the government keep spending
money on Obamacare doesn’t really
oppose it.
Aren’t they right?
Not according to any principle that can
be generalized. Senator Rubio, for example, has said that Republican leaders who
let funding bills go forward without
the Obamacare-defunding language are
complicit in the program. He has not said
that any budget bill has to include language getting rid of funds for Planned
Parenthood. Is he therefore complicit in
subsidies for an abortion provider, and
not a real pro-lifer? Is he obligated to
start a fight over this issue that might
involve shutting down the government,
regardless of his judgment about the
likely consequences of such a fight? No,
he isn’t.
What do the Republicans who oppose
the defunding strategy suggest as an
alternative now?
They want to use legislation over the
debt ceiling—the federal government is
about to hit the limits of its borrowing
authority—to delay the implementation
of Obamacare. To get Republicans to
acquiesce to raising the debt ceiling, they
hope, Democrats will agree to this delay.
What’s the difference between delaying Obamacare and defunding it?
There isn’t much of one. If you
defund Obamacare for the duration of a
budget, you’re delaying its implementation. In polls, though, the public seems
to like “delaying” more than “defunding.” Maybe it sounds more like an
acknowledgment of its problems than a
partisan attack on it.
If the budget bill doesn’t give Republicans the leverage to defund Obamacare,
why would the debt-ceiling bill give them
the leverage to delay it?
Good question. People want the government to stay funded, and don’t like
raising the debt ceiling. But the consequences of hitting the debt ceiling are
generally considered to be worse than a
partial government shutdown. Econo mists think that by raising the risk that
the federal government will default on
its debts, hitting the debt ceiling will
rattle the stock market, credit markets,
and consumer confidence. That doesn’t
sound like a happier scenario than a shutdown for Republicans. If Republicans
16
|
aren’t willing to provoke a shutdown,
they probably won’t be willing to see a
default either.
It sounds like you’re saying that neither of these bills gives the Republicans
much leverage.
That’s right. In the aftermath of the
government shutdowns of 1995 and
1996, Republicans concluded that they
do not help congressional conservatives
advance their goals. They started pushing for a law that would automatically
continue government funding at a steady
level even if Congress did not enact a
new funding bill. As memories of those
days have faded, the theory that shutdowns can be a useful backdrop to negotiations has made a comeback. The
Heritage Foundation, which in the years
following the last shutdowns wanted
automatic-funding legislation, is now a
leading voice for defunding.
Earlier this year, most House Republicans voted for legislation to make it
less likely that a default would happen.
That legislation stipulated that even if
the federal government hit the debt
limit, it could borrow more to pay interest. The passage of that bill by the House
could be said to constitute an acknowledgment that the threat of default does
not give them leverage. It gives the president leverage.
Didn’t the Republicans force President
Obama to cut spending by refusing to
raise the debt ceiling in 2011?
That’s right: That was the origin of
the sequestration that has been starting
to take effect this year. That episode,
though, illustrates how little leverage
this kind of tactic creates. First, Republicans had to give the Democrats
more than just a debt-ceiling increase.
They also had to agree to defense cuts
most Republicans disliked. Second, the
cuts were nowhere near as momentous
a change as a halt to Obamacare would
be. The country is not going to look
much different in 2035 because of the
sequestration. It would look a lot different if Republicans were able to delay
Obamacare indefinitely or repeal it
(which would be the point of getting a
one-year delay now). Third, that was a
few months after Republicans had
picked up a lot of seats in the House and
the Senate. This time they’re negotiating
after an election in which Democrats
gained seats in the House and Senate.
Republicans didn’t get much last time,
and this time they’d be asking for more
with less political momentum.
So the Republican leaders’ real problem with the defunding strategy is its
brinksmanship, not defunding per se.
Then aren’t they undermining their own
argument by talking up their own
brinksmanship, and making a distinction be tween delaying and defunding
Obamacare?
Yes. Some of the defunders have noticed this.
So can Republicans get anything out
of the debt-ceiling or budget bills?
Maybe. If the Democrats want relief
from the sequestration badly enough,
maybe some more spending can be traded
for a delay in the most unpopular part of
the health-care law: the fine for not buying health insurance. Delaying that would
make the law much harder to implement,
strengthen the impression that the law is
not set in stone, create a precedent for
future delays, and highlight an unattractive feature of the law. Democrats might
go for it anyway, convinced as they are
that history is on the side of their healthcare law.
Are they right? If defunding is unlikely
to work, are we stuck with Obamacare?
Democrats seem to think that once
people start receiving benefits from the
law, it will become unrepealable—and
some Republicans agree. That’s the fear
behind the defunding strategy: Even if it
is unlikely to work, it’s the only way to
stop the subsidies from flowing before
2014. Subsidies put in place never expire, goes the theory.
Obamacare may be different, though.
The polls have consistently found public
opposition to it. It may raise premiums
for more people than it reduces them. It
has the potential to destroy insurance
markets as people act on the incentives
it creates to go without coverage. The
subsidies it provides go to insurers, not
their customers, and do not make most
medical services free to patients. (The
Congressional Budget Office projects
that these subsidies will go to only 2 percent of the population in 2014 anyway.)
All of these features suggest that the law
will continue to be vulnerable for some
time.
How is it that you have such pat
answers for all my questions?
Because you’re a journalistic device.
You don’t really exist. Sorry about
that.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
Bill de Blasio’s
New York
It has a lot of poor people, and
the rich liberals like it that way
BY REIHAN SALAM
are that Bill de Blasio
will be the next mayor of New
York city. as the Democratic
nominee in an overwhelmingly
Democratic metropolis that voted for
Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by an
81 percent–to–18 percent margin in last
year’s presidential election, de Blasio has
a built-in advantage. The question that
remains is whether his all-but-inevitable
victory represents a new phase in the history of american liberalism.
some observers, including Peter Beinart (writing in The Daily Beast), have
argued that de Blasio is a harbinger of an
energized political Left, led by Millennials
who, according to data from the Pew Research center, favor bigger government
at much higher levels than the rest of
the electorate, and at higher levels than
younger voters of earlier eras.
another, less romantic view is that de
Blasio is an amiable charmer who will
find it extremely difficult to tame the
city’s unruly public finances, and that he
and his supporters are in for a rude surprise as his vision of a more equal New
York runs into reality.
New York city has been electing Republican (or at least non-Democratic)
mayors since 1993, when ex-prosecutor
Rudolph Giuliani ousted the uninspiring
David Dinkins. But in the last three elections, Michael Bloomberg, a lifelong liberal who signed up as a Republican to do
an end run around a crowded Democratic
field in 2001, and who changed his party
affiliation from Republican to “unaffiliated” in 2007, has been the city’s GOP
mayoral nominee. Bloomberg has used
the bully pulpit to call for new gun regulations, comprehensive immigration reform, and new restrictions on trans fats,
tobacco, and super-sized sodas, and he
has been second only to al Gore in invoking the threat of climate change. By
any reasonable standard, he has been a
capable and devoted champion of various
liberal pieties. even so, Bloomberg had
C
HaNces
to spend $102 million of his own money
to narrowly defeat a little-known Democratic politician, Bill Thompson, in his
2009 bid for a third term.
Bloomberg has presided over an almost
50 percent increase in inflation-adjusted
city-funded spending since first entering
office, an increase driven largely by rising
pension and benefit costs that he has done
little to address. For all his managerial
virtues, Bloomberg is not a fiscal conservative. If anything, his fiscal management
has created a time bomb for his successor, who will have to negotiate new contracts for tens of thousands of unionized
city employees, who have been waiting
for a union-friendly Democrat to take
office.
The biggest contrast between Bloomberg and de Blasio is that while Bloomberg has celebrated the transformation
of much of Manhattan into a Xanadu for
the world’s ultra-rich, de Blasio is a selfstyled crusader against inequality. He
describes Bloomberg’s New York as “a
tale of two cities,” in which a rarefied
elite has flourished while the poor have
languished. He pledges to reverse the tide,
and to use the power of government to
give poor New Yorkers a hand up.
Interestingly enough, de Blasio’s pitch
proved most appealing to relatively affluent Democratic-primary voters, while
downscale voters gravitated towards his
opponents Thompson and John Liu. This
follows a pattern we’ve seen in Democratic presidential primaries, in which
upper-middle-income, college-educated
liberals embrace the most rhetorically
left-wing candidates while voters of
modest means gravitate towards centrists.
In fairness to Bill de Blasio, there is no
question that poverty is pervasive in New
York city. The census Bureau estimates
that 19.4 percent of New York residents
live in poverty. What is frustrating about
most of the reporting on poverty in New
York is that it rarely goes beneath the
surface to ask about who is poor and
why they are poor. To some extent, the
fact that many New Yorkers live in lowincome households reflects the fact that
New York is a magnet for immigrants,
many of whom have only modest skills.
Immigrants from Mexico have a 50 percent poverty rate. Brooklyn’s burgeoning Bangladeshi community has a 54
percent poverty rate, the highest rate
among the city’s eight largest asian immigrant groups.
Immigrants are often credited with revitalizing New York’s outer boroughs,
17
and with good reason. As native-born
New Yorkers have left the city in search of
affordable housing and better schools,
immigrants have taken their place. Skilled
immigrants often earn high incomes, and
some immigrants who arrive in the U.S.
as children climb the economic ladder
quite quickly as adults. But New York
has also attracted large numbers of lessskilled immigrants who work in the low
end of the service sector, and who often
find it difficult to make their way into the
middle class.
Indeed, one of the reasons Bloomberg
has loudly called for comprehensive
immigration reform is that New York
City is home to a large number of unauthorized immigrants. Hard numbers are
difficult to come by, but a recent article
in International Migration Review estimates that there are 750,000 unauthorized immigrants residing in New York
State, the vast majority of whom reside
in New York City. Jeffrey Passel, of the
Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends
Project and the Urban Institute, estimated
that there were 535,000 unauthorized
immigrants in the five boroughs in 2007,
a number consistent with the city’s own
estimates. This number does not include
the U.S.-born children of unauthorizedimmigrant parents. The Migration Policy
Institute estimates that 32 percent of
unauthorized-immigrant adults in the
U.S. live in households that earn less than
the federal poverty level, while the same
is true for 51 percent of unauthorizedimmigrant children. Legalizing this population would likely lead to somewhat
higher earnings, but it wouldn’t change
the fact that unauthorized immigrants
often speak little English and generally
have little education.
Like Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio celebrates New York’s unauthorized-immigrant
population. Among other things, he proposes offering city-backed ID cards to
unauthorized immigrants and working
with the state government to offer them
driver’s licenses as well. De Blasio also
pledges to end cooperation with the
federal government on a number of
immigration-enforcement programs.
These measures have the potential to
attract low-income unauthorized immigrants from other cities and regions. This
may or may not be a good idea, but it will
almost certainly increase the poverty rate.
In a related vein, the Center for an
Urban Future estimates that New York
18
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City is home to 463,000 immigrant residents over the age of 65. Many of these
older immigrants arrived to care for their
grandchildren and have spent little if any
time working in the formal economy in
the U.S. As a result, only 31 percent are
eligible for Social Security benefits, and
those who are eligible tend to receive less
than their native-born counterparts, since
they have worked for shorter periods of
time or for relatively low wages.
New York’s poverty story isn’t entirely
about immigration, to be sure. According
to the city’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the poverty rate for non-elderly
adults who worked full time, year-round
was 7.5 percent in 2011. The poverty rate
for those who did no work, in contrast,
was 38.7 percent. For working-age adults
with some work, the poverty rate was
24.4 percent. The city’s worklessness
problem is concentrated among nativeborn poor, including large numbers of
African Americans and Latinos living in
high-poverty neighborhoods in Brooklyn
and the Bronx.
The central problem facing poor people living in these neighborhoods is that
few of them work full time, thanks to a
lackluster labor market for less-skilled
workers and fragile families that often
lack the cultural resources that enrich the
lives of even very poor immigrants. There
are things New York can and should do to
improve life in these communities, from
raising school quality to reducing crime,
but it’s unlikely that these efforts will
pay off in a steep reduction in poverty
levels anytime soon. Moreover, the city
has already seen a dramatic reduction in
crime levels over the past 20 years, and it
spends 52.7 percent more on education in
inflation-adjusted terms than it did twelve
years ago.
It is hard to shake the impression that
Bill de Blasio is promising much more
than a mayor can realistically deliver.
Raging against New York’s rich may appeal to middle-income voters dismayed by
rising rents, but those rich people employ,
directly and indirectly, the Mexicans and
Bangladeshis and other immigrants who
are transforming the face of the city, and
they pay the taxes that keep the streets safe
and the housing projects in good working
order. New York’s brand of diversityfriendly, big-government liberalism is
ideologically hostile to inequality—but it
is a social model that is in a very deep
sense built on inequality.
Our Hideous
Capital
A vituperation against
federal architecture
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
greatest building is a
church, Notre-Dame de Paris,
while India’s greatest building is a
royal mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
Our greatest building is a train station,
Grand Central Terminal, a monument to a
nation in motion, if one built for a future
that never quite managed to arrive. It is
adjacent to another of the great American
monuments, the wildly exuberant Chrysler
Building, and only a few blocks from the
Empire State Building, the great symbol
of American confidence built mostly by
European immigrants and Mohawk steelworkers in just 410 days. These are the real
monuments to a nation whose business is
business, in Calvin Coolidge’s maligned
phrase, and they are rather different from
the accretion of marbled monstrosities
225 miles to the southwest.
Washington is a city full of monuments
and monumental architecture. But monuments to what? The capital city’s federal
architecture is rooted in classical forms.
The Capitol is an aggrandized secondhand Roman design by way of the Paris
Panthéon, while we have a Greek temple
dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and a tribute to the father of the country that would
have been familiar to both Freud and
Ramses II. One can understand why the
early Americans turned to classical forms
for their buildings. They wanted to show
that this new country of free men could
hold its head high in the world and stand
beside the pomp of any empire. They did
not wish to be seen the way Napoleon
would contemptuously regard the British,
as “a nation of shopkeepers”—but we
would do well to remember that that phrase
did not originate with the little corporal
but with Adam Smith in the seminal year
1776. George Washington abjured any
title loftier than that of “Mr. President,” and
we built him an obelisk four times loftier
than those dedicated to Julius Caesar. It
may have been that the Washington monument was intended to elevate the standing
of General Washington, commander of
the armies, but there is a discernible sub-
F
RANCE’S
OCTOBER 14, 2013
text: It is also a symbol of the ascendancy
of his namesake city.
There is much that is striking, and not a
little that is beautiful, in Washington—so
long as you do not think about it too much
or read the papers. It may be that those
Roman columns once called to mind Cincinnatus and the other pillars of republican virtue. In the Age of Obama, they call
to mind a different kind of Roman altogether: the one who declares the penitential words, “Memento, homo.”
After its early period of Greco-Roman
impersonations, Washington went through
a flirtation with the Second Empire style,
its striving after classical glory becoming outright aesthetic Bonapartism. The
exemplar of this is what is now called the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building,
which Mark Twain described as “the ugliest building in America.” Originally the
State, War, and Navy Building, it was
renamed the Executive Office Building
in 1949, and Eisenhower’s name was
added in 1999. Pity President Eisenhower,
who seems to be a magnet for federal
ugliness—see any Taco Bell–infested
crossroads of the Dwight D. Eisenhower
National System of Defense and Inter state Highways. Harry Truman bore Ike a
grudge after the 1952 election, and he was
no doubt smiling in the afterlife at the
rechristening of the building he once
described as “the greatest monstrosity in
America.” While architect Richard von
Ezdorf’s interior salutes Napoleon III,
Alfred B. Mullet’s exterior, being composed of fireproof cast iron, pays silent
tribute to General Robert Ross, the British
commander who put Washington to the
torch during the War of 1812. Somebody
ought to endow an architectural scholarship in General Ross’s memory.
Washington’s next great experiment
with publicly funded ghastliness coincided
with the rise of Fascism, which left its
mark on American government, in the
overreaching ambitions of Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and on
Washington’s buildings. The great stylist
of the era was Paul Philippe Cret, whose
famous/infamous tower looms over the
University of Texas. Cret’s main contribution to Washington is the Eccles Building,
home of the Federal Reserve. It is a masterpiece of what came to be known as
“stripped classicism,” Greco-Roman forms
debrided of ornamentation and rendered in the hard angles and overblown
scale that characterized both the public
buildings and the public policies of the
1930s. It is a style designed to dwarf the
individual, to literally cast an institutional
shadow over the pedestrians who simply
get in the way while men of importance
are chauffeured around. But the Federal
Reserve is not entirely without decoration—it is crowned with a Roman eagle,
suggesting that this is what the department
of transportation’s headquarters would
have looked like in Berlin if Hitler had won
the war. Lenin said that the only question
in politics is: “Who, whom?” Standing in
front of the Eccles Building, there is no
doubt about who is who and who is whom.
The more recent Dirksen Senate Office
Building is a less competently executed
example of the same principle. Senator
Patrick Leahy observes: “The Dirksen
Building looks like it was built by a committee of senators, which it was. I know
ugly when I see it.” This building is a
crushing, inhospitable presence, entirely
inappropriate to its republican functions.
There wasn’t much good to come out
of the 1930s, but say this for the Fascists
and their era: There was a sense of style.
When he wasn’t working in Washington,
Cret designed some impressive structures.
Philadelphia is home to his Benjamin
Franklin Bridge and the Barnes Foundation, and there is a world of symbolism in
his lovely Detroit Institute of Arts building,
the contents of which are likely headed to
the auction block as that looted city liquidates its assets. But Washington brought
out the worst in him. The white slabs of
his Folger Shakespeare Library would
make a good backdrop for a particularly
bloody production of Titus Andronicus,
but not much else.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the post-war
giganticism not only endure but swell,
while the New Deal’s sense of purpose,
daft as it was, evaporated. What remained
was a practically Soviet Brutalism, best
exemplified by the 1975 J. Edgar Hoover
Building, a structure so hideous that the
FBI has been trying to get out of it for
years. Words can hardly do justice to the
building, an atrocious jumble of honeycombed beige concrete that hulks over the
corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and E
Street. Architect Arthur Cotton Moore is a
few aghast adjectives shy in his criticism:
“It creates a void along Pennsylvania
Avenue. Given its elephantine size and
harshness, it creates a black hole. Its concrete wall, with no windows or life to it,
is an urban sin.” It goes without saying that
the cost of the building came in at double
the original estimate, and its construction
delays exceeded the entire construction
period of the Empire State Building. Like
the Federal Reserve’s home, the FBI headquarters expresses a clear insider–outsider
mentality, as though it were aspiring to
embody in concrete George Orwell’s “boot
stamping on a human face—forever.”
