THE EMPTY PANTSUIT

20160509 upc_cover61404-postal.qxd 4/19/2016 7:30 PM Page 1
May 9, 2016
$4.99
J EREMY C ARL :
No, the Process Isn’t Rigged
H ENRY O LSEN :
What Trump Means
E LIANA J OHNSON :
The Lessons of Wisconsin
THE
EMPTY
PANTSUIT
Hillary Clinton
is all calculation
and maneuver
Kevin D.Williamson
www.nationalreview.com
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SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
2016
UNITED
STATES
DISTRIBUTION
NOTICE:
NTRYING TO KEEP UP: Rapid shipments of heavy packages containing Vault Bricks loaded with valuable .999
solid U.S. State Silver Bars are flowing around the clock from the private vaults of the Lincoln Treasury to U.S. State
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U.S. residents who find their state listed below in bold get first dibs at just the $57 minimum
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“As Executive Advisor to
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heard yet, highly collectible
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To make it fair, special Toll
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Rapid shipments to state residents are scheduled to begin
(Continued on next page)
P7027A OF19569R-1
base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/19/2016 12:48 PM Page 3
SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
(Continued from previous page)
with the first calls being accepted at precisely 8:30am today.
“We’re bracing for all the
calls and doing everything we
can to make sure no one gets
left out, but the U.S. State Silver Bars are only being handed over at just the state resident minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury for the next
seven days or until they’re all
gone, whichever comes first.
For now, residents can get the
U.S. State Silver Bars at just
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Lincoln Treasury as long as
they call before the order deadline ends,” confirmed Shissler.
“With so many state residents trying to get these U.S.
State Silver Bars, lines are busy
so keep trying. All calls will be
answered,” Shissler said. N
WEIGHTS AND
MEASURES FULL
TROY OUNCE SOLID
.999 FINE SILVER
DATE NUMBERED
IN WHICH THE
STATE RATIFIED THE
CONSTITUTION AND
WAS ADMITTED
INTO UNION
BACK
FRONT
CERTIFIED SOLID
SILVER PRECIOUS
METAL
ALL 49 STATES
LISTED TO THE LEFT
AVAILABLE. 1 STATE
ALREADY SOLD OUT.
COURTESY: LINCOLN TREASURY
PHOTO ENLARGEMENT SHOWS ENGRAVING DETAIL
RESIDENTS IN 49 STATES: COVER JUST $57 STATE MINIMUM
Call
1.
2.
1-866-964-2953 EXT. FMS863 beginning at 8:30am
If all lines are busy call this special toll free overflow hotline: 1-866-964-3394 EXT. FMS863
Residents who find their state on the Distribution List on the left in bold and beat the deadline are authorized to get individual State Silver Bars at just state
minimum of $57 set by the Lincoln Treasury. That’s why everyone should be taking full Vault Bricks loaded with five State Silver Bars before they’re all gone.
And here’s the best part. Every state resident who gets at least two Vault Bricks is also getting free shipping and free handling. That’s a real steal because all
other state residents must pay over six hundred dollars for each State Vault Brick.
ALL OTHER STATE RESIDENTS: MUST REMIT $134 PER STATE SILVER BAR
1.
2.
No State Silver Bars will be issued to any resident living outside of the 49 states listed to the left in bold at state resident minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury.
If you are a U.S. resident living outside of the 49 states listed to the left in bold you are required to pay $134 for each State Silver Bar for a total of six hundred
seventy dollars plus shipping and handling for each sealed State Vault Brick loaded with five U.S. State Silver Bars. This same offer may be made at a later date
or in a different geographic location. Non-state residents call: 1-877-263-3007 EXT. FMS863
FEDERATED MINT, LLC AND LINCOLN TREASURY, LLC ARE NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, A BANK OR ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY. IF FOR ANY REASON
WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM SHIPMENT YOU ARE DISSATISFIED, RETURN THE PRODUCT FOR A REFUND LESS SHIPPING AND RETURN POSTAGE. DUE TO THE FLUCTUATING
PRICE IN THE WORLD GOLD AND SILVER TRADES, PRICES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. THIS SAME OFFER MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE AT A LATER DATE
OR IN A DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION. FL & OH RESIDENTS ADD 6% SALES TAX. NO SHIPMENTS TO MN. FEDERATED MINT 7600 SUPREME AVE. NW, NORTH CANTON, OH 44720 ©2016 LINCOLN TREASURY
P7027A OF19569R-1
NA SNEAK PEAK INSIDE SILVER VAULT BRICKS: Pictured left reveals for the very first time the valuable .999 pure fine silver bars inside each
State Silver Vault Brick. Pictured right are the State Silver Vault Bricks containing the only U.S. State Silver Bars known to exist with the double forged
state proclamation. Residents who find their state listed to the left in bold are authorized to get individual State Silver Bars at just $57 state resident
minimum set by the Lincoln Treasury. That’s why everyone should be taking full Vault Bricks loaded with five State Silver Bars before they’re all gone.
And here’s the best part. Every state resident who gets at least two Vault Bricks is also getting free shipping and free handling. That’s a real steal because all other state residents must pay over six hundred dollars for each State Vault Brick.
TOC_QXP-1127940144.qxp 4/20/2016 1:37 PM Page 1
Contents
M AY 9 , 2 0 1 6
ON THE COVER
|
VOLUME LXVIII, NO. 8
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 29
Henry Olsen on Trump’s faction
The Empty Pantsuit
p. 32
Mrs. Clinton may be a retro throwback
to the 1990s, a time when she was a
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
retro throwback to the 1970s, but her
campaign is cutting-edge in one
36
important sense: It is almost entirely
free of content, liberated from
38
substance, an empty pantsuit. Kevin D. Williamson
ARTICLES
43
THE NOMINATION PROCESS ISN’T RIGGED
‘NEVER TRUMP’ AFTER WISCONSIN
by Jeremy Carl
by Eliana Johnson
The businessman’s opponents won an important, but not a decisive, victory.
22
ABORTION AND PUNISHMENT
44
by Robert P. George & Ramesh Ponnuru
TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION DISASTER
by Reihan Salam
46
His campaign has set back the cause of border enforcement.
26
OBAMA’S ENDLESS WAR
MODERN FAMILY
FILM: HOLLYWOOD’S GREAT
JUNGLE
Ross Douthat reviews The
Jungle Book.
by Bing West
Refusing to prosecute an effective strategy against ISIS only prolongs the suffering.
27
WELCOME BACK, DOS
Jay Nordlinger appreciates The
Theme Is Freedom, by John
Dos Passos.
Why women should not be penalized for the killing of their unborn children.
24
WITNESSES
Paul Hollander reviews Exit Right:
The People Who Left the Left
and Reshaped the American
Century, by Daniel Oppenheimer.
Rather, its mix of direct and indirect democracy is a strength.
20
THE EU’S SOFT UTOPIA
John Fonte reviews The New
Totalitarian Temptation:
Global Governance and the
Crisis of Democracy in Europe,
by Todd Huizinga.
COVER: ROMAN GENN
18
A MAN OF STRATEGIC VISION
Lou Cannon reviews Ronald
Reagan, by Jacob Weisberg.
47
by Charles C. W. Cooke
MANHATTAN MOVIEGOING
Richard Brookhiser goes to
the movies.
We may lack jetpacks, but technology is no less wonderful for that.
FEATURES
29
THE EMPTY PANTSUIT
Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand for anything—and that is her appeal.
32
TRUMP’S FACTION
SECTIONS
by Kevin D. Williamson
by Henry Olsen
Its primary concerns are citizenship and nationality.
4
6
34
35
44
48
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sally Cook
Happy Warrior . . . . . David Harsanyi
NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2016. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all
subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. Eastern
time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept., NATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-6797330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to NATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other
foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions
expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors.
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letters--FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:38 PM Page 4
Letters
MAY 9 ISSUE; PRINTED APRIL 21
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
Literary Editor Michael Potemra
Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy
Washington Editor Eliana Johnson
Executive Editor Reihan Salam
Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson
National Correspondent John J. Miller
Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty
Chief Political Correspondent Tim Alberta
Art Director Luba Kolomytseva
Deputy Managing Editors
Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz
Production Editor Katie Hosmer
Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden
Research Associate Alessandra Trouwborst
Contributing Editors
Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster
Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow
Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long
Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy
Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W O N L I N E
Managing Editors Katherine Connell / Edward John Craig
Deputy Managing Editor Nat Brown
National-Affairs Columnist John Fund
Staff Writers Charles C. W. Cooke / David French
Senior Political Reporter Alexis Levinson
Political Reporter Brendan Bordelon
Reporter Katherine Timpf
Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell
Digital Director Ericka Anderson
Assistant Editor Mark Antonio Wright
Technical Services Russell Jenkins
Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt
Web Developer Wendy Weihs
Web Producer Scott McKim
E D I T O R S - AT- L A RG E
Linda Bridges / Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan
N AT I O N A L R E V I E W I N S T I T U T E
B U C K L E Y F E L L OW S I N P O L I T I C A L J O U R N A L I S M
Elaina Plott / Ian Tuttle
Contributors
Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen
Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman
James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder
Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler
David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / D. Keith Mano
Michael Novak / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons
Terry Teachout / Vin Weber
Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge
Accounting Manager Galina Veygman
Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya
Business Services Alex Batey
Circulation Manager Jason Ng
Advertising Director Jim Fowler
Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet
Assistant to the Publisher Brooke Rogers
Director of Revenue Erik Netcher
PUBLISHER
CHAIRMAN
Jack Fowler
John Hillen
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
The VOA's Unfulfilled Promise
As a former Voice of America manager responsible for launching the VOA
Ukrainian TV program hosted by Myroslava Gongadze, I applaud Jay Nordlinger
for his article on this courageous and talented Ukrainian-American journalist
(“A Voice of America,” April 25). I feel obliged, however, to comment on VOA’s
early history and its current effectiveness.
Contrary to the Voice of America’s promise to tell the truth, during World War
II it was primarily a propaganda tool of the Roosevelt White House and its own
pro-Soviet sympathizers. The station’s World War II leadership did not permit any
significant criticism of Joseph Stalin after his alliance with Hitler collapsed and
Russia suddenly became Britain’s and America’s valuable wartime ally while
remaining a strategic and ideological enemy. Elmer Davis, the head of the Office of
War Information (OWI), VOA’s parent agency, personally penned commentaries
promoting the Soviet lie that the Nazis were responsible for the executions of thousands of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest massacre. More than 20,000
Polish prisoners were in fact murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1940 by the NKVD
secret police. Even State Department diplomats were appalled by VOA’s pro-Soviet
Katyn propaganda and urged caution. Their warnings were ignored.
Elmer Davis and others in charge of VOA’s World War II broadcasts openly
referred to themselves as propagandists during and after the war. They sought White
House approval to coordinate their propaganda with the Soviet government. A
number of Soviet sympathizers employed by VOA made sure that spokesmen
for non-Communist governments allied with the United States in fighting the
Nazis but viewed unfavorably by the Kremlin would not be heard in U.S. overseas broadcasts. The OWI even tried to censor U.S. media to prevent the news of
massive Soviet human-rights crimes and Stalin’s aggressive designs on Eastern
Europe from reaching the American public. After the war, several of VOA’s
foreign-language broadcasters and their spouses left the United States to work
for the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe as anti-American propagandists.
One of them, Stefan Arski, had worked on VOA’s Polish desk during the war.
Another defector who became a Communist official, Adolf Hofmeister, had been
in charge of VOA’s wartime broadcasts to Czechoslovakia.
Thanks to Myroslava Gongadze and other similarly experienced Voice of
America broadcasters, some of the current propaganda from the Kremlin is being
exposed, but VOA’s overall performance is highly uneven due to years of mismanagement by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the federal agency
now in charge of VOA. While journalists such as Ms. Gongadze cannot be fooled
by Russian propaganda, the same cannot be said about all Voice of America and
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) programs. (RFE/RL, also overseen
by the BBG, made a recent Facebook post accusing Israel of practicing “wholesale racism” in its anti-terror security measures.) Ms. Gongadze alluded in her
interview to some of these difficulties and the lack of sufficient support from
VOA’s government agency. Journalists like her cannot be fully effective against
the new massive anti-American propaganda offensive from Putin’s Russia and
from ISIS until the U.S. Congress and the White House work together to reform
the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
PAT RO N S A N D B E N E FAC T O R S
Robert Agostinelli
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway
Mark and Mary Davis
Virginia James
Christopher M. Lantrip
Brian and Deborah Murdock
Peter J. Travers
Ted Lipien
Former VOA Acting Associate Director
Via e-mail
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to letters@nationalreview.com.
4
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
M AY 9, 2016
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T
he Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, named in honor of perhaps the greatest champion of liberty
in the 20th century, is presented every other year to an individual who has made a significant contribution
to advancing human freedom. Nominees are from all walks of life, with scholars, activists, and political
leaders among the hundreds of people nominated for the first seven prizes. The prize will be presented at the Milton
Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty’s Biennial Dinner on May 25, 2016, in New York City, at the Waldof-Astoria Hotel.
The name of the 2016 award recipient will be announced to the public in the near future.
The keynote address will be delivered by Angus Deaton, recipient of the 2015
Nobel Prize in Economics and Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics
and International Affairs at Princeton University. For additional information
and dinner reservations, please visit www.cato.org/friedmanprize.
www.cato.org
week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:55 PM Page 6
The Week
n Is there anything insulting we can say about New York?
n The New York Post, for decades a conservative opinion leader with a brash, Gotham accent, endorsed Donald Trump for
president. The quick reaction (short enough for the wood) is:
Who else? Trump has been a mainstay of the Post, especially
its gossip columns. Not to have endorsed him would have been
fratricidal. And Trump did indeed sweep the New York primary.
The long reaction (suitable for the paper’s often thoughtful
commentary) is: What were they thinking? The Post says
Trump has “electrified the public.” Just like the third rail. It
calls him “a do-er” with a “can-do approach” who “gets things
done.” As many bankruptcies and frauds, alas, as buildings.
“He’s slammed the system for being rigged”—when the system’s peculiarities (e.g., winner-take-all primaries) have benefited Trump as often as not. Then, as if rethinking its own
decision, the Post urges Trump to rethink his positions on
trade, border control, and pulling troops out of Japan and South
Korea. That’s a big rethink. Well, when the dust settles, we’ll
still have the op-ed page, sports, and Page Six.
ROMAN GENN
n John Kasich, speaking in Watertown, N.Y., was asked by a
female college freshman how he might help her feel “more
secure regarding sexual violence, harassment, and rape.”
Kasich imparted a bit of fatherly advice (Kasich has twin
teenage girls): “Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol.” Whereupon the roof fell in. A DNC flack accused him of
“insulting women every day . . . by blaming victims of sexual
and domestic violence.” ThinkProgress called it “the latest in
[his] long line of tone-deaf comments to and about women.”
Angelina Chapin in the Guardian: “the latest in a long tradition
of Republican victim-blaming.” Great minds think alike, do
they not? Which helps explain the rise of Donald Trump:
When the concern swarm descends on him, he gives it all back
with a flip of the bird. Crudely? Yes. Inaccurately? Often. But
how liberating it feels, if for only a moment, when the drum
starts beating, for someone to kick the drumhead in.
n Spending one year in a dorm with someone can be trying. But
with due respect to the trials of residential-college life, there are
genocide survivors less traumatized than Craig Mazin purports
to be. In 1988, the former Walt Disney executive, Hollywood
screenwriter, and Princeton alumnus was the freshman-year
roommate of then-17-year-old Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz—
and he has never let the world forget it. Since Cruz’s ascent to
the national stage in 2012, when he was elected to the U.S.
Senate from Texas, Mazin has been waging a Twitter crusade
against him. Cruz has “no principles, no moral center, no values,” he tweeted in March. He is “devious, hypocritical, unethical, pointlessly ambitious, valueless.” He’s “creepy, unfunny,
mean, boring.” He’s a “jackass,” a “d***head,” and “garbage.”
As of this writing, more than 96,000 Twitter users follow Mazin,
6
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
See page 16.
who has wondered what he ever did to deserve nine months in
a dorm with Ted Cruz. We wonder what Ted Cruz ever did to
deserve Craig Mazin.
n Cruz now stands accused of supporting a ban on sex toys.
The charge stems from Cruz’s work as solicitor general of
Texas. In 2007, while Cruz did that job, Texas was sued over a
1970s law that prohibited certain “obscene” items from sale.
By his own account, Cruz considered the offending statute to
be “ridiculous.” Nevertheless, his office was obligated to defend it in court. This he and his team did, drawing on legal
precedents that had been established in the 1980s and advancing the wholly defensible argument that there is a difference
between good public policy and constitutional public policy.
Where the Constitution is silent, Cruz argued, it must not be
used to override the popular will. Fealty to the rule of law,
though, can’t compete with a cheap shot at the height of the
political season.
n Hillary Rodham Clinton wants a $15 minimum wage. Or a
$12 minimum wage. Possibly a $12.50 minimum wage. Or a
minimum wage scheduled to go from $12.50 to $15 subject to
review by the great minds who made Albany Albany. It really
depends on the venue. Her tormentor in the Democratic presidential primary, Senator Bernie Sanders (S., Further), is fixed
on $15—he’d take $25, if that were on the table, because that
is his model of politics: Take whatever you can now and then
get ready to start asking for more. Mrs. Clinton is, in this context, the conservative, though her conservatism is rooted in
M AY 9, 2016
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AP RI L 2016
PAID ADVERTISEM ENT
U.S. S E CU RE CO IN S
The Outcome Of Election 2016 Scenarios:
How Each Could Affect Our Economy!
Historically speaking, Presidential election years
have been times of great uncertainty, and this has
perhaps never been more true or clearly defined
in the minds of American voters than in 2016.
American voters will be faced with choosing
between Donald Trump or Ted Cruz on the
Republican side, and Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders, whichever one emerges victorious from
what promises to be a contentious Democratic
convention in August.
If Trump or Cruz wins the Presidency in
November, despite their apparently differing
styles and profiles, virtually everyone expects
them to continue the war on terrorism, along
with its open-ended costs and deficit spending…
not to mention the tightening of the borders and
the expense of building a wall (If Mexico doesn’t
pick up the tab) as well as a system to deal with
those already here illegally. Such a scenario could
virtually assure that partisan gridlock remains
the status quo, which will likely reinforce and
extend uncertainty about the future. This could
cause Americans to search for and turn to
fundamentally safe havens in order to protect a
major portion of their nest eggs.
On top of that philosophical premise, the
problems we face today virtually assure that
expectations of a release from near term
uncertainty are bound to be disappointed.
Whoever controls the reins in 2017, a full slate
of serious challenges will be staring them in the
face on day one.
They will be charged with resolving the
seemingly endless and costly war on terrorism;
rising tensions with a host of potentially
hostile countries, including Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela and even Russia; an economy cloaked
in fake jobs and unpaid debt that is worse off
than when Barack Obama took over and now
saddled with a widespread credit crisis and
spiraling inflation; saber rattling around NAFTA
and trade relations; immigration and border
security; health care and social security; along
with skyrocketing energy, food and commodity
prices. And, this is just the short list.
Any way you parse it, no one is going to wave
a magic wand and make all our problems
disappear overnight. There are no easy solutions.
We are in for a long road to recovery and there is
no guarantee that balance will ever be restored.
In short, the only thing that is certain is that
uncertainty will reign for some time to come.
As uncertainty continues to prevail in America,
confidence in America, both from Americans
and the world at large, will continue to be in
flux. The US dollar, the very symbol of American
economic strength, is in such a state of crisis and
erosion of value that no measure of lower interest
Conversely, if either Bernie Sanders or Hillary
Clinton ascends to the White House, either
is likely to be partnered with a Republican
Congress due to the fact that Republicans
won the Senate majority in the 2014 midterm
elections when they gained nine seats and lost
none. There are 24 Republican seats and 10
Democratic seats up for re-election. In 2016, the
Democratic Party could pick up five seats in the
Senate in order to regain the majority they lost
in 2014. While such a scenario would seem to
hold the promise of a break from gridlock and
the prevailing uncertainty that reigns today, the
downside is that Democratic principles generally
mean bigger government and higher taxes,
which is almost never good for the economy.
rates is going to permanently buoy confidence in
the near term. In fact, lower interest rates, and
the printing of new money, will only further fan
the flames of inflationary fears and erode the
dollar’s purchasing power.
Americans Are Buying Gold
In Unprecedented Numbers To
Secure Their Wealth
For Americans facing or planning for retirement,
the simple truth is they can no longer rely on
the future strength of the dollar alone to secure
their golden years. This perhaps explains why
more Americans than ever before in history are
diversifying their wealth strategies by including
precious metals and rare coins into their plans,
alongside stocks, bonds and real estate. Gold has
always stood the test of time and its prices tend
to rise during periods of uncertainty.
We only have to look at recent history to prove
that truth. Since 9/11, gold prices have risen over
230%, for an annualized gain of over 34%. At
the same time the dollar is in decline, the stock
markets are volatile and the real estate bubble
has burst.
For purposes of planning for the future security
of your family, it would be wise to not rely on
whether your preferred candidate wins the
White House in 2016. The economic problems
we face are real and no one is going to solve them
in the short term, no matter how glorious or
promise filled either sides political rhetoric may
be. There are strategies to employ even during
times of uncertainty that insure the security of
your family’s wealth.
The only question you have to ask yourself is: do
you feel that the economic future is uncertain?
If you answered, “yes,” then it would be wise to
take action today.
Congress Takes Steps to Restore Americans’ Wealth
Since the advent of the technology age,
American investors have become increasingly
enamored of online stock investing as if they
were trading with Monopoly money. However,
prudent investors have always desired having
some of their money in tangible assets they could
hold in their hands.
In 1985, when President Reagan authorized
the Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985, he clearly
understood how valuable it was for Americans to
be able to own tangible, government guaranteed
gold in their retirement portfolios. For this
reason, the law also makes it possible for
American Gold Eagles and $50 Gold Buffaloes
to be legally eligible for inclusion in personal
IRA plans.
By restoring this fundamental right to Americans,
President Reagan provided a means whereby
average Americans could insure their family’s
IXWXUH DJDLQVW WKH HURVLRQ RI WKH ¿DW YDOXH RI
the US dollar. President Reagan understood that
as the dollar’s value declined over time due to
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increase. This counter relationship provides a
means for Americans to maintain their wealth
and future purchasing power. This is but one
more reason why Reagan’s vision and leadership
will result in his being viewed as one of the
greatest Presidents in modern American history.
