cover - National Review

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May 28, 2012
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KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: THE MYTH OF GOP RACISM
LI
M ON NG
A
N
Z
I
Can
Scott Walker
Slay the
Beast?
Christian Schneider
on the
Wisconsin
Recall
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Contents
M AY 2 8 , 2 0 1 2
COVER STORY
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V O L U M E L X I V, N O . 1 0
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 25
The Second Battle
Of Wisconsin
Wisconsin governor Scott
Robert VerBruggen on Girls
p. 23
Walker is fighting for his
political life, as he faces a June 5
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
recall election instigated by public-employee
unions. The race is widely regarded as the
second most important American election
38
COVER: ROBERTO PARADA
39
ARTICLES
16 THE GOP AND THE LATINO VOTE
by Sean Trende
by Arthur C. Brooks
It’s time to make the moral case for free markets.
21 MAY DAY WITH OWS
41
MUSIC: HIS OWN DRUM
Jay Nordlinger on the composer
Michael Hersch.
by Charles C. W. Cooke
A report from the revolution.
23 HIPSTER HATE
GREAT EXPERIMENTS
Arnold Kling reviews
Uncontrolled: The Surprising
Payoff of Trial-and-Error for
Business, Politics, and Society,
by Jim Manzi.
Good news: Republicans can do what they think is right.
18 BEYOND EFFICIENCY
TAKING BACK THE DEBATE
Rob Long reviews The Tyranny
of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat
in the War of Ideas,
by Jonah Goldberg.
in 2012. By Christian Schneider
43
by Robert VerBruggen
BACK TO TOMORROWLAND
Charles C. W. Cooke on Walt Disney.
On the supposed racism of the TV show Girls.
46
FILM: CULT FAVORITE
Ross Douthat reviews Sound of
My Voice.
FEATURES
25 THE SECOND BATTLE OF WISCONSIN
47
by Christian Schneider
IN THE ARENA: DRAFT BOARD
Kyle Smith on the NFL draft.
Will Governor Scott Walker, and public-union reform,
survive a recall election?
30 THE PARTY OF CIVIL RIGHTS
SECTIONS
by Kevin D. Williamson
It has always been the Republicans.
33 THE EMPTY PLAYGROUND AND THE WELFARE STATE
by Ramesh Ponnuru
How government policy discourages people from
having children.
2
4
36
37
44
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
Poetry . . . . . . . . . Lawrence Dugan
Happy Warrior . . . . . . Mark Steyn
NATIONAl ReVIeW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAl ReVIeW, Inc., at 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2012. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to editorial Dept., NATIONAl ReVIeW, 215 lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONAl ReVIeW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. eastern
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Letters
MAY 28 ISSUE; PRINTED MAY 10
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Political Reporter Robert Costa
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz
Robert VerBruggen
Research Director Katherine Connell
Executive Secretary Frances Bronson
Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos
Contributing Editors
Robert H. Bork / 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
David B. Rivkin Jr. / Reihan Salam
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez
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National Affairs Columnist John Fund
News Editor Daniel Foster
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Technical Services Russell Jenkins
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Don’t Be Cross with Her
In “Occupy the Senate” (April 16), Kevin D. Williamson
claims that Elizabeth Warren “was conspicuous in failing to cross herself” at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast
in Boston, “even though the signum crucis is
a common feature of Methodist worship.” But
in my 72 years as a Methodist—during which
time I have attended more than 2,500 services—
I have never seen a layman make the sign of the
cross. Maybe two or three showoff clerics, but never
a layman.
My experience has been largely in North Carolina,
but it also includes three years in D.C., as well as a year
in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard-Epworth Church.
Elizabeth Warren has serious flaws, but not making
the sign of the cross is probably not one of them.
Michael Childs
Via e-mail
Off by Half a Year
In The Week (April 16), The Editors mention that
Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her diamond
jubilee, and claim that in “three more years . . . she
will have the historic distinction of reigning longer
than her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.”
This statement is not quite accurate.
Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and seven
months, from June of 1837 until January of 1901. To
surpass her time on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II—
who ascended to the throne in February of 1952
when her father, George VI, passed away—would
need to serve not until April of 2015, but beyond
September of 2015.
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan
Contributors
Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman
Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier
Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans
Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
James Gardner / David Gelernter
George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart
Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune
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Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber
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Quiet Authority
My wife and I noted this comment in Jonah Goldberg’s “Goliath and David”
(April 30): “As the folks at Hebrew National say, ‘We answer to a higher authority.’”
Would that it were so. My wife and I are two goyim (Anglicans, to be precise)
who dote on Hebrew National’s beef franks, but we have missed that pleasant
theology on the packages for a number of months. We can’t help but wonder
what drove the deletion.
Robert J. Powers
Via e-mail
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
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Letters may be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com.
M AY 28, 2012
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The Week
n If Geronimo had a great-great-great-step-granddaughter once
removed, she’d look like elizabeth Warren.
n If you have heard about the Obama campaign’s social-media
offering “The Life of Julia,” you have likely heard of it via
mockery. The online slide show tracks a woman from age 3 to
age 67, showing how she benefits from big-government policies
and would suffer from GOP cuts (e.g., at age 18, college-bound,
she gets a Pell grant; at age 27, her birth control is covered by
Obamacare). Julia is a lifelong suckling at the teat of the state,
with minimal initiative and commitments: At age 31, she “decides to have a child,” evidently by parthenogenesis (no mate is
indicated). Ominously for her creators, she is also dull as dirt, a
public-service announcement from a Fifties middle-school film
strip. In 2008 Obama was triumphantly marketed as too cool for
school—author, hoop-shooter, man of many cultures. This time
around, if the sheen doesn’t shine, he will have to rely on the
dirty ground game of politics as usual. Buckle down.
ROMAN GENN
n vice President Biden may have been saying that he supports
same-sex marriage, or he may have been saying that the federal
government should treat same-sex couples as married whenever
state law does. Obama strategist David Axelrod insisted on the
second interpretation—as near as we can tell from his own
somewhat confusing statement. The next day Arne Duncan, the
secretary of education, said more forthrightly that he supports
same-sex marriage. The administration as a whole cannot speak
clearly because it favors same-sex marriage but evidently regards open advocacy of it as politically harmful. That’s why a
thread of dishonesty runs through everything it says on the subject. By speaking his characteristic gibberish, Biden may have
emerged as Obama’s perfect spokesman on marriage.
n President Obama talks a big game when it comes to money
and politics, and he was ostensibly so vexed by the Citizens
United decision that, complaining about what he would later call
the “corrosive influence of money in politics,” he took the unusual step of berating the members of the Supreme Court in his
2010 State of the Union address. Yet nobody has taken more
advantage of this allegedly corrosive system than he. While running for president in 2008, Obama abandoned his promise to opt
for public funding of his campaign, freeing himself to raise as
much as possible. That he did, ending up with twice the war
chest of his opponent, John McCain. Nor is he squeaky clean
when drawing the line between presidential business and political campaigning: In late April, the Republican National Com mittee lodged a complaint with the Government Accountability
Office that the president, with his frequent Air Force One trips
to swing states, seemed to have rediscovered his ardor for public funding of campaigns. Given such a record, it will be no surprise to learn that, per a new book on the subject by Brendan J.
Doherty, Barack Obama has already held more reelection
4
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Elizabeth Warren
fundraising events (124) than every elected president since
Richard Nixon—combined (94).
n The Obama administration has settled on “Forward” as its
campaign slogan, which has a nice midcentury-totalitarian ring
to it. As slogans go, it has a mixed history. It is the motto of
Wisconsin, a lovely if lefty state, and the name of a great Jewish
newspaper once edited by Seth Lipsky. Vorwärts is a Marxist
newspaper in Germany that once lost a libel case brought by
Adolf Hitler. (The paper had claimed he was financed by
American Jews and Henry Ford; both claims were false, but one
was more plausible than the other.) In some ways, “Forward”
is the perfect slogan for the Obama administration: Having
brought the country to the edge of fiscal ruination, the president
plainly intends to move forward into the abyss. “Forward” suggests the inevitable march of capital-H History. In November
voters will have a chance to stand athwart it yelling “Stop!”
n The Romney campaign hired Richard Grenell, a former
spokesman for John Bolton, to speak for it on foreign policy.
Some social conservatives complained because Grenell is openly homosexual, others (including Matthew Franck at NATIONAL
RevIeW ONLINe) because he has agitated for same-sex marriage.
Liberals, meanwhile, raised eyebrows at his history of personally abusive tweets toward liberal women. He ended up quitting.
M AY 28, 2012
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THE WEEK
A few principles recommend themselves after the fact. There is
and ought to be no test of chastity for campaign aides. The candidate’s views on policy matter far more than an aide’s, especially when that aide’s work has little to do with the policy in
question. And those who would speak for candidates should be
as judicious on Twitter as elsewhere.
n Journalist David Maraniss, whose new
book, Barack Obama: The Story, was ex cerpted in Vanity Fair, found and interviewed the hitherto unnamed white
girlfriend Obama met in New York City
when he was 22 (she is Genevieve
Cook, an Australian). Obama’s account
in Dreams from My Father showed why
he and a white woman could not stay
together, though to write it he wove in
details of another failed interracial
relationship. Smoothing the crooked
timbers of experience into insights is
an old practice of memoirists. More important are
the insights that Cook and other New York friends of Obama had
into his psyche: “coolness,” “wariness,” “guardedness,” “the
most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his
own identity.” Young Obama was deciding to create himself as a
black American; only so could he feel at home, and advance
politically. Say what you will about the man, he knew his market.
n Regular readers will no doubt have heard the basics about
Texas’s Ted Cruz, who hopes to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison
in the U.S. Senate, from one of his many fans here. But to
review: The 41-year-old Houston native was a Princeton debate
champion, a standout at Harvard Law, and a clerk for Chief
Justice William Rehnquist. He advised George W. Bush’s 2000
campaign on domestic policy and served in his administration in
both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.
Once back in Texas, he was an able and busy solicitor general
from 2003 to 2008, playing pivotal roles in Supreme Court decisions that kept the word “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, affirmed the individual right to bear arms, and held off an attempt
by the International Court of Justice (and the Bush administration) to meddle with Texas’s legal system. To borrow a phrase
from baseball, Cruz is what one might call a five-tool candidate:
He is excellent on the Constitution, on the economy, on social
issues, and on foreign policy, and he possesses the intellect and
rhetorical gifts to combine these views into a cogent and compelling vision. We urge Texans to vote for Ted Cruz in the May
29 primary, to vote for him in a runoff, should there be one, and
to send him to the Senate.
n After 36 years of representing Indiana in the Senate, Dick
Lugar went down to defeat against state treasurer Richard Mourdock. Lugar has served the country well in his six terms, but the
times call for a more consistently conservative voice, and it’s
healthy to remind the brood in Washington that their positions
aren’t lifetime appointments. Lugar didn’t help his cause by
making juvenile attacks against Mourdock—e.g., alleging that
the treasurer was playing hooky by sending staff to certain meetings instead of appearing in person. And Lugar’s refusal to say
during the primary whether he would support Mourdock in the
6
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general election indicated a childish pride beneath a man widely considered a statesman. The Left will call this election an
instance of right-wingery run amok, but Mourdock, soft-spoken
and self-assured, is no bomb thrower. His call to cut spending,
end government support of ethanol, and cast a more suspicious
eye toward Russia resonated with Indiana voters. We congratulate him on his victory.
n From 1986 to 1995, Elizabeth Warren, now a Harvard law
professor and Democratic senatorial candidate in Massachusetts, listed herself on a directory of law-school profs as a
minority, by which she meant a Native American. Warren
explained she did it hoping “that I would be invited to a luncheon . . . with people who are like I am.” Meaning, academic
greasy-pole-climbers looking to game the system? Warren is
at most 1/32 Cherokee: A great-great-great-grandmother was
listed, with what accuracy we do not know, as such on an application for a marriage license in 1894. In the service of social
mobility, institutions should look for smart hires from the
reservation (and the ghetto, and Appalachia). But once the task
is codified into rules and numbers, it becomes liable to lobbying and abuse. Affirmative action is a haggard system, of a
piece with Warren’s dirigiste blue-model worldview. N.B.: If
Warren wins, will she attend next year’s Jefferson/Jackson
Day dinners?
n The April employment numbers, like the March ones, were
disappointing. Non-farm payrolls increased by only 115,000,
and the unemployment rate dropped only because the labor
force shrank. Ever since the economy fell into a pit, there has
been a debate about how much of its trouble is “cyclical” and
how much “structural.” The persistence of high unemployment
is making the debate moot. The longer people stay unemployed,
the more they lose their skills, including the habits of work.
Many of them become demoralized and drop out of the labor
force altogether (an especially dangerous development when
demographic trends are already shrinking our work force). At
that point they become immune to even the best countercyclical
policies—which, in any case, we do not have. The recession
may have officially ended two years ago, but its consequences
will be ramifying for years.
n As it turns out, terrorists are jerks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 conspirators are making a mockery of their trial: refusing to answer questions, grandstanding,
throwing paper airplanes (nice image, guys), etc. At one point,
one of the accused partially disrobed while the others were
flipping through back issues of The Economist. Their lawyer, a
blonde American woman named Cheryl Bormann, wore a fulllength abaya and suggested that members of the prosecution
dress more modestly. (The courtroom drawings do not suggest
that the chief prosecutor, Brigadier General Mark Martins, was
dressed like a tramp.) More than a decade afterwards, the
nation still has not quite figured out whether what happened in
New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11,
2001, was an act of war or a crime spree, and our hybrid
response to it—drones over Pakistan, but lavish due process
for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—is at best schizophrenic. We
had better figure it out; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not the
last of his kind.
M AY 28, 2012
THE WEEK
n The response of most former officials of the Bush administration to the enduring controversy over its interrogation techniques has been to hide under their desks. Not Jose Rodriguez.
The former head of the CIA’s clandestine service has written a
book called Hard Measures defending the interrogations and
has taken his blunt plain-spokenness on a media tour. He
explains how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would recite passages
of the Koran in response to questions, and how sleep deprivation was crucial to breaking him. The terrorist knew we weren’t
going to kill him and counted off the time of the ten-second
pours during waterboarding. Eventually, KSM began to cooperate. If the situation in the aftermath of 9/11 hadn’t been so
urgent, we could have waited for a softer approach to win him
over. But everyone understood the stakes. In his characteristic
way, Rodriguez says top government officials put on their “big
boy” pants to authorize the CIA program. In contrast to the likes
of Nancy Pelosi, who now likes to pretend she never heard of
the program at the time, Rodriguez has never taken them off.
Significant Silences
HANKS to the trials and tribulations of book touring,
I missed my main shot at opining on Julia, the twodimensional darling of the Obama administration.
Still, now that everyone has had his say, more or less, I
would like to dissent, somewhat, from the prevailing conservative reaction to Julia.
The common response is to note how Julia is the perfect symbol of the “cradle-to-grave welfare state.” And
yes, like nearly everyone else on the right, I find the whole
thing poignantly sad, creepy, and more than a little
Orwellian. Julia’s life seems oddly joyless for a woman
who, we are supposed to believe,
has been made happy and fulfilled
by the president’s sagacity and muni ficence.
Well, happy and fulfilled isn’t quite
right, is it? There’s remarkably little
happiness in the story of Julia. “Under President Obama: Julia decides
to have a child” reads the Power Point version of her life. Not exactly
the sort of birth announcement one
breaks out the champagne and cigars for. That has all of the humanity
to it of “The spring wheat harvest in the Ukraine was in
accordance with Year Three of our Five-Year Plan,” or
maybe “It puts the lotion in the basket.”
The vision here is one in which the government keeps
a watchful eye over Julia, a bit like Sauron deep in
Mordor. James Scott in his book Seeing Like a State lays
out how this is simply what states do. They try to make
their populations “legible,” i.e. visible to the state. This
process has manifested itself in all sorts of fascinating
ways, from the widespread imposition of last names
four centuries ago in Europe to the doling out of Social
Security numbers in the United States today. Like a
woman in a one-act play, Julia crosses the state’s field of
view, in the Obama campaign’s telling, as she benefits
from government largesse (without ever seeming to pay
for it).
WWW.BARACKOBAMA.COM/LIFE-OF-JULIA
T
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And this is where I dissent. While all of the complaints
my friends on the right have raised ring true to me, the
creepiest part of “The Life of Julia” isn’t all the places
where the government “sees” Julia, but the long stretches where it doesn’t. From the age of 23, when it provides
her with “free” birth control, to the age of 42, the state is
doing almost “nothing” for her save forcing employers to
pay her as much money as a man would allegedly make
for the same job. Then, at the age of 42, she gets a smallbusiness loan (which presumably she has to pay back—
the outrage!). From then until 65, when she qualifies for
Medicare—as if that will still exist in
Obama’s fiscal universe—she is living in a veritable desert of government indifference.
Ross Douthat is absolutely correct
when he writes in the New York
Times that, as a policy matter, “The
Life of Julia” is “essentially a defense of existing arrangements no
matter their effectiveness or sustainability.” We cannot afford to give
Julia the life Obama promises without reforming or eliminating the very
things Obama promises.
But that is how we conservatives look at this thing. If
President Obama—who is something like president-forJulia’s-life—has his way, future progressives will one day
look back at these long lacunas where poor Julia is left to
swim the social-Darwinist currents without the government’s looking out for her, and shudder.
As the solicitor general demonstrated in his arguments before the Supreme Court defending Obamacare,
the people behind “The Life of Julia” cannot even articulate a “limiting principle” on the scope and depth of
government’s “help.” In other words, the terrifying part
of “The Life of Julia” is how it spells out for progressives
just how much more work needs to be done.
—JONAH GOLDBERG
M AY 28, 2012
THE WEEK
n Liberals have been attacking House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) as a bad Catholic because his proposals supposedly depart from his church’s social teaching. In
advance of a lecture he was giving at Georgetown, almost 90
members of the faculty wrote a letter purporting to instruct him
in that teaching. In his lecture, Ryan took the criticisms head-on.
His work in government, he said, is a good-faith attempt to apply
Catholic teachings, not those of Ayn Rand, which he has recently criticized. His budget does not “gut” programs that help the
poor, as the letter claimed, but rather reforms programs that are
supposed to help the poor but often fail at that task. (Ryan might
have noted that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are not
statistically different from those for people who have no insurance.) Georgetown has since announced that HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius, who resisted all restrictions on abortion
when she was governor of Kansas and now wishes to force
Catholic institutions to violate their consciences by providing
insurance coverage for abortion drugs, will be a commencement
speaker this year. Faithful Catholics may agree or disagree with
Ryan about the best way for a society to help the poor. Sebelius,
on the other hand, does not merely disagree with the Catholic
Church on how to protect the right to life of unborn children; she
disagrees with the goal itself. Which goes some way toward
explaining why liberal Catholics on the Georgetown faculty, as
elsewhere, are being taken less and less seriously by their coreligionists.
n Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) is working on his own version of the DREAM Act, which deals with young people who
were brought to this country illegally as minors. The previous
version of the bill would put them on a path to citizenship if
they went to college or joined the military. Rubio’s bill would
merely give them legal status. The original bill is a dress
rehearsal for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants generally. Rubio’s seems designed to be a precedent for an alternative favored by many Republicans: no path to citizenship, just
legal status. But the offer of legal status sounds just as bad in
most respects as the offer of citizenship, and in some respects
worse. Offering legal status to yesterday’s illegal immigrants
and their children is a magnet for tomorrow’s. And we should
not want to have a large group of second-class laborers without the full rights of Americans. The political logic is also
questionable. Will Hispanic voters really be attracted to a party
that says it wants more Hispanics to work in this country, but
not to participate in its politics? Our enthusiasm for Senator
Rubio is a matter of record, and we appreciate his evident
desire to overcome conservative divisions. The bill as de scribed improves on the original by withholding legal status
from the minors’ family members. But from the sound of it,
Rubio should stay at the drawing board.
n In April, Leviathan left its natural home in the big city, beat
down the dusty track, and declared the farm at the end of it to
be an anachronism. The Department of Labor proposed to
prohibit those under 16 from working in the “storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials”—i.e.,
doing almost anything. It also sought to replace 4-H and
Future Farmers of America safety classes with a governmentrun training course. Furious critics warned that the move
would end the operation of family farms and ranches as we
10
|
have known them. This pushback was ultimately enough to
convince the Labor Department to reverse its position, but
the original intention to intervene raises some questions
nonetheless. First among these is, “Why act?” If there is a crisis with what is emotively termed “child labor” on America’s
family-owned farms, then it has somehow managed to escape
the notice of almost everybody. The average age of a farmer
is now 55, and those on the ground explain that it’s much
more difficult to get people enthused if they come to the profession late. In America we used to leave these decisions up
to parents.
n Al Armendariz, a muckety-muck at the Environmental
Protection Agency’s Texas operation, has resigned after
video surfaced of him explaining the EPA’s approach to
the energy industry: “Like when the Romans conquered
the villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into little villages in Turkish towns and they’d find the first five guys
they saw and crucify them.” Armendariz protested that the
remarks did not reflect EPA practices, and the White
House press secretary echoed him. The fact is that the EPA
does attempt to make examples of companies that come
into its crosshairs. Armendariz’s office accused Range
Resources, the Texas firm that first showed the potential of
drilling for gas in the Marcellus shale, of polluting groundwater, and put it through nearly two years
of legal hell and ghastly expense before
a federal court threw out the case as
baseless, with the judge pointedly
suggesting that the EPA might want to
have some evidence before bringing
similar actions in the future. Whether
they want it or not, those who seek more
power for regulatory agencies are asking
for more crucifixions.
n In 2008, Candidate Obama said he would not “circumvent
state laws” permitting the medical use of marijuana, because
his Justice Department would focus on violent crime and terrorism instead. Yet the feds have shut down 200 dispensaries
in California alone during the Obama years, provoking complaints from Nancy Pelosi (D., San Francisco), as well as Ron
Paul and Barney Frank. Medical marijuana is a small-bore
issue that commands the attention only of afflicted (and putatively afflicted) patients and a handful of lawmakers. Voters
regularly support it in state-level referendums, but that does
not budge the inertia of Washington. Two baby-boomer presidents have come and gone, without changing matters. Barack
Obama, the post-boomer, who admitted to non-medical pot
use in his first memoir, seems content to follow in their footsteps.
n One might say that Occupy and the Tea Party are opposites.