Perhaps not forever: A report from the
Government Accountability Office recommended demolishing the building as
one of four options for rehousing the FBI
in a new, larger, and possibly more terrifying building.
Washington’s current architectural
controversy concerns plans for a monument to poor President Eisenhower
designed by Frank Gehry. I’m something
of an Eisenhower-ologist, and as it happens I live in an apartment building
designed by Gehry, whose best work is
very good, being playful and surprising.
“Playful and surprising” are not the words
that first come to mind when contemplating the architect of the Normandy invasion and his sober-minded presidency. It
would be hard to think of somebody less
suited than the high-concept postmodernist Gehry to design a memorial, and an
oversized one at that, to Eisenhower, a
man who insisted on being buried in an
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Comic-Book
Liberalism
Movie studios move rightwardly
away from their print sources
BY SONNY BUNCH
W
HEN the writers of the comic
book Batwoman announced
they were resigning from
the series because the publisher, DC Comics, would not allow the
titular character, a lesbian, to marry, the
outrage against DC in the comic-book
community was swift and fierce. Indeed,
it was so vigorous that one of the writers,
J. H. Williams III, felt compelled to tweet:
“I’ve just been told that threats of violence have been issued toward individuals at DC comics. This is unacceptable. It
needs to stop now.” The response was
overheated and unwarranted (DC, which
supported the sexuality of the character,
simply has a blanket ban on any of its
characters’ getting married), but not necessarily surprising. As the comic-book
industry and its fans drift to the left, such
outbursts are hardly isolated incidents.
For instance, earlier this year there was
a flare-up when a (fictional) character
held a (fictional) press conference in a
comic book to ask the (fictional) media to
stop referring to him as a mutant and
instead call him by his name, “Alex.”
Within the logic of the Marvel Comics
universe, this comes across as a relatively
reasonable request: For ages, “mutant”
and its variant slurs like “mutie” have
been synonymous with “monster.” What
writer Rick Remender did not realize is
that his commonsense notion violated the
norms of the real-world Left.
“In that little speech [the character
Havok] shredded the central thesis of
minority identity politics,” wrote An drew Wheeler of the blog Comics Alliance
(angry emphasis in the angry original).
“He is, definitively and explicitly, selfloathing about his identity. . . . That’s not
a message of inclusion. That’s a message
of assimilation. That’s a message of erasure.” Some went so far as to suggest that
Mr. Bunch is the managing editor of the
Washington Free Beacon.
fans should call on Marvel to take action
against Remender for his heresy because
they were “offended” by “Havok’s ignorant stance toward minority status and
assimilation.”
While Remender was able to survive
the attempted purge, others have not been
as fortunate. After it was announced that
Orson Scott Card, author of the classic
young-adult sci-fi novel Ender’s Game,
would contribute to a Superman anthology, the activist Left sprang into action.
More than 18,000 people signed a petition to get DC Comics to drop him.
Comic-book stores refused to stock the
book if Card was allowed to work on it.
One of the artists contributing to the
book quit in protest. Eventually, Card decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and
dropped out of the project.
His crime? He has vociferously denounced gay marriage and President
Barack Obama.
It’s worth noting that Card was not
going to write a story about Superman
stopping a gay marriage or deposing the
president in a Kryptonian coup. His heresies took place entirely outside the realm
of comic books; his thought crimes came
in his personal, not professional, life.
Whereas the Left once denounced efforts
to strip artists of their livelihood for their
political views, it now enforces orthodoxies through blacklists and boycotts all
its own.
These crusades aren’t terribly surprising, as the industry and its fan base have
been tacking leftward for decades.
The Uncanny X-Men, which debuted in
OCTOBER 14, 2013
DC COMICS/BATWOMAN
Army-issue pine coffin even though in
life he outranked George Washington.
But Washington isn’t building a monument to Eisenhower. It is building another
grotesque monument to itself. In the early
days of the republic, federal construction
meant monuments to the national character
and its aspirations, already imperial, while
in Paul Cret’s day it meant monuments to
the state, the declining character of which
may be seen in the Hoover Building. But
the planned Eisenhower monument is not
even that: It is a monument to Washingtonians, to their newfound sense of sophistication and their taste for the finer
things—it is not insignificant that the capital city is the nation’s leading consumer of
fine wines. Walking through Washington’s
collection of high-imperial cocoons and
Albert Speer–worthy ministries of selfservice, it is impossible to forget that
whatever these block-filling headquarters, temples, and obelisks once stood for,
they stand for something else now.
The most appropriate architectural
monument to today’s Washington can be
found at an office building in the suburb
of Herndon, Va., which is now home to
the North American headquarters of the
Volkswagen division responsible for
Bentleys, Bugattis, and Lamborghinis.
As the nation’s richest city, Washington
has been challenging such has-beens as
Beverly Hills when it comes to the acquisition of luxury totems, and the makers
want to be close to their customers—and
to the officials upon whose favor they
now utterly depend. One does not see too
many exotic sports cars in Washington,
but the streets are clogged with Bentleys
and other luxury sedans, along with the
ubiquitous Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV,
the $150,000 rolling cube that approximates a Federal Reserve building on
wheels. Washingtonians amuse themselves in the city’s increasingly Los
Angelic gridlock by trying to guess
which princeling’s movements are causing it. It is in the Bentley showrooms
and in the multimillion-dollar condos
that one finds the real monument to
today’s Washington. Standing among
them, all one can do is think of architect
Christopher Wren, buried in St. Paul’s,
his masterpiece, and his clever epitaph:
SI MONUMENTUM REqUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE.
That and raise a glass of the Domaine
Leroy Musigny Grand Cru to the memory
of old General Ross, who might have
been doing us a favor.
You deserve a factual look at . . .
Myths About Israel and the Middle East (1)
Do the media feed us fiction instead of fact?
We all know that, by dint of constant repetition, white can be made to appear black, good can get transformed into evil, and
myth may take the place of reality. Israel, with roughly one-thousandth of the world's population and with a similar fraction of
the territory of this planet, seems to engage a totally disproportionate attention of the print and broadcast media of the world.
Unfortunately, much of what the media tell us — in reporting, editorializing in columns, and in analysis — are endlessly
repeated myths.
What are the facts?
the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. The final status of
the “West Bank” will be decided if and when the Palestinians
I Myth: The “Palestinians” are a nation and therefore
will finally be able to sit down and seriously talk peace with
deserving of a homeland.
Israel.
Reality: The concept of Palestinian nationhood is a new one
I Myth: Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (the “West
and had not been heard of until after the Six-Day War (1967),
Bank”) are the “greatest obstacle to peace.”
when Israel, by its victory, came into the administration of
Reality: This is simply not
the territories of Judea and
Samaria (the “West Bank”) and “Peace will only come when the Arabs correct, although it has been
repeated so often that many have
the Gaza Strip. The so-called
“Palestinians” are no more finally accept the reality of Israel. And come to believe it. The greatest
different from the Arabs living in
that is not a myth — that is a fact!” obstacle to peace is the
intransigence
and
the
the neighboring countries of
irreconcilable hostility of the Arabs. Not more than 500,000
Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, than Wisconsinites are from
Jews are settled in these territories, living among about 1.4
Iowans.
million Arabs. How can Jews living there be an obstacle to
I Myth: Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and the Gaza
peace? Why shouldn't they live there? Over 1 million Arabs live
Strip are/were “occupied Arab territory.”
in Israel proper. They are not an obstacle to peace. Neither the
Reality: All of “Palestine” — east and west of the Jordan
Israelis nor they themselves consider them as such.
River — was part of the League of Nations mandate. Under
I Myth: Israel is unwilling to yield “land for peace.”
the Balfour Declaration, all of it was to be the “national home
Reality: The concept that to the loser, rather than to the
for the Jewish people.” In violation of this mandate, Great
victor, belong the spoils is a radically new one. Israel,
Britain severed the entire area east of the Jordan River —
victorious in the wars imposed on it by the Arabs, has
about 75% of Palestine — and gave it to the Arabs, who
returned over 90% of the territory occupied by it: the vast
created on it the kingdom of Transjordan. When Israel
Sinai Peninsula, which contained some of the most advanced
declared its independence in 1948, five Arab armies invaded
military installations, prosperous cities and oil fields
the new country in order to destroy it at its very birth. They
developed entirely by Israel that made it independent of
were defeated by the Israelis. The Transjordanians, however,
petroleum imports. For the return of Gaza Israel was
remained in occupation of Judea and Samaria (the “West
“rewarded” with constant rocket attacks. In the Camp David
Bank”) and East Jerusalem. They proceeded to drive all Jews
Accords, Israel agreed to autonomy for Judea and Samaria
from those territories and to systematically destroy all Jewish
(the “West Bank”) with the permanent status to be
houses of worship and other institutions. The
determined after three years. But, so far, no responsible
Transjordanians (now renamed “Jordanians”) were the
Palestinian representation has been available to seriously
occupiers for nineteen years. Israel regained these territories
negotiate with Israel about this.
following its victory in the Six-Day War. Israel has returned
All these myths (and others we shall talk about in a future issue) have poisoned the atmosphere for decades. The root cause of
the never-ending conflict is the unwillingness of the Arabs (and not just the Palestinians) to accept the reality of Israel. What
a pity that those of the Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens have lived and continue to live in poverty, misery and ignorance.
They could have chosen to accept the proposed partition of the country in 1947, would now have had their state alongside
Israel for over sixty years and could have lived in peace and prosperity. They could have kept hundreds of thousands of refugees
in their homes and could have saved tens of thousands of lives. Peace will only come when the Arabs finally accept the reality
of Israel. And that is not a myth — that is a fact!
This ad has been published and paid for by
Facts and Logic About the Middle East
P.O. Box 590359 I San Francisco, CA 94159
Gerardo Joffe, President
FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its
purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments
in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the
interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your taxdeductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals
and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We
have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational
work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail.
To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org
36E
1963, was originally a metaphor for the
civil-rights struggle; today it serves as a
stand-in for the gay-rights movement.
Captain America once proudly went to
war against the Nazis, before such unabashed shows of patriotism became
gauche: Steve Rogers famously ditched
his star-spangled alter ego in the 1970s as
Watergate roiled the nation; did so again
in the 1980s; and actively fought the government in the 2000s to protest a Patriot
Act–style law. DC tackled hot-button
social issues like drug abuse throughout
dios and independent comic-book houses.
Barely a month goes by without one
or more comic-book flicks’ hitting the
big screen. This summer alone saw the
release of Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, The
Wolverine, 2 Guns, Red 2, Kick-Ass 2,
and R.I.P.D. At least nine more comicbook adaptations already have release
dates in 2014. As studios grow more
reliant on existing properties (the “preawareness” of which supposedly helps
keep advertising costs down) and bigbudget spectacle (which supposedly
decision to provide something for everyone, politically speaking: Tony Stark,
patriotic billionaire, is arrayed against a
band of al-Qaeda-like terrorists and the
military-industrial complex. And Captain
America is Captain America, hewing to
an old-fashioned sense of American values—and the American responsibility to
defend the defenseless—in both Captain
America and The Avengers.
These artistic choices have reaped
huge financial dividends. Nolan’s Batman films grossed more than $2.4 billion
Recently, the comic-book industry has engaged
in what seems like an almost concerted effort to taunt
the American Right.
the 1970s, and the mid-1980s Watchmen,
one of the two most important graphic
novels ever written (along with The Dark
Knight Returns), treated Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger as bogeymen content to bring about nuclear war.
More recently, the comic-book industry
has engaged in what seems like an almost
concerted effort to taunt the American
Right. For instance, there was Superman’s
renunciation of his American citizenship
in 2011’s Action Comics #900: “Truth,
justice and the American way—it’s not
enough anymore,” Big Blue complained
before announcing he was headed to the
United Nations to give up his citizenship.
Similarly, in an issue of The Amazing
Spider-Man mourning the terrorist attacks
of 9/11, writer J. Michael Straczynski
explicitly compared American preachers
who blamed the attacks on “the pagans
and the abortionists and the feminists and
the gays and the lesbians and the ACLU”
to radical jihadist imams who supported
the destruction of the Twin Towers.
It often feels as if the comic-book
industry has moved to the left of Hollywood, long the nation’s most liberal
industry. This is an intriguing turn of
events, given that comic books are now
little more than a pool of intellectual
properties for Hollywood to raid. War ner Brothers owns DC Comics; Disney
bought Marvel Comics and holds the film
rights to the Avengers-affiliated properties
(Iron Man, Thor, etc.); Sony owns the
rights to Spider-Man; and Fox owns the
rights to the X-Men, the Fantastic Four,
and several other properties. This doesn’t
even account for independent movie stu22
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sells better overseas), the studios are
likely to lean ever more heavily on the
comic-book industry.
Which is funny, because the most successful of the comic-book adaptations
have been somewhat conservative. Comicbook movies are tacking to the right even
as the comic-book industry veers left.
This is best seen in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-universe. Batman Begins is
about the scion of a family of liberal dogooders whose father and mother die
before his eyes after being attacked on
the street and who decides that, having
been mugged by reality, he will fight
evil in the world. Upon its release, I
described The Dark Knight as “the first
great post-9/11 film” for its willingness
to grapple with, and support, issues like
warrantless wiretapping, harsh interrogations, and extraordinary rendition.
And The Dark Knight Rises could have
come with the subtitle “Two Cheers for
Capitalism” for its critique of anticapitalist populism and its plea for captains of industry to use their wealth to
help better society.
This summer’s Man of Steel could have
been titled Neocon Jesus of Steel, given its
religious imagery and its unequivocal
rejection of isolationism and support for
unilateral interventions. Director Zack
Snyder’s Superman is no citizen of the
world, telling a general at the end of the
film, “I was raised in Kansas. I’m about as
American as it gets.”
Marvel’s Avengers properties have
shied away from such topics, more content
to luxuriate in spectacle than engage with
ideas. But Iron Man was notable for its
worldwide (The Dark Knight and The
Dark Knight Rises grossed a billion each).
The three Iron Man films have racked up
another $2.4 billion. Avengers grossed
more than $1.5 billion worldwide. Man of
Steel has grossed a relatively paltry $662
million around the world—a figure that
nevertheless was more than three times its
production budget.
Films that have hewed to the ideological ground from which they sprang have
been far less successful. Consider Red
and Red 2, based on the comic-book miniseries Red, which take a thoroughly skeptical view of America both at home and
abroad. They have combined to gross just
over $300 million worldwide, against a
combined production budget of more than
$140 million.
As film budgets grow bigger, studios
are forced to cater to wider audiences to
recoup their investments. The comicbook industry, by contrast, is a relatively
insular community playing with a relatively tiny amount of money. It can afford
to appeal to a core group of obsessive,
angry enthusiasts who threaten boycotts
at the drop of the hat—indeed, it almost
can’t afford not to satisfy these hardcore
fans who make up its base.
According to Comichron.com, over the
last five years the comic-book industry
has averaged roughly $260 million in
sales per year on the 300 best-selling
comics each month. To put that in perspective, Avengers alone grossed more
than that in less than a week. When billions of dollars are on the line it only
makes sense to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
2col:QXP-1127940309.qxp 9/24/2013 11:39 PM Page 23
The Height of the Net
How can an anti-poverty program encourage people to work?
long ago committed to providing for the basic
needs of all its citizens, constructing a so-called safety
net of government programs to catch those unable to
support themselves. But an effective safety net must be
positioned at the right height—safely above the rock-hard floor
yet still well below the tightrope. The value of the baseline
government benefits provided to someone not working must be
significantly lower than the income that person could earn in an
entry-level job. That “income gap” creates the economic incentive to work in the first place, ensuring that all who are able will
strive to climb back up and into the labor force.
Unfortunately, a combination of macroeconomic trends and
counterproductive policy choices has significantly eroded the
incentive to work. Wages for low-skilled and entry-level positions have stagnated, while many of the positions that would have
afforded a middle-class lifestyle have vanished entirely. At the
same time, the safety net has grown to encompass an ever wider
panoply of benefits that have become ever more expensive as
health-care and education costs have exploded. This system of
benefits, obviously requiring careful design and management,
has neither. Countless programs are delivered through an alpha-
A
MeRICA
Mr. Cass was the domestic-policy director of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
bet soup of agencies, leaving no holistic anti-poverty approach
and no one accountable for measuring or maintaining a meaningful income gap.
The results are as predictable as they are depressing. Laborforce participation is at a 35-year low overall, and an all-time low
for men. (If participation were as high as it was before the recession, today’s unemployment rate would be above 11 percent.)
There are 2 million fewer Americans working than there were
before the recession but 2 million more Americans receiving disability payments. The number of food-stamp recipients has
climbed by more than 25 percent since the recession ended, and
more than 100 million Americans now receive some form of food
assistance each year. The War on Poverty is in its 50th year, and
yet the poverty rate today is as high as any previously recorded—
and 30 percent higher than it was in the 1970s.
Conservatives, whether genuinely awakened to the severity of
America’s poverty crisis or merely chastened by the disastrous
aftermath of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, are at least
taking notice. Representative Paul Ryan held House Budget
Committee hearings on the issue. Proposals to reform existing
programs, create new ones, increase spending, or decrease
spending are flying from all sides. None of these ideas are likely
to succeed unless they are built atop a new framework, one that
23
AP PHOTO/MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ
BY OREN CASS
establishes a benefit-delivery system capable of clearly separating those who work from those who do not, and one that maintains a substantial income gap between the two.
B
y some measures, the War on Poverty has already succeeded. If the goal is simply to guarantee that every
American has access to food, providing an average of
more than $3,000 of food stamps each year to households in need
is a nearly unqualified victory. If the goal is access to medical
care, a Medicaid program spending an average of $7,000 each
year for a family of three represents extraordinary progress.