By Executive Order of Congress, Public Law
99-185, Americans have the right to own
government issued precious metal coins. With
the release of the 2016 U.S. American Gold
Prior to President Reagan signing the Act Buffaloes, you have the chance to own the
LQWR ODZ LW KDG EHHQ PRUH WKDQ ¿IW\ \HDUV newest coins issued by the U.S. Mint.
since the United States government had
minted legal tender gold coinage for private These 2016 American Gold Buffaloes are wanted
RZQHUVKLS 8QGHU WKH *ROG &RQ¿VFDWLRQ $FW by collectors and investors around the world.
of 1933, President Roosevelt had suspended The U.S. Treasury is racing this month to keep
all gold coin production and made it illegal for up with the record global demand levels. China,
Americans to hoard gold for private purposes. India, and Europe’s indebted central banks had
voracious appetites for U.S. government issued
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to continue.
of the world’s most recognizable and most trusted
precious metal coins. Produced continually for
the past 10 years, these gold coins are made from
precious metals mined and minted exclusively in
the United States. Backed by the full authority
of the United States Congress, American Gold
Buffaloes are welcomed in the retirement plans,
personal portfolios, and any corner of the world
where you choose to travel. There is no doubt
about their authenticity or value.
has enjoyed more than a decade of appreciation
as a commodity, giving potential long-term
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but it has also brought hours of enjoyment to
families who have been collecting it over the
years. Buying the American Gold Buffalo coin
issued by the U.S. Mint is your chance to own
real money in a form that stands up to the tests of
time. By transferring your money from paper to
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There is simply no other form of wealth with
Every government issued Gold American the history, recognition, and security of precious
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goes well beyond their face value. Gold not only
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capacity. Despite new minting sites, only
a limited number of coins will produced
this year. Delay, and you may miss your
chance at the best of the 2016 minting.
A BETTER FORM OF MONEY
Not all currencies are created equal. Some
dramatically outperform others over longterm, such as the U.S. dollar. Yet there’s one
thing better than greenbacks - Congressionally
authorized United States gold and silver coins.
The American Gold Buffaloes are becoming one
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week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:55 PM Page 8
THE WEEK
politics rather than in prudence. Many economists (including
many progressives, such as those at the Washington Center for
Equitable Growth) worry that a $15 minimum wage will provide a nasty reminder about the interaction of price, supply,
and demand, with employers simply eliminating many lowwage jobs rather than paying $31,200 plus benefits a year for
them. But the only job that Mrs. Clinton cares about, or ever
has cared about, is the one she wants.
CLINTON: ED HILLE/THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER VIA AP; SANDERS: ERIC THAYER/GETTY IMAGES
n President Obama took to Fox News Sunday in April to
defend Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while
secretary of state. “Here’s what I know,” Obama told Chris
Wallace: Hillary “would never intentionally put America in
any kind of jeopardy.” Moreover, the president insisted inscrutably, “there’s classified, and then there’s classified. There’s
stuff that is really top-secret top secret, and there’s stuff that is
being presented to the president or the secretary of state.”
Presumably, Clinton was pleased to hear that the White House
is backing her in public. But, substantively, Obama’s defenses
were irrelevant. Per 18 U.S.C. 1924, if Clinton became “possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States . . . with the intent to retain such
documents or materials at an unauthorized location,” she’s
guilty of a crime. That Obama does not consider the information she possessed to be “classified classified” is immaterial.
Likewise, Obama’s insistence that Clinton “never intentionally
put America in any kind of jeopardy” is legally beside the
point. Under 18 U.S.C. 793(f)(1)–(2), it is a felony to transmit
information “relating to the national defense” through unapproved channels, and the applicable legal standard is not
“knowledge” but “gross negligence.” Not for the first time, the
president has a tenuous grasp on the law—and his appropriate
role as chief executive.
n This time last year, Bill
Clinton was largely repudiating the 1994 crime bill
that, in the dubious historiography of the Black
Lives Matter movement,
is responsible for a phenomenon of “mass incarceration.” But when Black
Lives Matter protesters
interrupted Clinton during
a campaign speech for his
wife in Philadelphia, the
former president offered a
full-throated defense of
the bill, arguing that it
helped bring about a “25year low in crime.” He
even accused the protesters of defending “the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids
hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children.” Left-wing pundits
hammered Clinton, accusing him of “historical amnesia”
and “white mansplain[ing].” Both Clinton and his critics
exaggerate the effects of the crime bill—crime was already
beginning to drop when it passed, and the trend toward
8
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
greater incarceration had taken hold in the 1980s. But Clinton
is right that not all the lives that matter are captured by the
Left’s slogans.
n The Inner Circle is a journalists’ club in New York. It’s like
the Gridiron Club in Washington. Every year, the Inner Circle
puts on a comedy show for charity. This year, Hillary Clinton
was a special guest. She was onstage with Bill de Blasio, the
mayor of New York, and Leslie Odom Jr., an actor in the
Broadway hit Hamilton. In a skit of sorts, Clinton said, “Thanks
for the endorsement, Bill. Took you long enough.” De Blasio
answered, “Sorry, Hillary. I was running on CP time.” Here,
Odom broke in. (The actor is black, and “CPT” has long stood
for “colored people’s time.”) He said, “I don’t like jokes like
that, Bill.” Hillary set him straight: “Cautious politician time.”
The world reacted with its usual excitement and stupidity—
this despite the fact that de Blasio is married to a black woman
and has half-black children. Message to the world: Lighten up.
And, no, that is not a racial remark.
n Bernie Sanders held a rally in front of the Brooklyn apartment building where he lived as a boy. The neighborhood
(Midwood), once solidly Jewish, is now home to many
Russians. An enterprising New York Times reporter interviewed one of them, in the apartment two stories above
Sanders’s old one. “I hate him!” said Farida Lazareva, 57.
“If you lived under socialists, you’d hate them too. They
make everyone poor. . . . If it will be Sanders, we will have
the same here. Everybody who comes from a Communist
country, Russians, Eastern Europeans, even Latinos
from Cuba, feel this way.
When you know what will
happen, when you see
it—you’re Republican.” Immigrants:
doing the intellectual work that
American socialists won’t do.
n In an interview with the New York Daily News, Sanders
claimed that in the Gaza war, Israel killed “over ten thousand
innocent people” (almost five times what Hamas itself claims).
In a Brooklyn debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders spoke at
length about Gaza’s devastated apartment buildings and infrastructure. Sanders’s Palestinian advocacy is doubly unfortunate. Unfortunate on substance: Palestinians lead wretched
lives because they are governed by gangsters and terrorists,
ever picking fights they intend to lose (because casualties will
earn the sympathy of leftists like Sanders). Unfortunate politically: Sanders’s stand allows Hillary Clinton to position herself as a friend of Israel, when she has in fact followed the
policies of the Obama administration, her former employers
(e.g., Benjamin Netanyahu is “a chickensh**”). Sanders has
moved the window of campaign discourse on the sufferings of
Palestinians—and let in a cloud of distortions and lies.
M AY 9, 2016
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THE WEEK
n Sanders met Pope Francis in person the other day at the
Vatican guesthouse where Francis lives and Sanders was
staying. They might have met earlier in your imagination: If
the secular Jewish socialist from New England were a South
American Jesuit who spoke rough Italian, he could be mistaken for Papa Bergoglio’s twin brother, gabby and grandfatherly and charming in his dottiness. Sanders was in town
to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. With
some justification, he thinks that the pope shares his sentiments, those Sixties pipe dreams that he mistakes for ideas on
economic policy. Francis makes the parallel error of confusing the Peronism of his youth with Catholic social teaching.
Suffer fools gladly, Saint Paul tells us, and so we do. We just
try not to vote for them.
THEO WARGO/WIREIMAGE
n Eagle Forum, the conservative organization founded and for
many years run by Phyllis Schlafly, is in the midst of a civil
war: Schlafly has reportedly asked six members of the board,
one of whom is her daughter, to resign; the board has tried to
remove the group’s current president. The proximate cause of
the turmoil appears to be presidential politics. Schlafly has endorsed Trump, which is in keeping with her longstanding
support for protectionism and related causes if not with her
longstanding commitment to social conservatism and good
character in leaders. The board members prefer the consistent
conservatism of Cruz. Eagle Forum has historically combined
a lot of useful work with some kookery. (Schlafly has, for example, sounded the alarm against a North American currency,
the “amero,” that nobody is seriously proposing.) We hope the
group comes through with its best traditions intact.
to the Kardashians, that we still have a republic that, in its rush
for happiness, took time to interest itself in them and their
ideas would move and gratify them.
n During Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, Anita Hill charged that he had made lewd remarks
to her as her boss. HBO is airing a dramatization of the story that
takes her side and omits key facts. Journalist Stuart Taylor Jr.,
writing in the Wall Street Journal, puts them back into the record.
Hill had followed the alleged creator of a hostile work environment to a new job, even though she had job security as a federal
employee. There was evidence she had friendly relations with
him even after she stopped working with him. She changed her
testimony. Two FBI agents contradicted her account of a conversation they had had with her. For these reasons and more, most
Americans did not believe Hill at the time of the hearings. As the
details receded from memory, her account became more widely
accepted. HBO is doing its part to keep those details forgotten.
n It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is right out there in
the open: There was a press conference and everything. Democratic attorneys general, frustrated by the Left’s inability to get
its way on climate change as a matter of national policy, promised to use their prosecutorial powers “aggressively” and “creatively”—because aggression and creativity are what you want
in police agencies—to achieve through civil and criminal prosecution that which they could not achieve through ordinary
political channels. Al Gore, green entrepreneur, was on hand
when the self-proclaimed “Green 20” announced their plan,
and, shortly thereafter, the investigations and subpoenas started:
Prosecutors in the U.S. Virgin Islands, New York, and California have opened cases against Exxon, broadly organized
around the notion that the firm’s involvement in political
ac tiv ism on the question of global warming is legally
actionable fraud to the extent that the company’s claims are
at variance with Democrats’ beliefs. The libertarian-leaning
Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is critical of globalwarming scholarship, has been served with a subpoena by the
U.S. Virgin Islands, whose attorney general demands a
decade’s worth of the institution’s correspondence. This is one
part political campaign and one part extortion, Exxon being
the world’s most valuable firm by market capitalization.
Prosecuting companies and think tanks for political activism is
strictly brownshirt stuff, irrespective of one’s view on the question of anthropogenic global warming. The Obama administration, naturally, is considering parallel federal action. This is
unconstitutional, illegal, and wildly unethical.
n It took a while, but the academy has finally realized that the
musical Hamilton praises a Federalist and the creator of the
first Bank of the United States. In a New York Times round-up,
Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard) said the show gives a “rosy
view of the founding era.” Sean Wilentz (Princeton) noted
that Alexander Hamilton was “a man for the 1 percent.” Lyra
D. Monteiro (Rutgers) said the Founders “really didn’t want
to create the country we actually live in today.” Rosy? The
show depicts strenuous debate, up to the dueling ground,
about politics and policy. Among the topics debated are
whether Hamilton served the elite (the view of Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison) or the country as a whole (the view of
George Washington). While the Founders would no doubt be
dismayed by many aspects of modern America, from Obamacare
n Commissioned salesmen do not always have your best interest at heart. The Obama administration, eager to bring every
aspect of the investment business under maximum federal
oversight, has declared that certain financial advisers are—
presto change-o—“fiduciaries,” meaning people with a legal
responsibility to act in the best economic interest of their clients, even when that conflicts with their own self-interest, a legal standard generally applied to senior corporate managers
and trustees acting on behalf of minors and charitable foundations. The fiduciary rule doesn’t prohibit financial advisers
from earning commissions for selling particular financial products—that would be too easy—or set comprehensible limits on
those commissions, on fees, or on other forms of remuneration;
rather, it simply (simply!) requires that such compensation be
10
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
M AY 9, 2016
base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/4/2016 3:06 PM Page 1
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week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:55 PM Page 12
THE WEEK
“reasonable.” Reasonable according to whom? That’s the
point. By creating an open-ended police power at the point of
sale, the Obama administration attains a power over financial
institutions that can be wielded with little or no oversight, a
handy cudgel to use against politically noncompliant firms and
institutions. If you’re wondering why Congress empowered
the president to do this, it didn’t. There is no new enabling law.
While taking a loosey-goosey approach toward “reasonable,”
the rule defines “advice” broadly enough to include Jim Cramer’s television program and Ric Edelman’s radio show. That
vagueness isn’t by accident, either.
CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
n The economy wobbles, the debt soars, jihadists whet their
beheading blades, and the nation’s attention is rapt, commanded
by the question of which toilets people use. Activists wept—
and filed lawsuits—after North Carolina enacted a law providing that bathrooms, locker rooms, and the like in the state’s
public schools and government facilities be single-sex facilities if they are shared facilities. For the purposes of the law, a
person’s sex is the sex on his or her birth certificate. In the
case of transgender people, North Carolina offers the very reasonable accommodation of single-person facilities. But that
accommodation is insufficient for the LGBT* (seriously;
they want that asterisk in there) activists, who demand that
people who believe themselves to be a member of the opposite sex be not only tolerated but recognized in law. The usual
miscreants threaten the usual boycotts. That’s the state of
American bigotry: Men who believe they are women are instructed to use private facilities instead of the girls’ locker
room at Podunk Junior High.
n Agents from California’s
Department of Justice raided the Orange County home
of David Daleiden and seized
all his video of Planned
Parenthood officials wheeling and dealing to get good
prices on their sale of fetal
tissue and body parts from
unborn children who had
been aborted at their facilities. A Texas grand jury that
had convened to look into
Planned Parenthood ended
up indicting Daleiden and a
colleague of his for forging
California driver’s licenses and for misdemeanors related to
their assuming false identities in their undercover videos. Their
guilt or innocence notwithstanding, their work was valuable
documentation of the dark underbelly of the nation’s largest
abortion provider. Kamala Harris, the state attorney general
and a Democratic senatorial candidate who has received campaign contributions from Planned Parenthood, has floated the
risible suggestion that her actions would help her determine
whether Daleiden’s organization has violated state charityregistration requirements. What it has truly violated is Democratic orthodoxy, and Harris’s treatment of that fact as illegal is
sufficient evidence of her fitness for both the office she holds
and the one she seeks.
12
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
n Indiana enacted a set of anti-abortion policies, including a
ban on abortion based on the race or potential disability of the
unborn child and a requirement that fetal remains from an abortion or miscarriage be cremated or interred. The main response
of supporters of abortion has been to charge that Indiana Republicans have an unhealthy interest in women’s menstrual cycles, to celebrate their own wit in making this response, and to
say that they are raising an extremely serious point with it. If the
point is that they are unable to think maturely about what we
owe nascent human life, they are certainly right.
n San Francisco has enacted a new and cumbrous familyleave policy. Under existing California law, workers needing
time off to care for a newborn or an ailing family member are
paid 55 percent of their salaries out of a fund sustained by a
dedicated payroll tax; under the new rule, San Francisco
workers will be entitled to 100 percent for up to six weeks,
with the additional 45 percent being paid directly by employers. San Francisco has fewer children per capita than any other
large American city, and local practices (a zoning regime that
makes housing unbearably unaffordable for people of ordinary means) make it one of the most hostile places in the
country in which to raise a family. The San Francisco rule,
like the state policy, applies only to firms with 50 employees
or more, and relatively few workers avail themselves of the
benefit—most California workers, according to a recent survey, have never even heard of the program. Like the woefully misnamed Affordable Care Act, the policy creates one
more reason for small firms to keep their headcounts down
and to keep part-time workers part-time. It also creates a reason for growing firms to cross the city limits. San Francisco
is home to a great many innovative and wildly profitable
companies, which compete ruthlessly with one another for
the best employees. But not every company is a successful
app maker, and standardizing benefits packages through
force of law is ill advised.
n If anyone doubts the Left’s intolerance, witness its temper
tantrum in response to Tennessee legislation that would protect
counselors or therapists from being forced to counsel clients
“as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors” that conflict with the
counselor’s religious beliefs. For most people, this is common
sense (who wants counseling from a person who believes your
lifestyle is immoral?), but for the Left it is “discrimination,”
and they at once summon the ghost of Jim Crow. This is preposterous. There is no shortage of counselors ready and willing
to counsel gay clients or any others in distress. If counselors
don’t enjoy rights of conscience, who does?
n Puerto Rico does not have the money to pay its debts. We
could soon face a humanitarian crisis or a bailout by federal
taxpayers. House Republicans are trying to avert those dangers
with legislation that allows those debts to be restructured, creates a fiscal control board to put the island’s budget in order,
and lets businesses in Puerto Rico pay a lower minimum wage.
The bill isn’t perfect. It should be strengthened to include more
pro-growth elements, such as relief from the Jones Act, a protectionist measure governing shipping to and from the mainland that raises costs for Puerto Rico. Changing the rules
regarding debt retroactively, though precedented, is obviously
M AY 9, 2016
week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:55 PM Page 13
not ideal. Short of time travel, though, we have no ideal solution. The question congressional conservatives need to ask is
whether they prefer the likely alternative of a bailout.
n What is in the 28 pages? The pages, for those not immersed
in the story, are a portion of Congress’s 838-page report on
9/11. The 28 may be read by members of Congress but remain
classified. Former senator Bob Graham (D., Fla.) wants them
released to the public. They reportedly suggest that support
was extended to 9/11 hijackers by Saudi businessmen and
government officials. Does this mean the Saudi state ordered
9/11? No: But Saudi Arabia is a family business run by a huge
clan with different agendas and byzantine interconnections.
Broadly speaking, the Saudi state supports global jihad by
encouraging its homegrown extremists to go abroad and by
propagating the most aggressive forms of Islam through oilfunded mosques, madrassas, and lobbying groups. We have
cooperated with Saudi Arabia for years on a number of issues,
from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan to driving Saddam
Hussein from Kuwait. We have cooperated with worse (Stalin,
World War II). But we should know what we are doing. Let
the sun shine in.
n Russian fly-bys and simulated attacks against American
warships and aircraft represent a dangerous but fitting conclusion to the Obama administration’s failed Russian “reset.”
Obama pursued a thaw throughout his first term, even to the
point of taunting a wary-of-Russia Mitt Romney (“The
: ies: are calling. They
: :: want their
::
: :: policy
:
Eight
foreign
back.”).
Then, in Obama’s second term, Putin dropped the hammer.
He invaded Ukraine, he rescued his Syrian allies with overwhelming air power, and he’s rearming Iran. We’re reliving
the bad old days of military brinkmanship. Obama did in fact
reset the American–Russian relationship—all the way back
to the Cold War.
n Few public personalities have taken the fate of Muslim refugees to heart as openly as Pope Francis. A couple of years ago
he visited the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands of
illegal immigrants were being held. He has sheltered some
Muslims in the Vatican, washed the feet of others, and spoken
of Muslim suffering in addresses to worshippers in St. Peter’s
Square. On the Greek island of Lesbos are some 8,000 refugees, many of them Syrian; and three families, a total of twelve
people and all of them Muslims, were selected by lots. Pope
Francis flew in his private plane to greet them and bring them
back with him to Rome, where a charity will look after them.
They speak of him as their “savior.” An increasing number of
Christians escaping from the Middle East would like him to be
their savior, too.
n Jan Böhmermann is a German satirist who specializes in
going too far, and then some more. In a late-night comedy
show on television, he read a skit of his aimed at Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The accusation of repressing minorities, “kicking Kurds and slapping Christians,” is all too
true, but Böhmermann mixed in a fantasy about amorous relations with a goat. A furious Erdogan wanted to prosecute.
Under an obscure and virtually lapsed law of 1871, insults
against organs or representatives of foreign states are punish-
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nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe
13
week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/20/2016 1:55 PM Page 14
THE WEEK
able with up to three years in prison. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave consent to the state prosecutor to start proceedings.
Critics argue that the deal just reached with Turkey to exchange refugees gives Erdogan the whip hand over Merkel.
Besides, this self-proclaimed sultan is in the habit of obtaining prison sentences for journalists whose opinions he dislikes. Merkel appears to be on an increasingly slippery
slope, and, as befits a satirist, Böhmermann may very well
have the last laugh.
n Haiti has been plagued by many forms of misery-inducing
calamity over the past 100 years, but cholera was not among
them—until six years ago. In 2010, following a catastrophic
earthquake, a cholera epidemic began that has so far taken
some 10,000 lives and infected nearly one in ten people in
the country. The source of the outbreak turned out to be a
U.N. peacekeeping base, where the contaminated feces of
U.N. soldiers from Nepal were unceremoniously dumped
into an open pit near a major river system. The Obama administration’s Centers for Disease Control has worked assiduously to suppress this politically inconvenient fact, as the
journalist Jonathan Katz has documented. The U.N. itself
has likewise declined to take responsibility. “From our point
of view, it really doesn’t matter” what the source of the outbreak was, said a U.N. spokeswoman. Really? It matters
enough to obscure.
n A yearning for freedom beats in every human heart, and the
same thing applies to mollusks, it seems. In New Zealand’s
National Aquarium, Inky the Octopus climbed up the wall of
his tank, squeezed out through a gap in the glass, and then slid
down a 150-foot drainage pipe that led to the waters of
Hawke’s Bay, his former home. When the story got out, he
became a Kiwi folk hero. A slippery character with a talent for
getting out of tight spots, Inky may have a future in politics
back in the bay.
n Lily Parra’s parents were advised by their doctors to consider
having her killed in the womb because she would probably
die shortly after birth. They chose not to, and their now fourmonth-old baby is in need of a heart transplant to survive. Her
doctors decided, however, that she should not be on the list to
receive a heart if one became available—not because of her
chances for survival, but, the Parras say they were told, because she may have an intellectual disability. Apparently they
view a potentially cognitively impaired life as less worth saving. Lily’s mother has started an online petition to appeal the
decision. She knows that her daughter faces many obstacles to
procuring life-saving surgery; she simply asks that unjust discrimination not be one of them.
n Celebrated British novelist Ian McEwan gave a speech to
the Royal Institution in London on the representation of
“self.” The author of Atonement said that identity politics are
reaching the point where anyone can now pick his preferred
“self” off the “shelves of a personal-identity supermarket.”
Anatomically normal males are identifying as women, he
lamented, and demanding admission to women’s colleges
and access to women’s locker rooms. “Call me old-fashioned,”
McEwan said, “but I tend to think of people with penises as
14
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
men.” You can imagine what happened next. After several
days of Sturm und Drang, McEwan recanted: “Biology is not
always destiny.” But bowing to the sexual-identity inquisitors apparently is.
n A generation ago, in one of the early signs that liberals had
ceded control of American higher education to leftists, Stanford University dropped a requirement that its students take a
course on Western culture. This came in the wake of protests
led by Jesse Jackson, who appeared on campus in 1987 to lead
a group of buffoons in a notorious chant: “Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western culture’s got to go!” And so it went, ejected by a faculty
that no longer cared about transmitting a glorious heritage to
young people. Earlier this year, a group of undergraduates connected to the Stanford Review, the conservative student newspaper, tried to revive this area of study, proposing that it
replace a watered-down humanities requirement. They gathered enough signatures to put their non-binding proposal on
the ballot for a student election in April. Despite their gallant
effort, the measure lost—by a margin of six to one, guaranteeing that Western culture will remain dead and gone at one of
the country’s great schools.
n Harvard has a Board of Overseers, composed of alumni.