The latter has a particular talent for being labeled as a hate
group despite all evidence to the contrary, and the former a gift
for adding criminal acts to an ever-growing police blotter without its reputation being tarnished one whit. On May Day,
Occupy added a few more “isolated incidents” to its sordid
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THE WEEK
tally. In Seattle and San Francisco, members of the movement’s “Black Bloc” smashed and paint-bombed the windows
of stores, cars, and a police station; while in New York City,
fellow criminals smashed and seized journalists’ cameras and
sent white powder and threatening letters to three Manhattanbased Wells Fargo branches. But the Occupiers saved the best
for Ohio, in which state five self-described members of Occupy Cleveland planned to blow up a bridge in Cuyahoga Valley
National Park with C-4 that they had obtained from an FBI
infiltrator. Ed Needham, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street,
complained that the alleged plot “goes against the very fabric
of the Occupy Movement.” The Cleveland Five disagreed, participating vigorously in their local chapter and arguing that
their blow would be struck for the “99 percent.” One of the
bombers, Anthony Hayne, signed the lease for a warehouse in
which a group of Occupy Cleveland protesters lived; another,
Brandon “Scabby” Baxter, had been arrested protesting foreclosures and was the architect of the “Occupy the Heart Festi -
marking bike lanes, promote “urban gardening,” and lobby for
increased taxes on soda and cigarettes. The principle at work
seems to be that everything has something to do with health, and
promoting health is the federal government’s job, so the federal
government can do whatever it wants. Dang, this Obamacare is
better than the Commerce Clause! But never mind the Rube
Goldberg chain of reasoning, the slush-fund aspect, and even the
budget deficit. Why on earth is the federal government sterilizing dogs in Tennessee? Answer: Because it makes the feds look
generous, while the state gets a “free” program. The only point
in sending taxpayers’ money on a detour through Washington is
to obscure whose pockets it comes from and who is responsible
for spending it.
n If the National Endowment for the Arts is to exist at all, it
should support worthy programs such as broadcasts of the
Metropolitan Opera. But the agency recently announced 2012
grants that will cut support for these traditional high-culture
If he didn’t spike the football, President Obama at least
twirled it on the ground in the back of the end zone over
his killing of Osama bin Laden.
val” event; and a third, Josh Stafford, registered “Occupy” as
his profession on Facebook. Radicals used to decry “the violence inherent in the system.” It certainly seems to be inherent
in their movements.
n Soon after the Trayvon Martin killing garnered national
headlines, a variety of activists advocated vigilante justice. In
particular, filmmaker Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was
George Zimmerman’s address, and the New Black Panther
Party offered a $10,000 “dead or alive” bounty. Zimmerman
himself remains unharmed—and yet around the country,
though the media have been a little shy about reporting them,
a variety of incidents reveal that the urge toward private retribution remains strong. In Gainesville, Fla., a group of five to
eight black men allegedly jumped a white man who was walking home and beat him while yelling, “Trayvon.” In Oak Park,
Ill., two black teenagers reportedly attacked a white teenager;
police say one of the perpetrators claimed he was upset by the
Martin case. In Toledo, Ohio, a 78-year-old white man was apparently beaten by a group of black youths who said, “This is
for Trayvon” during the assault. In Mobile, Ala., an ongoing,
racially charged neighborhood dispute culminated in the brutal
beating of Matthew Owens, who is white, by a large group of
black men, one of whom reportedly announced, “Now that’s
justice for Trayvon” as he was leaving. The legal system
should dispense to all these thugs a lesson in what justice really means.
n The presidential campaign’s dog days continued with a report
from House Republicans that Nashville’s health department,
which received a $7.5 million Obamacare grant, spent part of its
budget on free spaying and neutering of pets. The rationale:
Neutering would reduce the population of stray dogs, which
deter people from jogging, and would thereby improve their
health. Other localities used Obamacare money to post signs
12
|
efforts and refocus on more modern initiatives. These include a
video game based on Thoreau’s writings (no word if it’s singleplayer); “Power Poetry,” an application that encourages
teenagers to write poems via text message; and an “augmented
reality” computer game called “HERadventure” featuring a
black science-fiction heroine. An NEA representative explained
that “as a federal agency . . . it’s imperative that we assume a
leadership role and help move the field forward.” We would prefer “upward,” if we trusted the bureaucracy to know which way
that is.
n If he didn’t spike the football, President Obama at least
twirled it on the ground in the back of the end zone over his
killing of Osama bin Laden. He deserves praise for ordering
the raid, but he couldn’t help overplaying his hand. In an
Obama reelection ad, Bill Clinton emphasized the political
downside for the president had the raid gone wrong, as if that
were a more important consideration than the fate of the
SEALs on the mission. In a bit of cheap point-scoring, the ad
questioned whether Romney would have ordered the hit. The
president capped the week of none-too-subtle messaging with
a trip to Afghanistan on the anniversary of the terror leader’s
death. He signed a security agreement with the Afghans that is
an important step toward a long-term relationship with them,
while giving a speech to the nation that sounded as if victory is
already at hand. But the rapidity of our drawdown risks the real
gains we’ve made on the ground. In the case of the war, the
president would be well advised to focus on achieving success
before boasting about it.
n Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu has just mounted a political
coup that greatly strengthens his position as Israeli prime minister. He sprang his first surprise by calling for a general election to be held in September, though one was not due until next
year. Polls have been showing that his Likud party would gain
M AY 28, 2012
seats. One good trick deserves another, however, and behind
the scenes, Netanyahu had struck a deal to take an opposition
party, Kadima, into the governing coalition. In the old days
Ariel Sharon had split Kadima away from Likud, and it makes
for national unity that they come together again. Kadima’s
leader, and now deputy prime minister, is Shaul Mofaz, Iranian
born, and a level-headed military man. The proposed general
election will now not take place. A number of domestic reforms are in the air, but more obviously this is a government
much better placed to carry the country with whatever decision
emerges concerning Iran’s nuclear program.
DAN KITWOOD/PA WIRE/AP
n On one side: Chen Guangcheng, the charismatic, blind, selftaught lawyer and protester of forced abortions; his family and
friends; a network of dissidents, in China and abroad. On the
other: the officials of Shandong Province who put him in jail,
then house arrest; the goons who threatened and beat him and
his loved ones if they tried to move; behind them, the might of
the largest despotism in history. Last month Chen managed to
scale the wall of his house, breaking his foot in the process, and
make his way to the American embassy in Beijing, on the eve
of a visit from Secretaries Clinton and Geithner. The embassy
let Chen out, under a deal whereby he could live in China
unmolested; then Chen feared the deal would not be honored;
a new deal apparently will let him study overseas (New York
University is offering Chen a berth). What awaits his helpers is
repression, what the Chinese, with grim understatement, call
“settling of accounts” after “the autumn harvest.” The pettiness and cruelty of the Chinese state is matched only by the
bravery of those who resist it. Lincoln said it long ago: “They
are the two principles that have stood face to face from the
beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one
is the common right of humanity and the other is the divine
right of kings.”
n British prime minister David Cameron is suffering a bad
case of midterm blues. His poll numbers have never been
lower. He and his circle of friends and advisers are widely
mocked as “posh boys.” The government is pursuing left-wing
economic and social policies designed to placate its coalition
partners from the minority Liberal Democrats, while at
the same time bound to drive Conservative backbenchers
to protest. Local elections
have thrown up condign punishment, as is only to be ex pected. Out of about 5,000
contested council seats, the
Tories lost more than 400,
about a third of those they previously held. Numbers for the
Liberal Democrats are even
more dire. Making these huge
gains, the opposition Labour
party claims to be recovering
the electorate’s trust. Against
the trend, Boris Johnson was
reelected mayor of London,
but this may alarm Cameron
as much as console him. Out spoken, consistent, and witty
as well, Mayor Johnson is undoubtedly the most popular
Conservative in the country, and there is much muttering that
he ought to be prime minister. Coalition government is looking
ever more like a poisoned chalice.
n Pity poor Portugal. It hit its peak five centuries ago and ever
since has grown increasingly marginal in Europe, geographically and politically. Once a great sea power, it clung to a few
of its colonies well into the 20th century, but now even those
are gone. And while EU membership provided an initial boost,
membership in the euro and the single market is becoming
more of a straitjacket than a lifeline. Meanwhile those old
African colonies are dripping with oil wealth. The result,
writes the British journalist Allister Heath: “Five hundred
years after Vasco de Gama first landed in Mozambique, impoverished Portuguese are turning up in droves, begging for
work permits. . . . 100,000 Portuguese have moved to Angola,
four times more than the traffic in the opposite direction.”
(Angola has about twice Portugal’s population.) From prosperous Western economy to supplier of cheap labor to the
Third World: They did always say the EU would transform the
country.
n Delegates to the convention of the United Methodist
Church recently voted down two proposals to divest from several American companies that supply the Israeli military. A
few weeks earlier, speaking for the Episcopal Church, its presiding bishop said the church does not endorse divestment
even from Israel itself. Can it be that the leadership of the
mainline Protestant churches is finally catching up with the
faithful in the pews? Most American Christians support Israel.
For decades, church elites have talked over them, blithely
mouthing faculty-club rhetoric about apartheid and waving
the flag of the DBS (divestment, boycott, sanctions) movement against the only reliable democracy in the Middle East.
But the persistence of the quiet majority appears to be paying
off.
n “A Rose in the Desert” was how Vogue described the
“glamorous, young, and very chic” Asma Assad in a fawning
profile of the Syrian dictator’s wife last March. The timing of
the piece proved embarrassing for the magazine, as it coincided with the beginning of Bashar Assad’s ongoing slaughter
of Syrians, which has so far claimed the lives of well over
9,000 men, women, and children. An initially defensive Vogue
(a senior editor insisted the piece was “a balanced view of the
first lady”) later scrubbed the 3,200-word article from its website without explanation. In an interview with NPR last
month, the author of the piece, Joan Juliet Buck, mused that in
retrospect she wished a different title had been chosen for the
piece and that it was “horrifying to have been near people like
that.” Judging from the piece, any horror Ms. Buck felt at the
time was evidently overcome in admiration for Asma’s “longlimbed beauty,” her “Syrian-silk Louboutin tote,” and her professed commitment to engaging Syrian children in “active
citizenship.” Appropriately, Vogue’s attempt to quietly erase
its shameful paean to the Assads has been thwarted by an
employee of the Syrian state-run news agency who has
reprinted the article on a fan-page titled “In Bashar Al-Assad
We TRUST.”
13
THE WEEK
n Al-Qaeda spokesman Azzam al-Amriki, a.k.a. Adam
Pearlman of Riverside County, Calif., was terribly upset about
MSNBC’s firing of Keith Olbermann. (Keith Olbermann, if
you have forgotten, is a sports commentator who used to shout
incoherently about politics on MSNBC.) “I used to think that
MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit,” he wrote, “but
it has lately fired two of the most famous journalists—Keith
Olbermann and Octavia Nasr the Lebanese.” In the case of
Octavia Nasr, Mr. Pearlman has confused MSNBC and CNN,
which is admittedly easy to do, but otherwise he shows that he
is every bit as good a media critic as he is a political analyst.
Could somebody get this guy a talk show? Or a drone?
n Dinosaurs get a bad rap. Their very name connotes obsolescence and fustiness; in abbreviated form, it is a pejorative term
for Democrats who can do math. Now British scientists are
blaming dinosaurs for global warming—not just today, by having had the poor judgment to rot into a rich brew of hydrocarbons, but in their own era, through the humbler route of
flatulence, which filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
Still, the poor extinct beasts deserve some sympathy, because
Chinese researchers have found that they were plagued by large,
parasitic insects—or as the Register, a British technology website, puts it, “Dinosaurs were DRAINED of blood by GIGANTIC HORROR FLEAS.” That excuses a little anti-social
behavior now and then, doesn’t it?
EUROPE
France Turns Left
HOLLANDE has become the newly elected president of France more by luck than by any quality he might
possess. Almost anonymous, he has no ministerial experience. His platform nonetheless raised expectations mightily
that he would be able to find employment and entitlements
where Nicolas Sarkozy had failed to do so. Voters could conclude that there are jobs for all, and that everyone richer than
they would pay more taxes. France, Hollande likes to promise,
is not doomed to austerity, because he still believes that socialism is the magic formula for growth, and can be ordered up,
F
14
RANçOIS
|
François Hollande
much as King Canute ordered the waves. (The difference is
Canute got the joke.)
When originally elected, Sarkozy proposed what he called
rupture, meaning reform of the centralized powers of the state so
traditional in France. Nothing of the kind then took place. In the
campaign for reelection, this habitually competitive and ambitious man found himself unable to claim convincing credit for
achievements. Outbursts of spleen made him seem to be reacting to the programs of rivals rather than promoting his own.
Close on his heels was Marine Le Pen of the National Front, and
he could not make up his mind whether to condemn her or to
steal her thunder for the sake of obtaining her party’s votes.
Amid mutual recriminations, the Right is now split between
Sarkozy’s conservative party and the National Front. Add
together the National Front and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s outright
Bolshevik party, and the extremes of Right and Left have a third
of the votes cast.
Poor and insincere as Sarkozy’s campaign was, in reality the
Euro-crisis left him without a chance. No present head of government can hope to win an election in a Europe irrevocably tied
to the single currency and the political structure erected in
Brussels to enforce it. In the gathering climate of economic and
political disaster, Sarkozy is the eleventh in a succession of
officeholders in one nation after another to go down in electoral
defeat.
Germany sets the terms for Europe, and François Hollande
now has to discover whether Chancellor Angela Merkel, the
architect of austerity, is willing to permit a forlorn attempt at
socialist-induced growth. She had let it be known that she wanted the like-minded Sarkozy to win. But then she herself has
already lost regional elections, and until and unless something
changes with Brussels and the euro, she too is likely to join the
lengthening list of rejected European officeholders. European
elites appear to be willing to give up almost anything except for
their precious, disastrous euro.
M AY 28, 2012
MICHEL SPINGLER/AP
n In the Old West, or at least in old Westerns, bad guys used
to fire their Colt .45s at an enemy’s feet while snarling,
“Dance, pardner!” In today’s West, the guns and the dances
are more sophisticated—at least in Clark Fork, Idaho, where a
man said to have been using drugs (which seems entirely plausible) pointed an AR-15 semiautomatic at another man and
ordered him to moonwalk. Not quite a Deliverance-level
ordeal, perhaps, but scary nonetheless. The Bonner County
Daily Bee’s conscientious reporter explains: “Late singer
Michael Jackson popularized the moonwalk dance move,
although a slew of other entertainers—from Cab Calloway
and Ronnie Hawkins to David Bowie and Dick Van Dyke—
have been credited for using a variation of the move.” The
perp told police he was using an Airsoft pellet gun, but folks
in Idaho know the difference, so he faced a stiff sentence until
his victim asked that charges be conditionally dismissed (he
remains jailed for violating his probation). Should have tried
a dance-craze defense.
base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 5/8/2012 1:54 PM Page 1
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The GOP and the Latino Vote
Good news: Republicans can do what they think is right
BY SEAN TRENDE
UndITS routinely claim that the
GOP is electorally doomed unless it competes more effectively for the Latino vote. The
Latino population is growing so quickly,
analysts tell us, that the United States will
become a minority-majority country by
2040 (or 2050; estimates vary), meaning
that the GOP could not possibly win an
election while receiving only a third of the
Latino vote and 10 percent of the black
vote.
Almost invariably, this sort of analysis
ends with a declaration that the Repub lican party must abandon its supposed
opposition to immigration reform, as well
as its support for voter-Id measures and
Arizona-style immigration laws, and es sentially adopt some version of the
democratic position on these and a host
of other issues.
Much of that analysis is flawed. For the
GOP to be competitive, it is neither necessary nor sufficient that it change its
position on immigration policies. There
are several reasons for this.
P
Mr. Trende is senior elections analyst for Real Clear
Politics.
16
|
First, Latino support for democratic
policies on immigration is overstated. In
2008, only 46 percent of Latino voters told
exit pollsters that illegal immigration was
either “very” or “extremely” important to
them and that they voted democratic. In
other words, a majority of self-described
Latinos either thought that illegal immigration was fairly unimportant or thought
that it was important and voted Republican.
Indeed, polls of Latino voters this cycle
have consistently shown that for them—
as for other voters—the most important
issue is jobs. Immigration rates low on the
list of issues they care about.
So why don’t Republicans perform better with Latino voters? The answer is simple: income. In 2008, Barack Obama won
73 percent of Latino voters earning less
than $15,000 a year, and 57 percent of
similarly situated white voters. (Although
many Latinos are white, since “Latino”
represents an ethnicity rather than a race,
for simplicity’s sake I’ll use “white” as
shorthand for “non-Hispanic white.”)
Among voters making $100,000 to
$150,000 a year, 59 percent of Latinos
and 42 percent of whites went for
Obama—a sizable difference, to be sure,
but much less than the 24 points between
Obama’s share of Latino and white voters
overall.
In 2004 the pattern was even more pronounced. Among voters earning less
than $15,000 a year, John Kerry won 58
percent of Latinos and 57 percent of
whites—a nearly even split. Among those
with annual incomes over $100,000, his
share of both the Latino vote and the
white vote dropped—to 50 and 37 percent, respectively.
In other words, Latino voters vote a lot
more like white voters when you control
for income. The difference is that there
are more poor Latino voters than poor
white voters, which creates the appearance of a larger divide between the groups
when one looks only at the aggregated
numbers.
But as the character of the Latino
population changes from immigrant to
second- and third-generation American, it
should grow wealthier, and the income
gap between Latinos and whites should
close. This should, in turn, help to close
the gap in voting patterns. To be sure, a
gap of ten or fifteen percentage points
between white and Latino voters is nothing to sneeze at. But neither does it spell
ruin for the Republicans.
Second, we should question whether
the Latino population will really grow as
fast as many suggest. Consider this: The
United States would still be 46 percent
white if it absorbed every man, woman,
and child from Mexico.
Of course, it will never do that. Every
wave of immigration to our country—the
Scotch-Irish in the late 18th century, the
Irish and Germans in the mid-19th, and
the great influx of southern and eastern
European immigrants that washed my
great-grandparents ashore at the turn of
the last century—subsided almost as
suddenly as it started.
At some point, most of the people in a
given country who want to come to the
United States have come, and most of
those who’d rather stay put have stayed
put. As they did in the European countries
that sent immigrants to America over the
past 200 years, standards of living in
Mexico are rising. Mexicans increasingly
enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, a fact that
greatly reduces their incentive to move
here.
So it should come as no great surprise
that, according to the Pew Research
M AY 28, 2012
ROMAN GENN
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center, immigration to this country from
Mexico largely stopped in the past few
years, and last year there was probably
more out-migration to Mexico than immigration from Mexico. part of this is doubtless due to the weak economy. But it is
also the continuation of a trend over the
past few decades. The rate of growth of the
latino-immigrant population has declined
substantially since peaking in the 1980s;
the Mexican-born population grew by
almost 200 percent in the 1980s, but in the
first decade of the 21st century that figure
had fallen to roughly 25 percent.
As latino immigration to the u.S.
drops off, the latino population will
continue to grow. But it will increasingly
consist of second- and third-generation
Americans. These voters will likely be
not just wealthier but more assimilated.
In a recent pew poll, 62 percent of firstgeneration latinos described their ethnicity by their country of origin, and only 8
percent described themselves as American. Among third-generation latinos,
only 28 percent self-described by country
of ancestry, while 48 percent self-described
as American. only 34 percent of foreignborn latinos consider themselves “a typical American,” compared with 66 percent
of third- and later-generation latinos.
So the first and second points fit together hand in glove. latino immigration will
likely drop off in the coming decades, and
increasingly the latino population will be
born in the u.S.A. That, in turn, means the
latino population will be increasingly
assimilated, increasingly Americanized,
and increasingly likely to vote Republican.