Indeed, counting the full range of federal benefits as “income” to
low-income households leads to a substantial reduction in the
poverty rate.
But simply transferring enough resources to someone so that
he is no longer “poor” treats only the symptom; it does not move
him toward self-sufficiency or a foothold at the bottom of an
economic ladder that could lead to better opportunities. To the
contrary, it hinders that process. Therein lies the paradox at the
heart of anti-poverty policy. Every dollar spent to reduce the
suffering of an impoverished person reduces the incentive for
that person to improve his own condition by earning an
income—not only because the need has become less pressing,
but also because the system will in fact punish him for any success by taking the dollar away once he earns one of his own. The
“handout” is locked in perpetual battle with the “hand up.”
One could say, “So what?” Why not just spend the money
to ensure everyone’s needs are met, and let work be its own
reward? For one, fiscal constraints preclude the possibility of
further expanding benefits for the further-expanded pool of
beneficiaries that this approach would attract. But even if one
were prepared to undertake the taxation and redistribution necessary to implement such a policy, the result would undermine
societal values of individual responsibility and self-reliance and
impede the upward economic mobility that is possible only for
those who enter the work force in the first place. Thus the conservative emphasis on work requirements and other incentives
to move people into jobs. And thus the effectiveness of welfare
reform in the 1990s, one of the great conservative policy successes of recent decades.
But welfare reform was actually quite limited, replacing the
traditional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
with the new, work-focused Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF). TANF is not even among the top five federal
anti-poverty programs in either expenditures or enrollees. Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP,
commonly referred to as “food stamps”), the Earned Income Tax
Credit (EITC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI, commonly
referred to as “disability”), and even Pell Grants for higher education are larger. And when all the spending is added up, the
results are stunning.
The Cato Institute added up the annual expenditures for all
federal, state, and local anti-poverty programs (defined as programs whose eligibility is dependent on income level) and
arrived at a total of $1 trillion. (That total excludes Medicare and
Social Security, which amount to more than $1 trillion in additional spending each year. It also excludes the onset of the
Affordable Care Act, which will expand Medicaid and provide
more than $100 billion in annual insurance subsidies.) To under24
|
stand the magnitude of that $1 trillion in spending, consider that
it could provide each of the nearly 50 million Americans living
in poverty with an annual cash payment of more than $20,000.
A single mother with two children could receive more than
$60,000. Median household income in this country is only
$52,000.
Of course, not every dollar of the $1 trillion is spent on
Americans living below the poverty line. A significant share of
Medicaid spending also goes to support long-term care for the
elderly. So Cato went one step further and looked at the full package of benefits a welfare-eligible single mother with two children
could receive in each state. In most states the value of a package
of welfare benefits exceeded earnings from a minimum-wage
job. In half of all states, the benefit package brought the family
up to at least 80 percent of the state’s median salary.
The issue here is not whether taxpayers are spending “too
much” on support for lower-income families. The issue is not
even whether welfare benefits are “better” than entry-level jobs.
The problem is that with such high baseline benefit levels—benefits that fall away as the recipient begins to earn income—the
income gap is too low. The lowest-income households end up
facing what in effect are extraordinarily high marginal tax rates,
meaning they receive far too little additional take-home income
for each dollar they earn and thus face relatively little incentive
to earn any income at all.
The Congressional Budget Office reviewed the impact of
key federal programs and found that a hypothetical single
mother with one child would have $20,000 of disposable
income if she earned $0 in wages, but less than $30,000 of disposable income if she earned $30,000 in wages. From her perspective, she receives less than $10,000 in reward for her
$30,000 of work—the equivalent of a 70 percent tax rate. Gary
Alexander, Pennsylvania’s secretary of public welfare, found
that taking into account his state’s benefits as well resulted in an
even starker picture: There a hypothetical single mother with no
earnings might receive $45,000 in benefits, a total amount of
take-home income comparable to what she could expect with a
$50,000 salary.
Recent trends only compound the problem. Society’s definition of a minimum standard of living is expanding to include
higher education, health coverage for everything from birth
control to the most advanced therapies, and even cell phones
and broadband Internet access. Ensuring that every American
has access to these things is an admirable goal, but if every
American is entitled to them, then those who work hard to earn
a middle-class living will find themselves doing little better than
those who do not work at all.
At the same time as expectations rise, the standard of living
offered by low-skilled work continues to decline. In 1970, the
average income for a male with a high-school degree amounted
to more than double the poverty line for a family of four. In
1990, it exceeded the poverty line by only 60 percent. Today it
clears the threshold by only 30 percent. For entry-level positions
specifically, those numbers drop even lower. Entry-level jobs
are often just steppingstones to better opportunities for workers
who develop skills and a track record of performance. But that
upward mobility requires that the initial leap into the work force
be made. Without a sufficient income gap, it may never be.
As the range of potential benefits expands and the attractiveness of entry-level work declines, maintaining an income
OCTOBER 14, 2013
gap that favors work and encourages labor-force participation
becomes more challenging and more important. Unfortunately,
the current anti-poverty infrastructure makes it nearly impossible.
T
HE system through which $1 trillion flows each year from
taxpayers to beneficiaries appears designed to stifle
reform, increase spending, expand bureaucracy, and
avoid accountability.
The core assistance programs were created through different pieces of legislation and are administered by different
agencies, with different eligibility requirements, incentives,
and procedures. Medicaid is an entitlement program within
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Disability operates within the Social Security Administration.
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) controls food stamps
through legislation incorporated into the farm bill; the
Department of Housing and Urban Development controls housing assistance; and the Department of Education controls education programs. Unemployment insurance relies on a hybrid
state- and federally financed trust fund, administered by the
states, with oversight from the Department of Labor, backstopped by additional federal funds. The IRS administers the
Earned Income and Child Tax credits through the tax code. And
so on and so forth for dozens of smaller programs, from the
School Breakfast Program to the Weatherization Assistance
Program.
Implementation is sometimes but not always assigned to the
states, sometimes but not always with matching state funds,
sometimes but not always with state-established income thresholds. From the states’ perspective, little can be done but to replicate the structure of an array of federal programs and play by the
perverse rules set from above. The tangle of strings attached to
each program prevents any harmonization or consolidation
among programs. Matching funds reward higher spending in
some instances, while block grants attempt to curtail spending in
others. State-level programs get layered on top of federal programs rather than integrated with them efficiently. Individuals
end up facing wildly different incentives depending on their specific circumstances, sometimes encountering so-called income
cliffs where small increases in their earnings will disqualify
them from benefits and leave them worse off than before.
For policymakers, the system defies analysis, let alone substantive reform. The USDA is an illustrative microcosm: Last
year the agency spent $114 billion on 15 different nutritional
programs, each with a separate legislative authorization. In June,
its inspector general’s office expressed concern that the agency
“may be duplicating its efforts by providing total benefits that
exceed 100 percent of daily nutritional needs,” explaining that
the agency “has not fully assessed its food safety net as a whole
to determine the impact of providing potentially overlapping
nutritional benefits through multiple programs.” Now multiply
the absurdity across more than 100 different programs spanning
numerous agencies and objectives.
No one even considers how best to allocate funds across types
of assistance or types of beneficiaries. Rising health-care costs
drive Medicaid spending higher, crowding out funding for other
types of programs regardless of whether a marginal dollar is best
spent on health care. Thirty-five billion dollars goes annually to
26
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Pell Grants subsidizing higher education—a worthy and politically unassailable effort, but one that prioritizes those with the
brightest futures (and with access to already-subsidized public
universities and already-subsidized loans) over those with fewer
skills and opportunities.
Year after year the entrenched bureaucracies of separate agencies shovel their separate funds down separate chutes, each striving to secure the largest possible shovel for next year by
establishing just how acute is the need for its program. None are
required to show the reduction in demand for their services that
actual success would entail. Here comes another year, there goes
another trillion dollars, and the poverty rate is unchanged.
A better social safety net is only one piece of the anti-poverty
puzzle. Economic policies need to create greater demand for
workers. Immigration policies need to control the supply. Better
investments in areas from education to infrastructure to policing
need to offer greater opportunity for economic mobility. But if
labor-force participation is crucial to easing poverty, structuring
the $1 trillion of annual spending on the safety net to advance
rather than interfere with that goal seems a sensible place to
start.
A
N effective anti-poverty program requires reform in two
ways: first, restructuring the funding system to give
state-level policymakers the incentives and authorities
they will need if substantive reforms are to succeed; second,
sharply dividing programs designed to provide a safety net for
those not working from programs designed to increase the
incomes of those who are working, coupled with reestablishing
an income gap by increasing the relative generosity of the latter.
The restructuring process should begin with an acknowledgment that the federal government is well situated for only one of
its present tasks: collecting and distributing funds. Rather than
have numerous federal agencies each administer numerous
programs, the federal government would ideally have a single
agency apply a formula, establish the year’s lump-sum payment
for each state, and transfer the funds. Call it the Flex Fund. States
happy with the existing funding allocations and program structures could continue to apply the funding as they do today. But
states with better ideas—even radically different ones—would
be free to pursue them.
The Flex Fund sounds like a block grant, but it is not the type
of program-by-program block grant typically proposed as a pretext for capping the growth of costs. To the contrary, the funding
formula would be pegged to the size of the population in need
and would grow at the same rate as the poverty threshold itself—
a figure that already factors in growth in cost of living for the relevant household. But with the dividing lines between programs
erased, states would have genuine and complete flexibility over
resource allocation as opposed to the faux flexibility of applying
for waiver after waiver or delivering the federal Section 8
housing-voucher program “however you want.”
Why should the states have control? First, because states are
already largely responsible for implementing individual programs and delivering benefits. For all the reasons that, as the federal government realizes, states can best perform those tasks, so
too can they best structure the programs and allocate funds
across them. States have different populations, different economic circumstances, and different political preferences, makOCTOBER 14, 2013
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ing the state a unit better suited to establish these types of policies. State policymakers and administrators are also attuned to
the real-life challenges of implementing policy in a way that their
Washington counterparts never will be.
Second, and relatedly, good policymaking requires a decisionmaker to have control. As a practical matter, substantive reforms
cannot occur today because no one has the power to implement
them. Combining funding streams creates an initial point of control, while devolving that control to the state level consolidates
the full range of spending and implementation authorities. As a
matter of institutional design, that consolidation also increases
the likelihood of constructive reform by increasing accountability and eliminating unfunded mandates from above or efforts
to game the system from below.
Third, where the federal government has floundered for
decades, state-level experimentation is the more promising path
forward. Not every state will pursue innovative reforms—
indeed many will not—but innovation will occur. Welfare
reform, like it or not, was inspired by state-level innovation enabled by waivers from federal welfare requirements. President
Obama’s health-care reform, like it or not, was inspired by statelevel innovation enabled by waivers from federal Medicaid
requirements. There will be successes and failures, and policymakers might not always learn the right lessons from them. But
over time—decades, even—the testing ground in the states will
yield an evolution of approaches far superior to the stagnant federal landscape of today.
T
Flex Fund itself is an important reform, with the
potential to improve the performance of today’s programs and to produce further innovation. But just as
important are the subsequent reforms it could launch in the
direction of reestablishing an income gap.
There are several paths one might take to increase the value of
an entry-level job relative to the value of welfare benefits. One
could simply refuse to give benefits to those who do not work,
but that approach ignores both the political realities of what
American society is committed to providing and the everyday
realities of millions of Americans who struggle to find or keep a
job. Proposals to impose work requirements on food stamps
sound like easy fixes but imply that America could or should
strip a significant number of people of their access to food. One
might also question the wisdom of striving for a system in which
people with jobs not only need food stamps but are indeed the
program’s only constituency.
At the other extreme, one could focus on expanding support
for workers, either by allowing them to retain the benefits that
they currently lose as their income increases or else by adding
new and more generous supplements to their income. The
expense of such an approach would be enormous, especially as
it would kick the problem farther up the income scale: If welfare
benefits alone can provide income approaching the level of
today’s median income, then low-skilled workers would have to
be supported at or above today’s median income, which would
mean that today’s median earners would suddenly need support
as well. In the current and foreseeable budget environment, such
an approach is as unrealistic as cutting off support to those not
working.
Striking a feasible balance requires a finely calibrated set of
28
hE
|
benefits that would make some progress on both sides of the
ledger. The goal should be to create two separate sets of lowincome programs—a state-administered safety net for those
who are not working and a direct federal wage subsidy for those
who are. Benefit types and levels should be adjusted between the
two in an effort to reestablish an income gap.
An adjustment in benefit types offers the best opportunity to
incentivize work without slashing benefits or increasing spending. Two families—one whose head of household works, one
whose head of household does not—may both need $3,000
worth of nutritional support. But if the non-working household
receives the $3,000 in food stamps while the working household
receives it as cash via a wage subsidy, the latter might feel substantially better off. While the Affordable Care Act draws an
arbitrary line, providing Medicaid to those below 138 percent of
the poverty line and a subsidy for private insurance to those
above 138 percent of the poverty line, the benefit could instead
be provided as Medicaid for those who do not work and, for
those who do work, as additional cash provided via wage subsidy.
These types of reforms would only produce further complexity given today’s policy structure, but substitute a Flex Fund
and they become more straightforward. For example, more than
40 percent of food-stamp recipients live in households with
earned income. If $50 billion, equivalent to 40 percent of what
is spent today on USDA nutrition programs, were shifted out of
the Flex Fund and into a doubling of a still-federal EITC, there
would be no change in anti-poverty spending, but for working
households a greater share would come in the form of a subsidized wage instead of an in-kind benefit.
Taking a similar approach in other benefit categories could
continue to expand the EITC dramatically. Reforming the credit
itself to make it a direct-to-the-worker wage subsidy would
further clarify its incentives and amplify its impact. The infrastructure for such a subsidy already exists, of course—it is called
the payroll tax, which reduces the take-home pay of every
worker, on every dollar earned in every paycheck, up to a specified income level. The wage subsidy would function as a
reverse payroll tax, increasing the effective wage associated
with a given job in a predictable and transparent way. The effect
in many ways would mirror a substantial increase in the minimum wage. But whereas a price control would tend to decrease
the size of the labor force, a subsidy would tend to increase it.
And whereas higher wages paid by employers tend to increase
prices for consumers—affecting most the lower-income population the policy is intended to help—a subsidy-supported higher
wage is funded disproportionately by the higher-income tax base.
States, via their federal Flex Fund dollars, their own programs, and their public–private partnerships, would be responsible for crafting a safety net to provide basic support for those
outside the labor force. The federal government, via direct wage
subsidies held apart from the Flex Fund, would ensure that anyone entering the labor force found significant advantages in
doing so. The income gap would be easily quantifiable, and if
necessary it could be expanded by shifting additional resources
out of the Flex Fund and into the wage subsidy—not a reduction
in support for the poor, only a shift in who receives what share.
On this foundation, efforts to attack the causes of poverty and to
improve the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs might actually succeed.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
Divestment
Du Jour
Obama endorses a crusade
against fossil fuels
BY STANLEY KURTZ
President Obama declared war on America’s
fossil-fuel industry? The administration has been at
pains to deny claims by lawmakers of both parties
that it is waging a “war on coal.” But what if the real
war is wider? Largely unnoticed by critics, Obama has begun
supporting a cause called the “fossil-fuel resistance” by its radical advocates. The movement’s leading edge is a drive to have
college endowments, as well as church, municipal, and state
pension funds, divest themselves of stock in any large fossilfuel companies.
Fossil-fuel divestment is meant to turn America’s conventional energy producers into social pariahs. Its goal is the enactment of a steeply escalating carbon tax that would result in
America’s oil companies’ having to leave 80 percent or more
of their known reserves forever unused in the earth. A massive
national shift to renewable energy sources could then be financed by a slow-motion, government-imposed shutdown of
America’s fossil-fuel industry.
If only for political reasons, it might seem unlikely that a
president could support a program this extreme. After all,
Obama may yet approve that ultimate environmental bugaboo,
the Keystone XL pipeline project, which is still broadly supported by the public. And for all of his assaults on coal, the
president’s June address on climate change at Georgetown University contained an endorsement of job-creating natural-gas
production, at least for the medium term. Yet that same speech
included a barely noticed expression of support for the extremist
fossil-fuel-divestment movement, which swept across America’s
college campuses over the past academic year. After telling
Georgetown’s students he wanted to enlist their generation’s
help in the battle against climate change, Obama said: “Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution. Push your
own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest.
Remind folks there’s no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth. And remind everyone
who represents you at every level of government that sheltering
future generations against the ravages of climate change is a
prerequisite for your vote.”
That quick call to divest, followed by a plea to make climate
change an election issue, was overlooked by the general public,
few of whom had even heard of the fossil-fuel-divestment
movement. Yet for student activists listening in, Obama’s call
hit like a thunderclap. “We all shouted, screamed, and/or fell
H
AS
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
out of our chairs,” wrote University of Michigan divestment
campaigner Marissa Solomon, adding, “This was huge. The
president of the United States of America knows that we have
started a legitimate, world-changing movement, and he likes
it.” Barnard-Columbia divestment campaigner Daniela
Lapidous was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “I was
watching the speech with fellow divestment activists and when
the president said ‘divest’ our jaws dropped. We just looked at
each other in shock and then excitement.”
Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, the group
behind the divestment campaign, quoted in the same Huffington
Post piece, called Obama’s statement “a huge endorsement”
and added: “My Twitter feed absolutely lit up with students
tweeting the news, people are pumped.” A Boston Globe magazine piece recently declared that fossil-fuel divestment “now
has the support of the White House,” while the New York Times
devoted a July article to Obama’s pro-divestment signal.
Given the radicalism of the divestment crusade, it may suit
the president that few outside of liberal environmental circles
realize he has endorsed it. Responding to Obama’s climatechange address, Chris Hayes, who hosts a show on MSNBC,
tweeted, “‘invest, divest’ is the most crypto-radical line the
president has ever uttered.” The author of the Huffington Post
piece, senior community organizer and 2008 Obama campaign
adviser Peter Dreier, said the president was “signaling his support to the current generation of campus radicals,” adding, “The
word ‘divest’ was like a dog whistle to campus activists.”
Transposing the president’s elusive whistle into an audible
register could reshape the politics of energy. To understand
why, let’s have a closer look at the fossil-fuel-divestment movement.