Five new members are chosen each year. Ron Unz, a conservative software entrepreneur, has formed a five-man slate. Besides him, it includes Stuart Taylor Jr. (mentioned above for
correcting the record of an HBO film about Clarence Thomas)
and Ralph Nader. They are running on a platform summarized
as “Free Harvard / Fair Harvard.” They favor free tuition for all
—saying that the university has more than enough money to
cover that. And they favor transparency in the admissions process. For example, what are the racial criteria? Are there racial
quotas? Do these quotas disadvantage Asians? We aren’t so sure
about the free tuition, but we’re sure about the transparency. We
endorse the slate. So, there you have it—a historic event:
NATIONAL REVIEW for Nader.
n Believe it or not, there are places even more PC than Dartmouth. The New Hampshire college was founded by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, who—according to the lyrics of a
still-popular campus anthem usually described, somewhat
redundantly for Dartmouth, as a “drinking song”—“set forth
into the wilderness to teach the Indian.” A similar backstory is
attached to Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Wash., named
for a pair of missionaries who came to the Northwest in the
1830s to teach and convert the Cayuse tribe. Until recently, the
college was proud of its history; for the last century or so,
Whitman’s athletic teams have been called Missionaries, and
the student newspaper has been the Pioneer. But on today’s
more enlightened campus, everyone knows that missionaries
were racist imperialists and that pioneers turned pristine
wilderness into strip malls. So now the teams and the paper are
looking for new names. May we suggest Diversity Officers
and the Undocumented Migrant?
n Perrie Edwards, of the British female pop group Little Mix,
went online and posted a picture of her favorite footwear, a
beaded pair of American Indian–style moccasins that she’d had
since she was 13, and from the reaction you’d think she had
M AY 9, 2016
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THE WEEK
tomahawked Elizabeth Warren: “If you’re not Native American
you have no business wearing these. . . . It’s silly and wrong
and disrespectful.” “Someone’s culture isn’t a fashion statement.” “Moccasins are a part of a traditional Native American
regalia and something like that is earned, not just given to
you.” So we guess that walking a mile in someone else’s shoes
is no longer on the agenda.
n Born in an abandoned boxcar in Oildale, Calif., in the valley of
the Great Depression, Merle Haggard attempted robbery 20 years
later and landed in San Quentin. He knew privation. Johnny Cash
performed at the prison and inspired him to become a songwriter
and musician. Ten years after Haggard’s release in 1960, nine of
his recorded songs, some of them about the trials and woes of
incarceration, had topped the country charts. In 1972, Governor
Ronald Reagan formally pardoned him of his past crimes. Haggard’s lyrics oozed a compelling mix of dignity and poignancy.
The poor mother’s “hungry eyes” he painted in words and music
are instantly memorable. He was proud to be an “Okie from Muskogee,” where no one bought the radical chic of the 1960s, or so
he sang. Some critics thought the song was ironic, but it became
an anthem of a kind of counter-counterculture nonetheless. He
continued to perform until his death, on his 79th birthday. R.I.P.
n Vint Lawrence joined the CIA right out of Princeton. He spent
the 1960s with the agency, including four years in the jungles of
Laos, where he helped Vang Pao’s guerrillas fight Communists
in their own country and in Vietnam. Then he did something
unexpected: He quit and turned to art, having had no formal
training in it. He eventually became one of America’s great
political caricaturists. He put his pen to the service of liberalism,
drawing for the likes of The New Republic and The Washington
Monthly. Lawrence was very good at what he did, telling stories
about the figures of the day through his exaggerated renderings.
Dead at 76. R.I.P.
2016
Whine and Roses
TRUMP is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged
in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates than of votes. Unsurprisingly, Trump never
mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to
whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t.
D
16
ONALD
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Trump threw a tantrum over Colorado and Wyoming, states
where Ted Cruz swept the available delegates. Trump called the
results “totally unfair” and on Twitter asked: “How is it possible
that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to
vote in the Republican Primary?” Eleven states and five territories opted for caucuses or state conventions over primaries.
People nonetheless had a chance to vote. In fact, in Colorado
on March 1, 60,000 Republicans attended nearly 3,000 precinct caucuses to elect delegates to the county assemblies and
congressional-district conventions that convened during the
following weeks. Nothing was “stolen.”
Repeatedly in recent weeks, Trump has been outmaneuvered
by a Cruz campaign that has demonstrated exhaustive knowledge
of the delegate-selection process, a vastly superior organization,
and unflagging hustle. Cruz operatives were on the ground in
Colorado eight months ago, preparing for the March 1 precinct
caucuses. By contrast, Trump’s last-ditch effort to secure delegates at Colorado’s state convention—his campaign had reportedly decided not to begin working on this effort earlier because it
expected to have the nomination sewn up beforehand—was so
chaotic that his team ended up inadvertently directing votes
toward Cruz delegates. In Wyoming, Cruz showed up to speak at
the convention, whereas Trump surrogate Sarah Palin was a lastminute no-show.
The nominee-selection process has emerged from evolution
more than design, and it includes different kinds of contests. That
diversity respects federalism. It also means that to win the nomination, a candidate has to show demographically and geographically broad support and build an organization that can master the
details. Not coincidentally, those things are related to picking a
strong general-election nominee and a good president.
Trump wouldn’t be either of these, and his failure on the
ground in Colorado, Wyoming, and elsewhere is yet another indication. Contrary to his endless boasts, he is not a quick learner,
he does not run complex organizations well, and he does not hire
the best people.
Trump may well get to 1,237, and certainly his huge delegate haul in New York helps. But if he falls short, he will wish
that he had whined less and worked more.
MARK WALLHEISER/GETTY IMAGES
n James Levine is one of the most important classical musicians in the world, and one of the best. A conductor and pianist,
he has been music director of the Metropolitan Opera since
1976. He first conducted the company in 1971. Now, at age 72,
he will step down from the music directorship and take on
emeritus status. In recent years, Levine has been plagued by
health problems. He has set musical standards for the whole
world: discipline, wisdom, precision, integrity. His conducting
is unmistakable. There are many stories about Levine, but
here’s one: When he was a teenager, he was conducting an
orchestra in Aspen. A very senior conductor observed this. He
said to a bystander, “Who’s that?” The bystander said, “That’s
Jimmy Levine, from Cincinnati. He’s going to Juilliard next
year.” The conductor asked, “Why?”
M AY 9, 2016
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A cowboy hat is used to collect votes at a Republican caucus in Ottumwa, Iowa, February 1, 2016.
The Nomination Process
Isn’t Rigged
Rather, its mix of direct and indirect democracy is a strength
BY JEREMY CARL
N one of his rare cases of truth in
advertising, Donald Trump recently
commented, “I keep whining and
whining until I win.” That tactic has
never been so obviously on display as in
his recent drumbeat of complaints about
the GOP primary-election process.
Never mind that, as of this writing,
Trump leads the GOP field with 45 percent of all delegates awarded to date,
despite having won only 37 percent of
GOP voters, a ratio far more advantageous than that of his closest rival, Ted
Cruz (whom I have endorsed). Never
mind that, according to mediaQuant, a
firm that calculates the advertising value
of free TV exposure, he’s received free
coverage estimated to be worth $2 billion, almost 600 percent more than Cruz
has received, even though Cruz has won
only 9 percent less of the vote. And
never mind that the man demanding that
the GOP elect him by acclamation by
effectively disenfranchising delegates
has not managed to command a majority
of voters in any state except his home
state of New York.
I
Mr. Carl is a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University.
18
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
In effect, Trump is complaining that
the nomination process is a process,
complete with competition for delegates
and different rules in each state, and not
simply a coronation of the winner of the
popular vote nationally. “The rules surrounding the delegate selection have
been clearly laid out in every state and
territory and while each state is different, each process is easy to understand
for those willing to learn it,” the RNC
said recently in a memo in response to
his charges.
Trump has counted on his free-media
advantage. (Media like Trump because
he boosts ratings, and liberal media like
him also because they see him as the
weakest potential Republican nominee.)
If Trump were on track to win a majority
of the vote, or anything near it, he would
be coasting to the nomination no matter
what GOP and conservative leaders
thought. But he doesn’t have a majority,
and his failure to build an effective campaign organization is coming back to
haunt him.
To better understand the spuriousness of Trump’s complaint, it is useful
to review the primary process to date.
Trump won most of his early victories
against a large field of candidates, who
divided the votes of Republicans who
opposed him. Analyzing exit polls of
the head-to-head preferences of voters, we can say definitively that the
divided field cost Cruz victories in
Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan, and
North Carolina—and very likely in
Illinois, Kentucky, and Louisiana. It is
possible that divided opposition swung
Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi into
the Trump column as well. In Michigan,
which Trump won by 13 percentage
points over Cruz, exit polls showed
Cruz beating Trump head to head. In
many Republican primaries, Trump has
benefited tremendously also from the
ability of non-Republicans to vote.
Through mid April Cruz had won as
many closed GOP contests as Trump had.
The states in which Cruz expected to
be strongest held their contests when
the field of candidates was much larger,
but Cruz has never complained. Now
that the field has narrowed to two and a
half candidates, the contest is being
waged in states that are generally more
favorable to Trump. The next six primaries are in “blue wall” states that
have voted Democratic in each of the
last six presidential elections. Trump
tends to poll well among Republicans in
these Democratic strongholds, none of
which he would carry were he the nominee in November.
Having written in these pages about
problems with the current Republican
delegate-allocation system, I should in
theory have some sympathy for Trump’s
critique. The process is in need of reform, with arcane delegate rules that
favor insiders, most egregiously in the
cases of the 59 delegates awarded to territories that will not vote for president
and of the disproportionate number of
delegates awarded to Washington, D.C.,
which has few Republican voters. Rubio
won most of these delegates in the GOP’s
rotten boroughs, with Trump and Kasich
in a tight fight for second place, and
Cruz trailing far behind.
The allocation of delegates to states
should also be changed, though the current system hardly seems to be the result
of an establishment conspiracy against
Trump. His victory in the primary in
New York, whose 29 electoral votes the
Democratic nominee will almost certainly win in November, helps him
almost as much as does his win in the
M AY 9, 2016
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primary in Florida, a crucial swing
state. Note also that the timing of the
Texas primary and its allocation rules
were disadvantageous to Cruz, re sulting in the awarding of 48 of
Texas’s 155 delegates to Trump, despite Cruz’s having won all but six of
Texas’s 254 counties.
The GOP understandably wants to
compete in every state, but California
should not be weighted more heavily
than Texas in determining the party’s
nominee. The party should develop a
formula that rewards performance, solid
Republican states, and, in particular,
swing states, while deemphasizing deepblue states. Nor should Puerto Rico be
weighted as heavily as Wyoming and
more heavily than Delaware. If one
were to impute bias to the GOP establishment, it would be against Cruz, who
is harmed by the high number of delegates that Trump is likely to win in
solidly blue states that will not be in play
in the general election.
But the flaws in Trump’s critique are
more fundamental than that. The hetero-
geneity of GOP contests, a mix of primaries, caucuses, and state conventions,
is an advantage of the nomination
process, not a flaw. The same is true of
the party’s mix of open and closed primaries. Even conventions, which Trump
maligns, are hardly smoke-filled rooms.
In the first stage of the Colorado convention were almost 3,000 precinctlevel events that involved tens of
thousands of voters. The convention,
like state caucuses, rewarded knowledgeable activists who care about the
party and conservatism. In Wyoming,
also a subject of recent Trump complaints, precinct caucuses (some involving hundreds of voters) and county
conventions elected delegates to the
state convention, which gave its support
to Cruz unanimously. “In primaries, we
will become numbers, we will become
statistics,” one prominent Colorado
GOP activist told the Denver Post.
“There will be no conversations . . . and
no ability to influence our neighbors.”
This combination of direct and indirect
democracy, which Trump abhors, is the
greatest strength of the current nomination process.
That process is divided into different
categories of election that reflect different
degrees of popular representation,
much as the three branches of the federal government do. This year, 40 states
and territories hold primaries, eleven
hold caucuses, and five hold conventions.
This does not prevent the democratic will
of voters from largely determining the
first-ballot vote in Cleveland. If a majority
of GOP primary voters voted for Trump to
be the nominee, he almost certainly
would be. (John McCain won an overwhelming delegate victory in 2008 with
just over 46 percent of the popular vote.)
But so far, among party activists and voters alike, Trump’s staunchest opponents
appear to outnumber his staunchest allies.
Only if no candidate wins a majority
of delegates from the popular-vote
process do party activists and operatives
begin to assume a decisive role in selecting the nominee. It is a rare occurrence.
The GOP hasn’t had a plainly contested
convention since 1952. Typically, by the
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3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/19/2016 11:50 PM Page 20
spring of election year, one candidate
emerges as the likely nominee and is
acceptable enough for the party, both
leaders and ordinary voters, to coalesce
around. We saw this in 2008, for example, when the party’s base, which disliked McCain, embraced him as its
presumptive nominee after he narrowly
won some critical contests. That Trump
has failed to win acceptance by the
majority of his party is his fault, not the
party’s. If the party establishment realized its fever dream of selecting a nominee who is not presently running for
president, it might validate Trump’s
broader critique, but Cruz’s savvy campaign would appear to have precluded
that prospect by ensuring that as many
delegates as possible will support Cruz
as soon as they are able to do so. And of
course Trump himself might have rendered the question moot by now had he
campaigned as rigorously and smartly
as Cruz.
The GOP primary process implicitly
acknowledges the full range of skills a
president needs to be effective, of which
proficiency in the bully pulpit is just one
among many: He must pay attention to
detail, win allies, and organize behind
the scenes. He must sometimes slog.
The work of governing is hard and often
tedious. Trump’s rally-and-telly campaign has failed miserably to demonstrate
that he is capable in these regards. A president must do more than tweet and appear
on Sean Hannity’s show. “We are very
blessed that our opponent had no idea
what he was doing on this until about a
month ago,” notes chief Cruz delegate
hunter Ken Cuccinelli. If Trump won’t
bother to seriously organize in states
where he easily won the popular vote,
why should we think that, when grappling
with complex legislation and regulation,
he would be organized enough to take on
the liberal establishment in Washington?
Like many liberals before him, Trump
demands more direct democracy. But
our Founders understood the danger of
that approach and rejected it. The mixed
system of republican governance that
they established is admirably reflected
in the GOP nomination process, despite
that process’s flaws.
Cruz learned and followed the rulebook. Trump has continued to whine.
It looks likely, however, that he will
fail to fulfill his promise to whine until
he wins.
20
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
‘Never
Trump’ after
Wisconsin
The businessman’s opponents won an
important, but not a decisive, victory
BY ELIANA JOHNSON
days before Wisconsin’s
April 5 primary, the Club for
Growth polled Republican voters
in the state. Ted Cruz led Donald
Trump by five points, 36 to 31 percent.
John Kasich was running third at 21 percent. When the results came in on Election
Day, Cruz had trounced Trump by a 13point margin, and Kasich had taken home
just 14 percent of the vote. Voters had
moved significantly in just two weeks,
and Wisconsin marked the first clear win
for the forces that have on Twitter dubbed
themselves “#NeverTrump.”
It happened at a critical juncture, when
a Trump victory would have significantly
increased the businessman’s odds of
amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to
secure the nomination before the Republican National Convention convenes in
Cleveland this summer. Instead, Cruz
made a contested convention more likely.
Many of Trump’s Republican foes
have argued for months that defeating
him would require an all-hands-on-deck
effort: opposition from elected officials,
conservative media, and top-dollar donors.
While there has been a lot of buzz about
an anti-Trump movement, its components have rarely worked in tandem. The
literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in
1950 that conservatism was less a body
of ideas than a series of “irritable mental
gestures”; its expression in the form of a
movement to destroy Trump and save
itself has been similarly disjointed.
In Wisconsin, the stars aligned. Outside
groups funded by Republican donors
poured millions of dollars into ads attacking Trump. Local talk-radio hosts hammered him relentlessly. And the state’s
popular governor, Scott Walker, emerged
from self-imposed hibernation to champion Cruz over Trump.
Trump’s loss was a galvanizing moment for the forces aligned against him.
So it makes sense that his defeat in
F
IFTEEN
Wisconsin has become the subject of
intense interest for his foes, who are now
looking to pull off a repeat in Indiana.
“It’s like the Spanish Civil War,” says
Wisconsin-based talk-radio host Charlie
Sykes, who opposes Trump’s candidacy
and conducted a bruising interview with
him a week before the primary. “Both sides
are trying out their military tactics, and
whatever happens to have worked or not
worked will be applied in other war zones.”
A Trump loss in Indiana on May 3, with
57 delegates at stake, would make a contested convention virtually inevitable.
Reaching that point would be a decisive
victory for Trump’s opponents and would
knock the businessman back on his heels.
His campaign has been heavy on media
and rallies but light on the infrastructure
necessary to wrangle delegates on the
convention floor, so he would arrive in
Cleveland at a distinct disadvantage—for
the first time in months, Donald Trump
would be the underdog.
But the Trump vote has proven relatively inelastic. In some states, such as
Wisconsin, it sits in the mid 30s. If that’s
the case, he’s beatable, according to a top
Republican operative, because enough
Kasich voters can be convinced to hold
their noses and vote for Cruz to cobble
together a coalition large enough to defeat
Trump. But the Kasich contingent can’t
be so big that the Ohio governor’s supporters see no reason to abandon him, and
in many northeastern states Kasich has
run even with Cruz. Defeating Trump has
been far more difficult in states—New
York, Florida, Massachusetts, Arizona—
where his support hovers in the mid 40s.
It will stay that way, at least so long as this
remains a three-man race.
The Club for Growth’s early polling in
Wisconsin showed that nearly a third of
Kasich supporters were open to backing
Cruz in order to stop Trump. So the group
spent a million dollars broadcasting a television spot called “Math,” which urged
them to do just that. Bar graphs danced on
the screen, demonstrating visually how
the Cruz and Kasich vote together could
defeat Trump but keeping them divided
would hand Trump the win.
The ad worked: Kasich’s numbers, as
measured in the Club’s poll, fell seven
points by Election Day; Cruz’s vote shot
up twelve, to 48 percent from 36.
Trump’s voters aren’t all that persuadable. “All of the ads that have called
Trump too liberal, or said he hates women,
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or that he ripped people off at Trump U,
they’re all good messages,” says a top
GOP strategist. “But they aren’t moving
voters away from Trump. The Kasich vote
is far softer and easier to move around.”
That certainly proved true in Wisconsin.
That said, direct attacks on Trump can
convince conservatives he’s enough of a
menace that they should back the candidate likeliest to defeat him—even if that
candidate wasn’t their first choice. Our
Principles PAC, the super PAC partly
funded by TD Ameritrade founder Joe
Ricketts and his wife, Marlene, put up a
seven-figure sum to air a television ad
featuring a series of actresses reading
some of Trump’s most eye-popping
statements about women. (“You know, it
really doesn’t matter what they write as
long as you’ve got a young and beautiful
piece of a**.”)
“We were really looking to hit him in
a way that would kind of feel like a kick
in the gut,” says Katie Packer, the
group’s executive director. Produced by
Larry McCarthy, who created the famed
Willie Horton ad that helped sink
Michael Dukakis in 1988, the spot garnered a million views on YouTube within the first 48 hours.
And then, Trump started playing into
the caricature. On March 24, he retweeted
a now infamous tweet featuring an unflattering snapshot of Cruz’s wife, Heidi,
next to a glamorous professional shot of
his own wife, Melania, a former model.
“The images are worth a thousand words,”
read the caption with the photos. Trump
had threatened to “spill the beans” on
Mrs. Cruz the previous day.
From there, conservative talk radio and
elected officials helped turn the screw.
While many nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio hosts have been tacit
Trump allies, Wisconsin was a different
story. “How do we get to April of 2016
and nobody got in his face before?” Sykes
asked before the primary.
A few days earlier, Sykes, the king of
the medium in the state, had been one of
the first to do just that: “I know you realize that here in Wisconsin we value things
like civility, decency, and actual conservative principles, so let’s possibly make
some news,” Sykes said when Trump
appeared on his show a week before the
primary. He challenged Trump to declare
the wives of the candidates off-limits and
to apologize for implicitly mocking Heidi
Cruz’s appearance. Trump rebuffed him,
arguing, essentially, that Cruz had started
it. “I expect that from a twelve-year-old
bully on the playground,” Sykes told him
on air. “Not somebody who wants to hold
the office held by Abraham Lincoln.”
The media reactions came in swiftly.
The conservative website RedState:
“Charlie Sykes Just Destroyed Donald
Trump.” The New York Times: “Wisconsin
Radio Host’s Combative Interview
Surprises Donald Trump.” Mashable:
“Donald Trump Meets His Match in
Wisconsin Radio Interview.”
The following day, Wisconsin governor
Scott Walker joined Sykes’s show to
announce that he was endorsing Ted Cruz,
introducing another element into the combustible mix and offering a test case for
what could happen if a popular conservative governor got off the sidelines.
Walker had bowed out of the presidential race in September, urging marginal
candidates to join him so that the party
could focus its resources on defeating
Trump, and then he went quiet. When the
race hit Wisconsin, though, he not only hit
back against Trump’s juvenile barbs but
went out of his way to help the Texas senator, appearing alongside him at rallies
and cutting television ads on his behalf.
This sort of support for Cruz and opposition to Trump has been notably lacking
in other important contests. In Iowa,
Governor Terry Branstad set aside his
custom of staying out of presidential politics and urged his constituents to stop
Cruz; in Florida, Governor Rick Scott
was friendly to Trump for weeks and
endorsed him the day after he won the
state’s primary; and in Arizona, the state’s
former governor, Jan Brewer, endorsed
Trump while its current chief executive,
Doug Ducey, stayed on the sidelines.
Trump’s foes are cautiously optimistic
about their chances in Indiana. Trump has
fared poorly in the Midwest, where his
bluster is ill suited to people for whom
courtesy and manners are a cultural
touchstone. “We are conservative politically, philosophically, and temperamentally. And Trump’s New York values and
brash campaign style will not play well
here, in my humble opinion,” says Curt
Smith, the president of the Indiana Family
Institute, who has endorsed Cruz.
Trump also performs best among people with low educational attainment:
There’s a high correlation between support for Trump and lack of high-school
diplomas. That’s good news for Cruz:
Statewide, Indiana, like Wisconsin, boasts
above-average high-school-graduation
rates, though in other ways the educational
attainment of Indiana voters suggests
they will be more favorable to Trump.
Trump struggled in Wisconsin’s Republican strongholds, the suburban areas
that happen to be some of the most
highly educated counties in the state.
Ninety-five percent of adults in suburban Milwaukee’s Waukesha County, for
example, hold high-school diplomas or
the equivalent degree, compared with 88
percent of the U.S. population at large,
while 41 percent graduated from college,
compared with the 33 percent national
average. Cruz carried Waukesha County
with 61 percent of the vote, compared
with 22 percent for Trump.
In Indiana, the state’s reddest counties
look similar to Waukesha County, though
they’re less educated across the board.