The third and final point is that we tend
to observe more heavily racialized voting
in states with large minority populations.
And indeed, as the Democratic party has
seen its base shift to non-white voters,
we’ve seen white voters increasingly vote
Republican.
In 1982—the first year for readily
available exit-poll data—congressional
Democrats won 54 percent of the white
vote, a figure roughly the same as their
share of the overall national vote. In 2010,
they won only 38 percent of the white
vote, while their share of the overall
national vote was nine points higher.
If we assume a nearly all-white electorate prior to 1952, that probably represents the worst performance for any major
party among white voters in congressional elections since 1822. Republicans
18
|
could have lost every latino voter in the
country in 2010 and still won a slight plurality of the vote for congress.
Arizona offers a case in point. There
Governor Jan Brewer embraced a controversial immigration law that many suggested would alienate the state’s latino
population. And it probably did. In 2008,
John Mccain won over 40 percent of the
state’s latino vote. Brewer won 28 percent in 2010. But Brewer ran ahead of
Mccain overall, because she won over 60
percent of the state’s white population. In
other words, while the state’s policies
might have alienated latino voters, they
were popular among white voters, who
shifted toward the Gop.
As the first two points suggest, in the
long term the disparity between the white
and the latino vote will become less of an
issue as the category “latino” loses its
salience. Again, there is historical precedent for this; as recently as 1986, the nomination of Justice Scalia to the Supreme
court was seen as a bid to shore up the
“Italian vote.” But very few analysts saw
such motives at work in Justice Alito’s
nomination in 2005, in large part because
the Italian vote as such had disappeared.
Eventually, so will the “latino vote.”
until then, in the short to medium term,
any loss of latino support that Re publicans experience because of their
stances on immigration could well be
offset by an increase in their share of the
white vote.
of course, none of this goes to the question of what policies Republicans ought
to adopt. I myself am somewhat partial
to more liberal immigration laws. But
we should always bear in mind that, in a
large, diverse country, every move to gain
one member of a political coalition usually alienates another member.
Republicans (and Democrats), then,
should build their immigration policies
not out of concern for a future coalition
that likely will never materialize. They
should, instead, simply do what they
think is right.
“I lied to you about having a lot of money.”
Beyond
Efficiency
It’s time to make the moral case
for free markets
BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
couplE of years ago I wrote a
book called “The Battle: How
the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government
Will Shape America’s Future.” I made
what I thought was a very clever observation: that America is a “70 percent
nation” when it comes to free enterprise.
In virtually every survey on the matter,
about seven in ten Americans say they
believe free enterprise beats all other economic systems, even during recessions.
In response to this, several even cleverer reviewers pointed out an incon venient truth: Americans may vow a
monogamous love for free enterprise, but
they have a huge fidelity problem. Tart up
a little social democracy and parade it
front of most Americans, and they’re all
hands.
For example, in a July 2009 cBS
News/New York Times poll, 64 percent of
Americans said they thought the government should provide health insurance for
everyone. Similarly, a February 2011
NBc News/Wall Street Journal poll
asked a thousand Americans whether cutting Social Security was an acceptable
way to reduce the deficit. To this question, 77 percent of respondents said that it
was either mostly unacceptable or totally
unacceptable.
This is a paradox, but not a mystery.
on one hand, citizens say they love free
enterprise. on the other hand, they sure
wouldn’t mind a new government-funded
rec center and maybe a few free prescription drugs, and politicians eagerly
oblige.
Most people hardly have the time to
consider the inconsistency between these
two sentiments. people leading lives
filled with work, church socials, and soccer practices don’t have much opportu-
A
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise
Institute and author of the new book The Road to
Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free
Enterprise (Basic Books).
M AY 28, 2012
nity to contemplate the potential damage
that each new government act—each tiny
encroachment on their freedom—could
cause.
This is America’s road to serfdom. No
death squads or goose-stepping thugs,
just one little compromise after another
to the free-enterprise system. Each one
sounds sort of appealing, and no single
one is enough to bring down the system.
But add them all up, and here we are, on
our way to becoming Greece.
Don’t believe it? Consider: In 1938,
when my own organization, the Ameri can Enterprise Institute, was founded to
fight the growth of government, government spending at all levels (federal, state,
and local) amounted to about 15 percent
of GDP. By 1980 it was 30 percent. Today it is 36 percent. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, by
2038 it will be 50 percent.
Most Americans know something is
wrong—which is why 81 percent are dissatisfied with the way the nation is being
governed, according to a 2011 Gallup
poll. But they rarely notice the discrepancy between their free-enterprise values
and the statism they are getting.
What’s the solution? How do we help
them understand that unless they actively
choose free enterprise, they will ultimately get big government? Some people say
they need to hear a more forceful argument than ever before about the material
superiority of free enterprise over the
alternatives. In other words, capitalism’s
advocates need to yell louder that free
enterprise makes us richer than statism.
Master the numbers, make some snazzy
PowerPoint charts, show Americans the
watertight evidence on fiscal consolidation, and the light bulbs will finally go on.
But that strategy doesn’t work. Dataladen material arguments for free enterprise have been tried again and again.
They have failed to stem the tide of big
government.
There’s only one kind of argument that
will shake people awake: a moral one.
A lot of people are reluctant to talk
about morals, or to make a moral case for
anything in politics and policy. We’re
willing to talk about principles, perhaps.
Values, maybe. But morals? Even for
many conservatives, morality evokes
unpleasant memories of the “culture
wars” of the 1990s. As a result, many
who believe in free enterprise steer clear
of all moral arguments.
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This is a mistake and a missed opportunity. A great deal of research shows that
all people demand a system that is morally legitimate, not just efficient. Research
in fields from neuroscience to social psychology has shown that moral arguments
are more powerful and persuasive, and
are processed by the brain more quickly,
than material arguments. That, in a nutshell, is why your bulletproof argument
about the national debt will always lose
when pitted against a an anecdote about a
family living in a dumpster because their
welfare benefits were taken away.
So here’s the question: What makes
people regard an economic system as
moral?
One answer comes from University of
Virginia social psychologist Jonathan
Haidt, author of the best-selling book
TheRighteousMind:WhyGoodPeople
Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Through extensive surveys and sophisticated statistical analysis, Haidt has found
that the perceived moral legitimacy of a
person or system depends in no small part
on an issue conservatives generally try to
steer clear of: fairness.
Indeed, fairness seems like a sure loser
for conservatives, which is why they tend
to avoid the idea. Some dismiss it as hopelessly subjective, even childish. Even
Saint Milton (Friedman) argued that
“‘fairness’ is not an objectively determined concept. . . . ‘Fairness,’ like
‘needs,’ is in the eye of the beholder.”
President Obama is so sure that conservatives will scatter at the first mention
of fairness that he brandishes the term
like a magic talisman.
In his 2012 State of the Union address,
he used the term “fair” or “fairness”
seven times. He used it 14 times in his
Osawatomie, Kansas, speech a month
earlier.
Here is an example, from an address at
the University of Michigan in January of
this year. “When it comes to paying our
fair share, I believe we should follow the
Buffett rule: If you make more than $1
million a year . . . then you should pay a
tax rate of at least 30 percent. On the
other hand, if you decide to go into a less
lucrative profession, if you decide to
become a teacher, . . . if you decide to go
into public service, if you decide to go
into a helping profession, if you make
less than $250,000 a year—which 98 percent of Americans do—then your taxes
shouldn’t go up.”
20
|
There are several legitimate objections
to this plan. In America today, the top
5 percent of earners pay 59 percent of
federal income taxes while earning 35
percent of the income. If this is not fair
yet, when will it be? When the top 5 percent pay 75 percent? One hundred percent? In addition, one might bridle at the
president’s use of the expression “helping
profession” to exclude business, as if
creating private-sector jobs didn’t help
others.
But the biggest objection should be to
the president’s implicit definition of fairness. The Left today believes in redistributive fairness, in which economic
rewards are made more nearly equal, and
it considers income inequality to be
inherently unfair. An alternative definition—a superior one, in my view—is
meritocraticfairness, in which reward is
attached to merit. This second definition
defines forced equality as unfair because,
as Aristotle pointed out, the worst form
of inequality is to try to make unequal
things equal.
Which definition do most Americans
believe is correct? Social surveys again
provide evidence of the answer.
For example, the 2006 World Values
Survey, which polled a large sample of
Americans, asked respondents to consider this scenario: “Imagine two secretaries, of the same age, doing practically
the same job. One finds out that the other
earns considerably more than she does.
The better paid secretary, however, is
quicker, more efficient and more reliable
at her job. In your opinion, is it fair or not
fair that one secretary is paid more than
the other?” To this question, 89 percent
answered that it was fair to pay the better
secretary more, while 11 percent said it
was unfair.
This result is typical. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, fairness means rewarding merit, not spreading
the wealth around. This is consistent, of
course, with America’s founding ideals.
In his first inaugural address, Thomas
Jefferson laid out his vision of “a wise
and frugal government, which shall re strain men from injuring one another,
shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take from the
mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Most of our ancestors weren’t as eloquent as Jefferson, but their actions spoke
even louder than his words. If you are
descended from immigrants, ask yourself: Why did they come to America? To
find a fairer system of forced income
redistribution? Unlikely. Rather, they
came in search of a system that would
reward their hard work, innovation, and
ambition.
Those who dispute the president’s
argument for redistributive fairness need
to understand that the issue at hand is not
a disagreement over the tax code. It is a
clash of visions about America. Is the
United States, while imperfect, still an
opportunity society where merit is rewarded? Or is our system simply gamed
to heap unearned riches on the 1 percent?
If the former, then the president’s definition of fairness is wrong and should be
vigorously rebutted—not with arguments
about the efficiency of capitalism, but
with arguments about the fairness of the
free-enterprise system. And conservatives should work for an even better
opportunity society and even fairer—
more moral—policies.
They should denounce the policies of
the current welfare state not just as inefficient, but as unfair and immoral. A tax
code riddled with special deals for crony
corporations is unfair. It is unfair to bail
out companies and individuals who made
bad decisions and took foolish risks.
There is nothing fair about the fact that
bureaucrats get better pay and benefits
than private-sector workers. Most unfair
of all is the theft we are perpetrating
on future generations with our ruinous
national debt.
Still, the biggest challenge is not to
beat the hard political Left on the issue of
fairness. It is to resolve the Santa-state
paradox, which finds citizens claiming to
want small, restrained government but
welcoming virtually any public spending
on offer. We must somehow persuade our
friends and neighbors to resist the allure
of welfare-state growth. Moral arguments about fairness are the only chance
we have to meet this daunting challenge.
As the early self-help icon Dale Carnegie instructed his readers in HowtoWin
FriendsandInfluencePeople, one must
“appeal to the nobler motives” of others.
Conservatives, unfortunately, have done
just the opposite.
Privately, conservatives are guided by
lofty ideals on economic questions.
While they generally accept the need for
a safety net, they celebrate capitalism
because they believe that succeeding on
M AY 28, 2012
merit, being able to rise out of poverty
through hard work and virtue, and having
control over one’s life are essential to
happiness and fulfillment. But in public
debate, they often fall back on capitalism’s superiority to other systems solely
in terms of productivity and economic
efficiency.
This dogged reliance on material arguments is a gift to statists. It allows them to
paint free-enterprise advocates as selfish
and motivated only by money. Average
Americans are thus faced with two lousy
choices in the current policy debates: the
moral Left versus the materialistic Right.
The public, or a substantial part of it,
hears a heartfelt redistributionist argument and knows it leads to the type of
failed public policies that are all around
us today. But sometimes it feels like the
alternative comes from amoral conservatives who were raised by wolves and
don’t understand basic decency.
No wonder the general public is paralyzed into inaction, even when dissatisfaction with government is at an all-time
high. There just doesn’t seem to be a
good alternative to the “statist quo,” and
as a result the country is slipping toward
a system that few people actually like.
Most Americans, for instance, seem to
intuitively understand the urgent need for
entitlement reform. But do you seriously
expect Grandma to sit idly by and let
free-marketeers fiddle with her Medicare
so her great-grandkids can get a slightly
better mortgage rate? Not a chance—at
least, not without a moral reason (and
good policies to back it up).
Will an appeal to the nobler motives
work? Will voters agree to stop stealing
from their children, even at significant
cost to themselves? The truth is, we don’t
really know. What we do know is that the
old appeals do not work—and have never
worked. Conservatives fist-bump about
winning elections, but meanwhile Amer ica is on a path to being a country whose
citizens work six months of every year
just to pay for a government they don’t
want or need. Securing the future of the
nation is worth more to each of us than
a few short-term government benefits.
To get off the path to social democracy
or long-term austerity, we must rededicate ourselves to what our Founders
struggled to give us and what the culture
of free enterprise has brought us. In so
doing, we will bequeath it to future generations.
May Day
With OWS
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR
JAY NORDLINGER’S
A report from the revolution
B Y C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
a long winter’s absence,
Occupy Wall Street came back
to town for May Day and,
along with the usual paraphernalia of progressive public protest,
brought with it a new offering: college.
Intrigued by the prospect of returning to
school, but initially aiming only casually
to observe, I sauntered onto the campus
in midtown Manhattan’s Madison Square
Park to take a closer look.
Ten minutes after it was supposed to
have opened, the “Free University,” as it
had been christened, was still in the
process of setting up. It was a forlorn
sight. Lonely red balloons flew at various
points around the water fountains, and
bored policemen sat on benches looking
bemused and coordinating their patrols
with the parks department. It was raining.
In its infancy, the scene resembled a ramshackle village fête in a sleepy english
village, of the sort that Bertie Wooster
might have popped into in hopes of finding a Guess Your Weight competition and
some free samples of strawberry jam.
Dotted around the park’s treelined four
square blocks were “professors” without
students, waiting expectantly under
hand-drawn signs that read “OpenAccess Teach-In,” “Self-altering Democratizing Space,” and “Free Yoga.” They
were ready at a moment’s notice to teach
subjects such as “Jacobinism and Black
Jacobinism” and “The Fiction of Men
and Women,” but the market wasn’t playing ball. Students, it appears, will be no
earlier to the revolution than they are to
their classes, and the commuters cutting
through the area evidently had more
pressing concerns than attending the
“Protest Songwriting Workshop.”
On the park’s north side, next to the
statue of David Glasgow Farragut and in
the shadow of the gold-topped New York
Life Building, a circle had formed. I wandered over and stood on its edge.
“Naomi Klein went to the Heartland
Institute’s International Conference on
Climate Change,” the speaker was say-
A
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The New, Acclaimed History of the
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21
Madison Square Park, New York City, May 1, 2012
ing, “which must have been an unpleasant experience.” (The assembled group
laughed heartily at this.) “And what she
discovered was that the conservatives get
it. She wrote about it in The Nation.” He
turned to his notes somewhat frantically,
and read aloud. “Here’s what she said
they think”:
Climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace
it with some kind of eco-socialism. As
conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of
Corruption, climate change “has little to
do with the state of the environment and
much to do with shackling capitalism
and transforming the American way of
life in the interests of global wealth
redistribution.”
This passage elicited some impressively
vigorous nodding. “Yes!” affirmed the
speaker, in a voice more preacher than professor, “the Right gets it. They spread misinformation about the science. . . . They
know that it means the end of how we’ve
been living. And they’ll do anything to
keep the system as it is.” The group shared
world-weary, knowing smiles that congratulated one another on their insight.
“So,” he continued. “What can we do?”
There followed a brief conversation
about the vital importance of bequeathing
“the scientific truth” to the recalcitrant
American public and a hasty and unanimous agreement that everybody “needs
to stop driving cars.”
22
|
“A lot of people live in the suburbs,”
the speaker proposed. “They have a few
cars and they live in houses that they
probably bought in the 1980s. We need
to morally exclude those who don’t recognize the problem, and let them know
that they have no place in a future America.”
When the meeting adjourned, I waved
down a friendly-looking girl and asked
her if I could pose a few questions. She
assented, in a string of jargon that included the words “interface,” “discourse,”
and “growth” among sundry other terms
in a combination that was very probably
unique in the history of the English language.
“I understand that you think these people in the suburbs can’t continue their
lifestyles. Where will they live if not
there?” I asked.
“Where will they live? In a community!” she replied, flashing me a smile
whose ingredients were delight and pity
in equal measure.
“They do live in a community,” I said.
“A different community. One that we’d
all design together.”
“Forgive me,” I said. “But you just
described America. This is a community
that we all designed together. How would
yours differ?”
After a bit more back-and-forth and an
awful lot more newspeak, we established
that the community for Americans who
don’t wish to be “morally excluded”
would be of her own design. (For the
“common good,” of course.) She was
nice—more Tom Friedman than Mussolini—but she ultimately couldn’t help
betraying that she considers her perspective to be more important than mine, and
both traditional liberty and the rule of law
to be outdated in these modern times.
By the time I left my friend and her
cabal of Five Year Planners, a few of the
other classes had hit their stride. I had a
vague desire to attend the “Workers’
Rights and Civil Rights” class—I could
have sworn that I’d heard someone at
the registration desk arguing that the
Thirteenth Amendment applied to electric can openers or automatic doors or
something—but, while searching for it, I
stumbled instead into a seminar concerned with the very nature of teaching.
The symposium—titled “Horizontal
Pedagogy”—was absolutely buzzing
with those evidently unhappy with the
angle at which they were being taught.
The class was primarily concerned with
discussing “alternative power dynamics,
sources of motivation, and the movements of knowledge,” and was hosted
by two devastatingly earnest students in
their early twenties whose commitment
to ensuring that nobody took an “unfair”
role in the conversation was sufficient to
render them skeptical even of their own
responsibilities as facilitators.
In fact, they were skeptical of the value
of teaching anyone anything at all. They
reminded me of something that hadn’t
really occurred to me the last time I wandered into an Occupy franchise—namely
that progressives of this stripe do not just
wish to have others pay for their education, but wish in parallel essentially to
reduce teaching to therapy.
In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure
how I’d expected the conversation to go.
I’d perhaps anticipated hearing stories
about brilliant-but-poor children who
were unable to attend the universities of
their choice, or being told that America
was falling behind in the world because
student debt was crippling its finest
minds. But those taking part seemed captivated by a single, quite extraordinary
question, best distilled as, “Is the fact
that people possess differing levels of
knowledge an unacceptable form of inequality?”
This was not, as I’d initially assumed,
a means of arguing that the uneducated
are effectively disenfranchised, but instead the overture to a truly asinine
M AY 28, 2012
debate about whether the very act of one
person’s imparting knowledge to another
is inherently hierarchical—and, thus,
undesirable. One attendee even described
the “traditional” means of conveying information to another as “intellectual violence.” (In doing so, he took the old “all
sex is rape” canard and dressed it in a
gown and mortarboard.) The consensus,
it seemed, was that education would
work better if we just all shared our experiences with one another and valued each
person’s contribution equally. A selfdescribed “radical teacher” added that
each person should be free to absorb the
facts that best fit his or her “narrative,”
without outside interference from anything like the truth. This approach would
put us on the path not only to the establishment of 2+2=5 as a verity, but to the
labeling of anyone as a bigot who had the
temerity to disagree.
To her credit, one girl—a student in her
early twenties—kept pushing back. “I
want to go to college to learn things,” she
said. “I want to be taught by people who
know more than me. That’s the point!”
But she was alone, at least among the
vocal. “Who are you to decide who knows
more than someone else? Who are you
to decide what is right and wrong?” came
the replies. “I’m a physics major,” she
answered. “My teacher does know more
than me.”
But the others weren’t interested in this
fact—or any facts, really. To them, the
truth was just a construct of the ruling
class, to be kept or dispensed with by
virtue of its utility. They would undoubtedly profit from this girl’s embrace of
external reality; instead they rhetorically
crucified her for her apostasy and
changed the subject. This attitude was all
the more strange, given that it was utterly
at odds with the assured rhetoric at the
climate-change roundtable—at which 15
or so students were convinced enough
that they were in possession of the ab solute “scientific truth” to advocate
remaking the country according to their
own design.
But perhaps such inconsistencies
should not be surprising, because the
Occupiers were on May Day what they
have fundamentally always been: a diffuse, inchoate, and rag-tag bunch of progressives standing around in a park, each
wondering out loud what America might
look like if everyone else agreed with
them.
Hipster
Hate
On the supposed racism of the
TV show Girls
BY ROBERT VERBRUGGEN
I
n the pilot episode of HBO’s raunchy
new comedy Girls, the main character’s parents announce that they
will no longer be giving their 24-yearold daughter an allowance. If the young
Hannah, a college graduate, wants to
keep living in her fashionable, expensive
neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn,
she’ll need to leave her publishing internship for a paying job.
She whines a lot. She visits a muscular
unemployed guy she knows and has sex
with him. (“You modern career women,
I know what you like,” he informs her
as they’re getting started, but the experience is in fact quite awkward.) She drinks
opium tea. She and her three girlfriends
talk about life and texting and student
loans. One of those friends is dating a
guy who’s too nice to her. Another has a
British accent and a remarkable sense of
style.