D
IveSTMeNT’S biggest moment to date was a November
2012 referendum in which 72 percent of participating
Harvard undergraduates called on their university’s
endowment to sell off any stocks in large fossil-fuel companies.
Prior to that, fossil-fuel divestment was an outlier idea, confined to radical environmental groups on a few scattered campuses.
That changed after America’s most influential environmentalist, Bill McKibben, published a July 2012 article in Rolling
Stone titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” Already
a hero to America’s green-minded Millennial generation for
penning the first major account of global warming a quartercentury ago, McKibben caused a sensation with this new article
by predicting climate catastrophe should more than about 20
percent of the world’s known fossil-fuel reserves be burned.
He followed up by launching a rock-star-style tour of concert venues across the country, calling on students to join the
“fossil-fuel resistance” by supporting divestment.
On a first hearing, divestment strikes many as a futile gesture.
Since most energy companies are moneymakers, any stocks
sold off are sure to find buyers. The only financial losers under
such circumstances are likely to be the university endowments
and public pension funds that divest, not oil companies.
McKibben understands this. The real goal of his effort, modeled
on the anti-apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s, is to
impugn the moral legitimacy of America’s energy producers.
The first step toward bankrupting oil companies financially,
29
McKibben believes, is bankrupting them politically, by turning
them into pariahs. With disarming honesty, McKibben insists
that “movements require enemies.” By painting oil companies
as planetary enemy No. 1, McKibben hopes to generate a public groundswell for steep carbon taxes and other policies
designed to force America’s conventional energy producers out
of the fossil-fuel business.
That harvard divestment vote, which followed hard on
McKibben’s Boston tour stop, made the New York Times’s front
page. In the ensuing months, the movement spread to over 300
college campuses, sparking scores of pro-divestment student
votes at schools across the land.
While McKibben is the leading figure behind fossil-fuel
divestment, his key ally is Naomi Klein, long an inspiring
presence for the anti-corporate-globalization movement and
its successor, Occupy Wall Street. Klein argues that, as a practical matter, hard-Left causes can best be advanced in current
political circumstances under the banner of environmentalism.
her partnership with McKibben’s divestment movement embodies a long-sought alliance of the environmentalist and
anti-capitalist Left.
By any reasonable standard, McKibben’s social vision is
radical. Breaking with liberals as well as conservatives, he
firmly opposes growth as an economic goal. As he explained in
his 2007 book Deep Economy, as well as 2010’s Eaarth,
McKibben hopes to unwind capitalist modernity, putting something like a postmodern peasantry in its place. From McKibben’s
perspective, modern society is not only ecologically disastrous,
it’s also far less satisfying than village and small-town life in the
days before the Industrial Revolution.
That’s why McKibben would like to see a return to farm-based
living. Instead of industrial farming, with its products distributed
by way of carbon-intensive long-haul transport, McKibben
seeks a revival of local, labor-intensive organic farming. In his
ideal future, we’d abandon our cars and grow food on our suburban lawns.
While this vision is laid out in McKibben’s books, he’s
downplayed it since the divestment campaign began. “More
farm labor” has limited appeal as a student rallying cry. Yet the
goal of shutting down America’s fossil-fuel-based economy
dovetails perfectly with McKibben’s agrarian communitarianism. Critics of the climate movement have long maintained
that forcibly paring back the carbon economy will do more
harm than good—killing economic growth, with devastating
human consequences. A post-growth society is McKibben’s
goal, and he’s willing to risk some social and economic disruption to get there.
Do McKibben’s young followers understand his deep-lying
hostility to economic growth, not to mention his odd utopian
vision for America? For the most part, they do not. These days,
McKibben has plenty to say about all the industry he wants to
shut down, but he tells us virtually nothing about the economic
and social consequences of that loss.
Naomi Klein shares McKibben’s no-growth, communitarian,
localist vision, and means to use state power to achieve it.
Shifting American society from high-tech capitalism to postmodern peasanthood can be financed, Klein believes, by
nationalizing America’s oil companies and making them pay
for the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy. Full-throttle
anti-capitalism? Klein happily embraces the charge. Given the
30
|
intellectual underpinnings of the movement President Obama
has endorsed, it’s hardly surprising that he chose to quietly
“whistle” his support rather than shout his approval from the
rooftops.
T
quality of debate over the divestment issue on college campuses has, in general, been atrocious. At harvard, apocalyptic climate-disaster scenarios drawn from
the most questionable studies went all but unchallenged.
Divestment critics raised questions about the economic wisdom
of the tactic, yet few dared dispute the underlying assumptions
of the movement: the fantasy of a cost-free post-carbon economy,
or catastrophic climate predictions based on data susceptible to
perfectly reasonable alternative interpretations. During harvard’s debate, the wildly controversial economic and social
visions of McKibben and Klein never even came up.
No doubt any student with the temerity to raise such questions
would have been stigmatized as a climate-change “denier” and
an abetter of corporate evil. Like many other universities that
now house an official “office of sustainability,” harvard, with its
many “green” programs, effectively sends a message to its students that climate activism is something close to official university policy. The principle of free debate at the heart of liberal
education cannot help but suffer when a disputed policy becomes an officially protected sacred cow.
This past March, Vassar College provided an example of what
happens to those who dare to cross the line guarding campus climate orthodoxy, when a student group invited Alex epstein,
president of the pro-fossil-fuel Center for Industrial Progress,
to speak on campus. Posters advertising the talk were ripped
down. Students, a number of them wearing Dick Cheney
masks, interrupted epstein’s lecture with a hostile statement
accusing him of being a pawn of the oil industry, then walked out
en masse. Before epstein arrived, a couple of student leaders even
tried to persuade his hosts to pay him a fee not to give a talk.
The climax of the last school year’s divestment movement
came just before graduation at Swarthmore, where activists
took over a Board of Managers meeting that had been called to
discuss divestment, at the activists’ request. Conservative student opponents of divestment were blocked from speaking by a
bizarre, Alinsky-style tactic in which the protesters rhythmically “clapped down” opinions they opposed, rendering them
inaudible. Craven administrators present at the meeting did
nothing to impose order. Caught on video, the spectacle rightly
embarrassed many Swarthmore students, yet served to encourage the radicals.
The coming school year is bound to bring more disruptions.
A takeover of the president’s office at the Rhode Island School
of Design late last year may be repeated elsewhere. Divestment
activists have been training and planning all summer.
On the plus side, organized opposition to the divestment
movement has emerged at Vassar, where many students were
outraged by last March’s assault on free speech. They are circulating a statement opposing divestment to students, faculty,
and administrators across the country. That statement, developed by the Center for Industrial Progress, calls the divestment
movement “an attempt to silence legitimate debate” and condemns its refusal to grapple with the social costs of an industry
shutdown. Rather than asking schools to endorse a particular
he
OCTOBER 14, 2013
stance on energy or the environment, the statement calls on
them to eschew politics and promote open debate. signed by
such luminaries as steven Hayward, alan Charles Kors,
Harvey Mansfield, Matt ridley, roger scruton, and Peter
Wood, the statement represents the most serious pushback
against the divestment movement to date. (a copy of “Don’t
Divest, educate—an Open letter to american Universities”
can be found at fossilfueldebate.com.)
lopsided student support for fossil-fuel divestment depends
on the atmosphere of intimidation that has surrounded the
movement so far. Many students support divestment for want of
having heard counterarguments, or because they live on campuses where just about any policy proposal claiming the mantle
of environmentalism is considered right. real opposition could
burst this bubble.
The president clearly hopes otherwise. as the New York Times
suggested in the wake of Obama’s Georgetown nod to the
divestment movement, his speech can be taken as a plea for
help. Obama knows, said the Times, “that if he is to get serious
climate policies on the books before his term ends in 2017, he
needs a mass political movement pushing for stronger action.”
so Obama’s supportive signal may have been an attempt to
kindle divestment activism that will serve to pressure Congress
to pass aggressive carbon restrictions, the end that Obama and
the fossil-fuel-divestment movement share.
Democrats worry that the president’s climate proposals will
leave them vulnerable to charges of killing jobs and raising
energy prices. Organizing for action, President Obama’s
national community-organizing group, will counter such attacks
by painting republicans as anti-science climate “deniers.”
That’s silly, since it’s perfectly possible to accept the basic
physics of carbon dioxide’s effect on temperature without buying into climate catastrophism, but the administration is paying attention to polls that say republicans can be hurt by
being portrayed as “deniers.” This is what’s behind Obama’s
more open and aggressive stance on the issue.
What if, instead of fighting a defensive battle against bogus
efforts to paint them as troglodytes, republicans were to highlight President Obama’s endorsement of the fossil-fueldivestment movement? again, the real goal of that movement
is to use divestment activism to pressure Congress to pass a
draconian carbon tax. Would the public be onboard with a
government-imposed shutdown of america’s conventionalenergy industry, leaving 80 percent of america’s fuel reserves
in the ground, well before wind or solar becomes an economically viable substitute? What would that do to jobs and energy prices, not to mention our dependence on Middle eastern
oil (in the short term)? and what if the public were to get an
inkling of the radical social vision of the divestment movement’s leaders?
The White House has so far declined to elaborate on what the
president meant at Georgetown when he called on students to
divest. No wonder. should critics force the issue, the president
will find that he has trapped himself. either he will have to justify his support for a radical movement whose outlandish goal
the public is sure to reject, or he will have to back off, sorely
disappointing his Millennial base. Congressional republicans
and potential GOP presidential candidates should help the president choose—by calling on him to clarify his stand on fossilfuel divestment.
How We
Used to Do It
American diplomacy in the
Yom Kippur War
BY MARIO LOYOLA
srael’s dashing victory in the six-Day War of 1967 left it
in control of the sinai Peninsula and the Palestinian territories. It also lured the Jewish state into a dangerously
self-satisfied complacency. On september 26, 1973, the
Jerusalem Post proclaimed in an editorial, “There was never a
period in which our security situation seemed as good as now.”
Not even a large build-up of egyptian and syrian forces could
shake Israel out of its torpor. On October 5, Israeli intelligence
rated the possibility of war as “lowest of the low.”
The next day, on Yom Kippur, egypt and syria attacked from
the west and northeast. Israel was taken totally by surprise.
Now well trained and superbly well armed with the latest soviet
weapons, the egyptian army executed a brilliant crossing of the
suez Canal and quickly threw Israel’s front-line units into disarray, while the syrians were soon mauling Israeli forces with
wave after wave of tanks.
When the Israeli counterattack in the sinai finally materialized on the third day of the war, it promptly ran into a withering
barrage of soviet-supplied anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.
Israel’s losses of tanks and planes were so severe that the
counterattack had to be called off, and the government desperately appealed to the Nixon administration for help.
The Yom Kippur War was a major foreign-policy crisis for
the United states, carrying with it the potential for armed
conflict with the soviet Union. The soviets’ position in the
Middle east had been growing steadily stronger for years while
america was paralyzed by the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile,
americans had spent the summer of 1973 transfixed by the
Watergate hearings. The Yom Kippur War broke just as the
Nixon administration was starting to fall apart.
Onto this dramatic stage stepped secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, to deliver the masterpiece of his diplomatic career.
Today, on the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, that performance stands in painful contrast with the appalling incompetence of President Obama’s Middle east policy, through
which, one blunder after another, he is unraveling virtually all
of what american diplomacy achieved then.
egypt’s new leader, anwar sadat, was bent on recovering the
sinai Peninsula and eager for america to push Israel to the
negotiating table even as he prepared for war. sadat later told
Kissinger, “You didn’t pay attention to me, and this was the
result.” To gain maximum freedom of maneuver, sadat had
expelled soviet advisers from egypt, but he remained depen-
I
Mr. Loyola is a former counsel for foreign and defense policy to the U.S. Senate
Republican Policy Committee.
31
dent on the Soviet Union for weapons and was still, to all
appearances, a Soviet client.
And yet Sadat had already decided to throw his lot in with the
Americans, who, he realized, alone could deliver peace
between his country and Israel. His motives for attacking Israel
were more complex than he let on. Sadat appears to have understood all along that he could not win back the Sinai through
force of arms alone. His primary purpose was political, not
military. By 1973, he had come to believe that the diplomatic
impasse over the return of the Sinai could be broken only by
war.
Sadat also knew that compromise with Israel would be
almost impossible as long as Egypt’s humiliation of 1967 hung
in the air. Kissinger understood that as well. He believed that
America had to ensure an Israeli victory but that the victory
should stop short of humiliating the Arabs to that degree again.
Charting a middle course would require deft diplomacy.
Once the fighting started, the first order of business for the
U.S. was to rearm the Israelis fast, but the airlift took a week to
materialize. Though the delay was partly Kissinger’s fault, it
proved salutary. Because the Soviets began resupplying their
Arab clients almost as soon as the shooting started, while the
Americans dithered, the wily Kissinger was able to portray the
U.S. airlift, once it began, as a reasonable response to Soviet
provocation.
D
IPlOMACy immediately focused on the terms of a
cease-fire, which, given the Israelis’ frightening position after the first few days of war, they were only
too happy to agree to. Sadat, however, rejected the proposal, his
first major mistake. After blunting Israel’s initial counteroffensive, Egyptian forces went on the attack and fatefully
pushed beyond the cover of their anti-aircraft-missile umbrella,
his second mistake.
As the first week of war drew to a close, Israel’s mobilization
was starting to produce large numbers of reinforcements, just as
American weapons of every category started to arrive. The
Israelis took just days to understand the new tactics of the Arab
armies, and their countermeasures began tilting the casualty
ratios dramatically in their favor. From this point forward, the
Israelis prevailed in every engagement.
General Ariel Sharon, commanding a brigade in the center of
Israel’s Sinai front, developed a bold plan for slicing through
the seam between Egypt’s Second and Third Armies and then
crossing to the west bank of the Suez Canal, well to the rear of
Egypt’s army in Sinai. His attack was brilliantly successful;
several brigades crossed the Suez Canal in short order and
wheeled south, on the way to surrounding Egypt’s Third Army.
In a matter of days, Egypt was on the precipice of total defeat.
By this point, Israeli forces were also smashing the Syrian army
to bits hundreds of miles to the northeast.
The Soviets now realized that their Arab clients were in serious trouble, and that disaster loomed for themselves as well.
After the Israeli breakthrough, Sadat agreed to a cease-fire and
asked U.S. and Soviet troops to enforce it. The U.S. had no
interest in a joint mission with the Soviets, but Brezhnev
warned that he would send Soviet forces to Egypt unilaterally if
the Americans didn’t join him. Kissinger was adamant that any
such move be met with American force. The Nixon administra32
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tion quietly put U.S. nuclear forces on worldwide alert. It was a
powerful shot across the bow, and it clearly rattled the Soviets,
who promptly backed down.
Trying one last time to snatch victory from the impending
disaster, the Soviets agreed to impose a cease-fire on their
clients if Israel agreed to return the land it took in 1967. To
Kissinger, this proposal was “preposterous.” If the cease-fire
depended on a comprehensive settlement, the war would continue.
The momentum was now shifting irrevocably in Israel’s
favor, which presented new challenges for U.S. diplomacy. The
Israelis seemed determined to complete the encirclement of the
Third Army, and could hardly contain the desire to avenge the
thousands of young Israelis who had fallen in two weeks of war.
Kissinger realized that the Israelis’ determination would ruin
the chance for a durable peace, mire post-war diplomacy in a
new set of grievances, and likely cost the U.S. support around
the world.
Kissinger flew to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the ceasefire that the superpowers now expected to impose on the combatants through a U.N. Security Council resolution. By now the
Soviet position was eroding fast, along with that of its Arab
clients, and Kissinger’s stalling tactics soon led them to abandon their demands for a comprehensive settlement. They
agreed to the U.S. proposal for a cease-fire “in place,” with a
vague allusion to the land-for-peace formula, and agreement by
all parties concerned (chiefly the Arab states) to engage in a
post-war conference. America’s preferred text was adopted as
U.N. Security Council Resolution 338 on October 22.
The Israelis were initially furious, but the government of
Golda Meir soon accepted the resolution, though in the Israeli
press it was pilloried as a Soviet–American “diktat.” Abba
Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, explained the government’s thinking: “Perhaps the ambivalence of the military
result would be more conducive to a negotiated peace than if we
were to trample the Egyptians into the dust.”
After the cease-fire, Kissinger embarked on his famous tour
of “shuttle diplomacy,” to negotiate the details of a significant
disengagement of Israeli forces from the front lines. An international conference was convened by the superpowers in Geneva
in December, but this was a smokescreen. Kissinger intended to
exclude the Soviets from a meaningful role in the post-war
diplomacy and set to work negotiating bilateral agreements in
which the U.S. would be the sole mediator between Israel and its
enemies. The only purpose of the conference was to establish the
precedent of Arab governments’ talking directly with Israel,
thereby ending the Arab states’ refusal to negotiate after 1967.
The conference accomplished nothing else. The foundation was
now set for the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and
Egypt, and President Jimmy Carter would put the finishing
touch on the process that Kissinger had set in motion.
E
GyPT and Syria had been defeated, but a measure of
honor had been restored to Arab arms, and the mood in
Israel was anything but jubilant. For the Soviets, on the
other hand, the yom Kippur War ended in total humiliation.
According to Peter Rodman, the Syrians now held the Soviet
Union in the deepest contempt, for enticing them to war and
then caving in to the Americans. When Sadat reopened the Suez
OCTOBER 14, 2013
Canal in 1975, he insisted that an American aircraft carrier lead
the first ceremonial convoy through it, rubbing the Soviets’
noses in America’s ascendancy. The Soviets would never again
play more than a marginal role in the Middle East.
Though it never fired a shot, the real victor of the Yom
Kippur War was the United States. The U.S. became entrenched
as the dominant stabilizing force in the region. “Paradoxically
enough,” Chaim Herzog recalls in The War of Atonement, “the
courageous and unequivocal American stand in favour of Israel
gave the United States a standing in the Arab world such as it had
not known before, and showed the countries of Western Europe
in their craven and abject surrender to the Arab sheiks to be the
weak, leaderless and divided community that they are.”