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As of 2010, in central Indiana’s Hamilton
County, which the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman compares to
Wisconsin’s Waukesha, 96 percent of
adults had completed high school and
nearly 54 percent had bachelor’s degrees.
The surrounding counties, though—some
of Indiana’s most conservative, including
Boone, Hendricks, Johnson, and Shelby—
boast above-average shares of adults with
high-school diplomas but below-average
shares of adults with college degrees.
The other open question—the elephant in the room—is whether Indiana’s
conservative governor, Mike Pence, will
influence the race. Trump couldn’t stop
himself from attacking Walker in front of
the very people who had elected Walker
three times in four years, and he hurt himself in the process. Could Pence, who was
sent to Congress six times by Hoosiers
and elected to the governorship in 2012,
help Cruz and hurt Trump?
Like Walker, Pence is ideologically,
if not temperamentally, sympathetic to
Cruz. As a congressman, he was a prototea-partier, one of the few Republicans
who spent the Bush years lambasting
their party for growing government. He
made a stink in the House and voted
against several of Bush’s signature domestic achievements—from Medicare
Part D to No Child Left Behind.
But Pence is up for reelection this year,
and early polls show that he has a competitive race on his hands. He hurt himself
badly a year ago when he bungled public
appearances connected with the passage of
a state religious-freedom bill. Pence wasn’t
prepared for the national onslaught that
many Republican governors have since
faced. He meekly signed the bill in private
and has rarely poked his head up since.
For Pence, dipping his toe into the waters of a tumultuous Republican primary
may appear to have no political upside.
But he would become a hero to the antiTrump forces were he to throw political
caution to the wind and strongly back Cruz.
Trump’s critics, a motley crew, now
believe that Republicans will see a contested convention in July. They’re less
certain how far below a majority of the
delegates they can keep Trump before he
touches down in Cleveland, or whether
Cruz can clinch the nomination swiftly
thereafter on a second ballot.
It’s too soon to know, but, thanks to
Wisconsin, #NeverTrump finally has
a playbook.
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Abortion and
Punishment
Why women should not be penalized
for the killing of their unborn children
B Y R O B E R T P. G E O R G E &
RAMESH PONNURU
the government punish
women who procure abortions?
Most pro-lifers say no, but all
parties to the debate over abortion have considered the question an
uncomfortable one. It appears to put
them in an unwinnable position. If they
say yes, they hand supporters of the
abortion license another reason to call
them extreme, or at least to say that their
view should be rejected because of its
unacceptable implications. If they say no,
they can be accused of lacking coherent
convictions, or of lacking the courage of
those convictions.
The topic came up in Roe v. Wade itself.
In his opinion striking down nearly all
state laws against abortion, Justice Harry
Blackmun noted that “many states” did
not provide for the prosecution of women
for cooperating in abortions performed
on them. Parties in favor of allowing
abortion, he pointed out, inferred from
this fact that the laws had never been concerned with the protection of fetal life.
The implicit argument, which Blackmun
repeated without challenging, was that
exempting the women from prosecution
is incompatible with viewing the human
fetus as a bearer of a right to life: a person.
Donald Trump recently stumbled over
this topic. Asked whether women should
be punished for seeking abortions once
they are prohibited, he said yes—perhaps
under the impression that this answer logically follows from prohibition, or under
the impression that pro-lifers would find
this answer appealing. But pro-lifers were
generally appalled by the answer, and
Trump quickly retreated from it.
Most pro-lifers say they have no desire
to punish women who seek abortions. All
the major pro-life organizations share
S
HOULD
Mr. George is the McCormick Professor of
Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Mr. Ponnuru,
a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, is the
author of The Party of Death.
this view. The Republican platform, after
declaring that unborn children have a
right to life, affirms “our moral obligation
to assist, rather than penalize, women challenged by an unplanned pregnancy.” Antiabortion laws traditionally have shown
no interest in punishing the women. On
this point, at least, Blackmun was correct;
indeed, he understated the truth. Most
states had explicit exemptions for the
women, and the rest had exemptions in
practice. Clarke Forsythe has pointed out
that there was no documented prosecution
of a pregnant woman under an abortion
law anywhere in the United States between
1922 and 1973, the year Roe was decided.
Some pro-lifers, however, believe that,
to be consistent, they should seek legal
penalties for abortionists’ clients; and
others resist that reasoning but are not
sure why it’s incorrect.
That resistance is justified. The historical practice was right, and the mainstream
pro-life position is right, to seek to protect
unborn children from abortion (and abortionists) but not to punish their mothers
for seeking it. A coherent and sound set of
views, not just squeamishness and political cowardice, supports that position.
The core pro-life conviction is of course
that unborn children have a right to life: a
right, that is, not to be deliberately killed,
and a right to be protected by the government from being deliberately killed. All
human beings have this right, the most
basic right any creature can have. The
right attaches to human beings in the
embryonic and fetal stages of development, just as it does at later developmental
stages, because human embryos and fetuses—no less than human infants, toddlers,
adolescents, and adults—are living, individual members of the human species.
They are not dead, or inanimate, or members of a different species, or functional
parts of larger organisms (in the way that
sperm and egg cells, or liver and skin
cells, are functional parts of larger organisms). Embryos and fetuses differ in certain important respects from other human
beings. But these differences—notably,
but not exclusively, differences in their
stage of development, size, location, and
condition of dependency—cannot justify
denying them this fundamental right.
Lawmakers are thus justified and
indeed duty-bound to treat abortion as an
injustice, to communicate the truth about
its injustice in law, to prohibit it, and to
take steps to make sure that the prohibition
M AY 9, 2016
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/19/2016 11:50 PM Page 23
is not violated. (Citizens who are not lawmakers are justified and duty-bound to
work to persuade lawmakers to do these
things, and to work to elect lawmakers
who will do them.)
The precise dimensions of a legal regime
that meets these goals cannot simply be
deduced from the goals. There is room
for legislative judgment, which means
that different legislators could reasonably
reach different conclusions even while
sharing the basic premise that unborn
human beings have a right to life that the
government should respect and protect.
The legal regime necessary to achieve these
goals would also probably vary in certain
respects from place to place and era to era.
Notwithstanding those important caveats, a legal regime designed to give
teeth to a prohibition of abortion would
almost certainly, in any time and place,
sometimes prospectively by lawmakers. A
man kills his wife’s lover, and a businessman kills a rival. Both victims, equally,
had their right to life violated, but the law
treats the killings differently. In doing so,
it does not treat one victim as more important, as having more worth and rights,
than the other. If a government punishes
the killing of a police officer more severely
than the killing of an ordinary citizen, it is
not acting on the view that police officers
have a greater right to life than everyone
else: It is making a reasonable (though, of
course, debatable) judgment about the
conditions and requirements of public
order. (It might make a similar judgment
about punishing the killing of witnesses
to a crime, even when those witnesses are
not people of upstanding character: The
judgment does not turn on the moral
worth of the victim.)
None of the differences between the
killing of unborn children in abortion and
the killing of older human beings outside
the womb furnishes a good reason for
failing to prohibit the former. The fact
that many people of good will in our culture view abortion as morally permissible
does nothing to extinguish the unborn
child’s moral claim to be protected: Decent people have in other times and places
seen nothing wrong in denying basic
human rights in ways we now wish governments had been able to prevent.
(Slavery is the obvious illustration of this
point in our country’s history.) Unjust
killing is unjust killing, regardless of the
motives and the social context.
But the motives and the context can and
do justify a certain leniency of treatment.
Again, though, it’s important to note that
in different times and places, different
Does justice require penalties beyond those necessary to
protect unborn children from the injustice of abortion?
have to involve penalties for abortionists. Deterring abortion might require,
for example, stripping doctors who commit abortions of their medical licenses
and levying steep fines and even jail
terms on anyone who commits abortions
without medical licenses.
Does justice require penalties beyond
those necessary to protect unborn children from the injustice of abortion?
Those who say that the pro-life position
logically entails punishment for the pregnant women involved in it are implicitly
answering that question affirmatively.
Both the abortionists and their customers are committing a grave wrong
against another human being, and in
most such cases government exacts a
measure of retribution.
When deciding how harshly to punish a
crime, however, the law rightly takes
account of more than the gravity of the
injustice worked by the crime. It also takes
account of the rippling consequences of
the crime and the blameworthiness of those
involved in it. Did the act show depravity,
callousness, malice? Were there aggravating or mitigating circumstances? Did it
undermine the community’s sense of safety? If punished lightly or not at all, would it
be likely to lead to widespread vigilantism?
Sometimes these determinations are
made retrospectively by judges and juries,
Now apply these considerations to
the punishment of abortion. Abortion is
wrong and unjust, but neither the women
who procure abortions nor the abortionists are typically acting out of malice. The
women are frequently in difficult, and
sometimes in desperate, circumstances.
They do not have the same emotional
bonds with their unborn children that
mothers of infants and toddlers typically
do. The abortionists typically believe they
are providing a kind of humanitarian service—grotesquely, in light of moral reality, but nonetheless sincerely. For these
reasons, some pro-lifers avoid (and all
pro-lifers should avoid) using the word
“murder,” with its connotation of malice,
to describe abortion.
What may be most important is that in
our society, both the mothers and the
abortionists have had their understandings of abortion shaped by a culture that
does not communicate the truth about
abortion and unborn children—a culture
that includes laws that do not treat abortion as a crime or wrong at all, and that
deny the very humanity of unborn children. In this way, our law and culture lead
people into serious moral error. A reformed
law and culture need to take account both
of the seriousness of that error and of the
way that our culture has diminished people’s culpability for it.
judgments might apply. In a society in
which the vast majority of citizens appreciated the moral truth about abortion—the
society that pro-lifers should strive to
bring about—it would probably be the
case that abortionists were more likely to
be depraved, and tougher punishments for
abortionists might then be warranted.
But our society had a better understanding of abortion 100 years ago, and even
then sympathy for pregnant women in distress was a weighty consideration that led
to the waiving of penalties. That consideration was supplemented by a practical
one: The women’s testimony against abortionists was necessary for the law to fulfill
its primary aim of protecting the unborn.
Historically our anti-abortion laws did
what the pro-life movement wants laws
to do today: They recognized that unborn
children are living human beings with the
same right not to be killed that the rest of us
possess; they gave effect to this recognition
by prohibiting abortion; and they imposed
no legal penalty on the mothers. The laws
were right on all these points, and most
pro-lifers are right on all of them today.
That movement—the great humanrights movement of our time—has rightly
sought to save babies, not punish women.
And it has rightly understood that we can
save unborn babies without threatening
to punish their mothers.
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Trump’s
Immigration
Disaster
His campaign has set back the cause
of border enforcement
BY REIHAN SALAM
F there is one thing we know about
Donald Trump, it is that he wants to
strengthen America’s borders and
drive down immigration levels. So
there is no small irony in the fact that the
most likely end result of his insurgent
presidential campaign will be the weakening of border enforcement and a drastic
increase in immigration levels.
True, Trump has helped make immigration one of the central issues in the
race for the Republican presidential nomination, and his success may well have
stiffened the spine of anti-immigration
conservatives. Yet Trump’s rhetoric has
not just been heard by Republicans. It
has also been heard by independents and
Democrats. While it looks as though
Trump’s rise has had virtually no effect
on attitudes toward immigration among
Republicans—a large majority of GOP
voters believed that immigration levels
should be decreased before Trump, and
they feel the same way now—it has had
a not insignificant effect on attitudes
among Democrats, and in particular
among the elite Democrats who set the
party’s agenda.
To be clear, Trump has not singlehandedly made Democrats embrace high
immigration levels. There has been a
spike since last fall in the share of Democrats taking a pro-immigration stance,
and Trump surely played a role there. But
that’s only part of the story. Over the past
decade, the gap in partisan perceptions of
immigrants has widened, with Republicans taking an increasingly skeptical
view of the virtues of mass immigration
and Democrats moving in the opposite
direction. For example, the share of
Democrats believing that immigrants
strengthen the country has climbed
from 49 percent in 2006 to 78 percent in
2016, while it has gone from 34 percent
to 35 percent among Republicans. What
accounts for this longer-term shift among
I
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Democrats? There are a number of factors at work. The composition of the
Republican and the Democratic electorates has changed over time, and as the
salience of the immigration issue has
increased, at least some anti-immigration
Democrats and pro-immigration Republicans have presumably switched sides.
Older voters tend to be more skeptical
about immigration than younger voters
are, and the Democratic coalition is
somewhat younger than the Repub lican coalition.
Moreover, naturalized immigrants are
more likely to identify as Democrats than
as Republicans, and naturalized immigrants are, not surprisingly, more proimmigration, not least out of a desire to
bring their family members to the U.S.
Family immigration accounts for twothirds of all lawful immigration, and any
serious effort to reduce immigration levels would necessarily involve making it
more difficult for naturalized immigrants
to bring, say, adult daughters and sons
into the country. Recently, the economists Anna Maria Mayda, Giovanni Peri,
and Walter Steingress found that as the
share of immigrants in the adult population of a given U.S. state increases, so
does the Democratic vote share. The
main driver of this phenomenon is that
naturalized immigrants vote for Democrats at higher rates than natives do. While
some pro-immigration conservatives
attribute this pattern to the immigration
issue alone, the fact that households
headed by naturalized immigrants tend to
have lower incomes than those headed
by natives, and to rely more heavily on
safety-net programs, undoubtedly contributes to it. As long as most immigrants have below-average incomes, it
stands to reason that they will favor the
party of redistribution.
So why blame Trump for the
immigration-policy disaster to come?
While Trump’s champions insist that
their candidate has shifted the mainstream conversation on immigration to
the right, I would argue that Trump’s
noxious tone has made it much harder
for restrictionists to win new allies.
Some voters who might have otherwise
been open to calls for more-stringent
border enforcement and a more selective
immigration policy have recoiled from
Trump’s thinly veiled appeals to racial
and ethnic resentment. This is true among
Democrats and independents, but it is
also true among anti-Trump Republicans. As long as Trump is the most visible figure on the anti-immigration
right, extremists on the other side of the
immigration issue seem sober-minded
by comparison.
Early in March, Univision’s Jorge
Ramos, a fervent advocate of mass immigration who also happens to be a news
anchor, asked Hillary Clinton to promise
that she would not deport unauthorizedimmigrant children. Clinton made that
pledge, and she went even further, telling
Ramos that she did not want to deport the
families of unauthorized-immigrant children, either. This has long been a goal of
the partisans of amnesty—to extend
deportation relief beyond those who
entered the United States unlawfully as
children, to their parents. Clinton has
accepted this goal without hesitation,
making it a central part of her immigration agenda. At one point she said that she
would deport immigrants only if they had
criminal records. Bernie Sanders followed suit.
One can imagine a different universe
in which pragmatic Democrats questioned the wisdom of what amounts to an
immigration free-for-all. If the leading
candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination say that they have no
desire to deport immigrants without
criminal records, are they not suggesting
that we welcome all comers, whether
they enter lawfully or otherwise? But
have Clinton and Sanders been forced to
answer for endorsing lawlessness at the
border? Not at all. Instead, they seem
eager to double down.
Bernie Sanders will not be our next
president. Nevertheless, his sharp change
of course on immigration reflects a
broader trend. Earlier in the campaign, in
an interview with Ezra Klein, editor of
the liberal news site Vox, Sanders objected
to the idea of open borders, deriding it as
part of an anti-labor agenda advanced by
the Koch brothers, a rare instance of a
Sanders utterance I find entirely sensible. He has since been keen to curry
favor with immigration advocates, in
recognition of their growing power in the
Democratic coalition. It turns out that if
you’re trying to win the nomination of a
party that increasingly relies on the votes
of struggling immigrants who depend
on wage subsidies, Medicaid, and food
stamps to lead decent lives, calls for limiting immigration aren’t going to fly.
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3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/19/2016 11:50 PM Page 25
No one understands this better than
Hillary Clinton. During his first term, Bill
Clinton sensed that anti-immigration sentiment was becoming more potent, and so
he endorsed the findings of the U.S.
Commission on Immigration Reform,
which backed modest reductions in legalimmigration levels and more-rigorous
immigration-enforcement efforts. Almost
immediately, Clinton met with a fierce
backlash from pro-immigration groups
on the left and the right, and he soon
abandoned his flirtation with a more
restrictionist stance.
Instead, the Clinton administration
backed the Citizenship USA initiative,
designed to make it much easier for
immigrants, including formerly unauthorized immigrants legalized under the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986, to naturalize. As Republicans in
Congress fought to limit the access of
recent immigrants to safety-net programs,
a large wave of immigrants naturalized in
part to oppose these measures through
the political process. The politics of
immigration had irrevocably changed,
and Bill Clinton deftly switched sides.
Hillary Clinton has clearly not forgotten
the lessons of that era. Naturalized lowwage immigrants depend on public assistance, and as they have brought more of
their similarly poor relatives with them to
the U.S., these immigrants have become
a bedrock Democratic constituency.
If Hillary Clinton is our next president,
an outcome that is all but foreordained if
Trump is the Republican nominee, it is a
safe bet that her first big legislative push
will be on immigration. She will characterize her victory over Trump as a repudiation of the restrictionist cause and a
mandate for immigration legislation
more permissive than the comprehensive immigration-reform bill backed by
President Obama. Unlike Obama and
George W. Bush, who felt obligated to
make their pathways to citizenship for
unauthorized immigrants seem onerous,
Clinton has made it clear that she intends
to make her pathway to citizenship as
cheap and easy as possible.
It is not obvious that conservatives in
Congress, who could suffer major losses
if Trump is their party’s presidential nominee, will be in a position to prevent such
legislation from passing. Let’s assume
that Clinton succeeds in establishing her
immigration agenda as the law. By extending legal status to unauthorized immi-
grants and giving them a pathway to citizenship, Clinton will bring unauthorized
immigrants out of the shadows and into
America’s social safety net.
In 2013, the Migration Policy Institute
found that almost one-third (32 percent)
of unauthorized-immigrant adults lived in
families below the poverty level, and 62
percent lived in families earning less than
200 percent of the poverty level. A narrow
51 percent majority of unauthorizedimmigrant children lived in families
earning less than the federal poverty
level; 78 percent lived in families earning
less than 200 percent of that level; and
only 8 percent lived in families earning
more than 400 percent of it. Moreover,
only 30 percent of unauthorizedimmigrant adults are proficient in English,
a strong barrier in itself to upward mobility. In recognition of the fact that the vast
majority of unauthorized immigrants are
so poor, the Gang of Eight, a group of
senators who unsuccessfully pushed for
comprehensive reform, sought to win
conservative support by proposing to bar
immigrants granted provisional legal
status from various safety-net programs.
Leaving aside whether these restrictions
would have been enforced in practice—
I’m skeptical—it is hard to imagine
Clinton backing such limits.
The effects of new immigration legislation won’t stop there. Once these immigrants are granted citizenship, they will
be able to sponsor family members. The
1986 amnesty, which legalized roughly
3 million unauthorized immigrants, led
to a surge in family immigration. One
assumes that legalizing as many as 10
million unauthorized immigrants would
lead to a surge in family immigration
that was quite a bit larger. And these
immigrants would encounter a labor
market far less hospitable to less-skilled
workers than that of the 1980s and 1990s,
when demand for such labor was comparatively high and real minimum wages
were relatively low. By backing a steep
increase in the federal minimum wage at
the same time that she opens the floodgates to less-skilled immigration, Clinton
would re-create the conditions seen in
much of Europe, where immigrants have
been priced out of the labor market by
rigid regulations.
Whether or not Clinton succeeds in
passing sweeping legislation, she has
explicitly promised to shield virtually all
unauthorized immigrants from deportation. In other words, she has promised
that, under a Clinton administration,
there will be no danger that the agencies
charged with enforcing our immigration
laws will do their job. Over time, the
unauthorized immigrants whom Clinton
will have essentially invited into the
country will form families and give birth
to citizen children. They will then become virtually impossible to remove.
So far, conservatives haven’t given
much thought to Hillary Clinton’s immigration agenda. To the extent that her
views have been addressed at all, they’ve
been treated as little more than campaign
bluster. That is a mistake. Donald Trump’s
success has made it far more likely that
she will be our next president, and we
need to start thinking very hard about
what that means.
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Obama’s
Endless War
Refusing to prosecute an effective
strategy against ISIS only prolongs
the suffering
BY BING WEST
N September 10, 2014, President Obama pledged to destroy ISIS. Three years earlier,
on June 22, 2011, he declared
that “the tide of war is receding.” But
since he made that claim, more than half
a million people have been killed just in
Syria and Iraq. Currently, ISIS numbers
about 20,000 fighters and controls an
area of thousands of square miles in
Syria and Iraq populated by roughly 4
million Sunnis.
How, specifically, does the Obama
administration plan to destroy ISIS?
Here’s an answer from a Pentagon
spokesman: “By degrading them in Phase
One and then dismantling them in Phase
Two, we believe that that will set us up for
Phase Three, which, of course, is the ultimate defeat of this enemy.” There are two
problems with that approach. First, the
administration has ruled out the use of
U.S. troops in combat—which means that
“dismantling” the enemy is unlikely,
never mind defeating it. Second, defeating ISIS should itself be only an
intermediate goal: The ultimate goal is a
stable, pro-Western government after
ISIS. Our huge mistake in Iraq in 2003
was not having a sensible plan for who
was to govern after we defeated Saddam’s
forces. By not having a plan for what happens after ISIS, the U.S. administration is
today repeating that mistake.
In Obama’s view, ISIS is not a serious
threat. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg,
after interviewing the president, reported
that “Obama frequently reminds his staff
that terrorism takes far fewer lives in
America than . . . falls in bathtubs do.”
Bathtubs don’t murder people, but in
Obama’s parallel universe, the tide of history is like the gravitational pull of the
moon: The course of time is gentling the
nature of man. “If you look at the trajectory
O
Mr. West has written eight books about the wars in
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
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of history,” he said in the interview, “I
am optimistic. I believe that overall,
humanity has become less violent, more
tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference.”
Obama’s foreign policy is based upon a
benign spiritualism. Other nations have
taken advantage of it. Russian aircraft
buzz over our warships, China constructs artificial islands to extend its control of the sea lanes, and Iran captures
our sailors. These affronts occur because
Obama will not stand up to provocations.
Similarly, ISIS exists because the
president has flinched on a number of
occasions. In 2011, against the advice of
the Pentagon and the State Department,
he withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq;
the Shiite government in Baghdad then
oppressed the Sunnis. In 2012, Obama
encouraged the Syrian population, mostly
Sunni, to overthrow the Assad regime
(which relies on Shiite support) and
declared a “red line” that Assad must not
cross by using chemical weapons against
the Sunni towns. When Assad did employ
chemical weapons, Obama refused to
respond with force, and also refused to
fully train and arm the Sunni rebels.