So, Girls is basically a hipster Sex and
the City. Which is to say that it’s pretty
obnoxious. And also to say that it’s very,
very white.
It has never been any secret that the
hipster fad among educated young
adults—characterized by alternative
fashion, apartments in trendy neighborhoods, liberal politics, love of independent music and film, and above all an
obsession with irony—does not, shall we
say, look like America. The whiteness
of hipsterdom is so blinding that when
satirist Christian Lander made a blog
poking fun at various elements of the hipster lifestyle, he called it “Stuff White
People Like.” The neighborhoods of
Brooklyn near where the Girls live,
Ground Zero of the hipster epidemic,
contain some Census tracts that are heavily black or Hispanic—but the famously
hipster portions of these neighborhoods
are overwhelmingly white, often above
85 percent, with a few tracts above 95
percent. When I went through photos of
the “top 10 hipster bands” as chosen
earlier this year by College magazine, the
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23
are normally keen to defend artistic expression, even at its most vile—pounce
on a TV show’s creators for choosing a
cast that matches their vision.
A few Girls critics, including the black
writer who exists, tried their hand at a statistical argument, noting that Brooklyn
overall is only about a third white—saying, in effect, that Girls wasn’t representing reality, but distorting it. But this
argument is at best daft, and at worst
disingenuous: People do not live and
interact with a random sample of people
from their city or borough; they live and
interact with the people they get to know
in various setting—settings that are often
segregated, such as neighborhoods, jobs,
and university alumni communities. Indeed, there are many whites, many blacks,
and many Hispanics in Brooklyn—but in
large part, each group is tucked away in
its own bubble, as the briefest glance at
the Census data reveals.
Girls writer Lesley Arfin fought back
at first, tweeting a joke that was both
more insightful and funnier than anything
on the show: “What really bothered me
most about Precious was that there was
no representation of ME.” She perfectly
captured the absurdity of the idea that
every story should represent everyone,
not to mention the self-centeredness of
the demand that every work of art include
someone who looks like you, and made
her observation cut by choosing an ex treme example of a movie that did not
HBO
only non-white face I found was that of
Algernon Quashie, a guitarist for the
Miniature Tigers, who’s black.
In turn, Girls doesn’t feature any nonwhite major characters. Thus the Great
Girls Racism Panic.
You may not have noticed it if you
don’t regularly read the New York Times
website or check snarky liberal blogs, but
a debate has stretched on for weeks about
whether it’s okay to have Stuff White
People Like types played by white people
on TV. The Times even ran a “Room for
Debate” symposium with seven entries
on the topic. (Don’t worry; the contributors were conspicuously diverse.) The
leading charge of the Girls critics is that
the show somehow has a responsibility
to “represent” an assortment of races
and ethnicities. “I exist,” a black writer
reminded the show’s creator via a post on
the blog Racialicious.
But if taken seriously, this constraint
puts art into tension with reality and
places serious restrictions on freedom of
expression. Yes, there is racial diversity
in modern American life, but there remains a great deal of segregation as well.
Some writers may choose to depict life as
being more diverse than it really is—and
of course that’s fine. Others may choose
to tell stories that naturally lend themselves to a diverse cast. But there’s nothing wrong with telling a story about a
group of people who share the same race,
either, and it is odd to see liberals—who
The girls of HBO’s Girls
24
|
include her—a movie that no “diversity”
advocate would dare suggest should have
included her. Precious is a movie about a
black teenager in Harlem who suffers
horrifying abuse. It didn’t need a smartmouthed white girl for comic relief.
The Left was not amused. After Arfin
tweeted an incoherent apology, deleted
the joke, and then deleted the apology
as well, blogger Elspeth Reeve of The
Atlantic informed her readers that Arfin
was “learning there’s no such thing as
ironic racism,” and highlighted some
other jokes Arfin had written that touched
on race in some way. (For example, she
once suggested “taking Obama to the
White House” as a euphemism for defecating.) Reeve offered no explanation as
to why this particular humorist was not
allowed to use edgy racial material, when
these types of jokes are nearly ubiquitous
among American comedians of all colors
and creeds.
Seven excruciating days after Reeve’s
post, the fury reached a peak with Lindy
West’s “A Complete Guide to Hipster
Racism,” an article on Jezebel, a website
that bills itself as being about “celebrity,
sex, fashion for women.” In this brief
against humor we are informed, more or
less, that where race is concerned, there is
no such thing as a joke. For example, it is
racist to introduce someone as “my black
friend,” even if you say it with a smile on
your face and know that your black friend
won’t be offended.
The most amusing section of West’s
article pertained to racism of the “teehee, aren’t I adorable?” variety. This is
when white girly-girls find humor in pretending to be gangsters. We learn it’s
racist for a white woman to perform a
quiet acoustic cover of a violent rap song,
and for “suburban white girls” to flash
gang signs. It was also racist when the
cute white actress from the sitcom New
Girl, Zooey Deschanel, retweeted this
joke from the cute white pop singer Sara
Bareilles: “Home from tour and first
things first: New Girl episodes I missed.
#thuglife.” “Thug life” is a gangsta-rap
theme popularized by Tupac Shakur.
If the Left expects Americans to take
its crusade against modern racism seriously, it will have to find better examples
of bias than the predominantly white cast
of Girls and some harmless jokes from
adorable pop stars. And just as important,
young liberals could benefit from lightening the hell up.
M AY 28, 2012
The Second
Battle of Wisconsin
Will Governor Scott Walker, and public-union reform, survive a recall election?
BY CHRISTIAN SCHNEIDER
Manitowoc, Wis.
year, thousands of people passed by the front
doors of Madison’s Bartell community theater on their
way to the Wisconsin capitol to protest the state’s
government-employee-compensation reforms. More
recently, the theater lowered the curtain on its latest sold-out
hit—a play written in the “Fakespearean” style entitled “The
Lamentable Tragedie of Scott Walker, Govnour of Wisconsin.”
The dénouement of the play (which was originally titled
“F*** You, Scott Walker”) occurs when Walker escapes the
mob by climbing to the top of the capitol, only to be thrown to
his death while the fool yells “Sic semper tyrannis!” The play’s
author, Doug Reed, claims he is a “committed pacifist,” but
says he had to stay true to the form; as he notes, “the title characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies never survive to the end of
the play.”
On this late Monday morning in April, the real Governor
L
AST
Mr. Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
Scott Walker, very much alive, is standing in front of a bright
orange, $250,000 snowplow belonging to the Manitowoc
County Highway Department. Walker is beginning a tour of
the state in which he will tout the $1 billion that Wisconsin
governments have saved as a result of his hard-won reforms.
The governor, 44, is fighting for his political life, as he faces a
June 5 recall election instigated by public-employee unions.
The race is widely regarded as the second most important
American election in 2012.
Yet you couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the election by
observing the size of the crowd in the spacious garage that
houses the snowplow. As Walker speaks at a small brown podium, there are about 14 people on hand, four of whom appear to
be under the age of ten. Walker’s campaign team has to keep
public attendance at press events extremely limited; in every
corner of the state, protesters lurk, waiting for their chance to
scream an obscenity, on camera, at the governor they have
labeled a “dictator.”
25
Prior to Walker’s reforms, state and local-government employees paid nothing or very little toward their pensions and
paid only slightly more than 6 percent of their health-care premiums. according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers alliance, the
average Wisconsin government employee earned $71,000 in
total compensation in 2011. That same year, average total
compensation for employees of the state’s largest school district, Milwaukee Public Schools, reached $101,091. Walker
helped close the state’s $3.6 billion deficit by requiring public
employees to pay 5 percent of their salaries toward their pensions. He also required state employees to pay 12.6 percent of
their health-insurance premiums—less than half the average
both in the private sector and for federal-government employees.
But the most controversial part of Walker’s plan was its
sharp curtailing of union power, and in particular collective
bargaining. Prior to Walker’s law, all government workers
were required to join unions and pay dues, and unions were
able to negotiate all conditions of employment—wages, benefits, work rules. Walker made union membership optional,
eliminated the automatic deduction of union dues, and ended
collective bargaining for everything but wages. Today, the
unions are still able to negotiate wages for all employees
(including non-members), but governments may decide for
W
alker is often compared to Wisconsin congressman
Paul ryan—the two are young stars of the national
republican party, and Walker just happened to grow
up “right down the road” from ryan. Yet their styles are very
different.
ryan unceasingly warns of a coming fiscal apocalypse, making his listeners want to grab a flashlight and canned goods
and ride out the federal-debt armageddon in their basements.
Walker, on the other hand, speaks with subdued precision. He
has spent a full year explaining how his reforms are working for
Wisconsin; for instance, property taxes have declined for the
first time in twelve years. School districts whose contracts previously forced them to buy expensive health insurance from the
unions’ own health-care company are saving tens of millions of
dollars, because Walker’s law opened up their contracts to competitive bidding. large-scale teacher layoffs are occurring only
in the few districts that chose not to implement Walker’s plan
requiring increased health-care and pension contributions.
Wisconsin’s history created a substantial headwind against
Walker. It is the state that birthed “Fighting Bob” la Follette and
the Progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century. It is
where the union aFSCMe was first incorporated, and in 1959 it
became the first state to allow collective bargaining by government employees. Madison’s infamous Vietnam-era protests
The capitol was occupied by the ‘great hive’ of
public employees, who banged drums, blew
vuvuzelas, and camped on the marble floors.
Throughout the mayhem, Scott Walker stood firm.
themselves how to handle work rules and other forms of compensation, and employees may decide for themselves whether
to give money to the unions.
President Barack Obama immediately jumped into the fray,
calling Walker’s plan an “assault” on unions. Yet not only do
the overwhelming majority of federal employees not bargain
collectively, but Obama himself unilaterally imposed a pay
freeze on civilian federal workers just months before he
accused Walker of stripping workers of their collectivebargaining “rights.”
These reforms propelled the state into chaos for a good
portion of 2011. The capitol was occupied by, to steal a term
from Mark Twain, the “great hive” of public employees,
who banged drums, blew vuvuzelas, and camped on the
marble floors. Fourteen Democratic senators fled the state
for weeks to block a vote on the bill; Walker was the victim
of a prank call from someone pretending to be David koch,
one of the billionaire koch brothers. (Walker’s willingness
to take the call provided the left with a prominent talking
point: that Walker was beholden to corporate america and
that the koch brothers were secretly writing Walker’s legislation.) a government-employee union issued a press release
comparing Walker to “adolph Hilter.” No one batted an eye
when a camel was seen walking around the frozen capitol
square.
Throughout the mayhem, Walker stood firm.
26
|
included the bombing of a University of Wisconsin building, an
attack that killed a young researcher.
More recently, on the other hand, Wisconsin has been a
laboratory for conservative reforms; Milwaukee boasts the
nation’s oldest private-school voucher program, and in the early
1990s republican governor Tommy Thompson implemented a
welfare-reform program that became the model for national welfare reform a few years later. But when Walker was elected, it
had been twelve years since the state had elected a republican
governor and 26 years since it voted for a republican presidential candidate. (George W. Bush lost by a scant 0.22 percentage
points in 2000 and 0.48 percentage points in 2004.)
Walker’s opponent in the recall election is Milwaukee mayor
Tom Barrett, whom he defeated in the 2010 gubernatorial race
by six percentage points. In the months leading up to the May 8
Democratic primary, Barrett and former Dane County executive
kathleen Falk were locked in an internecine struggle to demonstrate their obeisance to organized labor. Falk, who has now lost
three statewide races, was the first to announce she was challenging Walker. While meeting with the state’s largest publicemployee unions in January, Falk pledged to veto any future
budget that didn’t fully restore the unions’ collective-bargaining
power. She was quickly endorsed by all the major unions, which
ended up spending an estimated $5 million in television ads on
her behalf.
Walker says he “always thought she would be bought and paid
M AY 28, 2012
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for by the unions,” and that Falk’s pledge “just proved it.” Falk’s
union deal appeared to be too much for Democratic voters
to stomach, and Barrett pulled away in the final weeks of the
primary.
Barrett, unlike Falk, had trouble connecting with the unions, a
failure that forced him to lurch leftward in an attempt to earn
their imprimatur. As mayor of Milwaukee, Barrett actually used
many of Walker’s reforms to balance his own budget; the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the city came out $10
million ahead thanks to the governor’s plan. A Web video sent
out to AFSCME supporters early in the campaign blasted Barrett
for supporting passage of Walker’s bill, and a number of his
early campaign appearances were picketed by union workers.
Yet according to Walker, Barrett’s tangles with public unions
shouldn’t lull voters into thinking he’s a moderate on labor issues.
“I don’t think anybody should mistakenly think that means that
Tom Barrett is any less extreme on this,” Walker says, adding,
“He was just more politically prudent to not let it get out publicly.
To me, it’s pretty clear that while he had enough political sense
not to publicly let out that he was doing this private pledge, the
reality is that he’ll be just as bought and paid for.”
Among likely voters, Walker and Barrett are in a virtual tie,
with Walker leading 48 percent to 47 percent, according to a sur-
through Walker’s reforms. Brown Deer’s finance director, Emily
Koczela, follows up by saying Walker’s law “turned us loose in
terms of talking about every dollar with regard to children.”
Following the school event, Walker retreats briefly to his campaign’s “victory center” in Wauwatosa, a city just west of
Milwaukee, where volunteers are making nonstop phone calls
on his behalf. In a corner office, Walker discusses why he, of all
the governors in the nation making changes to governmentworker benefits, is the one facing a recall election. He mentions
Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and California as states in
which Democrats are actually encouraging substantial changes
to government benefits, leaving Wisconsin Democrats out of
touch with the national party.
In criticizing Walker’s plan, Wisconsin Democrats have targeted the rollback of collective bargaining, saying their opposition to the plan “isn’t about the money.” Of course, it is about
little else. Walker believes it was the end of compulsory union
membership and automatic dues deductions more than the
end of collective bargaining in itself that prompted the unions’
crusade against him.
“I think in the end . . . they would have sold their members out
in a heartbeat for double the pension contributions or anything
else if they only could have gotten their hands on those auto-
In criticizing Walker’s plan, Wisconsin Democrats
have targeted the rollback of collective bargaining,
saying their opposition to the plan ‘isn’t about the
money.’ Of course, it is about little else.
vey conducted by Marquette University Law School in early
May. Yet Walker has a substantial lead among independents—
47 percent to 35 percent—and 60 percent of independents think
Walker’s changes will make the state better off in the long run.
O
N the hour drive south from Manitowoc to the Milwaukee suburb of Brown Deer, Walker tilts his head
back and nods off for ten minutes. He claims his hectic
schedule demands such catnaps; he usually sets the alarm on his
BlackBerry for ten minutes, and always wakes up 30 seconds
before the alarm goes off. It is clear that he considers this a kind
of skill.
When Walker reaches Brown Deer, he receives a brief tour of
Dean Elementary School before he sits down to read to a class
of fourth-graders. After finishing the book, he takes a few questions from the students before moving on to a press event in the
library. (Sample question: “How tall are you?” Answer: Six
feet.)
At his press event in the library, Walker moderates a roundtable
of local-government officials, who take turns praising his
reforms. Racine County executive Jim Ladwig explains how
unions had for years blocked the use of prisoners to mow the
county’s medians, so mowing occurred only once a year; now the
grass stays cut. Brown Deer schools superintendent Deb Kerr
says that her district is now able to build a new $22 million
school, 68 percent of which will be funded by savings realized
28
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matic dues deductions,” says Walker. “That’s what makes a difference for them, because that’s what they care about. They
don’t care about the workers, they don’t care about collective
bargaining, or pensions. . . . I mean, they do, but I don’t think
it was really about those things—it was about the raw power and
money they felt was at risk here because we gave people freedom to choose.”
Walker shifts topics, ripping his opponents for their lack of a
plan to balance the state budget. During the primary, both Barrett
and Falk refused to say how they would have balanced the budget, and failed to offer any hints as to how they would fund the
repeal of Walker’s collective-bargaining law, something they
both vowed to do. Walker boasts that he was able to increase
funding for Medicaid by $1.2 billion without raising taxes,
thanks to his benefit changes.
“Either they don’t have a plan, or the real answer is, they
would raise taxes,” Walker says. “Two people who are part of a
movement that claims that they want to undo what we did in this
past year can’t tell us what they would do instead.” One of the
primary critiques of Walker is that he didn’t campaign on rolling
back collective bargaining in 2010; ironically, it appears the
people trying to replace him are just as unwilling to reveal the
details of their biggest reform plans before voters put them in
power.
Walker asserts that his opponents want to take Wisconsin
down the disastrous path that Illinois has traveled over the past
year. In January of 2011, Illinois governor Pat Quinn raised
M AY 28, 2012
taxes in the state by $7 billion; yet, according to City Journal’s
Steven Malanga, Illinois’s lavish government-employee benefits sucked $5.7 billion from the state budget, a number that was
only $2.7 billion as recently as 2008. Even with the tax hikes, the
state was left with a $9 billion deficit. Consequently, Quinn has
proposed to reduce Medicaid eligibility and coverage and drop
the rates Medicaid pays to physicians.
“[In Illinois] they’re now shutting down state facilities, laying
off tons of public employees, and cutting Medicaid, while we
added money to Medicaid and avoided massive layoffs,” Walker
says. He points out that Illinois’s credit rating was recently lowered, and is now the worst in the country; that Wisconsin’s pension system is fully funded, while Illinois’s is less than half
funded; and that Illinois’s unemployment rate is 8.8 percent,
while Wisconsin’s is 6.8 percent.
Sipping from a plastic water bottle, Walker says the entire
recall effort is “intellectually dishonest.” He notes a recent interview given to Mother Jones by Graeme Zielinski, spokesman
for the Democratic party in Wisconsin, in which Zielinski admitted that “collective bargaining is not moving people”; he urged
Democrats instead to focus on Walker’s “war on women” and an
ongoing investigation of Walker’s former county-executive
office.
The investigation, which began in May of 2010, has netted
several criminal charges against former Walker aides. Walker’s
former deputy chief of staff, Timothy Russell, has been charged
with stealing $21,000 in contributions meant for Operation
Freedom, a picnic that honors veterans. Russell’s domestic partner, Brian Pierick, has been charged with two felony counts of
child enticement. Two former Walker aides have been charged
with doing campaign work on government time. The investigation is ongoing, and Democrats are hoping a charge comes down
before the election that ties Walker to criminal wrongdoing.
Walker says he doesn’t “think they know anything” about
what’s being investigated. He notes that it was his office that initially asked for the probe.
W
HEn asked about the vituperative attacks by union
activists he has endured over the past year, Walker
shrugs. He is disappointed that his two high-schoolaged sons have been targeted on Facebook; he said someone
began screaming at his septuagenarian mother in a grocery store
last year. “There’s gotta be more wrong with your life than
whether you agree with me or not” to do something like that, he
says. (Early in his campaign, his sons appeared in one of his television ads; they looked as if they had been forced to participate
via court order.)
One Sunday last november, Walker and his sons were raking
leaves in their front yard when a car on the street honked at them.
Walker looked over to see the car’s window roll down, a hand
jut out, and a middle finger extend. Three minutes later, Walker
heard another honk, and saw two different cars on his street. This
time, two arms emerged from the cars’ windows, and both
flashed him a thumbs-up signal before driving off. While he says
that should have comforted him, he adds, “I think it just means
I should start raking at night.”
Walker isn’t alone; for more than a year, it has been open season on Republican legislators in Wisconsin. E-mails threatening
death and physical harm poured into legislative offices faster
than the police could investigate them. GOP representative
Robin Vos had a beer dumped on his head. For much of the period of the demonstrations, legislators had to escape the capitol
through an underground tunnel, then get on a bus that took them
to their cars. One night the bus was spotted and protesters rocked
it back and forth as the legislators held on inside.
But it is Walker’s young lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, who has drawn the worst of the Left’s vulgarisms. The
comely redhead is like catnip to angry protesters; they simply
can’t help themselves. One liberal Madison radio talk-show host
ridiculed Kleefisch’s recent bout with colon cancer and suggested she got her job by performing sex acts. Following a recent
Walker speech, a protester turned to Kleefisch’s husband and
screamed, “Your wife is a f***ing whore!”
Despite all the vitriol, the Wisconsin imbroglio is earning
Walker new fans around the country. When the Republican presidential candidates campaigned in Wisconsin in early April, each
one tried to top the others in gushing support for the governor.
At an April speech before the Illinois Policy Institute, a woman
invoked a recent movie on education reform in asking Walker
whether he was the “Superman” she was waiting for. Walker
demurred, saying that he was partial to Batman.
Walker says he handles the pressure of newfound fame by
hopping on his 2003 Harley-Davidson Road King and hitting
the open road. He says the bike gives him “freedom”; his Harley
dealer is trying to get him to install a cell-phone communications
system, but he bristles at the notion. “Why would I want that?”
he says. “The whole reason I ride my motorcycle is for people to
not be able to get me on my phone.”
He also enjoys the egalitarianism of the Harley culture. He
says that when he rides, he might have the CEO of a major company on one side and a janitor on the other, “and nobody knows,
nor do they care.”