“Weak, leaderless, and divided” describes America as it is
perceived in the Middle East today. Where America won the
respect of all sides by firmly supporting its allies, Obama is
losing the respect of all sides by wavering in his support for
Egypt, Israel, and Iraq. Where America diminished Russia,
Obama has gratuitously enhanced its power. Where America
assumed a role of paramount influence in the Middle East,
Obama is abandoning it. Where the U.S. pursued maximalist
goals with determination, and achieved them, Obama fails to
deliver even on his own modest goals.
Obama’s disastrous Syria policy is a microcosm of these failures. When Bashar Assad’s regime attacked the outskirts of
Damascus with sarin gas, killing more than a thousand civilians, Obama proposed military strikes that would be carefully
designed not to advance any strategic interest of the United
States, not even to push Assad to the negotiating table. Instead
the strikes would be designed to “send a message” about the
importance of the “international norm” against the use of chemical weapons.
When Secretary of State John Kerry later foolishly intoned
that Syria could avoid strikes by putting its chemical-weapons
arsenal under international control, the Russians pounced, luring the U.S. into a plan that would give the previously marginalized Kremlin a central role in managing Syria’s civil dispute.
Obama’s failure to deliver on his clear word to act if a red line
was crossed has brought American credibility to its lowest point
since before the Yom Kippur War.
Syria has now dispersed its chemical weapons to some 50
locations throughout the country, making a mockery of Obama’s
tough talk. Assad’s recent disclosure of his chemical-weapons
stocks may be in substantial compliance with the U.S.–Russian
agreement—it will be impossible to know for some time, if
ever—but the agreement appears to legitimize his rule generally
as long as he appears to try to comply with it. The implication is
that force will be off the table in the meantime, something that
was not clear before. Obama’s reaction has turned Assad’s use of
chemical weapons into a huge success for the regime, and a disaster for the rebels.
One is tempted to chalk Obama’s Middle East policy up to
incompetence, but there may be a deeper explanation. Virtually
every American president from George Washington to George
W. Bush has believed that American influence is a force for
good in the world. But Barack Obama appears to believe that
American influence is intrinsically bad. That may be the real
reason Obama is now frittering away the legacy of America’s
brilliant diplomacy on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur
War.
Decision at
Pine Ridge
The ongoing, awful question of
alcohol on the reservation
BY JAY NORDLINGER
Pine Ridge, S.D.
August, a potentially momentous vote took place—not
momentous for the nation, but for the nation of the Oglala
Sioux, or Oglala Lakota, as they’re also called. Here on the
Pine Ridge reservation, tribe members voted to lift the longstanding ban on alcohol: its sale, possession, and consumption.
The vote was 1,843 to 1,683, or 52 percent to 48 percent. The
issue has stirred passions on the reservation. And it’s not quite
over: Repeal is “not a done deal,” as an official tells me. The
Tribal Council must approve it.
Pine Ridge drifts in and out of the national consciousness,
mainly out. In 1973, activists took over the village of Wounded
Knee, creating a national drama. Pine Ridge is in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. It’s larger than Delaware and
Rhode Island combined—but smaller than Connecticut. Some
17,000 people live here. By contrast, Wyoming, the least populous state, has 576,000. Pine Ridge is a very poor place, the poorest of all the reservations.
One could cite many grim statistics, and tug at heartstrings. I
will give a few facts, quickly. Infant mortality is sky high.
Diabetes is sky high. So are any number of other illnesses, including depression. Suicide is sky high. It is virtually epidemic
among teenagers. Life expectancy for men is 48; for women, it’s
52. One hears that this is the worst life expectancy in the Western
Hemisphere, except for Haiti.
Most people drop out of school, and most people don’t work.
Unemployment is over 80 percent. Most of those who do work
are women, and they tend to work for one government entity or
another. Homes are overcrowded. Often they have no water or
electricity, and often they have a dangerous mold. Teen gangs
have become a menace. To add insult to injury, the weather here
is some of the most challenging in the country—a “weather of
extremes,” as they say. It’s punishingly hot in the summer and
punishingly cold in the winter. Severe winds blow at many times.
The reservation is, as most people know, alcohol-drenched.
One reads that eight out of ten families are affected by alcohol. I
talk to people who have no idea who the other two families are:
They’ve lived here all their lives, and never knew a family unaffected by alcohol, and have barely known an individual unaffected. What are the effects of alcoholism? Robbery, rape, murder,
poverty, family breakdown, disease, death—one could go on.
Like two-thirds of all Indian reservations in America, Pine
Ridge has traditionally banned alcohol. Yet alcohol, of course, is
rife. Tribe members can get it over the border, wherever the
border is. They might get it in Martin, S.D., in the east. Most no -
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33
toriously, they get it in Whiteclay, Neb., in the south. (Sometimes
the name of this place is written “White Clay.” It depends on the
sign or map.) Whiteclay is just over the border from Pine
Ridge—meaning the village of Pine Ridge, not the reservation at
large. People in Whiteclay have been selling booze to the Sioux
for over 100 years. There are four liquor stores in Whiteclay and
only three times as many residents. Yes, Whiteclay has just a
dozen people or so. The liquor stores do a booming business.
They sell something like 4.5 million cans of beer a year, which
comes out to more than 12,000 a day. Whiteclay has been a focus
of tribal anger for a long time.
Last year, the tribe filed suit against the liquor stores in federal
court. They also sued beer distributors and beer makers, including Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Pabst. They claimed that
alcohol was stocked and sold “far in excess” of what Nebraska
law allows. The judge was sympathetic, saying, “There is, in fact,
little question that alcohol sold in Whiteclay contributes significantly to tragic conditions on the Reservation.” He also said that
the case did not belong in federal court.
Less than a year later, the tribe held its referendum. For some,
the victory of the repeal side had an air of, “If you can’t beat ’em,
join ’em.” If you can’t keep others from selling the stuff, sell it
yourself. In all likelihood, the Tribal Council will not nullify the
people’s vote. But, again, it has a right to do so and may. Many
leaders are against repeal, including the tribal president, Bryan
Brewer. (Yes, his name is Brewer.) The police chief, Ron Duke,
is on record as opposing repeal as well. By his own testimony, he
drank until he was in his early 30s, and he has had two daughters
killed in drunk-driving accidents.
T
ban or not to ban is a very, very touchy issue on the
reservation. Many people are reluctant to discuss it, certainly with a white stranger. But some open up. Three
boys, hanging out together, are against repeal. They’re also very
nervous about it. They seem from 14 to 16 years old. If people
have readier access to alcohol, they say, won’t there be more
alcoholism? “There’s a lot of pressure on us kids,” one boy says:
pressure to drink, to give in to the general malaise. Would the lifting of the ban constitute some sort of abandonment of them? A
surrender?
34
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From the boys comes, not just nervousness, but also a sense
of fear. Fear of alcohol is apparent in other people too. They talk
about alcohol as if talking about a plague. Warnings against
alcohol are in the air. Let me give an example. At the Prairie
Wind casino—motto: “Feel the win!”—there are signs posted
at the doors. They remind people, in strict terms, that alcohol is
forbidden. What would Prairie Wind be like if booze were
mixed in with the gambling? At the entrance of tribal offices in
Pine Ridge—the village of Pine Ridge—a sign promises that
anyone intoxicated will be evicted or arrested.
Naturally, a person will want to ask this question: How could
alcohol be more plentiful, or prevalent, than it is now? Can’t
people just waltz over the border to Whiteclay? Those in the
village of Pine Ridge can. And Pine Ridge is the largest of the
villages, with 3,300 people. But the reservation is a very big
place. It is also sparsely populated, and distances between communities are great. Many people live remotely, and relatively
few have cars. Public transportation is almost nonexistent.
People walk or hitchhike. Only once before have I seen so many
people walking along highways: That was in India, where it
was explained to me that the Jains, owing to their religious principles, don’t drive.
On the reservation, there is the stereotype of the Indian car—
the beater that can barely move. This stereotype exists for a
reason. There is a bumper sticker that says “Official Indian
Car.” Not a few cars are missing half a windshield, and not a
few are crunched up in the back. It’s amazing they can stay on
the road, or are allowed to do so. On the highways are signs
warning against drunk driving. These signs include photos of
cute kids, now dead.
In the parking lot of Big Bat’s, I see a couple of young men on
horseback. Later, down the street, they will playfully lasso each
other. Big Bat’s is the main hangout in the village of Pine
Ridge—Sioux Central. It’s a combination store, restaurant, and
gas station. The manager on duty talks about the impending
repeal: He’s against it. On his face are bitterness and disgust. He
does not believe that Big Bat’s will sell alcohol, if repeal goes
through. Why’s that? He gestures behind him, in the direction of
the Nebraska line. “Nobody wants Pine Ridge to look like
Whiteclay.”
Just before you get to Whiteclay, there’s a mural that says,
OCTOBER 14, 2013
AP PHOTO/CARSON WALKER
In Whiteclay, Neb.
“Legalize alcohol on the rez.” Downtown Whiteclay, so to
speak, is a forlorn strip. On the other end of it is another mural,
which says, “United we stand, divided we fall.” In between is an
Indian Bowery or skid row. Men sit or lie on the sidewalk, drunk.
They are zombie-like, broken. Along the strip are the liquor
stores. They are windowless, stark, brutish. They look closed.
But they’re not. The people come to them on foot or by car. In
my observation, the cars tend to be driven by women, with male
passengers. The women go in to buy the alcohol while the men
wait in the cars. Transactions in the stores are mechanical and
weary, with maybe a touch of shame about them.
There are grocery stores in Whiteclay too—two of them. You
cannot get alcohol in them. “No, we wouldn’t sell it,” says a
cashier. “Not every place in Whiteclay is for drinking, despite
what you hear.” What does she think of the Pine Ridge referendum and its result? (The cashier is white, by the way.) She says,
brightly, “I think it’s good. This has been going on for years”—
and by “this” she means the drinking and the blaming. “It’s their
problem, let them deal with it.” Unless I’m mistaken, her tone
says, “Whiteclay has had enough of being the villain.”
As I look at the Indians, lying on the sidewalks, I wonder,
“What’s the difference between them and the business executives
who get sloshed in their offices or at home in their dens? What’s
the difference between them and alcohol-fueled writers, some
of whom become immortal, such as Faulkner?” The answer, I
suppose, is that some can cope and some can’t.
T
advocates of repeal make many arguments. They say
that, with alcohol revenue, you can build detox centers
and fund treatment programs. You may also have more
money for the schools. Furthermore, repeal will cut down on
drunk-driving accidents, as people will be able to go less far for
alcohol. Police will not have to use their time investigating
possession and smuggling and the like. The casinos will
attract more visitors, because they’ll be wet, not dry. And look:
Prohibition has failed. It didn’t work in America 80 or 90 years
ago, and it’s not working today on Pine Ridge. Time to try something else.
There is also, I believe, an element of pride on the repeal
side—a sense that repeal will allow the Sioux to be masters of
their own destiny, more than they are now. After the vote, a prorepeal council member said, “I’m ecstatic. I’m so happy. Our
tribe took the decision to move forward and make history.” A
pro-repeal writer described this step as a matter of “fighting
back.” Against whom? Against Whiteclay and outsiders in
general, presumably.
The president, Bryan Brewer, recoils at the idea that alcohol
revenue should fund alcohol treatment. “I consider this blood
money,” he has said. Many are skeptical that the detox centers
and all the rest will appear if alcohol is legalized. Other reservations have promised the same and failed to deliver.
In my view, much of this debate turns on a single question:
Could things on Pine Ridge be worse? Or not? Has Pine Ridge
hit rock bottom? Or could it go down farther still? The antiprohibitionists, by and large, say, “No, things could not be
worse.” Prohibitionists say, “Oh, yes, they could.” The abovecited teenagers think so. The manager at Big Bat’s thinks so. The
same is true of a lady who describes the toll that alcohol has
taken on the reservation. She goes through a whole litany, eloHe
quently and emotionally. When she’s through, I say, “Well, life
is miserable already. Could it be worse?” Her face freezes for a
moment. Then she fixes me with a look and says, “Yes, of course
it could.”
One big reason, she says, and others say, is that it is moderately difficult to get alcohol now. Not difficult enough,
obviously—but moderately so. It takes something of an effort.
If people could buy it at any of the general stores that dot the
reservation, what then?
The cashier at the store in Kyle says she’s against repeal. “It’s
better when people sneak it. You don’t have to see it out in the
open. I don’t want my daughter to see drunk people.” (The
mother herself looks no more than 18.) But doesn’t her daughter
see drunk people now? “No. They’re not out in the open. They
sneak it in their homes.” A convenience store in Martin, 35 miles
to the southeast, sells alcohol. What does the cashier think of a
Pine Ridge decision to do the same—to sell alcohol? “Listen,” she
says: “They might as well make money off it like everyone else.”
O
Ne of the classic images in America is that of the wise
old Indian—the tribal elder. At Pine Ridge, there aren’t
many old Indians. Marty Two Bulls says this wasn’t
always so. He is a journalist—a writer and cartoonist—born in
1962. When he was growing up, he knew not only grandparents
but also great-uncles and great-aunts. “We used to see old people
at weddings or funerals or sun dances. You don’t see that anymore.” Today, you might see an old person off by himself, or,
more likely, herself. She has few peers. People used to die of natural causes, says Two Bulls. Now they are dying alcohol-related
deaths.
There is a connection, he thinks, between an absence of old
people and drinking. “When the old people left, it became okay
to get drunk, in a way. You didn’t dare drink around my grandfather.” These days, who has a grandfather? Kids, says Two
Bulls, grow up in the reservation equivalent of slums. The men
around them may be in very bad shape: unable to care for themselves, much less others. Whom do the kids have to look up to?
What hope is there for the future? Those who commit suicide
have decided there is none.
Two Bulls is against the repeal of the alcohol ban. Like
everyone else, he is loath to see the American Indian reduced
to two vices, two signatures: drinking and gambling. He
believes that repeal will exacerbate the former. But he has time
and patience for the other side. A fellow journalist, Brandon
ecoffey, is a strong advocate of repeal. “Legalizing alcohol is
not giving up,” he writes. “It is punting in an attempt to flip the
field. Those that drink will continue to drink and those of us
who don’t won’t. The only difference now is that those with
the desire to seek help will have local treatment facilities to
access.”
None of this would be an issue, as everyone says, if people
simply resisted drink. But that is a lot to ask. The Oglala Sioux
and other Indians, like individuals and groups all over the world,
have been in the grip of a spiritual crisis, for a very long time.
Alcoholism is but a symptom of it (though a terrible one). Would
repeal of the ban make Pine Ridge worse? I suspect it would. But
I also recognize, as others do, that the tribe can vote again, if
repeal turns out to be a disaster—or a worsening of the present
disaster. Democracy includes a spirit of pragmatism.
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lileks--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/24/2013 11:38 PM Page 36
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Suffer Little Children
He odiferous species of Jerkus internetus lacks
the moral compass of the Mafia, and that’s saying something. As I understand Cosa Nostra
mythology, you could whack a guy for cause,
but you left the family alone. Jerkus internetus has no trouble wishing horrible harm on children, and he imagines
he’s a better person for it. They wish to Save Children, as
evidenced by their support of the Save Children Act, and
anyone who says the act is a bad idea because it requires
state and local governments to encase playgrounds in a
sheath of Nerf obviously wants children to die and should
be excoriated in all possible terms.
Preferably sexual. There are few things more characteristic of a progressive with his brainpan fully enveloped by
his nether regions than the belief that enlightenment is
demonstrated by sexually degrading women who have different opinions on statism and tax rates.
And so we have this guy: Allan Brauer, communications
“chair” for the Sacramento Democratic party. To Senator
Cruz’s speechwriter and senior communications adviser,
Amanda Carpenter, he tweeted: “May your children all die
from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.” He also
referred to Carpenter as “pubic lice” and wrote some
unprintable things. Then he was canned, probably for saying things in public best kept to the break room.
Are there jerks on the right? Sure. Probably not stunted
wankers who also work as “Communications Committee
chair” for the local Republican party. If a GOPer had called
a woman what he called Cruz’s aide, MSNBC would feast
on the tale for a week—not just because it was a nice
chunk of partisan prime rib, but because it revealed an
essential truth about people on the Other Side. The horrid
old white men who wished Titanic had turned out so the
women and children were thrown overboard first and then
the ship righted itself and sailed on. But because he’s a progressive, it means nothing, and attempts by the Right to
call attention to his invective are simply a distraction from
their own institutional misogyny. Got it?
Interesting inferences abound in the Brauer tweets. Since
Carpenter is opposed to government control of health care,
she is opposed to health care. Obamacare, in other words,
invents medicine. Without the Affordable Care Act, we’re
back to leeches and tincture of newt. Children will be heaped
about the outskirts of town and left for the dogs and buzzards; the Republicans will raze every pediatric teaching
hospital in the country and make it illegal to treat anyone
who is not eligible for military service. (That’s the neocon
health-care proposal.)
No, you can’t be opposed to the bill itself. It has a nice
name. Imagine this scenario: Senator Darth Cruelington
takes the podium: “We have a new Healthy People Act that
keeps costs low by feeding sick people into slaughterhouse
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Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
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machinery previously used to flense bones. Hmm, I see
some of you shaking your head. Don’t worry, it’s powered
by wind farms, so it’s sustainable. I still see a few scowls.
You there: What’s your objection?”
His interlocutor might respond: “Aside from the positive impact on Social Security money, which would be
freed up for making sure these grinding machines are
available to rural areas as well, doesn’t this have the
unwanted effect of killing people in a horrible fashion?”
To which Senator Cruelington would reply: “You’re
saying you want children to get ill because someone with
tuberculosis coughed on them in the park. You know what?
I hope your children get TB regardless of whether this bill
does what it says, and let me just toss in polio on top of
that.”
That’s the general idea: If the president proposes the
Food Safety Act, and there’s a clause that requires any
mayonnaise-based side dish to sit in the trunk for six
hours on a hot day before being served at a picnic, and
someone points out that the law will lead to gut-gripping
salmonella, that person is opposed to the fundamental
concept embedded in the name, and his kids should drink
an E. coli smoothie.
Which is why the president started calling it “Obamacare.” Obviously, no one’s opposed to the bill on its merits,
which are manifest and great. It’s all about him.
Then you have David Guth, a U. of Kansas professor who
responded to the Navy Yard shooting with a temperate
tweet: “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time,
let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May
God damn you.”