Since 2003, Assad had been giving shelter to Sunni jihadists and former senior
officers from Saddam’s army. By 2010,
most of these terrorists had been driven
out of Iraq. By 2013, they had turned
against Assad’s Shiite regime. Ruthless
and highly organized, the jihadists swiftly
gained thousands of Sunni recruits and
came to dominate the “moderate” Sunni
rebel groups. With Assad’s regime in mortal danger, Russian president Vladimir
Putin sent in aircraft to bomb the “moderates,” while Iran dispatched Hezbollah
fighters to fight alongside Assad’s. The
U.S. responded by bombing the jihadists
but not Assad’s forces.
By 2014, the Sunnis in Iraq, furious at
their treatment by the Shiite government
in Baghdad, tolerated and in many cases
abetted the return of the jihadists—now
called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria) rather than al-Qaeda in Iraq—to
that country. Rather than fight ISIS, the
Iraqi army abandoned the Sunni northern
part of Iraq. Both Iran and the U.S. rushed
in trainers and advisers to aid the Shiite
government in Baghdad. Iran added soldiers on the battlefield, while the U.S.
contributed a bombing campaign.
In mid April 2016, Obama declared
that “in Syria and in Iraq, ISIS is on the
defensive.” While this is undoubtedly
true, ISIS can remain intact for many
years. Merely increasing the bombing
campaign won’t defeat it.
No war can end without someone’s
boots on the ground. Retired Army general Ray Odierno has estimated that a
ground offensive, even if composed
mostly of Arab soldiers, would require
U.S. troops on the order of 50,000.
Obama has firmly rejected that idea.
So where is Obama’s war headed in his
last eight months in office, and where will
that leave his successor?
In the northern parts of Iraq and Syria,
the Kurds already have an independent
state protected by 80,000 to 240,000
Peshmerga fighters. The U.S. is aiding
them with modest equipment and effective bombing. The Kurds will fight ISIS to
defend the borders of a de facto Kurdistan
and advance their goal of independence.
Over the next decade, they will engage in
a serious struggle, both political and military, with Turkey more than with ISIS.
In the central parts of Iraq and Syria,
ISIS flourishes because Assad’s Shiite
regime in Syria and the Shiite government in Iraq are oppressing the Sunnis.
Only Sunni Muslims can eradicate ISIS.
To do so, they need the incentive of selfgovernance. According to prominent military analyst Joel Rayburn, even if ISIS
were wiped from the earth tomorrow, the
Sunni–Shiite war would continue the
next day, with Iran trying to overthrow
Sunni regimes.
Throughout the Middle East, Obama is
viewed as having tilted toward the
Iranian and Shiite side. In addition to his
suspect nuclear deal with the Iranian government, he has urged the Saudis to
“share the neighborhood” with Iran. In
Iraq, Obama supports a sectarian government aligned with Iran. He has been
unable to persuade Baghdad to grant reasonable self-rule to the Sunnis and Kurds.
Iraqi forces, whether the army with
American advisers or the Shiite militias
with their Iranian advisers, lack the
logistical capability to retake all the
Sunni lands. The distance from Baghdad
to Mosul is 220 miles—the same distance
as from New York City to Washington. To
the Iraqi military, that is an enormous distance. While Iraq slouches toward Mosul,
the residents of Fallujah, 35 miles from
Baghdad, are starving. To the Sunnis, this
proves the Baghdad government does not
care about them, only about symbols.
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Modern
Family
We may lack jetpacks, but technology
is no less wonderful for that
B Y C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
a little time in the more
tech-minded corners of the
Web and you will eventually
come across a lament: “The
future has arrived,” someone will say,
half in jest. “So where’s my jetpack?”
Into this one succinct meme are distilled all manner of disappointments.
Sure, its progenitors will concede, the
advancement of the microchip and the
arrival of the Internet have significantly
altered the way we communicate: With
just an iPhone, we can send videos
across oceans in a matter of seconds, we
can order our groceries without leaving
our couch, and with just one swipe of
our credit card we can stream pretty
much anything that has ever been filmed
or recorded.
But the world doesn’t look especially
different today from how it did in 1954.
Children who grew up in the aftermath
of the Second World War were promised a wholesale change in their
lifestyles—not just hoverboards and
robot butlers and easy-to-use video
chatting, but an in toto alteration of the
classic American aesthetic. Open up an
original brochure for Disneyland’s
“Tomorrowland,” turn on an old episode of The Jetsons, or drive past the
rusting remnants of the 1964 New York
World’s Fair, and you will detect the
auguring of an architectural revolution
that never came to pass. In the 1930s,
middle-class types were told that by the
year 2000 they’d be living in spherical
houses that could move with their owners. In the 1950s, Monsanto’s “house of
the future” was set to cram a whole
family into a hard plastic shell atop a
garage that would hold a self-driving
car. In the 1960s, we were all going to
live on the Moon.
And now? As the British comedian
Jack Dee puts it, it can at times be hard
not to suspect that the “information
superhighway” was little more than a
clever marketing line for “typing in your
S
SAUL LOEB-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
President Obama pledges to lead a broad coalition to fight ISIS, September 10, 2014.
As the war drags on, the Sunnis will
remain embittered toward the Shiite
political system and will view the U.S.
as being on the Shiite side. Over 90 percent of young Iraqis in a recent poll
viewed the U.S. as an enemy, and over
50 percent view Iran as an ally. The odds
are low that a nonsectarian Iraq, with its
current state boundaries intact and a
government not in the Iranian orbit, will
emerge from this Sunni–Shiite war. Yet
that end state is what Obama envisions
when his war ends, many years after he
has left office.
In Syria, to defeat ISIS will require
foreign boots on the ground. They won’t
arrive for many years, if ever. Syria is
permanently broken apart; the only question is who will broker the sectarian
pygmy states that will emerge from it.
Iran and Russia will support the future
Alawite/Shiite statelet in western Syria.
The odds greatly favor the emergence of
an independent Kurdistan in northern
Syria and Iraq, guaranteeing a decade of
serious friction with Turkey. The third
statelet will be an impoverished, striferidden Sunnistan in central Syria and
northern Iraq.
When Yugoslavia broke apart in the
1990s, the U.S. and NATO did enforce
the creation of a half dozen such statelets.
Assuming there is not another attack on
the scale of 9/11, however, no American
president will undertake a similar mission in Mesopotamia. With 75 million
people in that region, the task is much
greater than the one in Yugoslavia was.
The costs of a U.S.-Arab army invasion
are simply not worth the benefits. The
conflict between the West and both Sunni
jihadists and a cunning Iran will persist
for the next decade.
Obama’s policy is to dam up the financial streams of ISIS while hammering its
fighters with air and artillery attacks. The
next president will probably proceed
along that same course, seeking to grind
down the jihadists like a steamroller,
slowly but steadily. This means our
defense budget, which Obama has reflexively reduced, must be increased. It
also means more civilian casualties and
staggering damage to the cities, where
the jihadists hide among the pitiable
Sunni people. Regrettably, many in the
Arab world will interpret this strategy as
American support for Iran and its Shiite
proxies. The destruction inside Iraq and
Syria is worse than what occurred in
Belgium and France in World War II—
but these Arab populations lack the education, cultural initiative, and concern
for the commonweal to snap back as
Western Europe did. The Sunni region
of Mesopotamia will lie in ruins for
many years.
The Obama legacy in the Middle East
will be a resurgent Russian military presence, an expansionist Iran, a broken Iraq,
a catastrophe in Syria, chaos in Libya and
Yemen, and a rampant Islamist scourge
across the region. By irresolution, the
president lost the war in Iraq, convulsed
Syria, imperiled Afghanistan, and antagonized our traditional Sunni allies. Worse
still, he convinced the American public
that the decisive application of military
force was not possible. Obama has said
he does “not support the idea of endless
war.” Yet his fecklessness has created
that very condition.
PEND
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bedroom,” and that “the future” largely
consists of low-interest mortgages on
timber-framed houses and better Wi-Fi
routers for our laptops.
Or does it? Curmudgeonly as I can be
at times, I’m not sure that the pessimists
yearning for jetpacks are correct in their
rueful resignation. Not only do today’s
Americans casually use technology that
would have made their grandparents
gawk (imagine explaining Netflix to
your recent ancestors), but they are also
beginning to use it to create precisely the
sort of “futuristic lifestyles” of which
the 1950s generation could but dream.
Using products that are available off the
shelf at the Apple Store or at Best Buy,
networking tools that come standard
with any household cable package, and a
little DIY know-how, it is now possible
to refashion your home without spending a fortune.
things. And suppose I want to do something somewhat more prosaic, such as
reorder the usual toothpaste? I can just
ask Amazon to send it to me. Rosie the
Robot, eat your heart out.
To the skeptic, these developments
may sound like gimmicks or, worse,
indulgences. But they have changed the
way I live at least as much as the
“world-changing” offerings that General
Electric boasted in the 1960s changed
the lifestyles of that generation’s tinkerers. During my wife’s recent pregnancy, I worried that she would fall in
the winter’s snow. By installing Wi-Ficontrolled lights that came on automatically when it got dark—and, more
important, that came on extra bright
when she got within a mile of our
house—I made sure that her path from
the outdoor garage to the house was
always lit. Moreover, because the smart
not be too long until one can sport a
wristwatch that monitors skin temperature and instructs the heating system
accordingly. How, one wonders, would
the future-watchers of the 1950s have
reacted to that?
And yet we still seem to feel that
we are doing less well than we should
be. Why?
The answer, I’d argue, is that human
beings have a tendency to privilege the
superficial over the real, and thus to
draw the wrong conclusions about
how much progress we are actually
making. In almost every depiction of
the future—be it Blade Runner, 2001,
or Back to the Future Part II—the
“advanced” nature of the society is suggested as much by peculiar clothes and
oddly shaped buildings as by technological developments. This has skewed
our expectations of what real change
Human beings have a tendency to privilege the superficial
over the real, and thus to draw the wrong conclusions about
how much progress we are actually making.
I know, because I’ve done it. In the
past year, I’ve put in digital thermometers and Web-connected smoke alarms,
installed Wi-Fi-enabled locks, replaced
my old filament bulbs with LED lights
that can be controlled from a browser or
an app, added a garage-door opener that
senses when I arrive home, and wired in
a set of security cameras that I can monitor from anywhere—even, should I
desire, from 30,000 feet in the air. By
adding Amazon Echo and the voicecontrol functions that come with even a
basic cellphone, I have been able to program these devices to respond immediately to my spoken command.
And, with a little tinkering with free
sync services such as IFTTT, I have programmed them all to work together.
Suppose I want the lights to go down,
the TV to switch on, and the speakers to
turn up to a pre-approved level? No
problem. I just have to say “Movie time”
aloud while in the den and the room
changes before my eyes. Suppose I am
ready for bed and I need the doors to
lock, the lights to switch off (except in
the bedroom), the temperature to rise,
and the garage door to close? Easy. A
single button press can do all of those
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locks on the front door no longer require
a physical key, I knew that she would
never again be locked out of the house
(or put at risk—neither of us has to be
home to let visitors in, nor do we have to
give or leave a key for strangers). What
price that peace of mind?
Once I discovered how much is on
the market, I found it hard to stop. Because our smoke alarms are linked both
to the local police station and to our
phones—and because of security cameras accessible from anywhere—we
now know immediately if there is a
problem at home, even if we are abroad.
Because we have remote control of our
thermostats, we can now let the house
get cold or hot when we are not there,
then heat it up or cool it down when
we’re on our way back—which has dramatically reduced our heating bill. Soon,
these sorts of features will be available
on dishwashers, stoves, microwaves,
and refrigerators; and eventually, even
the most standard equipment will be
able to distinguish between family
members and guests, react to individuals’ locations within the home, and even
respond to biometric variables such as
body temperature and heart rate. It can-
looks like, such that if the person selling the latest gizmos is wearing a blue
polo shirt rather than a boiler suit—and
if the device he is hawking comes with
self-installation instructions rather than
as an integrated part of a gleaming,
retro-futuristic space home—we are
less dazzled. We were told that the
must-have gadgets of the year 2015
would be large and metallic with beeping noises and flashing lights. When,
instead, they were small, quiet, and
housed in beige plastic, we were underwhelmed. And when the great strides in
computer and home technology came
not via the centralized planning of a government or mega-corporation but from a
thousand separate places via a million
incremental, hard-won advances, we
were skeptical.
What we have is even better than what
we were promised. But it can be hard to
see, because it defies our expectations. In
the ’50s, the model was Robert Moses; in
2016, it is the plucky little startup in a
Silicon Valley garage. In the ’60s, we
were promised EPCOT; instead, we got
suburban sprawl.
The future may not have jetpacks. But
that does not mean it isn’t here.
M AY 9, 2016
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Hillary Clinton at the Democratic presidential-primary debate in Brooklyn, April 14, 2016
The Empty Pantsuit
Hillary Clinton doesn’t stand for anything—and that is her appeal
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Brooklyn
ANIEL and Rachel are Hillary Rodham Clinton voters,
part of a crowd that merrily taunts her rival, Senator
Bernie Sanders, with the chant SEND BERNIE HOME!
SEND BERNIE HOME! When the right-wing provocateur who has infiltrated the crowd suggests that this is a peculiar
thing to chant in Brooklyn, inasmuch as, as anybody with ears
knows, Senator Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, about eight miles
away from the Brooklyn Navy Yard (where we’re waiting for
the candidates to show up and debate, or at least to engage in
the weird and backward performance-art spectacles that we
insist on pretending are presidential debates), while Mrs.
Clinton comes from the well-off suburbs of Chicago, the
response among the Rodhamites is somewhere between coweyed confusion and that harrowing final scene in Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (1978 version) in which Donald Sutherland
(spoiler alert!) points and shrieks at the unassimilated humans
who once had been his friends.
They get tired of SEND BERNIE HOME! But the ensuing selection of chants is equally uninspiring: First comes I BELIEVE THAT
SHE WILL WIN! Perhaps, but there are lots of people who believe
that she will win who also believe that she is a miscreant, a
criminal, a crook, and worse. Get your average Washington
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
D
Republican talking about it after cocktail hour and he may well
agree that she will win. IT’S TIME FOR A WOMAN IN THE WHITE
HOUSE! has its appeal, but it comes with an implied question:
“Why this woman?”
I’M WITH HER! I’M WITH HER! I’M WITH HER!
Of course you are. This is Brooklyn, you are gainfully
employed, and you are not stoned out of your gourd on a
Thursday afternoon. You are not Bernie people. And neither
are you about to confess to the NATIONAL REVIEW reporter that
you’d really been hoping Rick Perry would make the cut this
time around, or maybe Rick Santorum. Of course you’re with
her. But why?
I BELIEVE THAT SHE WILL WIN!
A big chartered bus goes chugging by, emblazoned with
three-foot-high lettering: BLACK MEN FOR BERNIE SANDERS.
There is a reproduction of a photo screened onto the side of the
bus, which, amusingly, has no black men in it. (It is a picture
of Senator Sanders confronting police at a 1963 protest.) Much
to the consternation of the Hillary people, who have been
standing outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard for hours, the Bernie
people, who have developed a slight degree of media savvy,
show up about 15 minutes before the debate kickoff, carrying
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electrified signs that, in the early-evening darkness, exaggerate
their numbers vis-à-vis Team Herself.
“We’ve been here for hours,” sighs a young professional nonprofit fundraiser, still in his I’ve-got-a-good-job workaday suit
but looking barely old enough to shave.
What keeps these two teams of partisans, Hillary’s and
Bernie’s, out into the late hours on a still-cold April night in a
bleak, dead corner of Brooklyn dominated by housing projects,
half a mile from the nearest subway station and a mile from the
nearest Starbucks (in a city with nearly 300 locations), is the
hope of glimpsing a candidate, or at least a lower-level political
celebrity. When a small entourage of Democratic politicos
marches past into the heavily guarded Navy Yard, the crowd
cheers lustily and then whispers, with nearly one voice, “Who
was that?” (It was, unless my eyes deceive me, Chuck Schumer.)
But they remain disappointed: Mrs. Clinton does not show up. Of
course she shows up at the debate, but she is brought in, quietly,
through another entrance, probably in one of those many black
SUVs with blackout windows that go rolling through like a
modern-day Trujillo dinner excursion.
But they needn’t be too disappointed: Even when she shows
up, she doesn’t show up. She isn’t there, and never has been.
‘W
HY Hillary?” Daniel doesn’t seem to have been
expecting the question, and he needs a minute to
collect his thoughts. He gives a surprisingly cogent
answer, which is that he supports the policies of President Barack
Obama and believes that Mrs. Clinton represents the best opportunity to consolidate and make permanent those political gains. If
you have spent very much time speaking with people who come
out to political rallies—who are, let’s not forget, about 10,000
percent more informed, energetic, and committed than run-ofthe-mill voters—you will despair, and you will recognize that
Daniel’s thoughtful answer, simple though it may be, sounds like
Solon compared with the usual sort of thing one hears.
Of course, it does not take very much to unravel Daniel’s sentiment. I ask him which of Obama’s policies is most important to
him, and he answers, “The Affordable Care Act.” He is a nurse
practitioner who works with a mainly Medicaid-dependent population, and so this does not surprise me. He is perfectly bright,
well scrubbed, educated, and no doubt a regular reader of whatever aggregation of digital communiqués passes for a newspaper
in his household. But when I inform him that Mrs. Clinton has in
fact been vocally critical of the Affordable Care Act, that she has
criticized what she calls the “family glitch” that can make many
ACA-compliant policies too expensive in practice for many families, that she has been critical of ACA plans’ high deductibles,
rising premiums, etc., and that Chelsea Clinton has expanded on
this criticism, complaining of “crushing” health-care costs, his
eyes turn slightly feral, narrow. He literally clenches his fists and
takes a step backward. He is under attack. “It’s still better than
what we had before,” he says. It does not occur to him that, regardless of whether he is correct in that assessment, his argument is
with Mrs. Clinton rather than with the NATIONAL REVIEW reporter.
Rachel offers up “economic policies” but whiffs with the
follow-up: “Which ones?” Sounding more like a Bernie voter,
she says she is very concerned that if Republicans have their way,
then the United States will end up like some banana republic in
which a tiny ruling elite—“the corporations”—effectively owns
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and controls everything while the great masses of people founder
in penury. I reply that I understand her concern and wonder why
her response is to vote for a woman whose husband owns $1 million worth of wristwatches, who herself was paid $6,000 a
minute to flatter Manhattan investment bankers’ sense of selfimportance. “I don’t care about personal things like that.”
H
ILLARY RODHAM CLINTON has this weird thing she does
when she’s even more Nixonian than usual: She forgets to smile until a half a second after she has entered
a room. (Anthony Hopkins captures this defect perfectly in
Oliver Stone’s Nixon.) If you keep your eyes open, you can see
her do it (as I have, in Des Moines, Las Vegas, Brooklyn . . .)
and practically hear the hoists and pulleys and whatnot lurching
squeakily into action to pull that dour mug into its familiar forpublic-consumption rictus. Maybe she’s feeling antsy: She’s
under federal investigation, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, scene
of the New York Democratic-primary debate, used to house a
federal prison. She isn’t lovable, and she knows this. What she is
is a scarecrow, a placeholder for the political hopes and anxieties
of a certain kind of reasonably well-off white progressive and
for non-whites across the income spectrum who remember
with fondness (and in error) her much-diminished husband as
one of their champions.
The debate ends up being familiar stuff: Senator Sanders and
his honking Brooklyn accent, Herself and her horrifying vice
principal’s screech, his take-what-we-can-get-while-we-can-getit approach to every question contrasting with her less-of-thesame difference splitting. In practical terms, what that means is
that Senator Sanders demands a $15 federal minimum wage
immediately, while Mrs. Clinton would pause for consideration
at $12.50, which is, as she repeatedly reminded the audience,
the approach taken by the State of New York. (Obviously, we
want the entire country to be governed by the high ethical standards and bottomless economic acumen constantly on display
in Albany.) Bernie promises—his word—“revolution.” Mrs.
Clinton promises to deliver the same basket of goodies as
Sanders, more or less, without the revolution.
There’s a contrast, sure, but not too much—and that’s her
strategy. Like George H. W. Bush accidentally reading his
stage directions (“Message: I care!”), Mrs. Clinton a few days
after the debate will appear on the cable-news program hosted
by her husband’s former press secretary (because that’s not
weird and incestuous or anything) and declare that Senator
Sanders was dishonestly trying to draw “some big contrast”
between himself and Herself on the minimum wage. A big contrast on that issue—or on any issue—is precisely what she
aims to avoid, which is why her policy statements, to the extent
that they exist, are such a nugatory collection of banalities,
vagueness, and wishful thinking.
She has learned her lesson: Issues are dangerous.
T
next day, a hilarious picture makes the rounds: Mrs.
Clinton enters the kitchen of a government-supported
home for oldsters in East Harlem, with plants in the sink
and a little bit of domestic disorder in evidence. She looks—
horrified, a dowager countess plunked down in a Walmart. It
was a good get by Josh Robin of NY1. On a normal day, there’s
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no way a working reporter lays a glove on Herself. Her events
are tightly scripted and access to them is tightly controlled. In
Des Moines, reporters were literally penned in, kept separate
from the crowd. That the Secret Service is used for press management goes unremarked upon.
There’s plenty of spectacle to be had, sure: At a recent San
Francisco fundraiser hosted by the actor George Clooney, protesters lamenting the enormous amount of money involved—you
could be a “co-chair” for $353,400 per couple—decided to make
it rain, pelting those attending the gala with dollar bills. Clooney,
apparently shamed by the protest, later agreed that the money
involved was indeed “obscene.” He added: “The Sanders campaign, when they talk about it, is absolutely right.”
That looks like it might threaten to be a big contrast, so . . .
Of course Mrs. Clinton laments that “obscene” money, too,
even as she collects it by the bucket. She, too, wants to see
Citizens United overturned—after all, the dispute in that case was
whether the federal government might ban the showing of a film
critical of her. She has learned, and learned well, the lesson of her
husband’s presidency: Policy doesn’t matter. Consistency
doesn’t matter. Ideology doesn’t matter. It sure as hell doesn’t
matter to Daniel and Rachel. What matters is that Republicans
are evil, evil, evil, and that Bernie Sanders is a nobody compared
with the great and eternal Herself.
genes are: through parents. Political loyalties are transmitted with
remarkable efficiency down generations: In a recent Gallup poll,
71 percent of teenagers identified their politics as being essentially
the same as those of their parents. Children identify with their
parents’ political parties about 70 percent of the time.
As Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels document at
great scholarly length in their recent Democracy for Realists,
voters are guided mainly by irrational reactions to very recent
events, making little or no distinction between those that are
results of political decisions and those (such as natural disasters) that are not, along with “political loyalties typically
acquired in childhood.” Rachel tells me that she has seen charts
that prove Americans do better economically when there are
Democratic presidents. I ask her how much effect she believes
policy differences between the parties to have in the near term,
and she looks at me as though it is the first time she ever has
considered such a question.
Daniel and Rachel and I stand in the shadows of a dozen
Brooklyn housing projects, towers of dysfunction that once rendered the neighborhood in which we are standing one of the more
dangerous places in New York. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, behind
us, was an economic black hole for decades, a blight on the
neighborhood until it was largely turned over to free enterprise.