Walker says he learned political fortitude by studying the travails of Ronald Reagan. He has read numerous Reagan biographies, and lists Dinesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an
Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader as his favorite.
“[Reagan] is a guy who was obviously well liked, but who, early
on, faced tremendous challenges, major pushback, had a lot of
people, including people in his own party, telling him to back
off,” he says. “But he knew who he was, he knew where he
wanted to go, and he knew how he was going to get there, and
he didn’t back off.”
Walker says that if he wins on June 5, the state will begin to
come together. He doesn’t believe a recall victory will give him
a new mandate; it will merely reaffirm the mandate he believes
he was given on the day he was elected in 2010.
“If Tom Barrett wins, it doesn’t end the ‘civil war,’ it just
opens it all up again,” he says. Barrett, he argues, is “going to go
to extreme lengths to try to repeal the reforms we have passed,
which means you’re going to have this debate all over again. If
people just want to move on, the easiest way to do that is to see
me elected.”
When I hand the Lamentable Tragedie playbill to Walker, he
chuckles. When informed of his gruesome theatrical demise, he
rolls his eyes. “How pleasant,” he says. But he does not minimize the national implications of the recall election—the serious
effects it could have on states that are attempting to rein in excessive employee pay and benefits. To those states, a Walker loss on
June 5 would be the unkindest cut of all.
29
The Party of
Civil Rights
It has always been the Republicans
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but
worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the
utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for
the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two
major U.s. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis
protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed
to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let
Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of
their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the
GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon
of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression
of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the
19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been
allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition
to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a
century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads
among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do
well to demolish this myth nonetheless.
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the south had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism—or, more precisely, white
southern resentment over the political successes of the civilrights movement—would be an implausible explanation for the
dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and
the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because
those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the
1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was
far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats
of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break
in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Re construction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the
Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that
is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D.
Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching
laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights
T
his
Mr. Williamson is a roving correspondent for NATIONAL REVIEW and the
author of The Dependency Agenda, which will be published by Encounter
Books on May 29.
30
|
Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there
exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and
Lyndon Baines Johnson. supporting civil-rights reform was not
a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but
it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
T
depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights
reform must be digested in some detail to be properly
appreciated. in the house, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less
intensely segregationist than the rest of the south by being more
intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but
Johnson was practically antebellum in his views. Never mind
civil rights or voting rights: in Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black
Americans from lynching. As a leader in the senate, Johnson did
his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes
sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere
symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic
colleague strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of
staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking
for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers
came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the
1957 act, and Johnson’s senate Democrats again staged a recordsetting filibuster. in both cases, the “master of the senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having
seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to
southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These
Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a
problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had
before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve
got to do something about this—we’ve got to give them a little
something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make
a difference.”
Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo.
Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth
Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the
military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously
integrated federal facilities. (“if the colored people made a
mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)
Klansmen from senator Robert Byrd to Justice hugo Black held
prominent positions in the Democratic party—and President
Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film
ever shown at the White house.
Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights
reform as the “nigger bill.” so what happened in 1964 to change
Democrats’ minds? in fact, nothing.
hE
P
REsiDENT JOhNsON was nothing if not shrewd, and he
knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the
“solid south” in the late 1930s—at the same time as they were
M AY 28, 2012
picking up votes from northern blacks. The Civil War and the
sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New
Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the
country, including much of the South—Johnson owed his election to the house to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt
connections—but there was a conservative backlash against it,
and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the
Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface,
looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call
“Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant
when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the
United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam). The tiniest
cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the
backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of
1937. Republicans would pick up 81 house seats in the 1938
election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to
be so with the acquisition of its first Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican house member in 1934, as did Missouri, while
Tennessee’s first Republican house member, elected in 1918,
was joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s,
the Republican party, though marginal, began to take hold in the
South—but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first
Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of
John Tower.
At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell
on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed, wrongly, that the
issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black
Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states,
was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second
political confrontation between North and South. (As late as
1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of
any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”) The conventional
Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward
because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.
And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that
Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or
the old elites—the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race—but among the emerging southern middle
class, a fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and
Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class,
Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (harvard
University Press, 2006). Which is to say: The Republican rise in
the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the
most important political question and tracked the rise of middleclass voters moved mainly by economic considerations and antiCommunism.
The South had been in effect a Third World country within the
United States, and that changed with the post-war economic
boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South
transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the
national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban
class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that
best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class
whites, however—and here’s the surprise—even those in areas
with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This
was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you
believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly
trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ
signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest
otherwise.
T
heRe is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and
thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had
delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J.
Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign. But in the main
they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect. The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination
of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been
strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but
who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of
federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts
but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were
unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert
Bork. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern
segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York
representative, William e. Miller, who had been the co-author
of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Re publican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It
spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the
“just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining
programs where most needed, particularly where they could
afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other
planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights
statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to
end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to
vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race,
creed, national origin or sex.” And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation
and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all
other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog
whistle.
Of course there were racists in the Republican party. There
were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well
documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial
obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their
heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”),
and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of
those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or
goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative record,
the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote
speeches—none of them suggests a party-wide Republican
about-face on civil rights.
Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican
affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s,
the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among
whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940,
Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the
North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who
31
crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread
dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the
New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s
Great Society was pure politics. Johnson’s War on Poverty was
declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades,
and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment
rate was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had
long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but
the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the
elderly—even though they were, then as now, the most affluent
demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of
above-average wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health,
Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the
Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and
the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely
to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support
to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his
political heirs. In the context of the rest of his program,
Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an
attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make
clients of them.
I
the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil
rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral
results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 aboutface on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21
Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would
ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that
elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans:
The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were
replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a
century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks
ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in
1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early
1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South—but
not that slow.
Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and
in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by
southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the
loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s
John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964
reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the attorney
general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his
will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon
citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the
German people. I would say this—I believe this would be agreed
to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the
first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who
says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)
Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a
very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by
the name of George H. W. Bush.
It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a
majority of the southern congressional delegation—and they had
hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of
Jim Crow.
It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped mid 32
F
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century partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against
the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had
represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish
wing of the Republican party over what remained of the America
First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency. The Republican
party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war
era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad—in the form of the Soviet Union and
its satellites—and at home, in the form of the growing welfare
state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded. By the
middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest
current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic antiCommunism—especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting
international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home—
left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party.
Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party
was not his alone.
The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the
stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics:
Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried
only five states, while Republican Richard Nixon, who had
helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress,
counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South
Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried.
Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe
plus Texas. Mindful of the long-term realignment already under
way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about
losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.”
Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a
49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the postWatergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like
Sherman. Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states
in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the
post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.
T
Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with
the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly
trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the
welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that
ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual
events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic
convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the
Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns—especially welfare and crime—are “dog whistles” or
“code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light
of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S.
voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed,
Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans
are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are
engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation
President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical
southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to
have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred
years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the
past, but his strategy endures.
HE
M AY 28, 2012
The Empty
Playground and
The Welfare State
How government policy discourages people
from having children
BY RAMESH PONNURU
debate broke out recently in the blogs about the
ethics of having children. the occasion was the publication of a remarkably silly book arguing that
reproduction is immoral. One blogger argued in
response that people have an obligation to create new life as an
expression of gratitude for the life they have been given.
another denied the existence of any such obligation but argued
that having children is an important source of happiness for
most people. In this fact he finds sufficient justification for
having children, and for governments to help people afford to
have them.
the discussion, while interesting, would have been unintelligible throughout most of human history. the absence of reliable
means of contraception meant that having children was a less
discrete decision than it is today. and while many people felt an
obligation to bear children or wanted the emotional satisfactions they can bring, they also had an overwhelming practical
reason for wanting them: they needed the help. they needed
their offspring’s labor. they needed children, especially, to
avoid hunger and privation in old age. the bargain was simple:
Parents take care of their children until they are able-bodied,
and in return get taken care of by their children when they no
longer are.
We still need to have children so that we can enjoy a secure
old age. Modern societies have disguised the old bargain by
socializing it. they maintain expensive government programs
to assist the elderly, financed by successive generations. the
children still take care of the elderly when they grow up: but
now it’s all the children providing for all the elderly, collectively.
In some ways this arrangement may represent an advance for
civilization. Most people seem to think so. but it has a littleappreciated drawback: It imposes a heavy, if hidden, burden on
parents, especially those with several children, and societies
that adopt it therefore tend to have fewer children. For both
moral and practical reasons it is time to revise the generational
bargain again.
Incentives tend to change when activities are socialized, and
provision for old age is no exception. Now it is possible to
enjoy a free ride, as the economists say: don’t raise children
yourself, but benefit in old age from the fact that others have
done so. Looking at it from the other direction: Parents contribute more to the programs than non-parents who pay the
same amount of tax, but they get the same benefits. One ancient
A
motivation for having children dramatically shrinks (although it
does not vanish: many elderly people still get a lot of help from
their kids). One might therefore expect that the introduction and
expansion of old-age programs would lead people to have
fewer children. One might further expect people to marry later
in life, and for fewer people to marry at all, as they envision
lives with fewer, or no, children.
the fact that children are not only future contributors to oldage programs but beneficiaries of them does not force any modification to this analysis. the childless still free-ride. Or think
about it this way: Imagine a society where from time immemorial each woman has had two children. For one unusual generation, each woman has three children, and then the society
reverts to the historical norm of two. the temporary increase in
fertility would improve the finances of that society’s old-age
programs, and this effect would never be undone. the ratio of
contributors to beneficiaries, that is, would temporarily rise
above what it had originally been and then fall back to its original level but not below it.
Nor does the fact that governments finance the education of
children by taxing everyone, including the childless, affect the
analysis. educational expenses are only part of the economic
cost of raising children, including the cost of forgone income.
and everyone got an education paid for by someone else,
whether his parents or taxpayers generally. Parents are not freeriding on the childless.
even if entitlements reduce the number of children, it may
still be the case that they improve social welfare. Hans-Werner
Sinn, a German economist, has noted that old-age entitlements
can be seen as a kind of insurance policy. they protect people
against the risks that they will be unable to have children, or that
their children will be unable to provide for them, or that they
won’t want to. He suggests that the desire to enforce obligations
toward parents was a major motive behind bismarck’s creation
of these programs. but this argument, he notes, can justify only
a “moderately sized” set of entitlements. If the elderly often
leave some of their pension funds to their children and grandchildren, the transfer programs are larger than optimal. In passing he suggests that the effects of entitlements on family size in
his country have been anything but small: “In Germany, generations of households have learned that life in old age can be
pleasant and economically sound even without children. the
idea of marrying and having children in order to ensure satisfactory consumption in old age had been common before
bismarck’s reforms. a century later”—Sinn was writing in
2002—“this idea has largely vanished, and a growing number
of people prefer to stay single or at best form a ‘dink family’—
with double income and no kids.”
the american Social Security program is often said to contain a subsidy for “homemakers.” both social-conservative
activists who laud this “pro-family” feature and feminists and
libertarians who consider it an illegitimate government favor
for social conservatives say this. It is true that the system gives
these women benefits as though they had contributed some
taxes to the program. but what the government gives with
one hand it takes away with the other: take account of the antichildrearing effect of entitlements, and only housewives with
no kids—a rare social type—come out clearly ahead. a family
in which the husband makes the income while the wife devotes
herself full time to raising three children still loses.
33
I
N the U.S., the debate over entitlements has dwelt almost
entirely on their effect on the government’s solvency, and a
little bit on their effect on the capital stock. Martin Feldstein
has argued, for example, that Social Security undermines the
incentive to save. But research confirms that entitlements also
reduce our stock of human capital by reducing the number of
children we have.
That research acknowledges that large social trends other than
entitlements contribute to the decline in fertility. People have
fewer kids as infant-mortality rates drop. The shift away from
farming has reduced the value of children as laborers. The development of financial markets has expanded the range of alternative investments. The growth of female participation in the
market for paid labor has also reduced the fertility rate—
although one has to be careful in analyzing this relationship,
because causality runs in both directions. (A woman who
expects to have one child is more likely to pursue a career than
a woman who expects to have four.) A 2005 paper for the
National Bureau of Economic Research by economists Michele
Boldrin, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Larry E. Jones points out
that “the size and timing of the growth in government pension
systems” matches up nicely with fertility trends in the U.S. and
Europe. They expanded on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and
fertility fell on both sides, after World War II; and they expanded more in Europe, where fertility fell further. In their model,
entitlements account for roughly half of the decline in fertility,
and 60 percent of the difference between European and American fertility. When a pension system expands by 10 percent
of GDP, the average number of children per woman drops by 0.7
to 1.6. “These findings are highly statistically significant and
fairly robust to the inclusion of other possible explanatory variables.”
A 2007 paper by Isaac Ehrlich and Jinyoung Kim, also for the
NBER, reached similar conclusions, finding that pension programs explained a little under half of the decline in fertility rates,
and a little more than half of the decline in marriage rates, in
developed countries between 1965 and 1989. One implication of
this finding is that pension programs have contributed to their
own financial woes by suppressing fertility.
In one of the last issues of the social-science quarterly The
Public Interest, the sociologist Neil Gilbert looked at how the
fertility decline played out in the lives of different groups of
women. He constructed a useful, if rough, typology. He labeled
women who reached age 40 without having
children “postmoderns.” As a percentage
of women of their age they had increased from 10 to 18 percent
between 1976 and 2005. “Traditional” women, who had
three or more children by that
age and were usually “stayat-home mothers,” had been
59 percent of the group and
had fallen to 29 percent.
The percentage of “modern” and “neo-traditional”
women, with one and two children respectively, had also
jumped (by 90 and 75 percent). The moderns tend34
|
ed to be career-oriented, like the postmoderns, but the neotraditionals tended to prefer part-time employment.
It is easy to surmise the differences between these groups that
Gilbert does not emphasize (or sometimes even mention).
Almost all of the traditional women (defined, remember, by number of children) are married; their average age at first marriage is
surely lower than that of other groups; they are almost certainly
more religious. They are also more conservative in politics: The
list of states that went for each party’s presidential candidate in
the close election of 2004 lines up pretty well, and in exactly the
way you’d expect, with their rank in terms of average age of first
marriage and white fertility rate. (The racial qualifier on the second correlation results from the overwhelming Democratic preference of blacks, and strong Democratic preference of Hispanics,
which holds regardless of family type.) Republicans in presidential politics have illustrated the pattern almost too perfectly in
recent years. The large families of John McCain, Sarah Palin,
Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum led a Washington Post reporter
to comment on the party’s “smug fecundity.”
Gilbert’s essay was titled “What Do Women Really Want?”
and his answer to Freud’s famous question is the obvious one:
Different women want different things, and some of these differences form predictable patterns. His “traditionals” and “postmoderns” have different values and interests, on average. It is
this basic fact that underlies the “mommy wars.” Hence our
inability to wish those wars away.
Hilary Rosen, a Democratic lobbyist and talking head, set off
a brief furor in April when she said on CNN that Ann Romney
had no understanding of the economic circumstances of most
American women because she had never worked a day in her
life. Rosen is no more representative of “working moms” than
Romney is of stay-at-homers: Each has far too much money for
that. But the warring sentiments expressed during the brief controversy—Rosen, under pressure from the White House, apologized—reflected an enduring conflict. Many moderns regard
traditionals as self-indulgent and retrograde. Many traditionals
regard moderns and postmoderns as selfish and materialistic.
This division helps to account for the political weakness of
“family-friendly” policies: They invariably help some families
more than others. Moderns are the core constituency for subsidized day care. Traditionals and postmoderns often resent it as a
tax on their life choices. These policies might be thought to
counteract the negative effect of entitlements on fertility. But
their actual effect is ambiguous because different
women respond to them differently. The
availability of subsidies might make it
easier for women with no children
to have one, or women with one
child to have a second. They are
much less likely to lead a
woman with two children to
have a third. They may even
discourage her, precisely by
making it easier to lead a life
with one or two kids plus paid
employment. If women considering having a third child
are also considering
scaling back their participation in the labor
M AY 28, 2012
DARREN GYGI
market, subsidized day care may be something they pay for in
taxes more than it is something they receive as a benefit.
Which effect will predominate depends on, among other
things, how many women of each type a given society has. In a
society where full-time paid employment by women is nearly
universal and almost nobody has three or four children, day-care
subsidies might well increase fertility; not in a society with the
opposite conditions. “Family-friendly workplaces,” Gilbert
notes, are also friendlier to some family structures than to others—families with fewer children are more workplace-friendly,
one might say—and their effects too are therefore ambiguous.
D
IScoURAGInG middle-class adults from having children
is one of the federal government’s most important
social policies, even if its existence is not widely recognized. It is hard to justify it in the absence of a domestic overpopulation crisis. We would never have adopted an explicit
policy to this effect democratically. neutrality on family size
seems a much better policy for a limited government in a free
society. We ought to end the federal government’s bias against
having children.
The conceptually simplest way to eliminate the negative
effects of entitlements on fertility would be to eliminate the entitlements. no way that’s happening. Some proposed reforms to
entitlement programs would reduce the effect—but not all proposals would. Raising payroll taxes to finance future benefits
would not help, and could hurt. Partially converting Social
Security into a system of private savings accounts, whatever the
other merits of the idea, would not reduce the program’s implicit tax on childrearing and could, again, increase it.
Reducing the size of entitlements would reduce their effects
on family structure. Altering Social Security to slow the growth
of benefits would be one such reform. But even a reined-in program would still entail a large, forced transfer of wealth from
larger to smaller families. To prevent this transfer would require
either paying parents more than non-parents in retirement or taxing them less beforehand. The rationale in either case would be
that raising children is a contribution to the old-age programs
just as taxes are, and the government should recognize it. The
tax-cut approach seems preferable: Just let families have the
money now instead of taking it from them to return later. Robert
Stein, an economist at First Trust Advisors who served in the
Treasury Department during the George W. Bush administration, has calculated that a $5,000 tax credit per child would fully
offset entitlements. (Stein, I should note, has exerted a large
influence on my thinking on the issues considered in this essay,
and he pointed me toward some of the research it draws on.) The
logic of the tax credit would require that it be applied against
payroll taxes as well as income taxes. conservatives sometimes
resist payroll-tax cuts on the theory that payroll taxes fund entitlements, and tax credits that reduce people’s contributions give
people something for nothing. obviously that argument, whatever its force generally, would have none in this case, since the
premise of the policy is that children and payroll taxes both
finance old-age programs. If a childless couple making
$100,000 has a total federal tax bill of $30,000, a similarly situated couple with two kids should pay $20,000. A couple that has
no tax liability, on the other hand, shouldn’t get an annual $5,000
check for each child they have. That arrangement would enable
them to start getting their own free ride: receiving pension benefits without having contributed through either children or taxes.
Unlike subsidizing day care or forcing companies to offer
generous parental leave, an enlarged child credit would have an
unequivocally positive effect on fertility. Families of three might
often use the money for day care; of four, to move one parent
from full-time to part-time employment; of five, to get a slightly bigger house; and of all sizes, to bank for future educational
expenses. The choice would be theirs.
The social-science literature on the effects of the tax treatment
of parents on fertility finds mixed results. Papers have found that
tax benefits for children have raised fertility significantly in
Quebec, in France, and in Israel. Research on the U.S. has tended (though not uniformly) to find small effects. The effects could
be non-linear: Quintupling the existing $1,000 child credit could
have an effect more than proportionally larger than the modest
policies so far studied. The goal of the credit, it should be
remembered, is not to bribe Americans to have more children
than they want. Rather it is to rectify the government’s bias
against children, which leaves families with children bearing an
unjustifiably large share of the tax burden. Reducing that share
would surely help some people who want more children to have
them—and surveys suggest that in the U.S. and the West generally, desired family sizes are larger on average than actual family sizes. The credit would not make much difference to the very
rich, or for those who have little in the way of federal tax liability to begin with. (Single parents would rarely get much benefit
from it.) The biggest impact would be on middle-class families:
exactly the people on whom one would expect old-age entitlements to have the largest effect.
Many Americans, especially conservatives, find the idea of
flattening taxes appealing. They want a tax code that doesn’t discriminate between homeowners and renters, between people
who buy “green” consumer goods and everyone else, and so on.
In their pursuit of this goal, conservative politicians have sometimes proposed to eliminate the paltry child credit in today’s tax
code. Their mistake is to consider the income tax in isolation
from the payroll tax and what federal taxes pay for. Getting rid
of the child credit would make the federal government less neutral with respect to family size, not more; and expanding it
would make it more neutral, not less.
Readers may well wonder whether a large tax cut would be
wise at a time of large deficits. But the appropriate tax structure
is a separate issue from the appropriate tax level. Whether the
tax code is designed to extract 15, 19, or 23 percent of the
nation’s economic output for the federal government’s use, parents ought to pay a lower portion of that burden than they do
now. To make room for a large child credit, my preferences
would be, in order, to cut spending, to end or reduce truly discriminatory tax breaks, and to expand the top tax brackets so that
a higher proportion of the income of high earners is taxed at the
top rates. What’s important is that budgetary decisionmakers
include the fair treatment of parents among their goals.