Of course: The NRA has been fighting for years to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and loosen background
checks for military-base employees. It would never occur
to Scholar Guth that a similar fate ought to befall the offspring of Shotgun Joe Biden, who argued for the simple
utility of the very firearm used in the Navy Yards massacre.
It’s very different because . . . because . . . OH LOOK!
BuzzFeed has a new post up:
“The 17 Most Inexplicable Comments on Beyoncé’s
Instagram of Blue Ivy’s Toe”
That actually means something to some people. In case
you’re curious, Blue Ivy is Beyoncé’s baby. No one would
want harm to come to her, regardless of the condition or
shape of her toe, even if he didn’t like Beyoncé. One does
not wish misery on the children, unless one has an ashtray
for a heart.
One of the most wrenching scenes in Downfall, a
dramatization of the last days in Hitler’s bunker, is the
sight of Mrs. Goebbels poisoning her children. There was
no reason they should suffer for the evil of their parents.
But perhaps Mrs. Goebbels thought of it as the Affordable
Child Care Act. In which case you’re a monster for thinking she was wrong.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
longview--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/25/2013 1:36 PM Page 37
The Long View
Republican National
Convention 2016
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:
NOT FOR RELEASE
Opening Ceremony:
All delegates will assemble in the
Starbucks near the off-ramp to I-40
before processing as a group to the
Grand Ballroom in the Holiday Inn
Express along the frontage road,
where the convention will take
place.
The Starbucks manager assures
us he has ample space for our group
of delegates, which currently totals
25 individual persons. Please note
that if you have NOT yet sent in
your list of guests, they MAY be
turned away at the door if the manager is able to book another group
at the same time. So please!!! Let
your RNC rep know who you’re
bringing. If you don’t know who
your RNC rep is, that’s because it’s
probably you. Please remember the
names of your guests and plan
accordingly.
Another note: The guy at the
Starbucks is being really cool about
not charging us for the use of the
space. On the phone, he seemed
pretty jazzed about having the entire
membership of the Republican party
in his store, and was a little surprised
that we currently have only 40
national members. Still, I promised
him that we’d do our best to order
coffee and snacks to make up for the
inconvenience, so, GUYS!!! Don’t
let me down!!! Order something!
This guy is a businessman. A lot of
them used to be Republicans. This is a
good chance for us to show everyone
in the I-40 interchange area that we
can be a national party again!!
Opening Address:
Senator Ted Cruz will speak to
us from the set of his show on
Cruz.Net (http://www.cruznet.com)
via Skype or some other free service.
(Does anyone have any connections
to a company that provides this kind
of video hookup??? E-mail me at
[email protected].)
The VIP Area of the ballroom at
the Holiday Inn Express is also
where the hotel keeps the pool
chemical stuff, so please only
gather there if totally necessary. As
of this morning, we have no registered VIPs coming to the convention, so this area may end up
doubling as the Media Hospitality
Center.
Remembering Reagan:
After the Opening Address, the
lights will dim (although hotel
management tells me that it won’t
be completely dark due to the
Jacuzzi lights outside and the fact
that the Grand Ballroom and the
Hotel Lobby are essentially one
large room) and a group of youngsters from a non-gay Scout troop in
the area will act out great moments
of President Reagan’s administration. (We still need some people to
hold flashlights on these talented
young people, to give their presentation the visual pizzazz so typical
of past Republican National Conventions, so see your RNC rep if
you’ve got flashlights to lend or
good aim.)
The True, Real Conservative
Photo Montage:
Before the Roll Call, we were planning to show a 10 to 20-minute photo
montage of real, actual conservatives
(NO RINOS!!!!!) on the big screen at
the back of the Grand Ballroom. This
event is now scrapped due to an
inability to agree on who those
might be.
BY ROB LONG
Other Notes:
Morning Events will take place in
the breakfast area of the lobby.
Please try not to disturb the hotel
guests as they enjoy their free
breakfast. Please note that breakfast
items are FOR HOTEL GUESTS
ONLY, so if you’re not actually
staying there—and the majority of
the 30 or so delegates and attendees
are not staying at the hotel due to the
wedding party that’s taking place
the same night—you ARE NOT
ALLOWED to consume the breakfast pastry items in the nook. We are
currently negotiating with the manager about coffee/tea etc., but so far
we’re looking at a pretty sizeable
bill for the whole convention shebang, so please plan ahead and
bring a Thermos from home.
The Roll Call will be conducted
via Snapchat, which my teenager
tells me is a fun phone thing and
something that young people will
relate to.
We’re trying to come up with a
really good “grand gesture” for the
moment at the convention—probably about 45 minutes into it.
Something that crystallizes the
current Republican party. So far,
we’ve got some great ideas—setting our hair on fire in frustration,
chasing a RINO senator down and
drawing on him with a Sharpie,
continuously hitting ourselves in
the face with some kind of heavy
metal object, that sort of thing. If
you have any ideas of your own,
please e-mail them to me at
[email protected]. DEADLINE:
TUESDAY AFTERNOON!!!!
Final note: We only have the Grand
Ballroom until 3 P.M., when the hotel
staff informs us that they must begin
setting up for the Benson–Abernethy
wedding. Please respect that. Again,
they’re running a business. There
was a time when that meant they
were our kind of people.
37
books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 9/24/2013 9:02 PM Page 38
Books, Arts & Manners
A Catholic
For All
Seasons
M A RY E B E R S TA D T
Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from
Liberal to Conservative, by Michael Novak
(Image, 338 pp., $24)
N
ovelist,
ambassador, vizier,
poet: how fitting that some of
Michael Novak’s monikers
should parallel the rhythms
of “tinker, tailor, soldier, spy,” that
classic Cold War title by John le Carré.
it is fitting, for starters, because a significant chunk of Novak’s daunting body
of writing not only coincided with the
years of that long war, but also influenced
certain of its seminal events. His 1982
masterwork, The Spirit of Democratic
Capitalism, to offer the most obvious
example, was read and digested on both
sides of the iron Curtain—but with extra
appetite in an east starved for alternative
moral and economic ideas. vaclav Havel,
later to become president of the Czech
Republic, read the book in (illegal) translation with friends, and others behind the
iron Curtain would join Havel in finding
in Novak’s writing a unique source of
Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center and the author, most recently, of
How the West Really Lost God: A New
Theory of Secularization.
38
|
intellectual and spiritual morale. the
coincidence of Spirit’s appearance on the
eve of the velvet Revolution could not
have been more fortunate.
Yet the prism of the Cold War alone,
helpful though it is in reflecting some of
Michael Novak’s life work, remains too
small to capture the breadth and depth
of this singular thinker. theologian,
columnist, journalist, professor; blogger,
saloniste, mentor, public intellectual:
over six decades, he has worn all of these
hats and more. We now have his new
memoir as a handy and engaging guide to
at least some of the contributions of its
author to America and the wider world.
Certain accomplishments the memoir
touches on lightly or not at all, so a brief
mention seems in order. its author is, for
example, the recipient of 26 honorary
degrees—at last count—and, among
other honors, he has been awarded (in
1994) the most prestigious annual recognition of religious thought on the planet,
the templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. then there is Novak the institution
builder, the inspirational force behind a
number of influential organizations: cofounder of the tertio Millennio seminar
on the Free society, which has been
nourishing future generations of eastern
european and other leaders for 20 years
now, and co-founder of Crisis magazine.
He has been a continuing intellectual
presence at First Things; a formative
figure behind a number of other bodies,
including the institute on Religion and
Democracy, the slovak summer institute, and empower America; and a
member of more White House and other
government commissions and committees than can be counted.
there is also Novak as consigliere
here and there to some of the great public figures of the day, which makes for
absorbing stories chronicled in this
new book: beginning on the left with
sargent shriver, Gene McCarthy, Robert
Kennedy, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
and continuing on to several presidents,
left and right, as well as to that secular
trinity of the Cold War, Reagan, thatcher,
and John Paul ii. the book also mentions
the two-way street of intellectual influences between Novak and his distinguished fellow travelers from left to right:
irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge
Decter, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and others.
From start to finish, Writing from Left
to Right throws new light onto all that
activity, intellectual and otherwise. “My
first movement from left to right,” writes
the author, “began in religion”—specifically, in the heady experience of vatican
ii, which he covered in all its drama in
Rome with new bride Karen laub Novak
at his side. it would be hard to imagine a
better crucible than vatican ii for the
themes that would later become the stuff
of decades’ work.
As many people outside the Catholic
world (and in it) do not understand, and
as Novak himself has made clear, vatican
ii was animated profoundly by an impulse decidedly not new—namely, the
desire to effect a recovery for the modern world of Catholic rituals, teachings,
and ideas. that is to say, he writes, the
Council was “truly, deeply, probingly
more traditionalist” than is commonly
understood—including by many socalled Church conservatives of the times.
And neither was the true spirit of vatican
ii grasped by most Catholic progressives,
who were too reflexively hostile to the
authority of the popes and bishops to
understand what was truly radical about
the Council.
But such was not the case with Michael
Novak. Within a few years of vatican ii,
the author writes, he was finding himself
“reacting more and more negatively to
the large faction of the ‘progressives’
who failed to grasp the truly conservative
force of vatican ii—its revival of ancient
traditions, its sharper disciplines, its challenges to mere worldliness and politics.”
it would take years for these earlywarning signs of incipient religious conservatism to point the way to political
conservatism. But like two future popes
who were also part of the Council, Novak
would ultimately take from his experience there a lesson not about radicalism
simpliciter, but rather about something
more specific: radical orthodoxy.
A
s for politics, this memoir is
equally clear: As with many other
contemporary political converts,
OCTOBER 14, 2013
this one was created in part by the experience of 1960s-style academia.
In retrospect, Novak’s stint as a professor at an experimental college—summarized in a short story that is included
as part of this memoir—appears to have
been decisive. Instead of rebellion there,
the young professor found anarchy;
instead of skepticism of authority, hatred
for it (even as many students simultaneously harbored “a suppressed but ardent
search for it,” he notes). Novak’s heart is
on the side of the young and radical, but
his head cannot help but know just how
self-defeating their laziness and disrespect will turn out to be.
This pivotal experience “made me face
the full implications of the deep leftist
principles, and face them in an overruling left-wing context, without any palliative or other form of reason,” he writes.
By the end of it, only two things would
stand between him and full-blown conservatism: his ties to the Democratic party
and—ironically enough, in light of his
best-known work—a lingering antipathy
to capitalism. How these totems, too,
eventually fell makes for fascinating
reading.
Part of the appeal of Writing from Left
to Right is the author’s charming, almost
bashful sense of perspective on his former
selves. Here, for example, is the student
at Harvard, effusively grateful to his
mentors (especially theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr and French existentialist Gabriel
Marcel). Following a “first, shy meeting”
with Marcel, Novak learns from this
teacher that “human dignity springs
from the inexhaustibility of the human
person, outrunning scientific descriptions
and human verbalization.” Here as elsewhere, one sees the former student taking
every influence to heart—and mind.
About Niebuhr, the young Novak determines to read “every word,” and indeed to model himself on the theologian
“in two chief respects: his realistic re sistance to utopianism, and his habit of
unmasking the pretensions of elites—in
particular, the so-called political re formers.” These themes, too, become
prominent features of Novak’s contributions through the years. Yet as the memoir repeatedly makes clear, the avid
student’s relationships with his teachers
was not just a matter of arid lessons
learned; even 60 years later, the enduring
earnestness and affection of these relationships shine through.
So, too, does a sly sense of humor
about life in the higher circles the author
goes on to enjoy. Here, for example, is
the Honorable Michael Novak, Reagan’s
newly appointed ambassador for human
rights in Bern. He is green enough and
(once more) bashful enough to worry
about his every diplomatic move—but
savvy enough at a diplomatic cocktail
party to throw his vodka shots into potted plants during a particularly hard
round of negotiations with the Eastern
bloc, while the opposing team got, well,
potted. (Given what other diplomats of
the time thought of Ronald Reagan, “they
would be relieved that I did not wear
cowboy boots or carry pearl-handled pistols,” he observes.)
Yet also present in these pages is the
son of a Slovak working-class family in
Pennsylvania, sincerely and even relentlessly puzzling out over the course of the
decades a terribly important question:
What really helps the poor? This question, too, drew Novak initially to the left,
as it so often does those who know the
face of genuine poverty. But in seeking
an actual answer to that question, he was
pulled over time far away from the precincts of early socialism, and into the
mental orbits of thinkers like Hayek,
Weber, Adam Smith, and others making
a different argument: the moral case for
capitalism.
Though this is largely a political
memoir, it cannot help but be held
together by forces quite beyond mere
politics—in particular, by the late Karen
Laub Novak, the wife and artist who was
the touchstone of the author’s life. Her
presence as muse is a constant of these
pages, whether to the young, ambitious,
and relatively unknown novelist and
academic in 1962, or to the writer who
would later enjoy global scope and recognition. Throughout, theirs is the duet of a
marriage in full, including three children,
an extraordinary shared social and intellectual life, and twinned ambitions to
work long and hard toward discerning
artistic and religious truths.
O
NE other constant of this memoir
may be even rarer than such an
enviable match, and that is gratitude on a scale seldom seen in the firstperson accounts of important men or
women. Anyone impressed with his own
stature can report back with excitement
about what it is like to be, say, a diplomat
in Grindelwald, Switzerland, the sort of
thing featured in scores of lesser memoirs
by lesser public folk. But only someone
who is impressed with matters beyond
his own stature will write instead that
such an experience makes one “grateful
for the majesty and beauty of these Godgiven mountain ranges—whole ranges
after whole ranges. Down the centuries,
tens of thousands have seen this view;
they are gone now and all their immense
cares forgotten. Human failures fade; the
breathtaking beauty remains.”
Gratitude also graces the literary
parade of eminent people known to (and
sometimes influenced by) the author
over the years. Surely no recent political
memoir has so successfully communicated the sheer marvelousness of the
Michael Novak
political whirl to someone on the inside of
it—and simultaneously the clear understanding that much is expected from
those who are given much.
A related theme writ large here is
magnanimity, including magnanimity of
the mind. To read Michael Novak’s
work—any of it, including this book—is
to be struck by its intellectual pantheism. It is no wonder that the author
began his literary life as a novelist,
because his curiosity about everything on
earth is practically boundless. Similarly
does the novelist’s itinerant touch of
color and whim distinguish his thought
39
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
and his prose from that of other authors,
including like-minded ones. Throughout
his writing, he embraces lines of argument and alternative ideas, admiringly
turning them this way and that, with an
intellectual openness rare to see—especially among intellectuals.
Reading Novak’s reflections elsewhere
on Jacques Maritain, in tandem with reading this memoir, I was struck particularly
by his description of that great French
Catholic thinker. “The key to Maritain’s
intuition of being,” Novak wrote, was
a way of seeing in which so many other
philosophers simply could not follow
For exactly this insight, of course, Novak has been excoriated by critics who
spied in this re-humanizing of capitalists
something sinister—a “blasphemous”
“sacralization” of democratic capitalism,
as one particularly emotional dissenter
put the charge. But such arrows have
always missed the moral mark, as a
reading of the memoir also affirms. The
failure to understand that arguments on
behalf of capitalism might be driven by
something other than sinister motives
is, in the end, a failure of charity. Moreover, such ad hominem detraction characteristic of many on the left has itself
been a force pushing people toward the
face of empirical events.
As several of his political fellow travelers on that shared journey have ob served over the years, it was not so much
that they moved politically as that the
ideological ground shifted radically beneath them. In that sense, along with
some of his closest friends, Michael
Novak is a quintessential neoconservative. In another sense, though, no “ism”
quite captures one more trait that unites
his work from left to right over six
decades, which is his willingness to
take intellectual risks all over.
How many other theologians could
write a book like The Joy of Sports, let
Throughout his writing, Novak embraces lines of
argument and alternative ideas with an intellectual
openness rare to see.
him. Maritain approached each day with
a certain wonder—at the color of the
sky, the scent of the grass, the feel of the
breeze. He marveled that such a world
could have come to be. . . . He could
sense it, his every sensible organ alive to
its active solicitations of color, sound,
scent, taste, and feel. More than that, his
intellect would wonder at it, knowing
that it did not have to be as it was on that
particular day, or any other day.
right side of the political spectrum for
some time now—as Novak would be
the first to agree, even as his book passes
in silence over the role of that kind of
enmity in his own political journey. In
refusing to use this book to settle old ideological scores, he has once again and
magnanimously done his adversaries a
favor.
Much the same can be said of the supple mien of Maritain’s admirer here,
whose work springs so often from not
only willingness but also desire to
understand what other human beings are
actually doing in the world.
It is precisely this intellectual magnanimity that lies at the heart of one of
Novak’s most piercing insights, which
animates, among other works, The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism. That is the
idea that “inventors and discoverers in
many fields of business” were not the
secular demons of all progressive insistence since at least Karl Marx, but rather
human beings who were “benefactors of
the human race”: “Better eye care, dental services, hygienic products, vaccinations, and ‘miracle cures’ were saving
lives in almost every family known to
me,” as he puts the point here in plain
English. “Older people who a generation earlier would have been dead were
still living, and in many ways living better.”
HOSE interested in the differences
between early and later Novak
might find themselves wanting
to reach beyond this political memoir
for a fuller account. The author has himself repeatedly identified the continuity
in his thought, particularly in the essay
“Controversial Engagements” (published in 1999 in First Things), which
might bear rereading alongside this
book. There, he emphasizes half a
dozen intellectual preoccupations that
remained the same throughout his work:
the existentialist challenge of meaninglessness; the importance of caritas; “the
eros of inquiry,” or the meaning of our
unlimited drive to ask questions; the
“incarnational dimension of theology,”
meaning the effort to see the workings
of divine grace in every act, culture, and
moment in history; the importance of
the body in Christian thought; and
what he calls “intelligent subjectivity,”
or the effort to find rational structure
beneath the ostensibly nonrational sur-
40
|
T
alone make the observation that even
God must be a fan? Similarly, he tells
Kathryn Jean Lopez during an interview
for NATIONAL REvIEw ONLINE that everyone should write poetry: “Poetry sharpens our touches, tastes, the scents we
smell. Open a bottle of cologne—is it
even close to the one your father sometimes wore? Brings back no memories at
all? Poetry grabs onto passing things and
fully dwells in them awhile.”