Today, it hosts businesses that employ thousands of people
What matters to Hillary voters is what she isn’t: an addled
kook like Bernie, a right-wing caveman like Ted Cruz, a
horror show like Donald Trump.
Mrs. Clinton may be a retro throwback to the 1990s, a time
when she was a retro throwback to the 1970s, but her campaign
is cutting-edge in one important sense: It is almost entirely free of
content, liberated from substance, an empty pantsuit. Of course
her policy statements draw from the market basket of comfortablelifestyle liberalism with which a Clinton candidacy is necessarily
associated: She isn’t going to suddenly change her views on abortion or (now that she’s settled on one that is reasonably popular)
gay marriage. But neither is she going to press any of that to the
point where a voter might have to think—think—about what it
means to support Herself. She can be whatever you want—the
$15-an-hour candidate or the $12.50-an-hour candidate. What
matters to Hillary voters is what she isn’t: an addled kook like
Bernie, a right-wing caveman like Ted Cruz, a horror show like
Donald Trump.
Beyond that, everything is kept intentionally vague enough
that the nice young professionals in Brooklyn can project onto
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign whatever their hearts may fancy. It’s not
like they know what she really plans to do. It’s not like she does,
either. For Herself, everything is negotiable.
Before the word “meme” meant “a funny picture and caption I
saw on the Internet,” it had a more specific and interesting meaning: an idea, style, or behavior that spreads through cultures in a
way analogous to the way a gene spreads through a population.
Some critics have bemoaned the “meme-ification” of politics,
but the fact is that political affiliation has always been a meme
and always will be. In fact, political identity is one of the better
examples of the form, in that it is largely transmitted the way
producing everything from food to whiskey to sweaters, and it
also hosts what will be one of the largest film studios outside of
Los Angeles. The move to open up the Navy Yard to business was
a project of Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani made possible by
Manhattan moneymen, a project continued and expanded on
by billionaire megalomaniac entrepreneur and sometime Republican Michael Bloomberg. It’s a story seen all over New York,
from Williamsburg to the Bowery, and all over the country: capitalism overcoming political shenanigans, cleaning up and repurposing the disastrous “investments” politicians make.
There’s another “big contrast” waiting to be made.
“I think this neighborhood is a Democratic success story,”
Rachel says. She doesn’t see the blight, the almost complete
lack of enterprise outside of the locked-down Navy Yard, where
security conditions are such that one worker therein says it is
like “working in a federal prison.” (Which, again, it used to be.)
She doesn’t wonder why there’s a craft whiskey distillery operating from a former military site but no grocery store on the corner.
Jonathan Swift asserted that it is impossible to reason a man
out of an error he wasn’t reasoned into. There’s no reaching the
Hillary voter. I’M WITH HER is sufficient for them, and she knows
this. And that is why she will, to the extent that the Republican
candidate permits it, refuse to take a definable stance on almost
anything except the vague progressivism that is hers as a matter
of course. Beyond that, she is perfectly insubstantial. There may
have been an ideologue down in there, somewhere, once upon a
time. But Hillary isn’t the 2016 zombie candidate; she’s the
1965 Zombies candidate: She’s not there.
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Trump’s Faction
Its primary concerns are
citizenship and nationality
BY HENRY OLSEN
I
T is tempting, if disheartening, to believe that Donald Trump
has irrevocably changed the GOP for the worse, imperiling
conservatism’s hold on the party. But he hasn’t. The same
dynamics and fissures that existed prior to this cycle remain
intact today. Trump’s armies do, however, constitute a new “fifth
faction” that now competes with the GOP’s traditional “four factions” for party dominance. This new faction is not wholly
unconservative. It is instead a forceful reassertion of a kind of
conservatism that has long lain dormant.
“Trumpism” is best understood as a resurrection of the conservative ideas of nationality and citizenship. Trump’s success
shows how important it is to reincorporate these neo-Kirkian
strands into modern conservatism, thereby creating a new fusionism that can command a national, conservative majority.
Republican nominating contests prior to this year were primarily battles between four factions. Two of these groups tended to identify as “very conservative.” Evangelicals constituted
about 20–25 percent of the GOP electorate, and they liked candidates who focused on giving their religion a role in public life.
Another 10–15 percent of GOP voters were hard-line fiscal conservatives, and they liked candidates who talked about cutting
taxes and lowering spending.
The other two of the traditional four factions, often referred to
as the “establishment,” were actually distinct groups with different priorities. Moderates, who accounted for about 30 percent of
the national party, always liked candidates who downplayed religion’s public role and favored making government work over cutting it. “Somewhat conservatives,” the largest group of the four,
were the remaining 35–40 percent of Republican voters, and they
backed candidates whom movement conservatives considered
“moderates”: Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt
Romney. Though they were not the preferred choice of the party’s
“very conservative” factions, these men stood farther right than
moderates would have liked, endorsing movement-conservative
goals such as lower taxes and a strong national defense.
Trump’s coalition does not fit neatly into this paradigm.
Although he does better with the two “establishment” factions
than with the two “very conservative” ones, his support is strong
in all four groups and seems to be driven by class more than ideology: The less formal education one has, the likelier one is to back
Trump. The group that likes him the most has never been to college,
and the group that likes him the least has post-graduate degrees.
Since the race now seems to be defined in terms of whether one
is for or against Trump, some pundits have contended that he has
completely upended the party and made old distinctions irrelevant.
A closer look at the data shows that this isn’t quite so. Support
for the non-Trump candidates has broken on exactly the ideological
Mr. Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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lines that the “four factions” theory would predict. Cruz has done
very well among very conservative Evangelicals and almost as
well among very conservative seculars. Marco Rubio ran
strongest among somewhat conservatives, while John Kasich has
racked up large margins among moderates who don’t back
Trump. The real-estate developer has not renovated the GOP; he
has simply built an addition to its existing structure.
Many conservatives think that this addition threatens their
principles, because Trump voters are out of sync with some of
the sentiments that dominate today’s conservative movement:
They are suspicious of, if not opposed to, free-trade agreements
and entitlement reform; they are not strongly pro-life; and they
question the sort of foreign military intervention many strong
conservatives favor. But this does not mean that Trump voters are
unconservative; it simply means that they sing from a different
hymnal than the one distributed in today’s conservative church.
T
HEIR hymnal is one of nationalism and citizenship. Virtually
every one of the major concerns that move Trump’s voters
can be tied together under the idea that America is an entity
that exists apart from voluntary arrangements of its residents, and
that this entity obligates all of its members to act on behalf of all the
other members. In this view, citizenship is not simply voting and
paying taxes: It is a membership by birth in a body that demands
things from everyone and in return protects and supports everyone.
This view will strike many readers as odd, given the by-nowossified conventional wisdom that Trump’s support is based on
his extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric, his ability to tap the GOP
base’s anti-establishment fervor, and his persona. But the exit-poll
data show that none of these assumptions is quite true: Trump’s
appeal contains these elements but largely transcends them.
The immigration argument is easy to refute. Exit polls regularly
ask which of four issues is the most important to GOP voters, and
immigration almost always ranks last, with just 8–12 percent of
respondents. Trump does capture most of these voters—he normally gets between 50 and 70 percent of them—but they are a
small share of the electorate, and the bulk of his supporters think
some other issue is more important. Nor does his advocacy of
deporting illegal immigrants explain his rise. The exit polls show
that there are only two states, Alabama and Mississippi, where a
majority of Republican voters favor deportation. Trump normally
wins only a bit more than half of such voters, and in virtually
every state, about half of his backers oppose deportation.
Anti-establishment fervor is also overstated as a cause of
Trump’s rise. One exit-poll question asks whether voters prefer
someone with political experience or someone from outside the
establishment. While a majority normally prefers the outsider,
and Trump wins about two-thirds of that vote, this is a classic
chicken-or-egg question. Do voters want an outsider and then
choose Trump, or do they like Trump and then say they want
someone without political experience? A better gauge of the depth
of anti-establishment fervor is to ask whether voters feel “betrayed by Republican politicians.” A majority say they do, but
Trump does not fare much better among these voters than he does
among those who say they don’t. Indeed, in five of the 14 states
where the question was asked, Trump ran better or as well among
those who did not feel betrayed by Republican officials.
Trump’s persona doesn’t explain his success, either. Exit polls
ask voters what quality they find most important in a candidate,
M AY 9, 2016
2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 4/19/2016 10:55 PM Page 33
Donald Trump acknowledges supporters at a campaign rally in South Carolina, February 5, 2016.
and one of the options is “tells it like it is.” We should expect this
to be one of the most popular answers among Trump’s supporters
if they were primarily attracted to his brashness. It is not. It almost
always ranks third, just ahead of electability, and is usually mentioned by about 20 percent of all voters. Trump does clean up with
that 20 percent—he usually gets around 80 percent of the vote
among those who prefer someone who “tells it like it is.” But
fewer than half of his voters overall choose that answer.
A larger share of Trump’s vote comes from people choosing
another quality, the one that often finishes first or second: “can
bring needed change.” About a third of all voters select this
quality on average, and Trump usually gets about half of their
votes. Indeed, these voters are so important to him that he
always either loses or wins quite narrowly when he gets fewer
than 45 percent of their votes. Those who want to understand
Trumpism, therefore, must understand the nature of the change
Trump’s voters want him to bring.
SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES
W
E can do so by looking for the common thread that ties
together the issues those voters care about: a perceived failure on the part of government to protect
vulnerable Americans from threats to their way of life.
With immigration and trade, the danger is economic—
Americans (in the view of Trump voters) are losing jobs and
wages to competition from foreigners, and the people who run
the country prefer profiting from that competition to protecting
workers who are harmed by it.
The stakes are felt to be much higher with Trump’s proposed
indefinite ban on Muslims’ entering the United States: The perceived danger is to life itself. Trump voters believe they are
threatened by Islamic terrorism. If Muslims come to America,
they think, Americans will be more likely to die. Trump’s proposed ban seems to them to be common sense: The first duty of
a national government is to protect its citizens from foreign
threats. One must not underestimate how important the proposed
ban is to Trump’s voters and to his appeal. Trump’s national poll
numbers were stuck in a narrow band in the mid 20s prior to the
Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks, according to the
RealClearPolitics averages. He started to move into the high 20s
immediately after the Paris attacks, and his appeal skyrocketed
after he proposed the ban on December 7. Polls taken after that
date show him in the mid to high 30s, a position of dominance
that he has held ever since.
The exit polls confirm this interpretation. The ban is highly
popular among Republican primary voters, with between 63 and
78 percent approving it in every state where the question was
asked. Trump normally wins between 45 and 50 percent of these
voters. But this actually understates the import of the issue to his
candidacy. Between 80 and 90 percent of his voters back the ban,
meaning that it unites his backers more than any other concern.
This fact helps us understand the change his voters want.
Opponents of Trump’s views on immigration, trade, and a ban on
Muslims’ entering the United States often use individual-based
arguments to justify their views. Immigration is needed because
individual employers need to contract with individual workers.
Free trade is good for individual companies and consumers, and
for the (often foreign) individuals with whom they trade. The
rights of individual Muslims in America outweigh the concerns
of native-born Americans about their safety. The implicit understanding conveyed by many in the “never Trump” movement is
that the country is little more than a land mass containing individuals rather than an entity with obligations to, and capable of
imposing obligations on, those who belong to it.
Trump voters disagree with this view. The America they want to
“make great again” is not a land mass, a large, rules-based network
that lets individuals coordinate with minimal transaction costs. It
is instead a place, a people, a nation. Trump voters believe that they
have upheld their side of the American social contract, while others—
businessmen, politicians, journalists, professors—have violated it.
In past generations, American conservative philosophy and
political leadership incorporated this strand of thinking into the
movement. Writers such as Russell Kirk and Edward Shils would
remind us that society has organic, primordial elements that no
culture of individuality can erase. Leaders such as Ronald Reagan
subtly weaved this element of thought into their invocations of
American nationality. The “boys of Pointe du Hoc” were worthy
of praise not because they individually made courageous choices,
although they clearly did in the heat of battle. They were worthy
of praise because they did their duty, they fulfilled their end of the
national bargain. Reagan’s appeal to Americans, especially to the
so-called Reagan Democrats, rested in part on the notion that he
would always commit the country to fulfilling its end of the deal.
Recapturing Reagan’s blend of American individualism and
American nationalism will be difficult but not impossible. A conservative movement that can achieve this goal will not only heal
a fractured party; it will also create a not-so-silent majority and
win many elections to come.
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The Long View
From the Archives
of the Hillary
Rodham Clinton
Presidential Library
It’s really wonderful to be here
with you all today. And I must say,
the view from here is extraordinary.
It’s always a treat to catch up with
my old friend Lloyd Blankfein, and
you, Michelle, and the whole terrific
team here at Goldman Sachs, who I
know are working hard to increase
shareholder value in many wonderful ways. Thanks, sincerely, for
having me.
My remarks today will be about
the regulatory work we’re doing
in Washington, particularly as it
impacts the work that you all do—
work, may I say, that is very important and I’m not one, as you all
know, to demonize the things that
go on here on Wall Street. As some
of you know—well, maybe some
of you older folks here! This
crowd gets younger and younger
each time I speak here at Gold man, which is now about, what?
Monthly? Could be more often if
you’d like. We can talk about that
offline.
Anyway, where was I? Right: As
some of you know, I’m no Wall
Street basher. I respect the work
and the artistry of the financial sector—and as some of you know, I
myself dabbled in commodity investing rather successfully—some
thought too successfully, for a
woman. They didn’t add that last
part—for a woman—but you always
knew that’s what they meant. When
a man invests $20,000 of borrowed
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
money into risky cattle futures and
makes over $100,000 in a week or
so with no trading slips to back up
the transactional record, they say,
Hey! What a great investor! When a
woman does it, they call in CSI:
Wall Street!
Am I right? That’s a topical reference! Hope you all enjoyed that!
Oh, right: The work you guys do
—particularly you, Adebayo, and
you, too, Deborah—and may I just
pause for a moment to ask this
question: Which one of you is responsible for my check today? I
don’t mean in general, I’m just trying to get granular here and find out
who it is I need to see when I complete these remarks to collect payment? Is it you, Mark? Just raise
your hand if you would. Yes?
Mark? Great.
I’m wondering, Mark—and
here we can maybe take a moment
and reflect, silently, to ourselves
on what I’ve already said—I’m
wondering, Mark, if it would be
possible for you to give me the
check right now, during my re marks? Is that possible? I know
it’s unorthodox, but then one of
the things I admire about Gold man is its willingness to take
risks, to be entrepreneurial. Is that
something you can do? Yes?
Thanks! Come on up here with the
check and we can continue with
the presentation.
As Mark makes his way to the
front, let me also thank you for the
scrumptious dinner you’ve been so
kind as to prepare. As you know, I
ate very little of it, so I’m wondering if some of it might be packed up
for me to take along with me, on my
way to JPMorgan Chase. Is that
possible? Whatever you’ve got is
fine—my plate and/or anyone else’s,
frankly, I can put the leftovers to
good use in the office fridge, so
don’t be shy.
BY ROB LONG
Thanks, Mark. Did you all know
that some of the radical changes in
banking laws—which I assure you I
will be reviewing as president, I
mean, what I’m trying to do here is
establish a dialogue between the
regulatory structure and you guys.
It doesn’t have to be adversarial.
You have a nice little bank here. Be
a shame if something happened to
it. Wasn’t that a fun reference? I’m
a fun person!
Anyway, let me demonstrate
some of the wonderful new exciting
changes that I support in the new
banking and finance environment.
As you can see, I’m taking out my
smartphone right now and photographing this check—wow, still not
used to all of those zeroes!—and
that photograph somehow—don’t
ask me how! I’m not a tech nerd
like, well, like you probably are,
Lakshmi!—but the photo from my
phone becomes a deposit slip of a
kind, and right now—wait, let me
just press send—right now, at this
very moment, the check is being
deposited to my account and will
probably be converted into cash by
the time I finish this little talk.
So please don’t let anyone tell
you I’m anti-bank! I love banks!
There! Did you hear that beep?
Isn’t that great? That’s the sound of
your check clearing my account.
Which means I can spend this money
right now, if I wish.
Thank you, sincerely, for your
time. I really enjoy visiting with all
of the Goldman Sachs team and
hope I can do it more often.
I’m happy to answer questions as
I walk to the elevator. But first, I
have a question for you all: These
chairs, in the conference room—
what are they, leather? Can I have
one? Wait, two? Can I have two?
And the flower arrangements—
you’re done with those, right? Can
I just—
M AY 9, 2016
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Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Supersize My Government, Please
HE bag of coffee was on sale, so I thought I’d try
a new brand. It was McCafé, a product of the
McDonald’s Corporation, still believing that
“Mc” is an attractive prefix and not a slangy
shorthand for something quick and cheap. No one would
say, “I need my head opened up. Hope I can find a McNeurosurgeon.” But as I said, it was on sale, and I am constitutionally unable to spend $14.99 for eight ounces of
shade-grown, fair-trade, sustainable organic beans that were
spat into by the hipster who ground them, because you
shouldn’t buy your coffee pre-ground. MAN, BEANS BEFORE
SWINE. (Ptui)
The wire closure that cinches the bag fell off when the bag
was opened. It had failed after three seconds of use. Well,
roll it up. Second bag: same thing. That’s a 100 percent
failure rate. It felt like the Seventies all over again:
Nothing works, everything’s cheap. This is a problem and
I want a presidential candidate to solve
it for me. Dear possible leaders, the wire
closures keep falling off my coffee
bags! What say you?
CANDIDATE NO. 1: We don’t make
wire-closing things anymore, it’s a disaster. Right? In South Carolina—where
they love me by the way, I was ahead by
millions and not even the polls saw that
coming but we did very well, very well,
and they have factories, okay? They
don’t make anything. They used to make
things. They don’t anymore. We’re going
to change that. What’s that? How will we
change it? Listen, we got smart people, Yale graduates,
Harvard graduates, and they all say I’m one of the smartest
people they know, and they know doctors. But you got dumb
people—really, really dumb people—in charge of our wire
situation. I’m sorry but a lot of dummies. A lot. We’ll work it
out and it’ll be great. We’ll have so much wire, people will
be saying, Where did all this wire come from? We will lead
the world with the wire.
CANDIDATE NO. 2: For too long, Big Coffee has been punishing the American worker by downsizing the amount of
wire you get! In the 1950s, a man could feed a family of
twelve on what he made down at the wire works! Thirty
years of unregulated capitalism has ruined the industry in this
country! I have spoken to the men and women who used to
be the backbone of the abacus industry, and they tell me
they’re living off turnips and soup made from boiled dandelions because we let capitalism spread computers everywhere, and that’s why we need to break up the banks into
small, digestible pieces with a caramel flavor, like those
Werther’s candies I like to give to small children! Is it cold in
here? Why do they keep it so cold in here? WAITRESS!
MCDONALD’S
T
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
CANDIDATE NO. 3: You know, as I travel around the country, talking to people, people who are real people, I am
reminded that it is the people who are the people of the
country, and that’s why I have FOUGHT my ENTIRE CAREER TO
FIGHT FOR WOMEN’S HEALTH AND ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITY
AND THE RIGHT TO HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS WAGE
EQUALITY. (Pause.) I have also worked hard in Washington
to reach comprehensive solutions to the issues about coffeebag wires we all share, but also to fight Republican efforts
to force our children to eat contaminated lead by the bucket.
They say, Oh, the science on eating lead, it’s not settled. I
say IT IS SETTLED, just like THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE is settled
and Citizens United IS NOT.
CANDIDATE NO. 4: Well that’s an interesting question. I
hear that a lot. After eight years of Clinton-Obama policies
it’s what we’re seeing in a lot of areas. But let me tell you
what concerns me. A lot of the coffee-bag wire enclosures,
they come from China. They’re our biggest trading partner, and they’re trying to
manage an economic contraction. They
have excess capacity in many industries,
and they’re shutting down plants. A lot of
people who moved from the rural area to
the cities are out of work, just like here
in America. But they don’t have the freedom that makes this great land so great.
They don’t have a Constitution that gives
them the right to dissent. I worry that
social unrest in China will lead to recklessness in foreign affairs, and we are not
prepared. When I am president, China
will know better than to invade Taiwan, because we will
have a president who’s not afraid to assert what God put us
here to do. Let us pray.
Those are four approaches, and I suppose there are others. (“My father was a mailman, and he used wire to bundle together the mail people built up over vacation. He
brought those letters together, and I can bring the country
together.”) But they don’t address the real issue. First of
all, those wire things fall off half the coffee bags you buy.
It isn’t just a McDonald’s thing. Second, you have to wonder whether McDonald’s is branching out into grocerystore coffee to soften the impact of higher minimum
wages on overall corporate growth. It would be refreshing
if a candidate addressed those things—you know, it’s not
really the worst problem in the world, and McCafé does
say something about how corporations constantly seek
new opportunities.
But the issue isn’t the wire. It’s the glue. The glue’s
cheap. What if the candidate blinked and said, “Why,
you’re right. I went charging ahead with boilerplate without
really thinking. Sorry! I’ll try not to do that again, and I’ll
really listen to what you say.”
President in a landslide.
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Books, Arts & Manners
A Man of
Strategic
Vision
LOU CANNON
Ronald Reagan, by Jacob Weisberg
(Times, 208 pp., $25)
R
REAGAN was good
for the United States of
America. He’s also been a
boon to the publishing industry, with the number of Reagan
titles now exceeding 1,000. The Reagan
presidency casts a long shadow. Perhaps because of our country’s present
plight, there is a growing realization
across the political spectrum that
Reagan as president made a constructive difference.
Jacob Weisberg realizes this, too,
although he’s not quite sure how it
happened. His book is the latest in the
American Presidents series, created by
the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
and now edited by Sean Wilentz, which
aims “to present the grand panorama of
our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid
enough for the scholar.” Put less
grandly, these books are extended
essays for readers who want to know
something, but not too much, about a
particular president.
sprayed his mist cynically, but I do
think he had considerable control over
it, at least until his later years. He
could disappear into the fog at difficult
moments and reemerge when conditions were more auspicious.
Weisberg develops his fog theory—
he compares Reagan to an “inversion
layer” in which the weather is murkiest
near the ground—to explain why Reagan
was a resonant communicator with the
American people while often distanced
from his family and closest aides. He is
not alone in struggling with this supposed contradiction. Reagan’s remoteness—Nancy Reagan called it “the
Barrier”—drove Morris, his official
biographer, up the wall. Unable to
understand Reagan, he resorted to fiction. Weisberg, with scant personal
Reagan is hardly the only popular
president who was an enigma up close.
ONALD
Mr. Cannon covered the Reagan presidency for the
Washington Post and wrote five books about
Reagan, including President Reagan: The Role
of a Lifetime.