Polls show strong public support for a bigger child credit,
especially among middle-income voters. Governor Romney
was recently overheard telling donors that he would be campaigning on two things: “jobs and kids.” A presidential race is
not the right forum for a discussion of trends in Western fertility
rates. But there is more the governor could usefully say than he
has so far, and he could say it in public.
35
longview--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/8/2012 9:08 PM Page 36
The Long View
TRANSCRIPT:
MASSACHUSETTS
SENATORIAL DEBATE
Sponsored by the League of
Women Voters and WBUR radio
Moderated by Andy Hiller,
WHDH News
October 17, 2012
Location: Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts
Page 6:
MODERATOR: Senator Brown, you’ve
stated publicly that while you support
the Keystone XL pipeline, you are
worried about its potential environmental impact. Given your party’s insistence on constructing the pipeline,
how do you square your hesitation
with your own party?
SENATOR SCOTT BROWN: Andy, I’m
glad you asked that. As you know—as
all Bay Staters know—we’re in the
middle of a difficult transition from
non-renewable energy, most of which
is bought from our enemies, frankly, to
more renewable clean sources. But
we’ve got to be careful as we make that
transition. Does this mean we need to
rely on our own resources, like sun,
wind, and natural gas? Sure. But I
think if you look at my record, you and
all citizens of the Commonwealth will
see that I’m independent. I don’t march
to the party line. I don’t work for a po litical party. I work for the people of
Massachusetts.
MODERATOR : Elizabeth Warren, do
you have a rebuttal?
ELIZABETH WARREN: I do, Andy. Let me
tell you a story. I was walking through
the land with my horse. It was peaceful, this land. Peaceful and good. The
36
|
eagle and the bear spirit were smiling.
And then I saw some traffic and saw
some litter upon the ground, and a single tear rolled down my cheek.
MODERATOR: Okay.
ELIZABETH WARREN: I’m not finished.
And as the single tear rolled down my
cheek I looked right at the camera.
There. Now I’m done.
MODERATOR : Ohhhhkay. Senator
Brown, you have 30 seconds.
SENATOR BROWN: I don’t know how to
answer that. I guess, I mean, I’m sorry
she saw some litter and cried.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Are you sorry
about killing my people with your
smallpox-infested blankets?
SENATOR BROWN: Andy, I thought we
agreed that we weren’t going to question each other directly?
MODERATOR: Ms. Warren, that’s true.
ELIZABETH WARREN: We also agreed
you people would stop just west of
Kentucky. And you’d return the isle of
the Manhattoes. So many agreements.
So many broken promises.
SENATOR BROWN: Boy, you are really
doubling down on the Indian thing,
aren’t you?
ELIZABETH WARREN: Was that a racist
reference to my people’s involvement
in casino gambling?
SENATOR BROWN: No, I just—
ELIZABETH WARREN: My people use
those revenues for the health and education of their children. So they can
stay on their sovereign lands and thrive
and grow like the buffalo that used to
roam free, before the white man came
and ate them.
SENATOR BROWN: I don’t think I ate a
buffalo.
ELIZABETH WARREN: I wasn’t saying
you personally. Your people.
SENATOR BROWN: My people?
ELIZABETH WARREN: Your people. My
people are peaceful and sit upon the
land like the wind.
SENATOR BROWN: I agree about the
wind part.
BY ROB LONG
And when we die,
we return to the earth and join the
brown bear.
SENATOR BROWN: I’m confused. What
are we talking about, Andy?
ELIZABETH WARREN: White man always
needs to know what. Never needs to
know why.
MODERATOR: If I could, I’d like to ask
another question. Ms. Warren, you’re
on the record as favoring a progressive
income tax. Could you tell us, please,
what you consider to be a tax rate that’s
too high?
ELIZABETH WARREN: The earth and the
skies and the waters belong to no one.
The bear spirit and the eagle spirit
roam a land without fences. How can
anyone give to anyone what is not
theirs to give? How can the bear spirit
take from the eagle spirit? Where does
the smoke begin and where does the
flame end? Both are part of the fire
god.
MODERATOR: Senator Brown?
SENATOR BROWN: What?
MODERATOR: Do you have a rebuttal?
SENATOR BROWN: I don’t know. I didn’t
really understand that.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Because you only
listen with your ears. White man needs
to listen with his heart.
SENATOR BROWN: I just—you wanted a
rate, right, Andy?
MODERATOR: Hoping for one.
SENATOR BROWN: I dunno. I think rates
are too high as they are. I favor lowering them, to make a flatter, fairer system.
MODERATOR: Ms. Warren?
ELIZABETH WARREN : I believe I’ve
answered it. But if there needs to be
more clarification, perhaps I should
drum my answer.
(sounds of drumming)
MODERATOR: That’s all the time we
have for this senatorial debate. We
thank the participants and the League
of Women Voters for their sponsorship.
(sounds of drumming)
ELIZABETH WARREN:
M AY 28, 2012
lileks_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/8/2012 9:08 PM Page 37
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
The Buffet Rule
summer the State of Massachusetts will nix
bake sales in school. Zero tolerance for frosting!
Down with sprinkles! They want to ban kids’
selling fudge door-to-door to raise money, too,
and by the time they’re done adults will have to stand 20 feet
from the door to eat a Milky Way.
This is intended to combat the Obesity Epidemic, as it’s
called. It’s a curious epidemic. Apparently one guy ate a
Twinkie on a subway in New York, and by the end of the
week everyone in the car had gained five pounds, and one of
them went to Hong Kong and everyone on the plane suddenly had to let their belt out, and when the flight attendant
ordered cheesecake from room service that night everyone
on her floor discovered that their underwear was too tight
the next morning. It spread uncontrollably. The Centers for
Disease Control are still tracking down Patient Zero, whom
they believe to be a man who ate an entire bag of tacoflavor Doritos in 1982.
I was stricken with a mysterious case of obesity as a child.
In elementary school we all walked home for lunch, because
Mom was waiting. In retrospect we know
this was a horrible burden for mothers
everywhere; they were all repressed
and unfulfilled, living on Metrecal diet
shakes and Lark cigarettes, staring out
the kitchen window wishing they were in
New York undergoing Freudian analysis,
sneaking a read of Betty Friedan when no
one was looking, but moms in Fargo
seemed to be holding up okay. Happy to
see us at noon, too. A grilled-cheese sandwich, a glass of milk, a cookie—then
we walked back to the low-slung brick
schoolhouse with the name of a murdered president on the
side. A few kids were on the chunk-style side, but every
class had some beanpoles to average it out.
Then came junior high, and the cafeteria. Hot caramel
rolls the size of throw pillows, great greasy pizza squares
with the dimensions of linoleum tiles. No more walking
home at noon. I gained ten pounds. Suffered the humiliation
of getting my trousers in the husky size, as they called fatboy pants in the Dads & Lads department. Teasing resulted.
My dad said I should either go on a diet or get a bra. If only
we’d known: It wasn’t my fault. It was the epidemic.
Now I have a child in middle school, and pack the lunch
with care: non-sugary juice pouch, protein, dairy, an apple
that has been carefully examined to make sure it has no
bruises, since they’re apparently poisonous, and so on. It has
to be eaten quickly, because sometimes she must spend half
her lunch period standing by the recycling bins to ensure
everything is put in the proper bin; the rules for ecologically kosher disposition make a glatt kitchen look like an Upton
CORBIS
T
HIS
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
Sinclair–era slaughterhouse. At home there are no sugared
sodas, but everything else is permitted, so nothing attains
the allure of a forbidden delight. Moderation, portion control. Also, I daub a big “X” in chocolate syrup on the door
so the Angel of Obesity passes by.
Her school is PC, as can be expected; last month it
observed a day of silence to support gay rights, for example.
I can only imagine the look on my mother’s face if I’d kept
silent when I came home for grilled cheese and wrote a note
saying I was “being quiet for the homosexuals or something,” as my daughter described the event. But the school
still permits cupcakes. At an event celebrating the end of
the semester, cupcakes were allowed on school grounds,
and in some instances the teachers provided them.
Epidemic-wise, this is like a teacher full of bird flu coughing in their faces.
It’ll stop soon enough, probably. Last Christmas—sorry,
Red-and-Green Festive Time—the high-school kids came
by on a fund-raising drive, offering boxes of chocolates.
They weren’t utterly without nutritional merit; if you ate the
foil that covered them, you’d probably
get some essential minerals. Fruits were
represented, but they were mummified
in sugar. Delicious. They also sold tins of
popcorn, probably made with luscious
oils that spackled your arteries and required the clear-cutting of some Burmese
jungle for a rare tree, so you knew it was
the good stuff.
This will end soon. Pictures of smiling
kids selling cookies will look as absurd
as old ads where doctors endorsed cigarettes, but we can’t get to that glorious
day unless the schools do their part. First, they’ll tell kids
not to eat the stuff—but hold on, isn’t that abstinence?
We’re told that doesn’t work. Okay, they’ll ban it. Hold on,
isn’t that prohibition? We’re told that never works. Well,
never mind, it’s bad, okay? Shut up with the analogies.
Final step: replacing the lunchroom tables with troughs, so
the children can lap up a fortified slop of liquefied tofu.
Today’s flavor: Beets!
The first lady has made healthy eating her cause célèbre,
and while you can guarantee that her hortatory exhalations
about swapping out the chili fries for braised asparagus will
change nothing, at least she will have raised our consciousness, and possibly Sparked a National Conversation. You’re
surprised she hasn’t proposed her own Buffet Rule: 30 percent of the stuff on your tray has to be leafy.
We had our own conversation at home about school food.
My kid hates it. Breaded wads of compacted chum, lukewarm poultry nodules, goopy macaroni, sawdust hamburgers—the free, union-approved food the state doles out is
inferior in every way to the meal your parent makes. That’s
a good lesson. Easily digested, and quite nutritious.
37
books5-28_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/8/2012 7:29 PM Page 38
Books, Arts & Manners
Taking Back
The Debate
ROB LONG
The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals
Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg
(Sentinel, 320 pp., $27.95)
D
ecaDes ago, during the 2012
Republican presidential primaries—it was decades ago,
right? or does it just seem that
way?—Newt Gingrich made his bones
with a simple strategy.
He dissented from the premise of the
question.
some smug television-news personality
would ooze out a question—cradled, inevitably, in left-wing assumptions—and
Newt would blast away at the foundation
of the question itself, the superficiality of
the process, and often the right of the questioner to be there in the first place.
It was “dials up,” as campaign strategists say, referring to the focus-group
reactions. People eat that stuff up—I
know I did—and a lot of us were halfway
to the post office with our checks made
out to “Gingrich 2012” before we slowed
down and asked ourselves, “Dude, c’mon.
Newt?”
Newt may not get the big prize of
2012, but he’s certainly booked up with
speaking gigs for the next half decade.
People—and by people I mean me, and
us—are tired of folding themselves into a
protective crouch every time someone
trots out a liberal cliché, and we’re thrilled
when someone else bats it away. Most
people—and by people I mean me, and
us—read the New York Times positively
38
|
punch-drunk, as we are peppered with
bad assumptions, liberal pieties, and unchallenged shibboleths.
so along comes Jonah Goldberg.
Jonah Goldberg writes as if he’s handing you a drink. You know what I mean:
It’s a friendly gesture, inviting, almost
conspiratorial. He writes that first sentence, and sits you down, tells you a few
jokes, tops off your drink, and before you
know it you look up from your empty
glass, deep into his book, and you’re both
laughing away like fast friends. You’re
out of the crouch and well into your
second belt. suddenly, you’re not punchdrunk anymore. You’re drunk drunk.
Happily so.
In his new book, The Tyranny of
Clichés, Jonah Goldberg pulls the Mother
of all Gingriches. He enumerates the top
two dozen liberal clichés—about the separation of church and state, the living
constitution, political dissent, that sort of
stuff—and peppers them into tatters with
research and argument and wit. Jonah
Goldberg, for 277 sprightly, clever, and
calmly reasoned pages, dissents from the
premise of the question.
Here, for instance, is Jonah on Ideology:
What is ideology? academics have an
infinite capacity to make this a profoundly complicated question. How could it be
otherwise for a profession that has managed to make the films of Keanu Reeves
into a realm of serious inquiry?
Or here, on Diversity:
Diversity can strengthen a group or it can
weaken it. The problem with the progressive obsession with diversity is that it is a
very narrow understanding of the term
applied universally. When Bill clinton
said he wanted a cabinet that “looks like
america,” he synthesized the problem
perfectly. superficially, his cabinet was
the most diverse ever, boasting a remarkable number of women, blacks, and Jews.
. . . More to the point, his cabinet may
have looked like america but it acted like
what it was—a collection of uniformly
liberal lawyers.
The drawback to being such an effortless stylist—or, should I say, an effortlessseeming stylist: there are over 200
footnotes to this closely researched
book—is that it can sometimes feel like a
comedy act. a smart one, with a point
and a point of view, but an act nonetheless. It’s possible to read The Tyranny of
Clichés and bleep over the highbrow references—and there are lots of them—to
German philosophers and american
political thinkers and historical events,
and still get a lot out of the book. I know
because I did exactly that.
But then I felt guilty, like I do when I
eat the crunchy croutons on the salad and
pick out the shards of Parmesan cheese,
and I went back and read it again, this
time for the actual nutrition. The good
news is that the book delivers at every
level. The best news, at least for me, is
that it’s still funny, even if you chase
down the footnotes.
although that raises the question: Who,
exactly, is this book for? It’s unlikely,
given the current state of the american
conversation, that anyone left of center is
going to pick it up and be persuaded.
We’ve all managed to cocoon ourselves
fairly snugly within our own type—especially the Left. But persuasion doesn’t
seem to be what Goldberg is really after.
He’ll take it, to be sure. and be glad for it.
But what he’s doing, I think, is what you
do when you hand a friend a drink after
a long day.
What conservatives have been missing
is a sense of joyful confidence. We’re right
about everything, of course, and we know
it, but we’ve behaved—at least out there in
the culture, when ambushed by left-wing
media stars or surrounded by liberals at a
cocktail party—as if we’ve got something
to hide, something to apologize for. as
if, ultimately, we’re on the losing side.
That’s what Goldberg is up to, I think,
in this smart and browsable book. He’s
bucking us up. He’s reminding us what
this struggle—for a country, for a way
of life, for a future of opportunity and
progress—is all about. In two dozen
chapters, he’s providing some goodnatured argument for all of us—especially those who live, as I do, surrounded
by liberals—in our struggle against the
Tyranny of clichés. The jokes, which are
plentiful and funny and cheerfully delivered, are a little bonus. Which isn’t bad
for $27.95.
M AY 28, 2012
Great
Experiments
ARNOLD KLING
Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of
Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society,
by Jim Manzi (Basic,
320 pp., $28.99)
W
are social sciences less
scientific than natural sciences? And what does this
imply about public policy? To the first question, many people
probably would answer, “Because social
sciences involve human beings, and
human beings sometimes do things that
are not predictable.” But that answer is at
best shallow, and at worst entirely wrong.
Moreover, the fact that human beings
are not perfectly predictable has never
stopped economists, sociologists, or political scientists from trying to contribute
useful knowledge.
Jim Manzi’s book attempts to provide
an answer that is both more rigorous and
more helpful. Manzi, an entrepreneur and
a contributing editor to NR, ends up making a case that social scientists would be
better served by (cautiously) undertaking
more experiments. Undertaking rigorous
experiments is also Manzi’s recommendation to policymakers.
The ideas in this book are important,
and I think it belongs on the syllabus of
graduate programs and high-level undergraduate programs in social science and
public policy. It is unfortunate that Manzi
Hy
Mr. Kling is an economist and the author, most
recently, of Unchecked and Unbalanced: How
the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and
Power Caused the Financial Crisis and
Threatens Democracy. He writes for EconLog at
econlog.econlib.org.
probably does not have enough academic
street cred to gain that sort of audience.
For instance, even though he skewers
famous studies by renowned Princeton
and Vanderbilt political-science professor Larry Bartels and renowned University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt,
their position in the professional hierarchy probably makes them impregnable,
particularly when attacked by someone
from outside the academy.
Manzi introduces a new and useful
term to describe the problem of the social
sciences: causal density. Causal density
means that there are many factors that
can affect the phenomena in which social
scientists are interested. Think of all of
the plausible causes of World War I, the
Great Depression, or the recent financial
crisis. Causal density can be just as serious an issue when dealing with ongoing
social concerns: How can we sort out
the causes of, for example, income inequality or differences in educational
outcomes?
The problem of causal density also
crops up in physical sciences, notably
biology. Even though there is strong evidence of heritability of diseases and other
characteristics, the hopes of pinning
these traits down to specific genes or sets
of genes have faded. There is too much
causal density.
For me, the paradigmatic case of causal
density is macroeconomics, as typified
by the question of how effective fiscal
stimulus is in ameliorating a recession.
We want to know whether, all other
things being equal, more government
spending raises output and employment.
History, however, does not hold other
things equal.
When experiments are not practical,
we rely on observational data. Manzi
points out that this worked in the case of
establishing a link between smoking
and lung cancer. In that context, the circumstances under which observational
studies can demonstrate causality were
spelled out by epidemiologist Austin
Bradford Hill. Among them are strength
of relationship, consistency of relationship, dosage-response relationship, plausibility, and coherence with other scientific
findings.
The challenge in judging the effect of
government deficits on economic performance is that the data that are available
do not satisfy the Hill criteria. For example, one does not observe a consistently
PORTSMOUTH
INSTITUTE
June 22-24, 2012
Portsmouth Abbey School, RI
Speakers will include:
Dr. William Dembski,
Discovery Institute
Dr. John Haught, Woodstock
Theological Center, Georgetown
Dr. Kenneth Miller, Brown Univ.
Dr. B. Joseph Semmes, Director of
Research, True North Medical Center
Rt. Rev. Dom James Wiseman,
Abbot of St. Anselm’s Abbey and
Professor at Catholic University
Rev. Nicanor P. G. Austriaco, O.P.,
Providence College
Dr. Michael Ruse, Florida State Univ.
... and more to come.
For information and registration:
www.portsmouthinstitute.org
or contact Cindy Waterman
at (401) 643-1244
or cwaterman@portsmouthabbey.org.
www.portsmouthinstitute.org
39
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positive relationship between deficit
spending and economic outcomes; in
fact, one observes quite the contrary, that
large deficits are associated with weaker
economic performance. Turning to Hill’s
other criteria, a positive relationship between deficit spending and economic
outcomes is plausible and coherent for
Keynesians, but not for economists who
subscribe to classical theory. This debate
has persisted ad nauseam.
Manzi argues that where controlled
experiments are feasible (i.e., not in
macroeconomics), they can provide a
better, albeit imperfect, solution to the
problem of causal density. For example,
if one is testing a new pedagogical technique, one can randomly assign some
students to be taught the old way and
others to be taught using the new method.
Many of the most trustworthy findings
in social science have come from such
experiments. There is a famous Rand
study, now nearly three decades old, of
health-insurance policies with different
deductibles. Also famous are the various
experiments testing Milton Friedman’s
idea of a negative income tax as a tool
to alleviate poverty.
I was once seated at a dinner table next
to an official of the Department of Education involved in education research. I
made an impassioned plea for more controlled experiments in education. The
official responded by asking, “Would you
want your child to be the subject of an
experiment?” At this, my jaw dropped,
and I sputtered, “They do it to my children all the time! They constantly introduce curriculum changes, scheduling
changes, and changes in teacher methods. They just don’t bother to evaluate
whether or not it works.”
Statistical-quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming used the term “tampering”
to describe this process of introducing
changes without rigorously evaluating
results. Tampering and experiments are
two ways of disturbing the status quo. But
only experiments are designed with the
intent of producing reliable measurements
of success or failure.
Like my dinner companion, most policy makers view experiments as at
best costly and at worst immoral. Even
though tampering is just as bad, if not
worse, it somehow escapes such criticisms.
Manzi points out that most social experiments are too small and too limited
in their initial conditions. Much is made
of the Perry Preschool Experiment, conducted in one location with fewer than
150 students. Manzi argues that the best
practice is to conduct multiple experiments in a variety of initial conditions.
He concludes that in fields with high
causal density, experimental methods are
a significant tool for producing reliable
results, and that a single experiment is
much less reliable than multiple, replicated experiments. Most new programs
and policies fail to achieve their desired
results, and it would be better to discover this beforehand, using experiments.
(Of course, to the extent that policymakers do not want to recognize failures,
they will not want to conduct experiments.)
Looking at experimental results, Manzi notes a general finding that “programs
that attempt to improve human behavior
by raising skills or consciousness are
even more likely to fail than those that
change incentives and environment.” It is
really hard to fix flaws in human character.
Manzi argues that the value of experiments bolsters the case for federalism,
because states can be laboratories for
what works in social policy. But I am not
sure that his case for this is sound. In
theory, if Washington were to approach
social policy by conducting rigorous,
controlled experiments in order to determine what works, that might be better, on
Manzi’s own terms, than leaving the 50
states alone to engage in unsystematic
tampering. I think that the case for federalism is actually more subtle: Attempting
to change the skills or consciousness of
officials in order to influence them to
conduct rigorous experiments as part of
the policy process is unlikely to work.