Fully dwelling in things is what
Michael Novak’s voluminous mind has
been doing since he first took up a pen,
and American life and letters are all the
better for that. Better off, too, is the
Church whose truths he has held to
throughout this extraordinary career; in
this arena as well, continuity rather than
change would seem the accurate summary of his work.
“Every one of my books had a place in
the journey whose route I announced in A
New Generation in 1964, and I never
deviated from it,” he noted in 1999, in a
summary of what was then already almost
40 years of work. That route, he wrote,
was to bring to the issues of Americans
and Catholics in America “a consistent
point of view . . . . empirical, pragmatic,
realistic, and Christian.” He concludes:
“To this day, I think I have been faithful to
that vision.” And so Michael Novak was,
and is. That is one point on which his
readers from left to right can also agree,
profitably as well as happily.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
The
Roadmap
KEVIN A. HASSETT
The Growth Experiment Revisited: Why Lower,
Simpler Taxes Really Are America’s Best Hope for
Recovery, by Lawrence B. Lindsey
(Basic, 320 pp., $17.99)
B
ack in the late 1980s, I was
working at the National Bureau of Economic Research in
cambridge, Mass., while finishing my dissertation. at that time, I
attended Harvard’s public-economics
seminar, where weighty and technical
papers about tax and budget policy
were discussed. Early in the semester, I
noticed that many of the Harvard professors went out of their way to criticize a
junior professor who also attended. If the
fellow said the sky was blue, senior faculty would coalesce around the idea that
the sky was red, and wonder what genetic
defect might afflict anyone who would
think otherwise.
Puzzled that even Harvard’s lack of
collegiality could countenance this level
of hostility, I asked a friend why everyone was so rude to this professor. My
friend said, “That is Larry Lindsey, the
most important conservative thinker on
the planet right now. He has Reagan’s
ear and Thatcher’s, and most everyone
on the Harvard faculty hates it.”
Lindsey, who years later became my
colleague at the american Enterprise
Institute for a short time, spent three
years in the early 1980s at the White
House. His ascent to the status of international conservative icon began in 1985,
when his dissertation investigating how
Mr. Hassett is the John G. Searle Senior Fellow and
the director of economic-policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute.
taxpayers respond to changes in tax
rates won a prestigious national academic award. Lindsey’s work was the
most rigorous and respectable effort to
date to document the beneficial effects
of Reagan’s fiscal policies.
The academic community was almost
universally opposed to Reagan. Following the lead of such luminaries as Paul
Samuelson, the academy and the Left
pushed the accepted wisdom that Reagan’s deficits would destroy the economy.
Witness this 1983 warning from the editors of The New Republic: “The Reagan
administration’s economic policies are
neither careful nor protective of the nation’s future. . . . They have touched off a
national borrowing and buying binge
that will have to be paid for in the morning.”
Into this debate leaped Larry Lindsey,
and his 1990 book The Growth Experiment was a fearless and pointed defense
of Reaganomics that was based not on
assertion, but rather careful argument,
academic citation, and telling charts.
It is an unusual choice to reprint a book
untouched except for additional chapters, but Basic Books’ new version, The
Growth Experiment Revisited, does this
for a simple reason. Looking back at
what Lindsey wrote in 1990, one can see
that he was right about virtually everything, and the american Left was wrong.
This is the book that Paul krugman is
terrified everyone will read.
Lindsey anticipated the boom of the
1990s and documented why it was the logical consequence of Reagan’s policies. He
carefully documented the flaws in the reasoning used by the Left. His discussion,
for example, of how inaccurate and even
intellectually indefensible it is to calculate
the budgetary impact of a tax change without dynamic scoring still rings true today.
The last chapter of the original volume is a final example of how accurate
Lindsey’s analysis turned out to be;
believe it or not, it was titled “The Great
Surplus of ’99.” In that chapter, Lindsey
documented that, given the high revenues
that were coming in, a small amount of
spending restraint would lead to a massive surplus in 1999, which he estimated
would be in the range between $230 billion and $347 billion. at a time when
deficits stretched “as far as the eye could
see,” he saw growth and surpluses because of deregulation and tax cuts. as
with so many other of his observations,
he nailed it: The actual surplus reached
$236 billion in 2000.
The second half of the book is new, and
provides Lindsey’s insider history of the
2000s. as he was the center of gravity of
the George W. Bush economic team, it is
gripping stuff. Even as the economy was
booming in the clinton years, Lindsey
warned George W. Bush—then the governor of Texas—that the bubble was
about to burst; when it happened, the
team was ready with a program that had
been prepared precisely for that eventuality. The case is clear that the Bush stimulus of 2001 was better than the later
Obama stimulus because Bush’s plan cut
marginal tax rates in addition to acting on
other, more keynesian prescriptions.
Lindsey finishes with a detailed analysis of our current predicament, and he still
has a master’s ear for catchy economic
comparisons. Spending is so high now
that increasing the top marginal tax rate to
50 percent would cover just one month of
THE PORTRAIT
Her face hung white and empty as a spoon.
She had resisted every breeze and flutter
That shuffled dead air through the shutter,
Propped up all morning in a pose.
To flush the color from that stilted rose
Was more than he could do that afternoon.
Perhaps a slip of light would catch her breath;
She stared through every shade that touched her skin,
Like a breathless doll or manikin.
So at noon when a bolt of live light struck
Her cheeks, he would rather stand and look;
The canvas stretched as blank and taut as death,
For one so seldom pictures such a tint,
Certainly nothing anyone could paint.
—DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN
41
the deficit. The debt is so high that if interest rates went back to normal, then interest costs would go up by $500 billion per
year. Just paying that interest bill would
require lifting the top rate to 50 percent
and eliminating all itemized deductions.
And all of the incessant tinkering with
the tax code has turned it into a blob of
nightmarish proportions. In 2011, we
spent $392 billion complying with the
U.S. tax code, according to Lindsey. That
same year, we spent $337 billion on new
homes, $328 billion on cars, and $375 billion on computers, their peripherals, and
software.
Lindsey waxes poetic at this point in
the book. Reagan’s infantrymen won so
many battles, and for this! The problem, Lindsey argues, is that conservatives
since Reagan have fought the wrong tax
battle. By fighting about tax rates that
apply to income, they were able to push
rates lower. But Lindsey points out that
income is an elusive concept. Lawmakers
will jigger the definition to favor their
friends and contributors, and victories
will be frittered away with creeping, even
corrupt, complexity.
Lindsey’s solution is to switch to a
Value Added Tax, but a uniquely designed one that is itself a novel contribution of the book. Lindsey’s VAT would
have multiple rates, to address concerns
about progressivity, and be paid by
firms instead of individuals, so that
nobody would have to fill out a tax form
to pay his taxes. Such a tax plan would
indeed be an astonishing improvement
over the current mess, and one can only
hope that lawmakers of both parties
bury themselves in the last chapters of
this book.
But for conservatives who have been
in the game for many years, the first half
of the book is an essential reread. The
original Growth Experiment was the first
serious academic attempt to defend
supply-side economics, and it is a tour de
force that is better in the fullness of time.
Along with Michael Novak’s The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism, it is one of the
few books that should be on every conservative’s shelf.
After all, there is no economist on earth
who has been more right about more
things over the past 30 years than Larry
Lindsey. Thank goodness he had the
courage to stand up to the intimidation of
the academic Left when he was a young
junior professor at harvard.
42
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The GOP
At War
COLIN DUECK
Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy
under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan, by
Henry R. Nau (Princeton, 344 pp., $35)
T
testy exchange this summer over U.S. counterterrorism practices—involving two
leading potential GOP presidential candidates, Kentucky senator
Rand Paul and New Jersey governor
Chris Christie—is part of a broad and
consequential new debate among Re publicans over foreign policy and national security. In the past, conservatives
and Republicans have tended to agree
more than they disagree on such issues.
The notion of a strong national defense, in particular, has been a bedrock
principle for conservatives for decades.
But tight fiscal constraints, voter fatigue with foreign wars, the rise of a
powerful libertarian strain within the
GOP, and the reelection of President
Obama (together with his relative
domestic political success on foreignpolicy issues) have all raised the question
of where Republicans and conserva tives are headed when it comes to
America’s role in the world. It is no
longer inconceivable that a truly prominent GOP presidential candidate next
time around might argue for deep defense cuts, strengthened civil liberties
he
Mr. Dueck is an associate professor in the
Department of Public and International Affairs at
George Mason University and the author, most
recently, of Hard Line: The Republican Party
and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II.
for terror suspects, and reducing U.S.
military commitments overseas.
Into this debate steps henry Nau, a
Reagan-administration official and professor at George Washington University. his project in this book is to
delineate and argue for a distinct historical and philosophical tradition in
American foreign policy that is both
internationalist and conservative. he
locates this tradition in the words and
actions of several U.S. presidents. For
Nau, some of the main principles of
conservative internationalism are an
emphasis on freedom over stability in
foreign countries; the proper coordination of force and diplomacy; a certain
skepticism toward multilateral organizations; and a willingness to use force
to promote liberty. Nau’s chosen tradition is internationalist in its support for
U.S. engagement abroad along with
the promotion of democracy as a core
foreign-policy principle; and it is conservative in its determination to back
diplomacy with force, and in its commitment to democratic accountability
in international forums rather than to
transnational governance or multilateralism per se.
The presidential case studies Nau puts
forward are uniformly interesting, even
if some are more convincing than others.
The selection of Reagan, in a way the
central figure of the book, as a conservative internationalist will surprise nobody,
and Nau examines Reagan’s specific
foreign-policy priorities and successes
with a keen understanding based not only
on some of the latest primary sources but
on his own time in that administration.
Truman’s strong foreign policy is a
model to which more and more conservatives have become attracted over the
years, and rightly so, though of course
Truman was far from conservative in his
domestic politics. Polk is perhaps the
most fascinating case of all, and certainly a neglected one in modern presidential mythology. here we have a man
who set out to establish the United States
as a truly transcontinental power through
massive territorial expansions westward, did so, and then stepped down
after only one term in office—a remarkable achievement.
Jefferson is more problematic. No
doubt he remains the most articulate
spokesman for U.S. conservative principles of limited government, and his
OCTOBER 14, 2013
handling of the Louisiana Purchase as
well as the Barbary pirates earns him
foreign-policy credit. But it is difficult
to see his management of relations with
Great Britain, including his handling of
the issues of the trade embargo and
naval impressment, as anything but an
example to be avoided: He drove New
England’s economy into the ground and
antagonized the British over matters of
principle, without maintaining the military power to match either his principles or the British.
Nau makes a plausible overarching
case for the existence of a distinct
conservative-internationalist tradition in
motion, while simultaneously rescuing
it from Obama’s relative lack of interest.
There is indeed a common cause here
between Nau and the neoconservatives,
in the assumption that America must
stand for something in world politics
beyond its own narrow interests; but,
after all, this is an assumption large
numbers of Americans share.
Nau is quite critical of Bush’s foreign-policy record in several respects.
He suggests that the invasion of Iraq
may have been a bridge too far, in
attempting to leapfrog democracy promotion into unfavorable territory. He
further suggests that Bush ought to
American national interests, especially
national-security interests, of which
democracy promotion is only one
aspect. A more tough-minded approach
would have handled U.S. relations
with Egypt, for example, very differently than Obama has over the past
three years.
Still, the great strength of Nau’s
book is that he is right about most of
the big challenges facing U.S. foreign
policy right now, including challenges
for conservatives. The real question
today is not so much whether the U.S.
will advance democracy overseas, but
whether it will even defend it. A strik-
Nau makes a plausible overarching case for the
existence of a distinct conservative-internationalist
tradition in American diplomacy.
American diplomacy, and one deserving
of fresh examination in the age of
Obama. It is quite clear, for example,
that President Obama usually feels no
pressing need to support his diplomatic remonstrations with adequate force,
or to make his actions conform to his
words, in cases such as Syria or Iran.
The president says that Iranian nuclear
weapons are unacceptable, but very
few—least of all in Tehran—believe
that he really means it. He declares that
“Assad must go,” but does little to
make it happen. Whatever one’s policy
preferences in such cases, it should be
obvious that Obama does not normally
coordinate American diplomatic statements with the prospect of meaningful
action. Instead, he makes public statements when necessary, and tries to
avoid international distractions in
order to focus primarily on domestic
political objectives. A conservativeinternationalist approach would operate very differently.
For Nau, conservative internationalism starts from the premise that the
underlying purpose of American foreign policy is to promote freedom
overseas. How, one might ask, would
this differ from the policies pursued by
President George W. Bush, or from those
often described as neoconservative? The
answer is that Nau looks to bring greater
discipline and discrimination to the
American tradition of democracy pro-
have cashed in on the leverage gained
from that invasion to pressure Iran
diplomatically in 2003–04. This is not
to say that he shares the hostile mentality of Bush’s liberal critics. On the
contrary, Nau is deeply sympathetic to
many of the assumptions and decisions of the Bush administration, and
certainly does not want to see lost
whatever geopolitical gains were
made during those years. But Nau’s
version of conservative internationalism would focus on democracy promotion in materially vital and proximate
rather than peripheral regions; cash in
diplomatically on superior military
strength, as Reagan did in 1987 with
the INF Treaty; and resist surpassing
what the American public will bear in
terms of international cost or expense.
I have a lingering sense that Nau’s
book overemphasizes democracy promotion as the one central driving purpose behind American foreign policy.
The Arab Spring, now turned to winter,
has once again revealed what early
neoconservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick intuited—namely, that pressure
for revolutionary change on U.S. allies
can easily backfire in ways that are
both authoritarian and profoundly antiAmerican. In such cases, the starting
point for U.S. foreign policy cannot
simply be democracy promotion,
however subtly pursued. The starting
point must be the clear-eyed pursuit of
ing number of Americans seem to have
concluded that the mistakes made and
costs sustained in Iraq constitute an
argument for ignoring current international security challenges altogether.
President Obama has played into this
conclusion and benefited from it. His
incremental dismantling of America’s
military power and strategic presence
abroad is creating a more dangerous
world, as authoritarian powers feel
increasingly free to act in the knowledge that the U.S. will do nothing.
Most liberal Democrats and academics, together with the mainstream
press, cannot fathom this fact and simply will not see it.
Conservative Republicans have historically been the last group to give up
on effective strategic leadership overseas. But a rising anti-interventionist
faction within the GOP argues that
U.S. military power is itself the problem—the main source of national debt,
and the main source of America’s
problems overseas. Neither of these
things is true. So in the coming years,
whatever else they have in common,
conservatives will have to make a
choice. Do we seriously believe that
America will be safer and stronger, and
the world freer and more stable, if we
help to accelerate the trend toward
strategic weakness and international
disengagement begun by Barack Obama?
43
Strictly
Irrational
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
American Psychosis: How the Federal Government
Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System, by
E. Fuller Torrey (Oxford, 224 pp., $27.95)
R
American Psychosis, i should declare an interest: Dr. Torrey was the first
author who ever sent me a
signed and dedicated copy of a book,
and i have remained silently grateful to
him ever since. it was his 1980 book
Schizophrenia and Civilization, in which
he argued that, there having been no
convincing descriptions of schizophrenia before the 19th century, something
new must have arisen at the time of the
industrial Revolution to cause it. (viral
theories were popular at the time he
wrote, and the urban overcrowding caused
by industrialization would have favored
a virus’s spread.)
in the present book, Torrey describes
the causes and consequences of the hasty
closure of state mental hospitals. it is
part historical and part epidemiological;
as always, he writes very clearly and is
forthright in his views, which are commonsensical. i do not mean this in any
derogatory way: Descartes started his
Discourse on Method by saying that
good sense was the most evenly shared
thing in the world, but in those days he
had not the advantage of knowing the
American Psychiatric Association or the
Medicare system.
The book begins with a moving and
eviewing
Mr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City
Journal and the author, most recently, of Farewell
Fear.
44
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terrible account of the Kennedy family’s
response to Rosemary Kennedy’s mental retardation. As a socially and politically ambitious family, they thought their
image would be hurt by having such a
relative. They never publicly admitted
her existence; instead, they inflicted a
disastrous pre-frontal lobotomy on her
and hid her away in an institution for
decades. From a sense of family guilt, and
no doubt a genuine feeling that something ought to be done for the mentally
afflicted, President Kennedy fell prey to
the schemes of Dr. Robert Felix, the
head of the national institute of Mental
Health, who was a reforming zealot with
great bureaucratic ability.
The times were propitious for change.
The conditions in state mental hospitals,
where hundreds of thousands of people
had been parked and were often subject
to not-so-benign neglect, had become a
matter of public scandal. Anything, it was
widely thought—and asserted—would
be better than the state hospitals.
The irony was that the state hospitals were emptying anyway, in large
part because of the use of the first drug
that genuinely ameliorated the symptoms of psychosis: chlorpromazine, discovered in France in the early 1950s.
The states were beginning to develop constructive ways of rehabilitating patients
who had been released from hospitals,
often after half a lifetime spent there,
but the matter was taken out of their
hands by a scheme to introduce federally
funded community mental-health centers. Financial responsibility for the
care of the mentally ill was transferred
to Medicare and Medicaid, to the great
satisfaction of the states, which were
able to save money simply by emptying
the state hospitals and closing them
down. Reforming zeal had met budgetary parsimony and bureaucratic
indifference to results. Felix and his
fellow reformers, incidentally, not only
had no evidence that their scheme would
work, but had no awareness that such
evidence was actually required. everything for them stood to reason.
The results of deinstitutionalization
were appalling. Many patients were left
homeless; many more were placed into
private nursing homes that were often
more interested in squeezing the last
cent of profit than in looking after them.
whole areas of cities seemed to be overrun by weird or threatening people; in
some of them, people became afraid to
use public facilities such as parks and
libraries, where former inmates of mental hospitals (or newly psychotic people)
gathered.
The reformers were often utopians
seized by moral grandiosity. Because
they thought (again, without any evidence but the schemata in their heads)
that mental illness must be brought about
by social conditions, they wanted to heal
society rather than to help individual
patients. They formed a strange alliance
with extreme libertarians of both the
Right and the Left, whose libertarianism
would ultimately lead to the imprisonment of many of the mentally ill. This
bore out Dostoevsky’s dictum that perfect liberty would end up in perfect servitude.