36
Weisberg’s readable book does not
match the best books in this series,
notably Garry Wills’s on James
Madison and Douglas Brinkley’s on
Gerald Ford, but he does try to be fair
to a president whose views he does not
share. Despite giving a greater share
of the credit to Mikhail Gorbachev,
Weisberg realizes that Reagan played
an outsize role in ending the Cold
War and in the subsequent demise of
the Soviet Union. He even acknowledges that some of Reagan’s economic policies succeeded, though he does
not appreciate the full reach of
Reagan’s legacy.
Unfortunately, Weisberg’s account
is undermined by pop psychoanalysis,
Freudian jargon, and an excessive tendency to portray Reagan as detached,
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
disengaged, and unable “to distinguish
fact from fancy.” The latter quote is
from an interview by Edmund Morris
of Reagan’s first serious girlfriend,
some 55 years after she had last seen
him. The girl’s father, a minister, is
described by Weisberg as a father figure for Reagan, which he might have
been. But Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Reagan’s first political idol, is labeled
an “alternative father figure,” which is
a stretch. It may not matter, since
Weisberg believes that Reagan was in
a “fog” much of the time. In the
author’s words:
Willed blurriness became a technique
[Reagan] used to overlook moral lapses by the country he loved. . . . Tuning
out discomfiting realities allowed
Reagan to articulate his resonant version of American exceptionalism, his
belief in the country’s divine chosenness and moral superiority. Reagan
found that vagueness was a good management technique as well. Setting
broad direction and leaving the details
to others meant he got credit for what
others accomplished, but less than the
ordinary measure of blame when his
plans ran aground. I don’t think Reagan
experience of Reagan, prefers psychoanalysis, for which he lacks discernible qualifications.
Biographers should resist the temptation to describe their subjects as living in a fantasy world, because they
don’t know what’s going on in the subjects’ heads. Reagan is hardly the only
popular president who was an enigma
up close. For instance, the playwright
and biographer Robert Sherwood saw
in FDR “a thickly forested interior”
that kept others from penetrating his
mind. Sherwood never put FDR on the
couch, as Weisberg does with Reagan,
but he did use psychological insights
to explain him. I tried to do the same in
my books about Reagan without having any illusion that there was a single
key to his personality. My explanation
for Reagan’s distancing was that his
father, Jack Reagan, was a nomadic
alcoholic who moved his family from
one Illinois town to another during
Ronald Reagan’s formative years,
depriving him of the opportunity to
form boyhood friendships. Of necessity,
Reagan became comfortable in his
own company. He wasn’t aloof, however. Young Reagan was a popular boy
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who excelled in dramatics and swimming. I suspect he had a rich inner life,
as evidenced by his vibrant imagination. But with the exception of Nancy
Reagan, he rarely shared this inner
world with others.
In public life, as governor of California and then as president, Reagan
was rarely a detail man, but he displayed what his long-serving secretary
of state, George P. Shultz, called “strategic thinking.” He may have lacked a
precise blueprint, but Reagan knew
what he wanted to achieve. At the
Washington Post in June 1980, Reagan
was asked whether the U.S. arms
buildup he advocated would intensify
the arms race. Reagan said that the
Soviet economy was so unstable that
the economic pressure of an arms
buildup would bring the Soviets to the
bargaining table. Reagan, who had
been president of the Screen Actors
Guild during a turbulent period, wanted
to sit down with a Soviet leader with
the United States in a position of
strength. To this end, he pushed
through Congress the largest peacetime
military buildup in the nation’s history.
He also embraced a missile-defense
plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative,
that frightened the Soviets because it
would have meant competing on multiple technologies in which the United
States had an advantage.
Weisberg properly lauds Reagan for
recognizing the fragility of the Soviet
system when most of his contemporaries did not. Had George H. W. Bush
won the presidency in 1980, writes
Weisberg, he would probably have pursued a “realist foreign policy that . . .
accepted the Cold War status quo as a
permanent condition. The Soviets
would have felt no economic pressure
from an accelerated arms race or SDI,
and no moral pressure from a righteous
American leader.”
But Weisberg goes astray in thinking
that “Reagan’s idiosyncratic view of
the Soviet Union as weak and vulnerable pointed him in two contradictory
directions,” one confrontational, the
other conciliatory. The two were of a
piece. Reagan saw the value of calling
things by their right names. In his initial press conference as president, on
January 29, 1981, Reagan responded to
a question by saying that the Soviets
remained dedicated to world revoluS P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
tion, “meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to
lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.” But
Reagan also said at this press conference that he favored negotiating with
the Soviets “an actual reduction in the
numbers of nuclear weapons” on a verifiable basis. Weisberg quotes the first
statement but not the second.
From his first day in office, Reagan
repeatedly reached out to the Soviets,
observes Jack F. Matlock Jr., a Russianspeaking Reagan adviser, in his valuable book Reagan and Gorbachev:
How the Cold War Ended. The problem
was the void at the other end of the line.
Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader
when Reagan took office, was so mentally frail, said Matlock, that he was
“no longer capable of discussing even
trivial issues coherently.” His two successors were physically ill. Brezhnev’s
immediate successor, Yuri Andropov,
died of kidney disease. Konstantin
Chernenko perished from cirrhosis of
the liver. By the time Chernenko died,
on March 10, 1985, Reagan and his
advisers had prepared a policy framework to engage the Soviets on arms,
human rights, and other issues. Then,
said Reagan, “along came Gorbachev.”
The two leaders shared a poignant fear
that the United States and the Soviet
Union might blunder into a nuclear war
if their nations forever remained on
hair-trigger alert with thousands of
missiles pointing at the other. That’s
still a concern, but Reagan and Gorbachev much reduced the danger.
Weisberg chortles at Reagan’s lapses,
such as mistaking his housing secretary, Samuel Pierce, for a mayor at a
conference of mayors. But when it
mattered, Reagan was a commanding
leader. This is demonstrated by the
transcripts of the 1986 Reykjavik
summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, which ended dramatically when
Reagan firmly refused to give up SDI.
There is no sign Weisberg has read
these transcripts, which show a confident Reagan more than holding his
own with Gorbachev, no slouch, on
complex issues. The Reykjavik summit led to the important IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty, the basis
of every subsequent U.S.–Russian
arms treaty. Last summer, as Barack
Obama and Vladimir Putin were exchanging insults, officials from their
two countries were inspecting each
other’s nuclear weapons.
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On domestic issues, Weisberg ac knowledges Reagan’s achievements
but gives the credit to others. “The legislative accomplishments of Reagan’s
second term were the pet ideas of senators which Reagan adopted as his
own: Bill Bradley’s tax reform, Alan
Simpson’s immigration reform, and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s welfare
reform,” Weisberg writes. What is he
talking about? Reagan favored tax
reform when Bradley was playing basketball for the Knicks, and he was
always appreciative of the contributions of immigrants, legal or not. As for
welfare reform, Weisberg himself
relates that Reagan achieved a major
welfare-reform bill as governor of
California by negotiating with opposition
Democrats. He didn’t need Moynihan to
jump-start him.
Weisberg also misunderstands American exceptionalism, a concept first described by Tocqueville in 1831 and
enunciated in varying forms by most U.S.
presidents, including Obama. Reagan
himself did not use the phrase, much
less assert the “moral superiority” of the
United States. He proclaimed instead
that our country was exceptional in
serving as a haven for freedom-loving
people and as a global beacon for
democracy. More than a score of
nations became democracies during the
Reagan years, and the United States
didn’t invade any of them except
Grenada, where thugs had murdered the
Marxist prime minister. U.S. forces
arrested the killers, expelled Cuban soldiers who were building an airstrip, and
left as swiftly as they had come. “More
than any other people on Earth, we bear
burdens and accept risks unprecedented
in their size and their duration, not for
ourselves alone but for all who wish to
be free”: The president who said this
was not Ronald Reagan but John F.
Kennedy. It lucidly expresses Reagan’s
conception of American exceptionalism.
Two Reagans are on display in
Weisberg’s telling. One decisively sets a
bold agenda, rewrites and edits speeches,
and makes productive compromises
with foreign and domestic adversaries.
The other is staff-dependent and in a
fog. Readers who know nothing about
Reagan will learn from this book that he
was a transformational president. But
they won’t have a clue as to how he
accomplished what he did.
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The EU’s
Soft Utopia
JOHN FONTE
The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance
and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe, by Todd
Huizinga (Encounter, 280 pp., $23.99)
T
HIS is the best book ever
written about the European
Union. The author, Todd
Huizinga (currently with the
Acton Institute), served as a U.S.
Foreign Service officer for two decades.
After years in Brussels, Luxembourg,
and Germany, he knows the EU as few
American scholars or statesmen do. He
deftly captures the essence of the
European Union as a “soft utopia,” a
quasi-religious vision of a secular
heaven on earth.
At the core of the EU is the belief in
supranationalism. The proponents of the
EU consciously portray its supranational institutions as a model for “global
governance.” In this intended utopia, all
nation-states in the future would cede
national sovereignty, and thus political
and legal authority, to supranational
institutions, just as today the European
Court of Justice is a higher legal authority for Germans than their own courts,
and most British laws originate not in
the House of Commons but in the
European Commission in Brussels.
From the EU perspective, supranationalism is necessary to achieve world
peace and global human rights.
In clear and cogent language, the
author meticulously details the history
Mr. Fonte, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is
the author of Sovereignty or Submission, the
winner of the 2012 Intercollegiate Studies Institute
book award for best nonfiction.
of the EU from its idealistic beginnings
in the ashes of World War II, through the
creation of the euro more than a decade
ago, to today’s refugee-migrant crisis.
He laments that, “after 65 years, the EU
has conclusively shown itself to be
inherently undemocratic, unaccountable
and unresponsive to voters.”
From the beginning, the intellectual
architects of European integration
sought to limit democratic sovereignty
in the name of supranational governance. The strategy to advance integration has been dubbed the “Monnet
method” after its foremost theorist and
practitioner, Jean Monnet. The method
envisioned a gradualist approach that
started with consolidating the economic
sphere, but with the ultimate aim of
European political integration—while
obfuscating the extent of this transfer of
power from the citizens of the member
states, through a conscious policy of
“constructive ambiguity.”
The introduction of the euro was a
classic example of the Monnet method.
Huizinga writes that the political decision
to create the euro “defied basic economics”: “The decision was taken . . . explicitly because they believed a common
currency would prove unsustainable
without political integration. Thus, it
would ultimately force Europeans to
accept a politically integrated EU.”
Indeed, the inevitable crisis resulting
from the creation of a common currency
for nations at vastly different stages of
economic development (to say nothing
of different work cultures and mores)
has resulted in broad transfers of power
from democratic nation-states to undemocratic supranational institutions.
Hence, today the executive branches of
democratic states must submit their
budgets for approval to the European
Commission (an unelected supranational bureaucracy) before they are
submitted to their own elected national
parliaments. At the same time, the
European Central Bank has assumed
unprecedented and unaccountable
political power.
Huizinga notes that because of the
euro crisis, “the democratically elected
leaders of Italy and Greece were ousted
in late 2011” by EU leaders in the name
of economic stability. As New York
Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, the
ousters of the Italian and Greek prime
ministers “open a troubling window on
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what a true European state would look
like. Stability would be achieved at the
expense of democracy.”
Huizinga writes that German chancellor Angela Merkel, “arguably the most
powerful person in Europe,” is walking
a “tightrope” as she balances between
her constitutional duty to German citizens and the utopian dream of European
political integration and global governance. With “her sporadic calls for more
Europe,” Merkel has “updated” the
Monnet method and chosen “the utopian
dream of European integration” over
democratic sovereignty. “Merkel’s commitment to saving the euro at all
costs” has led to significant opposition
from “prominent business people,
economists, and bankers” within
Germany. Likewise, her “welcoming”
attitude (the German establishment
refers to it as “Willkommenskultur”)
toward refugee-migrants has triggered
increased political opposition to her
policies in Germany and throughout
Europe. Huizinga asks, “Will Germany,
until now an indispensable motor of the
drive for supranational integration, pull
back from the dream of European political union?”
In May 2014, elections to the European Parliament in country after country
resulted in devastating losses for the
pro-EU parties and gains for Euroskeptics of the Right, Left, and center.
The voters expressed an interest in
returning power to nation-states, but the
European Parliament is mainly a talking
shop. For example, it cannot introduce
legislation, although it can block initiatives proposed by the European
Commission. In any case, the leaders
of the EU, with the installation of
Jean-Claude Juncker (an ardent eurofederalist) as head of the European
Commission, essentially ignored the
election results and even expanded the
centralized power of the EU administration over the democratic nation-states.
Huizinga explains that, despite the
often touted shared values and longstanding partnership uniting the U.S.
and Western Europe, fundamental tensions exist between the American
nation-state and the EU. At the deepest
philosophical level, “the United States
by its very existence stands in the way
of the EU vision of a world that has
evolved beyond the nation-state,”
Huizinga writes. “The same goes for
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
Israel, which suffers unrelenting EU
hostility largely because [it is] a democratic and proud nation-state.”
No doubt EU elites sincerely believe
in supranational global governance, but,
as Huizinga remarks, this idea, “at its
core, cannot but be a sworn enemy to
democratic sovereignty as practiced in
the American system.” Therefore, it is
not surprising that the EU leaders’
adherence to global-governance ideology
often translates into principled opposition to U.S. foreign-policy initiatives
and, at a minimum, complicates cooperation within the Western alliance.
Huizinga provides us with examples
of this from his days in the State Department. President Clinton attempted
to work with our European allies to
establish a Nuremberg-style international court for war crimes, a court that
would respect democratic sovereignty,
but they rebuffed him and insisted on
creating the International Criminal
Court with legal authority over American citizens. President Bush met
opposition from European leaders in
prosecuting the War on Terror, on
issues ranging from POW status for terrorists to the need for U.N. approval for
any use of force. Even President Obama
has run afoul of EU globalists for ordering unilateral drone strikes against
Islamist terrorists rather than the preferred transnational-progressive “global
law” solution that would bring the
“alleged” terrorists before a supranational court for trial.
Besides globalist ideology, for some
Europeans (particularly French officials) the purpose of the EU is to provide
a geopolitical counterweight to the
United States. The view that a politically
united Europe could become a world
power that rivals the U.S. is, Huizinga
writes, “ubiquitous among European
pundits and elites.”
Most significantly, Huizinga identifies the “fundamental” source of
American–EU tension as “the fact that
Europe is largely post-Christian while
the United States remains culturally, if
not in actual religious faith, JudeoChristian.” This divide is seen most
emphatically in vastly different views of
human nature. In The Federalist, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay sought to construct the American republic on what
Huizinga summarizes as “reverence for
wisdom and experience, prudent real-
ism, and a sober view of human nature.”
The Constitution, the Declaration of
Independence, and The Federalist expressed a belief in an objective truth and
reality and in a flawed human nature
(while recognizing that human beings
possessed enough redeemable qualities
to make self-government possible).
The worldview of the Founding
Fathers led to the creation of an
American government that was limited
and emphasized the separation of
powers and checks and balances. The
American Founders, unlike the revolutionaries of the past century in Nazi
Germany and Communist Russia,
China, and Cuba, did not seek to create a “new man,” but assumed an
unchanging human nature. Huizinga
maintains that this Judeo-Christian
worldview still, for the most part, prevails in America culturally, among
both believers and non-believers.
On the other hand, Huizinga tells us,
the worldview of the EU is profoundly
different: It holds that human nature is
malleable. It favors a “transformative
and liberationist” approach that would
reconstruct human nature and “free”
human beings from the constraints of
tradition, family, society, and even
objective reality. In several chapters
examining the EU’s global promotion of
radical feminism, LGBT rights, and children’s (anti-parental) rights, Huizinga
argues that the EU’s transnationalprogressive agenda seeks to expand a
supranational authority that promotes
the concept of the autonomous, atomized individual in opposition to the traditional institutions of civil society
(family, marriage, religion). At the
same time, Huizinga examines how the
“trickle-down postmodernism” of the
EU is totally ill prepared, both physically
and culturally, to face the threat of radical Islam in Europe.
Notwithstanding his criticism of the
EU, Huizinga remains deeply appreciative of historic European civilization
(“the unrivaled heritage of Athens,
Rome, and Jerusalem”). He describes
Europe as “America’s most important
ally,” insists that the “old Europe” that
“birthed Western civilization is still
alive and kicking,” and envisions a
“reformed” EU of sovereign democratic
nation-states in a strong transatlantic
alliance with the United States. One can
only hope.
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Witnesses
PA U L H O L L A N D E R
Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped
the American Century, by Daniel Oppenheimer
(Simon & Schuster, 416 pp., $28)
T
HE attempt to better understand
the complex and elusive connections between the personal
and the political realms in our
psyche is a worthwhile endeavor, hard as
they might be to unearth and document.
For well over half a century, intellectual
historians and authors of different
political persuasions have been asking:
Why have Communist movements and
systems attracted so many Western
intellectuals, and why, and under what
conditions, have many of the same intellectuals become disillusioned with them?
The author of this well-written (and
widely and favorably reviewed) volume
seeks to explore these interrelated matters, and in doing so makes some large
claims. He begins by averring: “This is a
book about why six men changed—why
they moved from one set of political
beliefs to staunchly different ones. It’s
also a history of the American Left in the
20th century, and the rise of the Right. . . .
It’s a book about how we come to believe
at all. Why is it that each of us holds the
beliefs that we do?”
Exit Right is certainly not a history of
the American Left, but it does provide
insights and information about it. Far
Mr. Hollander is a professor emeritus of sociology at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an
associate of the Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. His book
From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chávez:
Intellectuals and a Century of Political
Hero Worship will be published later this year.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
more questionable is the grandiose claim
of the subtitle, that the six individuals
dealt with, and presumably their political attitude change, “reshaped the
American century.” A closer look at
these six people—Whittaker Chambers,
James Burnham, Ronald Reagan,
Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and
Christopher Hitchens—offers little support for this assertion. Oppenheimer does
not explain how he selected his protagonists, a disparate group, members of
which had little in common, other than
their transient attraction to leftist ideas
and causes. Much has already been written about all of them. Given the declared
goals (quoted above) of the study, it is far
from clear why only those were included
who “exited to the right,” while those
who became moderate leftists or liberals,
or withdrew altogether from politics,
were excluded.
Reagan, of course, is the most incongruous member of this group, which otherwise might have been characterized as
one composed of intellectuals. Aside from
differences in personality, education,
and occupation, they are separated, most
importantly, by sharp and pronounced
ideological and psychological differences in regard to the political commitments and beliefs they eventually
discarded. Reagan and Podhoretz were
never Communists, fellow travelers, or
members of the radical Left. They had a
lot less to be disillusioned with than others of far deeper and more durable commitments. Reagan and Podhoretz used
to be liberals, or Democrats, on the
American political spectrum.
Arguably, Reagan was the least
politically active in this group: The
author refers to his having had only a
“low-impact commitment” to politics
until he became a vocal conservative.
By contrast, Chambers was a genuine
Communist and a Soviet spy; Burnham, a
well-educated upper-class Trotskyite
writer-intellectual (and a senior editor of
NATIONAL REVIEW later in his life);
Podhoretz, a liberal New York intellectual,
editor of Commentary; Horowitz, a
Sixties radical and activist, author of several books; Hitchens, also a Trotskyite, a
British journalist and contrarian (“the
underdog was his party,” writes Oppenheimer) who moved to the United States
and was a columnist for The Nation.
The trajectory and sources of these
men’s involvement and their disillusion-
ment were also notably different and
offer little basis for any generalization.
The book has barely any conclusions:
They amount to two and a half pages of
what the author calls a “Postscript,”
which is a poor substitute for them.
What we have are six discrete biographies, interesting and informative fragments of intellectual history that do not
live up to the promises and claims made
in the beginning. They often meander
and lose their intended focus—supposedly, the roots of political involvement
and disillusionment.
Perhaps unavoidably, these minibiographies drift in the direction of
psychobiography. For instance, Oppenheimer plausibly argues that Horowitz
was motivated by “a need to redeem the
radical hopes and action of his parents,”
who were lifelong members of the
Communist Party of the U.S.A. and
never revised their beliefs. Less successfully, he speculates about Horowitz:
“From the anger and self-hatred a political intuition began to coalesce. Barely
even an intuition at first—a shard of
pain emanating from the suppurating
wound in his psyche gesturing in the
direction of an intuition.”
To his credit, Oppenheimer is, on the
whole, impressively nonjudgmental and
sympathizes with the travails that attend
his subjects’ wrenching changes of political attitude. He seems genuinely interested in understanding their motives and
behavior. Although not a historian or a
social scientist (he is identified on the
cover as a writer and filmmaker with an
MFA in non-fiction), he did his homework and writes much better than his
academic colleagues. For example, summarizing the disillusionment of Burnham
not only with Communist politics but
with Marxism itself, he writes: “The
authoritarianism, the deterministic faith
in the ultimate triumph of the movement,
the hubristic claims to having perfect
understanding of all realms of knowledge, the irrational loyalty to the Soviet
Union, and, particularly, the mysticism
and disguised eschatology of dialectical
materialism—these weren’t infected
appendixes one could simply cut away
from the body of Marxism.”
Commenting on the disposition of
Podhoretz, he illuminatingly notes: “It
was steeped in Freud, and took as its
gospel his conviction that reason was but
a skiff floating atop the sea of terror, con43
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
fusion, and need that filled up most of the
human psyche.”
For readers who know little about these
figures and their politics, the book offers
substantial, colorfully presented information but no particular new insight or
proposition. Oppenheimer usefully reaffirms that it is almost impossible to separate the personal from the political, and
that one realm should not be used to discredit the other:
It is easy to disparage other people’s
politics by psychologizing, historicizing, biologizing, or sociologizing them.
The harder and more important truth to
admit is that everyone’s politics are resonating on all of these frequencies.
Once that point is granted, it casts into
relief the problem with one of the
charges that is so often leveled against
political turncoats, which is that they
are acting out personal issues. Of
course they are. That’s what being
human entails.
There remains the question why several reputable reviewers and important
publications found this book worthy of
considerable attention. Some of these
reviewers clearly have strong reservations about the “turncoats” here discussed, and the volume offers some
material that, regardless of the author’s
intentions, helps to confirm their negative disposition. Thus George Packer
wrote in The New Yorker: “Each tale of
defection reveals a personal temper that
makes these men passionately hostile to
the politics of pluralism. They embrace
new truths with the convert’s fervor and
certitude. . . . What they loathe most is
liberalism.” Sam Tanenhaus in The
Atlantic suggested that “the personal
doesn’t just merge with the political but
swallows it whole, . . . as ideological
heresy becomes its own form of postmodern exhibitionism.” Alan Wolfe
(writing in The New Republic) felt that
there was not enough emphasis on the
narcissism of these figures and that
Oppenheimer took them too seriously.
These reviewers seem skeptical about
the possibility that disillusionment with
radical leftist beliefs, even when it leads
to new certitudes, indicates that human
beings can learn from experience. And
they seem reluctant to acknowledge that it
takes some courage to publicly reject
comforting but groundless beliefs and
false hopes.