But creating an environment in which
incentives lead them to adopt experimental methods has a better chance of
success. A more competitive political
system, of the kind a decentralized structure might provide, could create this sort
of environment.
This is a provocative book for people
who are interested in how social science
relates to public policy. I am confident
that most of the people who read it will
benefit from it. I am much less confident
that most of the people who would benefit from it will read it. That reflects my
pessimistic view of today’s intellectual
culture, particularly in the academy.
M AY 28, 2012
Music
His Own
Drum
J AY N O R D L I N G E R
Cleveland, Ohio
story of Michael Hersch is
one of the most amazing you’ll
ever hear—in music or out. He
is an American composer, born
in 1971. He is one of the most honored
and lauded composers before the public
today. He deserves this recognition too
(say I, as a critic who has covered him for
years). Why is his story so amazing? First,
there is his extraordinary talent. Second,
there is the fact that he started in music
at a late age—and rapidly soared to something like the top.
Here in Cleveland, he is premiering
two works. To put it differently, and
maybe more accurately, the Cleveland
Orchestra is premiering one of them, and
he is premiering the other, as a pianist.
Before the concert, there is a “pre-concert
concert.” Hersch takes the stage as he
usually does: shyly, almost apologetically—as if to say, “Sorry to bother you,
your applause is so embarrassing.”
He sits down to play his massive and
monumental piano work The Vanishing
Pavilions, which he completed in 2005. It
is apocalyptic, visionary, and staggering.
And it takes approximately two and a
half hours to play. Hersch does not play it
all, in this pre-concert concert. He plays
excerpts, a little suite. And he plays it with
his prodigious technique, one that draws
gasps. Apparently, his fingers can do whatever his brain commands.
Which brings us to another reason
Hersch’s story is amazing: He could have
a big, big piano career, which would only
boost his fame as a composer. But he
eschews it—playing only his own music,
and that very rarely.
After the excerpts from The Vanishing
Pavilions, he premieres his Two Lulla bies. These are not what you might call
traditional lullabies, tunes to put baby to
sleep. The first is marked “Tense, disquieted” (as well as “restrained”). Both are
formidable piano pieces, not easy to play.
But there is definitely a lullaby aspect to
them. The composer wrote them, he has
RICHARD ANDERSON
T
HE
explained, in response to the death of his
closest friend.
That is true of his Night Pieces, too,
the work premiered by the Cleveland
Orchestra. It is a kind of trumpet concerto
(with the Cleveland’s principal, Michael
Sachs, doing the honors). The audience
showers this work with applause. Hersch
is willing to take a couple of bows, but
he is eager to get off the stage. I know
composers who could have milked that
applause for a good five minutes more.
A soprano worth her salt, ten more.
The next morning, I sit down with
Hersch, for a long talk. He describes what
a premiere feels like, to him: “The music
is sort of safe in your mind. And then it’s
out there, naked.” This gives a composer
“a feeling of incredible vulnerability.
That’s why, for years, I didn’t go to concerts of my music. George Rochberg once
said, ‘A composer needs an iron stomach.’” (Rochberg was an American composer, living from 1918 to 2005.)
Hersch grew up in Virginia. His family
divided their time between Reston, on the
outskirts of Washington, and a place deep
in the mountains, on the West Virginia
border. “Was this a weekend home?” I
say. “More like a weekend tent,” says
Hersch. “What do you mean, ‘tent’?” I
say. He says, “I mean, a tent, with little
stakes in the ground.” The family had a
tent on their farm for more than ten years.
Finally, they built a house. Hersch says
that his life in rural Virginia “shaped
who I am. I carry that place with me all
the time.”
He has two younger brothers: Jamie
and Eric. Their dad, Jay, once worked for
the federal government, but then he went
into the beef business. Their mom, Pat,
is a writer. Michael remembers going
around with his dad “in this refrigerated truck, and we’d stop by slaughterhouses—which was, you know, a little
traumatic. We’d stop by grocery stores
and try to sell our wares.”
Hersch’s parents weren’t musical, and
there was no piano in the house (either
house, or tent). An uncle played the guitar; Jamie played the French horn. The
family would listen to the radio on their
frequent car trips: bluegrass, rock, Casey
Kasem’s American Top 40. Michael appreciated everything he heard. “I joined
the KISS Army in 1978,” he says. He
would have been six or seven then. There
were also bands like Bad Brains and
Corrosion of Conformity.
Hersch is extremely reluctant to talk
about his abilities, but Jamie has talked
about them, publicly: If Michael heard a
song, even once, he knew all the words,
forever. And all the notes, forever. He
could also draw things with photographic
realism. Jamie was progressing on the
French horn, and is, in fact, a professional today. He pestered his older brother to
listen to some classical music, which he
Michael Hersch
41
finally did—at age 18. It was Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony, in a videotaped performance by Georg Solti and the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra. Michael knew what
his life would be.
Ordinarily, music is a child prodigy’s
game. Think for a second about what
18 means. Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, “the
Spanish Mozart,” died at 19. Lili Boulanger died at 24. Schubert, greedy, had
31 years.
Hersch does not feel at all disadvantaged, having started when he did. “I
didn’t look at it as, ‘I have so much to
catch up on.’ People sometimes say, ‘You
started so late, it must have been daunting.’ But I wasn’t thinking in terms of
chronology or lost years. I was just overjoyed at my luck. I had found this world,
and I had it all to explore.” His parents, he
says, have “caught a lot of flak from people who think, ‘What if he had started at
four or five?’ Well, maybe I would have
burned out.”
He quickly learned to play the piano.
He wrote his first composition at 19, a
piano fantasy. (Mozart wrote all five of
his violin concertos when he was 19.) As
the music critic Tim Page wrote in 2005,
“Hersch discovered, as geniuses will, that
he somehow already knew what he was
doing.” Hersch himself will allow only
this: “My mind works for music.”
“Miraculously,” he says, he was admitted to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.
He earned two degrees in composition
there. He started teaching at Peabody in
2006, when he was 34; he became chairman of the department (the composition
department) four years later. But we’re
getting too far ahead in our story.
After studying music just a few years,
he started to win all the prizes: a Gug genheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the
Berlin Prize, etc. Veteran and famed composers were agog at what he could do.
Some of the top performers took up his
cause, including Mariss Jansons, the conductor. In 2008, I did a public interview
of Jansons in Salzburg. I asked him which
living composers stood out for him. He
first named three septuagenarians: Pen derecki, Pärt, and Kancheli. And then he
paused to make special mention of this
young American, Hersch.
He has written music of virtually all
types: symphonies, concertos, chamber
music, songs. The only thing that’s missing is opera, which will no doubt come.
Much of his music is intense, as though
42
|
communicating something urgently im portant. I’ve often said, “He writes as
though his life depended on it.” Few notes
are wasted. Nothing is for show. The
music is unyieldingly honest. “Uncompromising” is a word several of us have
used. Also, we’ve said, “When you’re at a
Hersch premiere, you feel like you’re at
something historic. Like you’re hearing,
for the first time, something that will last.”
Be aware of something else about
Hersch’s music: It can be practically unbearable. In person, Hersch is a sunny,
pleasant, affable type. But his music tends
to express pain and despair. Of one of
his symphonies, a critic wrote, “Nearly
unbearable, it spoke to the kind of injury
from which one does not heal.” Already in
1996, when Hersch was 24, Rochberg
commented, “His music sounds the dark
places of the human heart and soul.”
When he was about 30, he decided he
wanted to write some very big and long
pieces, such as The Vanishing Pavilions.
These would take years to write, each of
them. No one commissioned them. He
recalls that people said, “You’re not doing
yourself any favors, you know—writing
these pieces that no one is going to program. That have no commercial appeal.”
He knew. But he could do no other, by his
lights. When money got tight, he worked
part-time for his father, selling beef. This
was while he was teaching at Peabody,
and had umpteen international prizes on
his shelf. He would finish a lecture on
Bruckner, then go to the phone to call
federal penitentiaries, talking up beef.
A colleague said to him, “You’re the
most own-drummer person I know”—an
excellent observation, and a high compliment.
Because of his own-drumness, he won’t,
as I’ve said, accept piano engagements.
People have said, “Why don’t you play a
Brahms concerto on one half of a program
and one of your own on the other half?”
He will not. Curious, I ask whether he has
to practice the piano (because I suspect
he doesn’t). Does he have to practice,
like mortals, or can he play whatever he
wants, whenever he wants, cold? He
won’t say. I browbeat him until he at last
confesses: No, he doesn’t have to practice. He can just play at will.
But what he wants to do is compose. A
bout with cancer, in 2007, only increased
his determination to release the pieces that
are in him. He lives with the two girls he
loves: his wife, Karen, a classicist; and
their daughter, Abigail. Abby was born on
January 27, 2006, the 250th anniversary
of Mozart’s birth. His favorite time to
compose is at night, when they are asleep.
“It’s better than any artist’s colony.”
Among his gifts is the need for very little
sleep—about four hours. One can get a lot
done, in 20 waking hours.
He does not struggle to compose, but he
does need time. He cannot be rushed. He
works on a piece in his head until it’s
ready. Then he writes it down, with no
revision. It took almost a year to write
down The Vanishing Pavilions, which
runs more than 300 pages.
Toward the end of our conversation, I
ask, “Do you care if they listen?” The
allusion does not have to be explained to
him: In the 1950s, there was a famous
essay by Milton Babbitt called “Who
Cares If You Listen?” Hersch, somewhat
to my surprise, says he does care. “If
people listen, and they connect with my
music, it’s deeply meaningful. And if they
don’t like it, it’s hurtful. But I’m gonna
write it anyway.”
Shostakovich liked to quip, “I like all
music, from Bach to Offenbach.” Hersch
is the same way—a man who devours
music from Gregorian chant to this week.
When I press him about favorite music, he
says, “For me, late Schubert piano music
is where it’s at.” He adds, “The thing
about music is, you can go for years without listening to a given composer, and
then suddenly have a need to hear him.
The music is lying dormant, waiting for
you. You can activate it anytime, simply
by engaging with it.”
Like most artists worth paying attention to, Hersch is grateful to be doing
what he’s doing. He considers himself
incredibly lucky—lucky to have been
exposed to music, even at a late date (or
an untraditional date, let’s say). And “it
just anguishes me that there are so many
people out there, possibly, who could
have been like me, or are like me, who
weren’t fortunate enough to have a brother who would say, ‘You need to sit down
and listen to Beethoven.’ What about all
the people who are just as talented as I am,
or more talented, and didn’t have the
opportunity?”
There you have some of Michael
Hersch’s greatness: not just a mind that
“works for music,” not just what people
unblushingly call his “genius,” but a
humanity, evident in his music and in
his life at large.
M AY 28, 2012
Back to
Tomorrowland
C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
I
n the autumn of 1918, a young
man from Marceline, Mo., sat
sketching in France while waiting
to be sent home. He was 17, on
the cusp of adulthood, and had little idea
what he wanted to do with his life, beyond buying a raft and floating aimlessly
down the Mississippi “like Huckleberry
Finn.” The man had signed up for the Red
Cross after being rejected by the Army on
medical grounds, but arrived in Paris
after the armistice was signed and the
action was over. He was intensely disappointed, writing home that he’d “missed
out on something big.”
Just over 73 years later, a few miles
outside of Paris, workers finished building a city that bore the young man’s
name. It was called EuroDisney, and it
was a tribute to America standing in the
very heart of Europe’s most self-obsessed
and anti-American nation. Although he
never lived to see it, Walter Elias Disney
had got his “something big” in Europe at
last.
EuroDisney, renamed Disneyland Paris
in 1994, opened 20 years ago this April. It
was an immediate flop and was derided,
as many of Disney’s projects have been
in their early stages, as “folly.” In its first
year, attendance was half of its predicted level, and the park lost 300 million
francs. Even Disney’s biggest apologists
were hard pressed to conclude anything
but that it was a failure. More hostile
observers in France complained about
everything from the park’s perceived cultural imperialism to its dress code, which
supposedly trampled on the “individual
liberty” of union members. Le Figaro
publicly hoped that “rebels would set fire
to Disneyland,” and Parisian theater producer Ariane Mnouchkine infamously
labeled the park a “cultural Chernobyl.”
Ultimately, the French concluded, it
was all just so American. It was all so
Disney.
The 20th anniversary of this landmark
in cultural history leads one to ask: Who
was this man, whose works are American
enough to so disturb the French, and
whose most famous creation—Mickey
Mouse—is used throughout the world as
a contemptuous shorthand for all that is
jects, regardless of how unrealistic they
wrong with the world’s remaining superwere. In Disney’s world, money could be
power? The answer is that he was somemade from ink and paint; his brother had
thing of a paradox: a conservative with a
no such luxury. Both onscreen and in his
deep streak of utopianism.
amusement parks, Walt Disney lived in
Avuncular, affable, Walt Disney is the
the world of Thomas Paine: He started
all-American boy, and his is the classic
the world all over again. It is no accident
rags-to-riches story—beginning with his
that to get to Florida’s sprawling Magic
youth in the small Missouri town of MarKingdom, guests must cross a lake in a
celine and ending with his death in
boat. In doing so, they are leaving the
Hollywood as the president and eponym
old world behind and starting anew.
of an entertainment empire. Disney was a
Whatever this is—at the very least it is
Republican, and a fierce anti-Communist,
wonderful, inspired theater—it is not
like his friends Gary
Cooper,
John
Wayne,
conservative. George Will’s complaint
and Ronald Reagan. He happily testified
that Paine’s maxim was “the least conser Acti-
conceivable” goes for
before the House Un-American
vative
sentiment
vities Committee, took on the Screen
Disney, too. “I don’t want the public to
helped
found
the Mo - see the world they
Actors Guild, and
live in while they’re in
wrote in a memo.
tion Picture Alliance for the Preservation
the Park,” Disney
He
rejected
the utopian
of American Ideals.
Disney’s
inclination was not
of Warner
limited to his films
freewheeling style
Brothers’
and his amusement
edgy “Looney Tunes”
series,
preferring
parks; he had designs on society, too.
instead to keep “the highest moral and
Although it ended up as an innocuous, if
spiritual standards” in his work. One
diverting, part of Florida’s Walt Disney
unfortunate employee discovered just
World complex, the Experimental Prohow deeply traditional Disney was when
totype Community of Tomorrow—
he was fired on his first day, having made
EPCOT—was initially designed as a
a crude joke about an animated pornoblueprint for the real world, and it was
graphic film while (unknowingly) sitting
only Disney’s death in 1966 that put the
next to Walt’s brother Roy. On the surplans on hold. (Disney spent the majority
face, Uncle Walt, as he came to be known,
of his time on his deathbed working on
was as American as apple pie.
the idea, and had already bought land
And yet, his obsessive quest for control
in Florida twice the size of Manhattan
and for perfection rendered him that
for the purpose.) Were a liberal to speak
most unconservative of things—a utopiof a planned community in the way that
an. Disney’s career was a procession
Walt Disney did, conservatives would
of increasingly grand projects that he
pick up pitchforks and run for the
sought to bend wholly to his will. Broadhills. (Even the name would put up our
ly speaking, writers and artists make
backs.)
good liberals because the problems they
There is no hiding from the facts:
face in their line of work can generally
EPCOT was Disney’s attempt to address
be overcome with the stroke of a pen.
his own worries about his children’s
Hollywood types control the lights, the
future and to rebuild the world in his own
camera, and the action, and they can
write their own endings, adjusting the
parameters of their worlds without hav“Rated One of New York City
‘Best Value’ Hotels.” ... Zagats
ing to surrender themselves to the external realities that afflict men of science,
finance, and war. John Lennon, thus,
could sing “Imagine” with gay abandon,
as if he were merely imagining changing
the chords to his song. The real world,
however, does not work like this, a fact
with which Disney struggled to come to
New York’s all suite hotel is located in
the heart of the city, near corporations,
terms for his whole life.
theatre & great restaurants. Affordable
Illustrative of his unrealistic worldelegance with all the amenities of home.
view was his dismissive attitude toward
his brother Roy, the Disney company’s
149 E. 39th St. (Bet 3rd & Lex) New York, NY 10016
Reservations 1-800-248-9999
CFO, who was often peremptorily told to
Ask about our special National Review rates.
“find the money” for his brother’s pro43
image. Why, he wondered aloud, could
he build a place such as Disneyland to be
free of crime, pollution, and disorganization, but not enjoy such things in
real American cities? His simple conclusion was that Disneyland was better
planned—and so would EPCOT be. He
would export the precision of his animation and of Disneyland to America’s
streets, and bring back the simplicity of
his childhood. Everyone living there
would have to be employed—even if of
retirement age—and nobody would own
his own property. The tone was unavoidably collectivist: “Everyone living in
EPCOT,” Disney wrote, “will have the
responsibility to maintain this living
blueprint of the future.” Robert Moses, a
controversial city planner who remodeled much of New York, and Disney’s
collaborator at the 1964–65 World’s Fair,
was thrilled, predicting that the “overwhelming” idea would provide the “first
accident free, noise free, pollution free
city center in America.”
The instinct to control was strong in
Walt Disney, as was his belief that he
could usher in a “new tomorrow.” But it
is important to look at what he chose to
place in his artificial world. A famous
story is instructive here: Disney was conducting a spot check of Disneyland in
California when he saw a cast member in
a cowboy outfit walking through the
futuristic Tomorrowland. Disney decided
at that moment that Disneyland was too
small, and the idea for Florida’s gargantuan Walt Disney World was born. The
story is about perfectionism, but it is also
about, well, an American cowboy walking through an American land that is
dedicated to American exploration of
the future. In its various iterations,
Disneyland is filled with celebrations of
America: the frontier; Hollywood; Mark
Twain’s riverboat; Tom Sawyer’s island;
the Carousel of Progress; the Hall of
Presidents; and, above all, Main Street
U.S.A.
Most artists from Middle America
reject their upbringing and move abroad
or to the coasts. Walt Disney did the opposite. With Disneyland, he brought
Middle America to the coasts, and to
Tokyo and Paris and Hong Kong for
good measure. (The Shanghai Disney
Resort is scheduled to open in 2015.)
However much success he had, Disney
never lost his love for Marceline, his
“laughing place.” At the creative sessions
for films and the planning meetings for
Disneyland, he would reminisce about
his childhood constantly. “Marceline was
the most important part of Walt’s life,”
his wife, Lillian, claimed. The smalltown community in which he spent his
THE LAST KEENERS IN SCHUYLKILL
(A NEIGHBORHOOD IN PHILADELPHIA)
She remembered that the Tobins were the last
To have wailing mourners at a wake
Women who cried in disbelief that a soul had fled.
Who they were she didn’t know, or how
They were hired or if they were volunteers
And she was not sure who had died
Only that the Tobins lived on Naudain Street
And came from Donegal. She was a school girl
Then, back in the ’60s, and told me this
In Kelly’s, of how having heard them
Before that night, she never did again.
Kelly’s is closed, and if I bring those
Keeners up again in five years, will she
Still remember them, or will they be gone
With Kelly, and the last of the Tobins?
—LAWRENCE DUGAN
44
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key formative years remained, for him,
the ideal. Like Norman Rockwell, he was
a popular advocate for an America disappeared, and he preserved it in celluloid
and plastic for posterity.
In EPCOT, too: The futuristic world of
which Disney dreamed—although far
more prescriptive than any down-the-line
conservative would enjoy—would not be
populated by government bureaucrats
and run along statist lines, but be a place
in which American ingenuity and business could thrive. Disney looked to
companies such as General Motors and
General Electric to come up with solutions to problems, and relied heavily on
his hand-picked team of creatives—his
“Imagineers.” It was these people he was
referring to when he claimed that “EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas
and new technologies that are emerging
from the forefront of American industry.”
Moreover, Disney was so concerned that
the government would get involved that
he petitioned the Florida legislature for
full control over the land he had bought,
and made it clear that he did not want
them involved in his project, nor did he
want to have to seek planning permission
for his urban experiment.
He may have been a reactionary futurist—he could fairly be criticized for
loving both the past and the future more
than the present—but he never once succumbed to the notion that the government
knew best. Nor did he think that it was
possible for mankind to arrive at a
finished version of a perfect world. “EP COT,” he contended, would be “a community of tomorrow that will never be
complete.” It is a sublime example of his
split personality that, while Disney was
planning a master community in which
the inhabitants would be studied to facilitate constant improvement, he was
vocally (and financially) supporting the
1964 presidential candidacy of archlibertarian Barry Goldwater.
But how did an apolitical illustrator,
whose sole desire as a young man was to
float passively down the Mississippi,
become both so political and such a
staunch advocate of America’s past and
future? The key to understanding this lies
with the unionism of the 1930s and the
establishment of the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB).