One of the influential libertarians
mentioned by Torrey is Thomas Szasz, a
professor of psychiatry who thought that
any compulsory treatment was wrong in
the absence of demonstrable pathology.
in the absence of such pathology, all
forcible treatment was but disguised and
sinister social control, with the doctor
serving as the witting or unwitting agent
of the state, imposing its values and
enforcing its conventions.
For Szasz as a polemicist i had a
high regard, and i found him personally
charming. i was impressed by the force
of his character and convictions; but
once, at a dinner party in London at the
home of a mutual friend, i had a discussion with him that i thought showed
that, like many idealists, he was more
interested in the general than in the
particular, and preferred to preserve
his ideas pristine rather than sully them
with the grubby or ambiguous nature of
reality.
it so happened that i had been on duty
the night before the dinner party as the
doctor on call for a prison; and i had been
called in the early hours of the morning
to see a prisoner who had stripped naked,
was talking loud gibberish, had smashed
the light in his cell, and appeared to be
trying to plug himself directly into the
electricity.
i did not think that this was the moment
for a Socratic dialogue about the nature
of mental illness. i ordered that he should
be held down while i gave him an injection. A few hours later he was as right as
rain; he had probably been intoxicated
with some drug or other. i asked Szasz
OCTOBER 14, 2013
what he would have done in the circumstances. He replied that he would never
have put himself in those circumstances;
in other words, that I should not have
made myself available to perform this
kind of work. In the absence of demonstrable pathology—how could one have
demonstrated it, even if present, in those
circumstances?—the man should have
been allowed to electrocute himself: no
doubt pour encourager les autres, as
Voltaire put it.
This seemed to me callous in the ex treme, favoring intellectual consistency
over the most elementary humanity, as
well as being as a complete abrogation of
moral responsibility. But Szasz, as Torrey
demonstrates, was not alone. The book
has many examples of how a concern
for civil liberties, taken to its illogical
conclusion, impinges on or destroys the
civil liberties of others. My favorite
example among those Torrey gives,
because amusing, is that of a chronically
ill man in Maine who dug himself a
cave in a slope below a parking lot. He
would accept no help or treatment;
there was no legal provision by which
he could be made to accept treatment;
and it was only when the lot began to
collapse that he was arrested—to save
the lot, not the man.
What has happened in America has
happened, perhaps to a lesser extent, in
countries in Europe. If anyone wants to
see care in the community under a regime
of exaggerated personal rights, I suggest
the Paris Métro station of RéaumurSébastopol, where for years resident
schizophrenics have imparted a smell to
the passageway between lines that makes
the passersby—by now, millions of
them—hurry on, trying not to breathe
until they reach cleaner air. In other stations, muttering and gesticulating psychotics are avoided by passengers who do
not want to run the risk of being pushed in
front of oncoming trains.
The reduction in hospital places for
psychiatric patients has been pursued as
an end in itself by a strange alliance of
ideologues and penny-pinchers, irrespective of the consequences for patients
or society, and as a sign of progress in
itself. It is typical of bureaucracies, of
course, to pursue procedural rather than
real goals; and the consequence of the
shortage of places is that such as still
exist have come to resemble the Bedlam
of the 18th century, as they concentrate
only the worst and most refractory cases.
In one British city known to me, the
closure of the psychiatric hospitals was
followed a few years later by the opening of large, semi-prisonlike facilities
for what used to be known as criminal
lunatics, the number of places for them
now outnumbering by a factor of four the
number of places for psychiatric patients
who have committed no crime. Naturally,
the expense has risen astronomically. In
a word, this is mad.
Dr. Torrey is the first to admit that terrible cruelties have been inflicted on
patients in the past, no doubt sometimes
from sheer desperation. But while we
should learn from history, we should not
be paralyzed by it; we have a responsibility always to do our best in the circumstances, which are seldom ideal, just
as our knowledge is always imperfect.
Torrey’s outrage at what has been done,
originally with the best of intentions but
no longer so, is evident; his book is a
timely warning—because such warnings
are always timely—against the dangers
of well-meaning zealotry.
nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe
45
Film
Modern
Love
R O S S D O U T H AT
MAGNOLIA PICTURES
I
t’s hard for new parents not to
find themselves regarding childless twentysomethings with a mix
of envy and contempt. Compared
with the unavoidable reality that is parenthood, their freedom seems staggering,
impossible, ridiculous. All those late
nights, those hangovers and brunches,
those endless empty weekends: Did we,
did I, really live that way? Why didn’t we
appreciate it more? And then, as amazement curdles into resentment: Why don’t
those shiftless layabouts get their acts
together and have some kids?
It’s a testament to the skill behind
Drinking Buddies, a portrait of two Chicago couples connected through the
microbrewery where one member of
each couple works, that its depiction of
twentysomething freedom and confusion inspired neither of the emotions
I’ve just described. Instead of envy, I
felt empathy, and pity instead of contempt. the movie isn’t a tragedy by any
stretch: just a richly observed slice of life.
But the particular slice that it observes,
the lager-lubricated culture of postcollege dating and mating, is one that I
was left feeling very glad to have permanently escaped.
the most important couple in the story
isn’t technically a couple at all. It’s the
two co-workers, Kate (Olivia Wilde) and
Luke (Jake Johnson), who have a flirtatious office friendship and significant
others waiting for them at home. the plot
involves the fleeting attempt to bring
those significant others into the same
orbit. Kate induces her somewhat older
lover, Chris (Ron Livingston), to invite
Luke and his live-in girlfriend, Jill (Anna
Kendrick), to his family’s vacation
house for a couples weekend—a weekend that turns out to have complicated,
relationship-altering consequences.
those consequences, though, are not
particularly melodramatic, which is one
of the movie’s significant strengths. the
director, Joe swanberg, is working the
same cultural vein as Lena Dunham’s
46
|
HBO show Girls, and like Dunham he
comes out of the world of “mumblecore,”
a low-budget, half-improvised demi-genre
about Millennials adrift. But in Drinking
Buddies, he demonstrates that you don’t
need Dunham’s shock-the-bourgeoisie
coarseness or flair for the grotesque to
capture the rootless, ruleless strangeness
of modern courtship and modern sex.
the absence of rules feels like the
controlling theme of Drinking Buddies.
the characters have the same desires as
earlier generations—for love, for sex, for
stability, for marriage—but no pattern to
follow in pursuit of them and no clear
sense of what they’re supposed to do and
say and feel along the way. Instead, it’s
jealous when that other woman finds
herself temporarily single and sleeps
with someone besides you?
this is a world where freedom can feel
infinite for men. We can see why Luke, a
shambling charmer, would want to postpone marriage as long as possible, and
why Jill, weary of his immaturity and
losing years to his hesitation, would feel
drawn to the older, more groundedseeming Chris. But then again Chris’s
actual situation feels like a cautionary
tale—unhappily dating younger women,
murmuring about wishing he’d met the
right girl earlier, unable to figure things
out even now that middle age looms.
Freedom extends longer for men, but in
Ron Livingston, Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, and Anna Kendrick in Drinking Buddies
all social uncertainty, all questions with
no definite answer.
For instance: For a couple that’s paired
off but unvowed and unwed, what besides sex counts as infidelity? A kiss? An
inappropriately intimate friendship? A
skinny-dip? A sleepover? Or again: For a
young woman who wants her live-in
boyfriend to propose—the situation of
Kendrick’s Jill, and the source of the
movie’s most horrifically plausible awkward moments—what kind of timeline is
appropriate? What hints are reasonable to
drop? What level of ambiguity should
you be willing to put up with? Or once
more: For a young man with a girlfriend
but a relationship that approximates a
courtship with another woman—the situation of Johnson’s Luke with respect to
Wilde’s Kate—is it reasonable to be
that length lies the temptation to postpone
too long, to let the right woman slip away
because the wrong ones seem so enticing.
Which is what Kate is, probably, allowing for the movie’s low-key ambiguities:
Miss Wrong, with enough beauty and
charm to always have another man in
the on-deck circle and enough talent for
self-sabotage to guarantee that she’ll
always need to call him up to bat.
Olivia Wilde has been a lovely presence in a lot of entirely forgettable
movies; her performance as Kate is the
first time that she’s done something
remarkable on screen. the rest of the
cast is less magnetic but just as raw and
real. Drinking Buddies is a modest film,
rough around the edges, deliberately
underwritten. But it’s also memorable,
and timely, and true.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
City Desk
The Rest
Is Silence
RICHARD BROOKHISER
I
was meeting a colleague for dinner at a restaurant I had never
been to. as soon as I walked in, I
hit the wall of sound. The street
door opened into the bar area. Patrons sat
at round tables on high chairs with low
sacroiliac-smacking backs. There was
music of some sort, cranked up, but I
could not distinguish anything because
the roar of voices overwhelmed it. I did
what I always do in the presence of the
wall of sound—my face winced, and the
muscles of my neck and shoulders contracted, as if I could thereby shrink the
portals of hearing. It actually works to
some extent, though not nearly enough to
silence the din. I moved quickly to the
reservation desk, reckoning that the dining area would be quieter.
It was, some—though hazards remained. The first table I was taken to (I
was first to arrive) was next to a party of
six suits. They were well into their meal,
cocktail or wine glasses stood at every
place. The business bellow is only slightly less bad than the barroom shout, so I
asked for another table. The maîtresse d’,
knowing her business, showed me to the
back of the room. an old couple, slightly
befuddled—tourists who had missed
some date with destiny—lay ahead of
me. a banquette for three—more suits,
but quieter, made shy not boisterous by
strangeness—sat to one side. a large ugly
pillar spoiled the view, but blocked the
wall of sound. when my colleague came
we would be able to eat our tiny tarted-up
portions and drink our unfamiliar-for-areason wines in something like peace.
It was a victory, but a fleeting one, for
every day the wall of sound reappears.
who built it? Cities, of course—those
million-footed centipedes—mass, motion, work and play. They are as restless in
their noisemaking as breakers or trade
winds. But the wall of sound seems to
have gotten louder in my lifetime. why
would that be?
Is music to blame? Electrification
was a big step. with amps three kids in
a garage could summon as many decibels as Furtwängler leading the “Ode to
Joy.” some of the crazy decadents—
Ives, scriabin—dreamed of monster
symphonies performed on hilltops. That
never happened, but a handful of yobs,
and their road crew, can fill an arena.
But the leap to electro-din was taken
when I was a babe. This too, then, cannot
be the reason the racket has gotten worse.
The villain must be the earpiece.
It looked like a blessing at first, for
before the earpiece was the boom box.
Even now, every so often, some pimpedup Escalade rolls up the avenue, 13 floors
down, with a speaker the size of Mt.
Marcy, pumping out its
groinal rhythms. Before
the earpiece, that seemed
to be an hourly occurrence. The youths humping boom boxes on city
streets were the auditory
equivalent of squeegee
men, making the lives of
everyone but themselves
nasty and brutish. The earpiece turned their noise
inward.
But consider the damage it did there. Imagine
the leperous distilment,
pouring into the porches
of their ears, and the ears
of every kid who joined them in listening
to music the newfangled way. The first
result was hearing loss. The second result,
which followed inevitably, was to turn the
volume up.
You hear it now, in elevators, subways,
and other confined spaces, with people
using earpieces: a tinny rustling sound,
like scraping fingernails over a hi-hat
cymbal. Every time I take the bus be tween the city and the country the driver
in his opening announcement reminds
wearers of “portable listening devices” to
turn them down “so that only you can
hear.” Do you realize how loud a portable
listening device has to be before anyone
besides you can hear? If prisoners were
subjected to such a thing, their jailers
would be arrested.
when the music lover removes his earpiece to communicate with his fellow
man, what can he do but shout? If he
speaks normally he will not be heard, if
his friends speak so to him he will not
heed them. Drunks talk loudly because
they are disinhibited; earpiece users talk
loudly because they are damaged. Next,
public places—bars and restaurants most
obviously, but also stores with piped-in
music and waiting rooms with televisions—turn the volume up, because that
is what their patrons expect.
My years of compulsive music listening ended just before the earpiece revolution, yet I am a secondary sufferer. There
are certain frequencies I have trouble
with: If I am near a running faucet, I can
hear speech in the next room, but I cannot
understand it.
I retain my sensitivity to other frequencies, however, and I would like to keep
it that way. Most compelling to me are
the voices of owls. In the
country, with doors and
windows closed, I can hear
them, faintly, through the
walls. I step out onto the
deck. I do the opposite of
what I do before the wall of
sound: relax my jaw, try to
open up to everything. Our
neighborhood owl is the
barred owl, and he has four
cries. The first is often a
single, descending hoot.
Then will come the eightor nine-note call: “who
cooks for you? who cooks
for you [all]?” sometimes
you can distinguish individuals. Two owls were trading calls the
other night; one was blunt and emphatic,
the other ended with a glissando. The first
was a cop, the second a gentleman or an
Italian. There are two other calls, less
common: a muffled complaint, perhaps a
curse: huff-huff-huff-huff-huff-whoahhh;
and demented cackles, impossible to reduce to human speech. That they are communicating is obvious: to each other,
perhaps also to the scurrying creatures
they mean to terrorize, then eat.
They stop, then resume, then stop
again. In between there are bugs; a car
coming up the road; a plane overhead;
and nothing.
47
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Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Whose Islam?
hE “war” part of the war on terror is pretty
much over, and we’re now fighting it culturally,
rhetorically. Which is not something we do
well. Take the British prime minister and his
traditional nothing-to-do-with-Islam statement, issued in
the wake of the Kenyan shopping-mall carnage:
T
These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the
perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion: They
don’t. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don’t represent Islam, or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the
world.
Same with the Muslims who beheaded a British soldier,
Drummer Rigby, on a London street in broad daylight. On
that occasion, David Cameron assured us that the unfortunate incident was “a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing
in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”
how does he know? Mr. Cameron is not (yet) a practicing
Muslim. A self-described “vaguely practicing” Anglican, he
becomes rather less vague and unusually forceful and
emphatic when the subject turns to Islam. At the Westgate
mall in Nairobi, the terrorists separated non-Muslim
hostages from Muslims and permitted the latter to leave if
they could recite a Muslim prayer—a test I doubt Mr.
Cameron could have passed, for all his claims to authority
on what is and isn’t Islamic. So the perpetrators seem to
think it’s something to do with Islam—and, indeed, something to do with Muslims in the United Kingdom, given
that the terrorists included British subjects (as well as U.S.
citizens).
It was a busy weekend for Nothing to Do with Islam.
Among the other events that were nothing to do with
Islam were the murder of over 85 Pakistani Christians at
All Saints’ Church in Peshawar and the beheading of
Ricardo Dionio in the Philippines by BIFF, the aggressively acronymic breakaway faction (the Bangsamoro
Islamic Freedom Fighters) from the more amusingly
acronymic MILF (the Moro Islamic Liberation Front).
Despite a body count higher than Kenya, the Pakistani
slaughter received barely a mention in the Western media.
You’d be hard put to find an Anglican church in England
with a big enough congregation on a Sunday morning to
kill 85 worshipers therein, but in Peshawar, a 99 percent
Muslim city, the few remaining Christians are not of the
“vaguely practicing” Cameron variety. Viewed from London, however, they’ve already lost: One day there will be
no Christians in Peshawar and the city will be 100 percent
Muslim. It may be “nothing to do with Islam,” but it’s just
the way it is: We accept the confessional cleansing of
Pakistan, as we do of Egypt, because it’s part of “the
Muslim world.” Nairobi, on the other hand, is not, and a
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).
48
|
murderous assault on an upscale shopping mall patronized by Kenya’s elite and wealthy secular expats gets far
closer to the comfort zone wherein David Cameron
“vaguely practices”: In a “clash of civilizations” in which
one side doesn’t want to play, a shattered church has less
symbolic resonance than a shattered frozen-yogurt eatery.
On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Canadian
branch of the Islamic Society of North America lost its
charitable status after it was revealed to be funding all
that jihad stuff that’s nothing to do with Islam. This presented a small problem for Justin Trudeau, leader of the
Liberal party, son of Pierre, and on course to be the Queen’s
dimmest prime minister of her six-decade reign: Where
David Cameron is a silky, slippery deceiver who surely
knows better, young Justin seems genuinely to believe the
mush he serves up. Asked to explain his recent photo-op at
the now-discredited ISNA, he replied: “Part of my job is
to speak with as many Canadians as possible and talk to
people about the kinds of shared values we have.”
I don’t suppose M. Trudeau really means he “shares
values” with terrorism supporters, but he does get to the
heart of the problem: To put it at its mildest, there seem to
be insufficient “shared values” between Western societies
and a not-insignificant number of young Muslim men who
are nominally and legally citizens thereof. One survivor of
the Westgate mall said, “I don’t understand why you would
shoot a five-year-old child.” But what’s to understand?
The child was shot because he was not Muslim. Fiveyear-olds died at All Saints’ Church for the same reason—
because, even in a town that’s 99 percent Muslim, a
non-Muslim kindergartner is a provocation. Crazy, huh?
Yet it is not inconceivable that the man who executed the
five-year-old at the Westgate mall was one of those
“British subjects” or “U.S. citizens.” That’s to say, he’s not
some primitive from the fringes of the map but someone
who has grown up in the same society as Justin Trudeau
and decided that Justin’s “shared values” are worthless.
To be charitable to Mr. Cameron, he is trying to point out
that very few Muslims want to stare a five-year-old in the
eye and pull the trigger. But, likewise, very few of them
want to do anything serious—in their mosques and
madrassahs—about the culture that incubates such men.
The prime minister is betting that all the clever chaps like
him can keep the lid on and hold things to what, at the
height of the Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British
officials privately called “an acceptable level of violence.”
A combined weekend corpse count of 150 is, apparently,
“acceptable”—or at any rate not sufficiently unacceptable
to prompt any reconsideration of a British, Canadian, and
European immigration policy that makes Islam the principal source of Western population growth.
But don’t worry: As John McCain says of our Syrian
“allies,” “Allahu akbar” simply means “Thank God.”
Thank God for that.
OCTOBER 14, 2013
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The New Era Of American Weakness

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