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Welcome
Back, Dos
J AY N O R D L I N G E R
N
long ago, I was titling a
piece, and a phrase came to
mind: “The theme is freedom.” Where had it come
from? I knew it was the title of a book by
John Dos Passos, one that I had long
wanted to read.
It is also the title of a book by M.
Stanton Evans, the famed conservative
journalist. The full title of that book, published in 1994, is “The Theme Is Freedom:
Religion, Politics, and the American
Tradition.” I’d like to read this one, too.
Dos Passos was very famous. His name
is little remembered today, but it was one
of the biggest in American letters from the
1920s until, say, midcentury. In fact, that’s
the title of one of his novels: “Midcentury.” Dos Passos was born in 1896.
Sartre called him “the greatest writer of
our time.” But something happened: Dos
Passos broke with the Left, where everyone was, and moved right, for he was
essentially a liberal, in the old sense.
Hemingway told him that, if he persisted
in his independence of thought, “the New
York reviewers will kill you. They will
demolish you forever.” They did.
Critics decided that he could no longer
write—which was baldly untrue. One
beneficiary of his writing was a new
magazine, NATIONAL REVIEW. NR’s
founder, William F. Buckley Jr., once
talked to me about Dos Passos. People
called him “Dos,” he said—pronounced
OT
“Dahss,” not “Dohss.” For these pages,
Dos Passos reported from the 1964
Republican convention. Four months
later, he voted for the nominee, Goldwater. Dos Passos died in 1970.
It was in 1956 that he published The
Theme Is Freedom. It is a collection of
his journalism. A better description, and
a more accurate one, comes from Dos
Passos himself: a “collection of various
writings of a more or less political complexion out of tattered back numbers of
surviving and defunct publications and
out of the already brittle pages of some
of my own out of print books.” Whatever it is, The Theme Is Freedom is dazzling and deep. Who writes like Dos
Passos today? Mark Helprin, for one,
but not many others.
The collected pieces date from 1926 to
the present, i.e., 1956. That is a neat span
of 30 years. And, for the anniversaryminded, this is the 60th anniversary of the
book. Throughout the book, Dos Passos
provides a running commentary, in italics. That is, his mid-’50s self comments
on his earlier self. He is sometimes
embarrassed, but he would not have republished these pieces if he weren’t
pleased with them—as well he should be.
He maintains that, wherever he has
been on the political spectrum, his theme
has been constant: the freedom of the
individual, and therefore of society as a
whole. We can argue with him, and claim
that he tarried too long with the Left, but
he has a case. And, even at his left-most,
he was usually awake and skeptical,
rather than hypnotized and fanatical.
The first chapter of his book is about the
Sacco and Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, remember, were the
Italian immigrants to America who were
ONE FLOWER
One flower stands for beauty, two for hope.
More buds begin their version of cross-talk
With tangled leaf and strong, supporting stalk.
Subject to breeze, they sway but somehow cope.
Shadows of butterflies, silk wings complete
Within this cloistered space are also seen.
Their colored layers; texture, pattern, sheen,
Are made from nectar. All the bees repeat
Their buzzing truth that no bloom stands alone,
But echoes every heart and mind and bone.
—SALLY COOK
M AY 9, 2016
books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/19/2016 5:14 PM Page 45
accused of murder in 1920 and executed
seven years later. Many protested their
innocence, saying that they were victims of
anti-immigrant prejudice and political discrimination. (The pair were anarchists.)
Dos Passos was a protester. In fact, he was
arrested alongside Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The next chapter is about the Soviet
Union, which Dos Passos visited in 1928.
The Bolshevik state was just eleven years
old. Then Dos Passos writes about Harlan
County, Ky., in 1932. Like Sacco and
Vanzetti, the miners were a cause célèbre.
Then we have Dos Passos reporting from
the Spanish Civil War—more dubious
than ever about the Communists, worldwide. Later, we get him among American
troops in World War II. The book also
includes essays, which are timeless.
But then, so are the reporting pieces, for
their observations about people, passions,
and politics. Reading this book, I thought
constantly about the present, which is not
so different from the immediate past—or
the distant past. I’d like to give you tastes
of the book. And we should begin with
Sacco and Vanzetti, and their partisans.
Talking to us in 1956, Dos Passos has
a memory:
HARRY CRONER/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
The protest meeting is over and I’m
standing on a set of steps looking into the
faces of the people coming out of the hall.
I’m frightened by the tense righteousness
of the faces. Eyes like a row of rifles
aimed by a firing squad. Chins thrust forward into the icy night. It’s almost in
marching step that they stride out into
the street. It’s the women I remember
most, their eyes searching out evil
through narrowed lids. There’s something threatening about this unanimity of
protest. They are so sure they are right.
Dos Passos agreed with the protest,
mind you. Was part of it. But he was
unnerved—“frightened”—by the people.
I know these people. I saw them in my
hometown of Ann Arbor. You can see
them on campuses today, as “SJWs,” or
“social-justice warriors.” You can see
them wherever there is arrogant, intolerant extremism, no matter which direction
it’s coming from.
Dos Passos writes,
The Marxists who are so skillful in the
detection and the isolation of heresies
used to inveigh against one particular
heresy that pleased me particularly. They
called it American exceptionalism.
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
“redhaired.” Formerly a lawyer in San
Francisco, the officer now serves in our
military government. And he doesn’t
much like what he has seen. The Soviets
are carving up Europe, and the Americans seem unsure of themselves.
What he tells Dos Passos has, to me, a
terribly contemporary ring:
John Dos Passos
This label, says Dos Passos, “was my
refuge.” He was guilty of the heresy, and,
though he would join certain causes of
the Left, he would never give up his
patriotism, his democracy, his attachment to the Founders’ vision.
“The House of Morgan was powerful
in those days,” writes Dos Passos, meaning the 1920s, “but not that powerful. It
was years before I learned that producing
a bogy man was an emotional quirk that
blocked clear thinking.”
At the beginning of April, a presidential
candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, sat
down with the New York Daily News. An
editor noted that Sanders liked to accuse
“corporate America” of tearing the “fabric
of the nation.” Could he name some corporations that were doing this? The first
syllables out of the candidate’s mouth
were “JPMorgan Chase.” I wonder what
ol’ J.P. (1837–1913) would think: still a
bogy, well into the 21st century.
In Spain, Dos Passos saw the Fascists
and the Communists fighting each other,
with both sides killing the liberals. They
“shot the best men first,” he writes, looking back on the war 20 years later. He
further writes, “How to bring home to
people in America that their own liberties
depended to a certain extent on the liberties of Russians, Spaniards, Esthonians,
Poles, Moroccans; that freedom in our
world was indivisible?”
For those words, he would today get
tagged a “neocon”—which, come to
think of it, he was, sort of, like many
another ex-leftist.
On a train through Germany in 1946,
Dos Passos talks to an American captain,
If the American people want to commit
suicide, I suppose in a democratic country
it’s the politician’s business to tie the
noose for us so that we can slip it comfortably around our necks. . . . It’s all this apologizing that makes me sick. With all our
faults we have invented a social system by
which the majority of men for the first
time in human history get a break, and
instead of being cocky about it we apologize about it. . . . We built up the greatest
army in the world and won the war with it,
and now we’re letting everything go to
pieces. . . . We apologized to the French for
saving their country and we apologize to
the British and we apologize to the
Russians. . . . First thing you know we’ll
be apologizing to the Germans for licking
them. . . . And they all hate our guts and it
damn well serves us right.
Incidentally, Dos Passos’s candidate
in 1964, Goldwater, titled his memoirs
“With No Apologies.”
In 1950, Dos Passos wrote an essay
called “The Changing Shape of Society.”
In it, he issues a word to the wise, or several of them. “If we are to save the republic we must continually be aware of the
aims of the republic.” Those aims, he
encapsulates as “the daily effort to give to
every man as much opportunity as is possible to fulfill himself in his own way,
protected by law from the arbitrary measures of those in authority.” He also notes
that a society “has to be born again from
time to time.” As many of us see it, 2016
would be a really good time.
Writing in 1956, Dos Passos says,
“The ordinarily decent impulses the ordinary man learned at his mother’s knee
are our last line of defense against the
wickedness of overweening power at
home and abroad.” Are mothers still doling out decency? They’d better be—or
we’re cooked.
Even in the most unburdened life,
there’s not the time to read or re-read
what one wants. But I can tell you that to
read or re-read Dos Passos is rewarding.
Frankly, I feel like reading The Theme Is
Freedom again, before moving on.
Slower this time.
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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
Film
Hollywood’s
Great
Jungle
R O S S D O U T H AT
WALT DISNEY PICTURES
I
F you want to have a sunny view of
Hollywood, to believe that sometimes it’s actually the kind of place
where talented people can have
happy lives making movies that the whole
family can enjoy, one place to look would
be the career of Jon Favreau.
Favreau is a heavyset, long-faced
Italian-Jewish guy from Queens who
made his way west after dropping out of
college to try to make a career in comedy. He did stand-up, landed a few small
movie roles, and then had a big break:
He wrote and starred in (and, crucially,
helped cast his friend Vince Vaughn in)
a little movie called “Swingers,” about
guys like him hanging out in Los
Angeles, that cost $200,000 to make and
turned into a film that every late-1990s
college male would see at least 16 times.
(Seventeen in my case, I think.)
Swingers turned Favreau into an
indie cult figure and a minor movie star.
But instead of following Vaughn and
chasing big-time stardom or simply
hanging out, Parker Posey–style, in the
indie realm, he pivoted to mainstream
directing in the early 2000s and turned
himself into a very reliable, very capable maker of big-budget, non-edgy, yet
often excellent movies.
But he didn’t make them all that often,
which left him with the time and space
to maintain what seems like a kind of
Hollywood dream life: He’s married with
three kids (no messy affairs or Affleckstyle meltdowns), he executive-produces
genre TV shows, he acts in a couple of
movies every year, and then every few
years he directs a movie that tends to
make a lot of money. He’s had duds, of
course (see Cowboys and Aliens, or, better, don’t), but he’s also given us the best
Christmas movie of the 21st century in
Elf, one of the best superhero movies in
Iron Man—and now, in The Jungle Book,
a movie that’s already doing staggering
business, and deserves it.
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Neel Sethi in The Jungle Book
First, it’s an extraordinary technological feat: a “live action” movie in
which the creatures and jungles were all
whipped together seamlessly by computers but the uncanny-valley phenomenon
is mostly absent and the awe of real nature
is remarkably preserved. In terms of
immersiveness and plausibility, the closest cinematic comparison to the landscape
Favreau conjures is probably the planet
Pandora from James Cameron’s Avatar.
The technology was younger then, but
Avatar was portraying an alien world,
which made an air of artificiality expected and forgivable. Because we all know
what a tiger looks like, The Jungle Book
lacks that safety net. And it doesn’t need
it: There is a dream-like seamlessness to
the finished product, but what’s being
dreamed feels like Rudyard Kipling’s
world, not some sort of dismal computerized copy.
It’s not entirely Kipling’s, of course:
No 21st-century movie marketed to
children would dare to channel fully
his stoic Anglo-Indian worldview, and
the film’s reviewers have mostly done
their due diligence and made sure that
any favorable reference to his stories
is balanced by a “to be sure” dig at his
imperialism and lack of environmentalist enlightenment.
But Favreau plainly set out to inject
more Kipling than was present in the last
famous Disney iteration of the story, to
strike a balance between the stern source
material and the shaggy-dog picaresque
of the late-1960s cartoon. So fans of the
latter get a lazy, hustling Baloo (Bill
Murray) who does, in fact, sing a version
of “The Bare Necessities,” and a Louie
the Monkey King (Christopher Walken)
who updates “I Wanna Be Like You.” But
the Kipling worldview is more fully realized this time—the hierarchies and mysteries of the jungle, the role of its law, and
the ruthlessness of its denizens.
One denizen, in particular: the mighty
Shere Khan, who is voiced by Idris Elba
in a perfect mix of voice work and virtual
embodiment, and who gets several of the
movie’s best speeches, several eloquent
(if self-interested) briefs against mancubs and Mankind. His work is matched
by Ben Kingsley as the panther Bagheera
and Lupita Nyong’o as the wolf matriarch Raksha, and their confrontations
with the tiger have an edge, an adult
thrill, that belongs squarely in the jungle
as Kipling saw it: perilous, serious, a
myth unto itself.
The only place where I wished the
movie had a touch more Kipling was in its
Mowgli. As embodied by a warm, widefaced Neel Sethi, he’s the only “really
real” thing in the movie, and his work is
just fine—never distracting, sometimes
charming, fine. But he still feels a touch
too modern in his intonations, a little too
informal and relaxed for a boy supposedly
reared in the wolfpack and schooled by
Bagheera. When he recites the poetry of
his upbringing—“For the strength of the
Pack is the Wolf / and the strength of the
Wolf is the Pack”—he should sound a
little more like a would-be soldier, and a
little less like a kid.
But then again Favreau is making a
crowdpleaser, not a Kipling-fan-pleaser.
And since most kids will have no trouble following this Mowgli into the jungle, one of Hollywood’s most likeable
entertainers has once again justified
his success.
M AY 9, 2016
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City Desk
Manhattan
Moviegoing
RICHARD BROOKHISER
W
went to see a French
movie (French actors
and language, with a bit
of Russian and Hebrew
thrown in). Where did we go?
There is a plexiplex on the square, a
few blocks from my apartment building. It hulks on a quarter of city block.
Escalators run up and down, on every
floor there is a gauntlet of concessions
to run before you reach the right theater, they show umpteen movies at a
time. Not there.
A few blocks in the other direction
is the retroplex, housed in an old
Yiddish theater. Molly Picon must
have been a big draw back in the day,
to judge from the size of it. Now it is
carved into one or two big theaters and
a cluster of little ones, tucked in like
pockets in a hunting jacket. Probably
not there.
Downtown a bit there is the highendplex that puts on cineaste airs: the
lobby decked with golden-age-ofHollywood posters, but in French, for
foreign release. We did see a French
movie there once—a film of a literary
classic, in alexandrines no less. When
we got to the theater it was filled with
small children. Aspiring city parents
start their kids young in hopes of
pitching them into the right private
schools, but this seemed remarkable
even by those demanding standards.
Then we realized we had mistakenly
gone into the auditorium showing a
movie about heroic turtles. Quickly
into the right one, where we had missed
only a few couplets. For the new
E
S P O N S O R E D B Y National Review Institute
French movie—no édition Pléiade—
not even there.
For this movie we went to one of
the theaters that are devoted to such
things—foreign films, old movies,
documentaries. There are a number of
theaters of this type in the city, though
they all seem to be run by foundations.
They have mailing lists, and they
show, among the trailers, requests for
support—better than the Hollywood
Q&As that run in the plexiplexes
(“He played Third Monster in The
Jedi vs. E.T.”), though you do feel as
if you’re watching public television
in begging season.
It didn’t always use to be this way.
Demand was great enough (constant)
and expenses (rent) low enough that
there were revival and art houses that
seemed to make it on their own. I
remember one off Broadway on the
Upper West Side where I saw Olivier’s
Hamlet with Joe Sobran, he saying all
the lines as or before Olivier did, occasionally spinning his right hand impatiently (pick it up, Larry!). There was
another in the East Village where I
saw, with Walter Olson, my first double bill of The 39 Steps and The Lady
Vanishes (how we applauded the
death of the wretched appeaser). My
wife, who is a few years older than I
am, remembers a theater in Times
Square—the ranky-skanky Times
Square, when the desnudas were handson—that showed samurai movies.
There, at the climax of Ugetsu, as the
hero made love in a windswept outdoor
pavilion to the ghost of a lady who had
never known passion, Jeanne’s companion stage-whispered, “It’s a shande
for the neighbors!”
You went to see such movies with a
friend because seeing them was showing off, or at least sharing a sense of
specialness (they’re watching Julie
Andrews, we’re watching Toshiro
Mifune). Snobbery can be mere pride;
it can also express appreciation and
friendship. The theaters that showed
such movies encouraged the comradely experience by serving espresso—
this in the days when, outside of old
Italian neighborhoods, caffeine came
only as plain old coffee, made (you
hoped) that year.
Then movies changed. Out went the
studios and Julie Andrews, in came
the auteurs (and agents). Out went the
regulation of content policed by
Cardinal Spellman. A movie could
show naked women and bloody men if
that was germane to its purpose. The
auteurs, whose methods were thought
to be incarnated in foreign films and
certain old classics, went mainstream—a little bit. Good movies of
the new type got made (gentlemen,
start your lists). But then it turned out
that what inspired the two most successful auteurs—you’ve seen their
stuff a million times—was boyish
thrills: sharks, spaceships, tomb raiders.
It got old very fast. Worse were the
movies that took their boyish thrills
from comic books. They were old the
minute they were born. I have seen the
inevitable fruit—a YouTube mash-up
of Batman and Hamilton; the lead rapper, in place of Aaron Burr, is the
Joker. Marvel and DC are our classical civilization. With the result, one
among many, that the French movie
still plays in a dinky theater.
The star of the French movie, and
the reason my wife wanted to see it,
turned out to be a parenthetical figure. The starlet, who played his longlost love, recovered in memory, had
big eyes, a crooked smile, and pale
skin, and burned eros like rocket fuel.
The theme of the movie was a young
man (the hero as a lad) trying to find
his way.
Earlier in the week, on the exercise
bicycle at my gym, I saw a bit of a
Hollywood western, one made before
the auteurs came in. The old hero sat
in the back of a saloon, chatting up
some Mexican women. In walked a
young man, trying to find his way. He
addressed a table of poker-playing villains, center stage. One of them had
killed a friend of his once. Killer drew,
but young man beat him, with a knife
to the chest. Behind the young man
another villain drew, but the old hero,
whom we had momentarily forgotten,
shot the gun out of this villain’s hand.
The chief villain then good-humoredly
called for order, and we went on to the
next turn of the plot.
When you think how obsessively the
auteurs, especially the French ones,
studied Hollywood, including its westerns, maybe the array of theaters and
the change of tastes and even the mashups (well, maybe not the mash-ups)
don’t matter so much. Roll ’em.
47
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Happy Warrior
BY DAVID HARSANYI
The Aspirin Eaters
morning I wake up and shake the small
white plastic bottles scattered across my home
office until one makes a familiar rattling sound.
I open it and pop two Excedrin pills whether I
have a headache or not—though most mornings I do. The
process is repeated throughout the day, almost every day,
until I get ready for bed. That’s when I rummage through
my bottles once again and dig out the nighttime headache
medicine (usually something caffeine-free, like Advil or
Tylenol) and swallow two more pills.
This process is a means of prevention. But no matter
what I do, every few weeks I will be subjected to another
debilitating migraine. It might be triggered by the
weather—especially cloudy and rainy days. Or it might be
activated by a lack of sleep. Or it could be I’ve stared at a
computer screen or binge-watched TV or talked on the
phone for too long. Maybe I was sitting in rush-hour traffic
or perhaps I failed to hydrate properly. It’s possible that I
haven’t been eating the right foods or, even more likely,
that I haven’t eaten enough. Whatever the case, wherever I
am, another migraine is coming. I’ve given up trying to
figure out why.
When I was younger, I assumed the attacks were attributable to cigarette smoking. So I quit. Later, I wondered if
perhaps my irregular sleeping habits might be the cause, so
I went to an apnea specialist. He told me to lose a few
pounds. I did. I’ve tried natural remedies, though I was
certain they wouldn’t work. They didn’t. One doctor even
suggested that I cut my computer time in half and stop
reading so much—which would have necessitated finding
another career. I got another doctor. Only unpleasant practices such as exercising, eating healthy, and drinking less
alcohol have proven to be even somewhat beneficial.
Gobbling down painkillers at this rate has become perfunctory, and it’s probably toxic for me in the long run.
My habit already causes self-inflicted “medicationoveruse headaches”—or rebound headaches—which
occur when a person ingests too many analgesics. I have
rebound headaches daily. Yet I continue taking white and
blue pills, which also attack my stomach and do God
knows what to my liver (though my blood is probably a lot
thinner than yours), because few things scare me more
than having to miss work and my family for a day or two
because of a migraine.
I’m sure a doctor would prescribe something more
potent, if I asked. But knowing how I feel about migraines,
I’d probably abuse those drugs, as well. So I avoid the
temptation altogether.
A few weeks ago, I ran across an ad campaign produced
by Excedrin featuring the slogan: “A migraine is more than
a bad headache. If you’ve never had one, you can’t understand. Until now.” The company contends that, through the
E
VERY
Mr. Harsanyi is a senior editor of the Federalist.
48
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w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
magic of a virtual reality, it can offer family members and
friends a taste of what migraine sufferers experience. Each
ad ends with an I-told-you-so moment:
“I’m sorry I ever doubted you”—See one man’s journey
from migraine doubter to believer.
Or: “See? You believe me now”—Tiffany missed
Michaela’s birthday because of a migraine. Now her friend
can see why.
Are there really migraine deniers? Can people empathize
only when they have firsthand familiarity with your
pain? Maybe. Empathy is the ability not only to perceive
what others feel but also to experience their emotion in
some way. But then we don’t need to have a bone sticking
out of our leg to understand that compound fractures can
be disagreeable.
Migraine symptoms include pain, nausea, vomiting, and
oversensitivity to light, sound, and smell—basically, all
the faculties that allow us to be sentient human beings are
hampered. It is impossible to write or read or think or even
tweet. Though it isn’t acute in the way most physical pain
can be, it can be incapacitating.
Who would inflict this on his family or friends? Frankly,
any machine that could re-create the experience—and
color me skeptical—should be weaponized. Honest
Excedrin advertising language would probably go something like:
“Take that, you jerk”—Bill was doubting David’s pain,
so David strapped him into a migraine-inducing virtualreality contraption against his will and laughed and
laughed and laughed . . .
At the risk of sounding saccharine, or like a middle-aged
man contemplating his mortality or grousing about his
increasingly brittle body, I’d say that migraines have
taught me some valuable lessons. About empathy, pain,
and perspective.
I don’t know if there is any dignity in suffering, but there
was a time when my headaches only depressed me. Not
anymore. Now I reflect that most people experience some
form of slow-boil misery in their lives—either physically
or mentally, often far worse than mine. For instance, I
recently started paying attention to the never-ending succession of pharmaceutical ads on TV. You know the ones:
bright, clean, well produced, with distinguished grayhaired couples, D-list celebrities, and retired sports heroes
imploring viewers to ask their doctor about this new drug.
These people are starting to resemble me. But they have
lung cancer or hepatitis C or unbearable joint pain or
chronic muscle pain or diabetes or gruesome rashes or
bouts of incapacitating depression or heart disease or massive allergic attacks—not to mention an impressive array
of other ailments I’ve yet to look up on WebMD for fear of
finding out that I have them. And all of a sudden I feel sorta
lucky. As I zoom toward 50, I’m kinda glad all I have are
migraines—pain and all.
M AY 9, 2016
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base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 4/18/2016 11:46 AM Page 1
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