In the early days of the Disney studio,
before the wild, unprecedented success
of 1937’s Snow White, Disney’s employM AY 28, 2012
ees were few and he knew each of them
by name, often stopping at desks to chat
and share jokes or stories. But as the studio grew, he drew back. He treated his
employees extremely well, paying them
much more than any other studio in the
industry and building them a comfortable, state-of-the-art facility in Burbank
(at the height of the Great Depression, no
less); but his operation was ramshackle,
and remuneration, bonuses, and opportunities within the studio were widely
perceived to be randomly allocated. It
was somewhat understandable that the
world’s first major animation studio—the
studio that invented the genre and its
techniques—would not be a hive of managerial predictability. But this patchwork
quilt of processes, and the influx of new,
less loyal talent, created a sizeable number of employees who were upset at one
thing or another, and that played straight
into the hands of the predatory unions.
In 1937, the International Alliance of
Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)
became the first union to target Disney.
IATSE was a deeply unpleasant outfit,
closely associated with Al Capone in
Chicago and headed up by thugs who
were quick to resort to violence. Its attempt to unionize Disney was rebuffed,
but in 1940, the Screen Cartoonists Guild
was ready to move in for the kill. Its boss,
Herbert Sorrell, who was described as a
“tough left-winger” by contemporaries
(read, “Communist”), claimed that he
had collection cards from a majority of
employees and requested that Disney recognize the union. Disney was livid and
refused outright. He and Roy, he said, had
“no use for any unions,” having grown up
listening to their father tell of having been
physically beaten by a union member.
Walt threatened to “close down this studio” before he would allow it to be unionized.
In response, Sorrell promised to
“squeeze Disney’s balls ’til he screams”
and “crush [him] to a dustbowl.” A standoff ensued, and Disney, under intense
pressure, offered to put the dispute to a
vote of the NLRB. Sorrell refused. Mat ters came to a head when Disney fired
(pro-union) animator Art Babbit, whom
he furiously called a “Bolshevik” and
accused of trying to destroy his studio
from within; Sorrell immediately called
a strike. After almost five weeks, dur ing which time production on the film
Dumbo came to a standstill, Nelson
Rockefeller, head of the State Department’s Latin American Affairs office,
called Disney and suggested that he go to
South America as a goodwill ambassador
in order to allow passions at the studio to
cool.
While he was away, a federal mediator
from the NLRB came in to arbitrate
between the SCG and the Disney studio.
It found in favor of the SCG on every
single issue. Upon his return, Disney
reduced the number of his employees to
the point at which he felt that he had
purged the “chip-on-the-shoulder boys
and the world-owes-me-a-living lads,”
but he was nonetheless forced to reinstate
Babbit and other agitators at the instruction of a labor court. Disney was heartbroken by the saga. Previously, his studio
had been described by a former employee as “one big happy family”; now he
didn’t know whom he could trust, and he
felt his generosity had been thrown in his
face. Moreover, he didn’t understand
how a union could be allowed in his studio without his permission and how the
government could force his hand.
Overnight, Disney turned rightward. A
man who had never had time for politics
became a leading anti-Communist and a
staunch conservative. From the outbreak
of World War II until his early death
in 1967, Disney—who had voted for
FDR in 1936—worked ostentatiously
for Republican candidates, including
Thomas Dewey, whom he endorsed and
made a speech for in 1944; Eisenhower,
for whom he cut a television advertisement in 1952; and Ronald Reagan, whom
he energetically supported during the
1966 California gubernatorial campaign.
In 1947, he told the House Un-American
Activities Committee that Communists
had infiltrated his studio and successfully tried “to take over my artists,” that
the NLRB was in bed with the unions,
and that there was a serious threat of
Communism in the motion-picture industry.
As with many iconic figures, rumors
about Walt Disney abound. The two most
popular are that he was cryogenically
frozen upon his death, and that he was an
anti-Semite. The first charge is harmless,
a perhaps inevitable product of his image
as an innovator and dreamer about the
future. But the second is not. Disney himself must take some of the responsibility
for his poor posthumous reputation, even
if it is just the consequence of negligence.
His lack of interest in the world around
him—except in how it related to his studio—led him to make mistakes that cost
him dearly: He invited the innovative
Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood in 1938, ostensibly without thinking about how it might look; and he stayed
too long at the Motion Picture Alliance
for the Preservation of American Ideals,
after it had been hijacked by Birchite
cranks (he eventually left). Further, his
horror over the unionization of his studio
brought him into conflict with many
Jews, toward whom he was extremely
rude.
But the anti-Semitism rumor is basically false. There is no evidence whatsoever
to suggest that the Jews were singled out
for special disdain, or that their being
Jewish invited his opprobrium. Neil Gabler, the first of Disney’s biographers to
gain access to his archives, found very little evidence of anti-Semitism, and noted
that, on the contrary, Disney employed
Jews without prejudice throughout his
career, was named Man of the Year by the
Beverly Hills chapter of B’nai B’rith, and
was generous to a range of Jewish charities. But critics who hated the America
that Disney celebrated—and took exception, especially, to his anti-unionism,
McCarthyism, and close relationship
with Ronald Reagan—have willfully
repeated the slur.
Why does any of this matter today? The
simple answer is that even now, among
both his admirers and his critics—and
rightly or wrongly—Disney is seen as
America distilled. His movies are the
favorites of children worldwide, and his
amusement parks welcome hundreds of
millions of visitors each year. Back in
April 1992, as EuroDisney prepared to
open, the French complained that “American culture” had come to France once
again. It is important for us to know which
America is on offer; America is a big
country, after all, and there is much in it
that is less than desirable. We can be
thankful that Walt Disney, by and large,
set forth a conception of America that
Americans can be proud of: He took the
best of Marceline and preserved it in
aspic, as part of an America that is not just
history-minded but also forward-looking.
And although Disney could veer into an
unconservative utopianism, his fundamental creed remained, “If you can dream
it, you can do it.” And there is no more
American sentiment than that.
45
Film
Cult
Favorite
R O S S D O U T H AT
L
ast summer in these pages, I
reviewed Another Earth, a
slight but haunting sciencefiction fable starring a young
actress named Brit Marling, who also cowrote the movie’s screenplay. On a barebones budget, her movie created an
interesting genre mash-up, combining an
only-in-the-movies personal melodrama
(a grieving Yale professor falls in love
with the young woman who accidentally
killed his wife and daughter in a car
a southern California cult, whose devotees gather in a featureless angeleno basement to be purged of their weaknesses and
prepared for what she tells them is coming
next: a civilizational collapse, a period of
civil war, and an opportunity to recover
the kind of authentic and organic life that
a soulless modernity has stripped away
from us.
this message no doubt sounds like the
usual “age of aquarius meets the Mayan
apocalypse” patter, but there’s a twist.
Marling’s Maggie doesn’t just claim to
have foreseen the coming american dégringolade; she claims to have lived it,
and then traveled backward through
time, à la John Connor’s father in The
Terminator, to shepherd a group of particularly important people through the fire
to come. to corroborate her story, she
has an ankle tattoo marked with the year
she comes from (“54” for 2054) and an
FOX SEARCHLIGHT
Christopher Denham and Brit Marling in Sound of My Voice
wreck) with the Twilight Zone scenario
of a mirror-image Earth suddenly sweeping into our orbit and looming up, with
all its counterfactual possibilities, in
the southern Connecticut night sky. the
results were uneven but interesting.
Another Earth wasn’t a complete work
of art, but its strengths suggested that
critics and audiences should keep an eye
out for whatever Marling ended up doing
next.
What she has done, it turns out, is cowrite and star in yet another slight, haunting,
science-fiction-tinged provocation—but a
better one this time, with a sharper script
and tighter, less self-consciously pretentious plot. titled Sound of My Voice, it features Marling as the charismatic leader of
46
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immune system so weak—time travel is
hard on the body, apparently—that only
an oxygen tank and a steady diet of greenhouse-grown, toxin-free food prevents
her body from failing altogether. More
important, she has a gift reserved for
grifters and messiahs: the ability to make
the incredible seem not only plausible, but
almost self-evidently true.
Into Maggie’s world comes a young
couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and
Lorna (Nicole Vicius), whom we meet in
the movie’s tense opening scene, when
they’re driven blindfolded from a rendezvous point to the cult’s basement headquarters, instructed to strip and shower
and change, and then ushered into the first
of several initiation rituals. Only after
Marling’s guru has welcomed them as
potential acolytes and revealed her nearfuture origins do we learn the truth about
them: they are not spiritual seekers
but would-be documentary filmmakers,
with a plan to clandestinely tape their
indoctrination and use the footage for an
exposé.
their plan, inevitably, does not exactly
go as planned. Peter and Lorna have baggage, it turns out: He, an über-rationalist,
is working out issues having to do with
his late New agey mom, and she, a former party girl, is using his ambition as
her own lifeline out of anomie. and Maggie, either because she has the dark gifts
of a Jim Jones or because (dum dum
dum!) she’s really who she says she is,
exerts an unexpected pull on both of
them, even as the personal excavations
required of her followers open cracks in
their relationship.
these cracks widen amid an atmosphere of mounting dread, spiked with an
occasional dose of dark comedy. (Wait
for the moment when Maggie is asked
to sing a popular song from 2054, and
reluctantly obliges.) the script, which
Marling co-wrote with Zal Batmanglij,
the movie’s director, keeps the unease
neatly balanced between the natural and
the paranormal, so that we can’t be sure
what kind of story we’re actually involved with. One moment we’re watching as Lorna is taught target shooting by
an older cult member, suggesting that we
should expect a purely secular, Waco- or
Guyana-style endgame for the cult. the
next we’re watching a pre-teen girl—one
of Peter’s students in his day job as a substitute teacher—build creepy towers out
of black Legos, as though she’s picking up signals from some supernatural
source.
the resolution, when it comes, doesn’t
necessarily resolve anything. as she did
in Another Earth, Marling chooses to cut
things off abruptly, leaving some of her
narrative balls hanging in the air. Because
Sound of My Voice is a more confident
and skillful movie than its predecessor,
though, the studied suddenness of its
last scene feels like more of a cop-out.
Marling is a serious talent, and she’s
building an impressive résumé by lavishing her gifts on small movies that raise the
biggest questions. But we’ll know about
the scope of those gifts when she takes
the plunge and makes bold to answer one
of them.
M AY 28, 2012
In the Arena
Draft Board
KYLE SMITH
T
he NFL’s annual spring draft
is a conference of innocence
and experience. The players
are spring lambs, capering
with youth and anticipation. As yet they
are unacquainted with their first paychecks, as they are with the unnerving
sight of the quarterback-mauling Pittsburgh Steeler James harrison coming on
the zone blitz. The teams that arrive to
offer them new homes in sleek green
pastures are hopeful but burdened with
harrowing memories of wayward sheep
and rams run amok. For every Super
Bowl–winning quarterback like Troy Aikman or John elway, there’s a bumbling
Tim Couch or a Jeff George.
A pleasing sense of recompense for
past sorrows fills the air thanks to the rule
of selection in reverse order of previous
standings. As in Matthew’s promise, the
last shall be first. Yet the meek may inherit Joey harrington, the ex-QB and No. 1
draft pick of the Detroit Lions who
played like an asthmatic kitten. Because
assessing new recruits to join in the 22man hurlyburly is notoriously difficult.
“Let’s break it down!” cry the analysts,
but in football, as in hollywood, as in the
Council of economic Advisers, nobody
knows anything.
The NFL draft is preceded by the
“Combine,” which carries gruesome
connotations of blades of empiricism
ruthlessly spitting out athletic chaff. It is
instead an exercise in whimsy at which
frowning coaches attempt to reduce
complex athletes to their constituent
parts—number of bench presses, swiftness of wind sprints, alacrity of Gator ade tub–overturning, etc. Is a wideout
who dashes the 40 in 4.4 seconds significantly preferable to a rival Mercury
who rings up a 4.6? Does it not depend
on the player’s ability to shed blocks, to
run patterns, to fake out defenders, to
catch—in short, to play football? Going
back to bench-pressing is like deciding
whom to invite to a chess tournament
by asking potential entrants to do some
quick calculus, on the grounds that
Mr. Smith is a film critic for the New York Post.
mathematical ability is correlated with
chess prowess.
What would be even more absurd
than asking chess players to take a math
quiz, though, would be to ask NFL players to take a math quiz. So the league
does so. Prospective draftees submit to
the infamous Wonderlic test of literacy,
logic, arithmetic, and other cognitive
tasks. Its utter lack of rigor (sample
question: “Paper sells for 21 cents per
pad. What will four pads cost?”) matches its lack of prophetic usefulness.
Pace the claims of Malcolm Gladwell
and others that the test has no value,
Mike Florio, who for reasons unknown
is employed to mull football for NBC,
suggests using the test to ward off insurrection. he has written, “Scoring too
high can be as much of a problem as
scoring too low. Football coaches want
to command the locker room. Being
smarter than the individual players
makes that easier. having a guy in the
locker room who may be smarter than
every member of the coaching staff can
be viewed as a problem.” Yes, you certainly wouldn’t want some smartypants
punter to seize the chalk and lead a
locker-room mutiny. This is why no
team would ever tempt fate by employing both the veteran linebacker London
Fletcher and Christian Ponder, a sprightly new play-caller for Minnesota.
This year the Wonderlic met LSU
cornerback Morris Claiborne. he scored
a four out of 50, then hastened to
acknowledge that the examination had
not captured his imagination. “Wasn’t
nothing on the test that came with football,” he reasoned, “so I pretty much
blew the test off.” he had something
more pressing to do that day than take a
twelve-minute quiz that he knew would
be evaluated by his next employer?
Would not a true iconoclast have left a
clean form and earned a more insouciant, not to say wittier, score of zero?
Apparently no player has ever done so,
the reported nadir being two points.
The Dallas Cowboys made Claiborne
the sixth-overall pick anyway, their
need being acute. Dallas’s man at the
position was Terence Newman, who has
spent the last several years master ing the reverse of the wide receiver’s
touchdown jubilation: the beaten cornerback’s high-speed retreat from the
cameraman’s frame in the moment of
humiliation. Furthering his quest for
anonymity, Dallas unloaded him on
Cincinnati.
The woeful Newman, though, was
himself a former fifth-overall pick, suggesting that, despite the Wonderlic data
and the Combine score and the collegiate
statistics, the Cowboys didn’t know what
they were doing when they drafted him in
the first place: Twenty-six picks later,
when future superstar corner Nnamdi
Asomugha was still on the board, even
the Oakland Raiders were wise enough
to sniff opportunity. That same year, 13
quarterbacks were drafted, including the
longtime Cincinnati Bengals starter Carson Palmer, who is now with Oakland,
and the journeyman Byron Leftwich.
None proved as successful as one who
wasn’t drafted at all: Tony Romo.
This year the management of the
Raiders, by eagerly sought reputation the
league’s most ruthless crew, and holders
of the title, in their 2011 iteration, of most
penalized team ever, pondered their nineyear absence from the postseason invitational and changed course. Detecting a
correlation between talented players and
those with “a strong foundation in their
faith,” the team drafted a slate of the
devout. Recent high draft picks by the
club have too often yielded such busts as
quarterback JaMarcus Russell, whose
penchant for falling asleep in team meetings went unprophesied by either the
Wonderlic or the Combine. The Raiders
could hardly do worse than they’ve been
doing. If all else fails, why not consider
character?
In 1998, the Indianapolis Colts puzzled mightily over whether to choose
Peyton Manning or Ryan Leaf with their
first-overall pick. The pair were seen as
so evenly matched that San Diego,
which was due to have the third pick,
traded a bundle of future draft choices to
move up a single slot and be assured the
rights to one of the pair.
The Colts, undecided, asked each
player what would be his first action
upon being drafted. Manning said,
“Study the playbook.” Leaf said, “Go to
Las Vegas.” Leaf was not the Colts’ pick.
Today Manning is preparing for another
season in his hall of Fame career, while
the player he nosed out for the title of
most hotly pursued footballer in the class
is an ex-athlete awaiting trial on charges
of burglary and drug possession. Where
is the algorithm that can take the true
measure of a man?
47
backpage--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/9/2012 2:06 PM Page 48
Happy Warrior
BY MARK STEYN
Give-and-Take
OME years ago in this space, I cited a famous
Gerald Ford line he liked to use when trying to
ingratiate himself with conservative audiences:
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you
have.” And I posited an alternative thesis: A government
big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big
enough to get you to give any of it back.
That’s what the political class of Europe’s cradle-tograve welfare states have spent the last three years doing:
trying to persuade their electorates to give some of it back.
Not a lot, just a bit. In France, President Sarkozy raised the
retirement age from 60 to 62. French life expectancy is
80.7, so you still get to enjoy a quarter of your entire human
existence as one long holiday weekend. In Greece, where
those in officially designated “hazardous” professions such
as hairdressing and TV-announcing get to retire at 50, the
government raised the possibility of ending the agreeable
arrangement by which public-sector employees receive 14
monthly paychecks per annum. They didn’t actually do it
but the mere suggestion that Greeks should, like lesser mortals, be bound by temporal reality was enough for the voters to rebel. M. Sarkozy lost to a socialist pledged to restore
retirement at 60, and in Greece the government got swept
aside not by its traditional opposition but by various
unlovely alternatives. The Communist party got 26 seats.
Syriza, a “Coalition of the Radical Left” comprising the
Trotskyite “Anticapitalist Political Group,” the Maoist
“Communist Organization of Greece,” the Goreist “Renewing Communist Ecological Left,” plus various splinter
groups too loopy to mention wound up with 52 seats and
the second-largest caucus. A month ago, a mere 4 percent
of European Union citizens lived under left-wing politicians. But, after a three-year flirtation with “austerity,” the
citizenry has decided that a government big enough to give
you everything you want suits them just fine, and they’re
not gonna give any of it back. Just keep those 14 monthly
checks per annum coming (it counts for your government
pension, too) until they’re dead. If it bankrupts those left
behind, who cares? Not my problem.
Even before the revolt of the non-workers, “austerity”
was more honored in the breach. Readers who deplore
Boehner and Romney as RINO squishes should see what
passes for “conservative” in Europe. Whatever principles
Sarkozy appeared to have if only by comparison with the
cynical old roué Chirac were long fled by the time of his
reelection campaign. France hasn’t balanced a budget since
de Gaulle’s successor, M. Pompidou, died in office (for
American historians, that’s back in the Partridge Family
era). Government spending accounts for 56 percent of the
economy—and, if you take into account all unfunded liabilities, French debt totals 549 percent of GDP (in Europe,
S
Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com).
48
|
second only to Greece’s 875 percent). And yet, in the age of
“austerity,” every single presidential candidate was running
on an economic platform that would increase those numbers.
The “extreme right” Marine Le Pen of the “far right”
National Front? Oh, if only. They don’t like immigrants,
but in every other respect they’re to the left of the incoming
socialist. You’d be surprised how many of Europe’s alleged
“extreme right” parties that applies to: These “right-wingers” are culturally protectionist and economically protectionist, or, if you prefer, culturally nationalist and
economically statist—like the old British Labour party and
most conventional left-of-center Continental parties were
before they got the Eutopian fever. Now they’ve abandoned
that market segment to fellows like Greece’s hilariously
named “Golden Dawn” party, which won 21 seats on a platform blaming the country’s current woes on the Industrial
Revolution, the “so-called” Enlightenment, and foreign
“usurers.” Usury is customarily understood as the practice
of charging excessive interest. Golden Dawn, like most
Greeks, feels the Germans and the EU and the IMF should
carry on lending them money but at no interest. No, wait,
forget the lending: They should give it.
Nationalist politics on transnationalist welfare does not
sound an obviously winning formula. But we’ll see more of
it before Europe’s done. In the first round of the French
election, Marine Le Pen got 18 percent to M. Sarkozy’s 27.
What is it that makes one a “fringe” “extremist” and the
other “mainstream”? Nine points? Well, she’ll close that
gap in the years ahead. In response, a beleaguered political
class will attempt to shift its spending to a European level:
Joining the EU’s foreign minister and the nascent EU diplomatic corps there will be an EU finance minister and EU
bonds and EU taxes. It will be even more unsustainable, but
for the Eurocrats transnational unsustainability will be
perceived as being more comfortably insulated from the
whims of their “citizens.” Where, after all, would one go to
vote down a “European” tax?
So back at the dreary national level there will be more
parties like Greece’s Golden Dawn and Bulgaria’s Ataka
(National Attack Union), whose official logos slyly evoke
the swastika while bending this or that prong just enough
to preserve deniability. Which seems fair enough, as
Greek “nationalism” is premised on the Germans’ ability
to fund it.
Meanwhile, youth unemployment in France is already 22
percent; Sweden, 23 percent; Poland, 27 percent; Hungary,
28 percent; Ireland, 30 percent; Bulgaria, 33 percent;
Slovakia, 34 percent; Portugal, 36 percent; Italy, 36 percent; Greece, 51 percent; Spain, 51.1 percent. For this generation, there will be no Golden Dawn—but I wouldn’t rule
out an Ataka. The aging beneficiaries of the Eutopian
moment may be disinclined to give any of it back. Sooner
or later, their successors will take it.
M AY 28, 2012
base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 5/8/2012 2:38 PM Page 1
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