The Return of the Old American Right

From Matthew Continetti, at WSJ, "The Trump GOP resembles the party of Calvin Coolidge in its commitment to economic protection, restricted immigration and non-intervention abroad":

It’s hard to think of two American presidents with less in common than Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. For one thing, Coolidge held a variety of public offices, from Massachusetts governor to vice president, before assuming office on Aug. 2, 1923. Mr. Trump had no government or military experience before his inauguration in 2017.

Coolidge, moreover, was a budget hawk who never met a line item he didn’t want to cut. Mr. Trump presided over record peacetime deficits even before federal spending took a quantum leap during the coronavirus pandemic. Coolidge was also a man of few words. Trump is not.

Yet these personal differences obscure important political similarities. Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements.

Mr. Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s, of Coolidge and his predecessor Warren Harding. Their conservatism was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. FDR’s New Deal created a federal government that Republicans did not comprehend or control. Then World War II discredited the right’s noninterventionist foreign policy. What emerged from the rubble was a postwar conservative movement that embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth.

This postwar conservative internationalism—known to its critics on the right as “globalism”—may have been an aberration. Today, the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety. This retro-Republicanism could turn out to be a popular mix, but history shows that it is also a combustible one.

By the beginning of the 1920s, the American electorate had soured on its experiences with the Progressive movement and the Great War. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the Red-hunting of Wilson administration officials A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, and postwar recession all contributed to civil unrest. Change came in the form of a garrulous Republican politician from Ohio named Warren Harding.

“Our supreme task,” President Harding said in his inaugural address, “is the resumption of our onward, normal way.” Harding promised to reduce social tensions. He disavowed foreign intervention and withdrew U.S. occupation forces from postwar Germany. His secretary of state pursued disarmament treaties with the great powers. He opposed Wilson’s League of Nations.

For Harding, “normalcy” meant nation-building at home. He raised tariffs and restricted imports. And he venerated the Constitution. In a speech delivered in 1920, he called the document “the very base of all Americanism, the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ of American liberty, the very temple of equal rights.”

When Harding died in office in 1923, Calvin Coolidge did not depart from this constitutionalist path. To Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the last words in a centuries-long argument over popular sovereignty. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

Coolidge argued that success in self-government was related to religious faith. Political freedom depended on traditional morality and self-control. He called on Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founders, to follow “the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.”

Coolidge opposed immigration. He and Harding signed into law two restriction acts that shut off entry to the U.S. for the next 40 years. As he closed the door to mass migration, however, Coolidge also celebrated the contributions of earlier waves of immigrants. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years [to] steerage,” he told the American Legion in 1925, “is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” But there was no room for additional passengers.

Coolidge was out of office for less than a year when the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression upended the established order. His Republican successor as president, former secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, struggled to contain the economic fallout and social disorder. “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs,” Hoover said in the run-up to the 1932 election. “It means deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come.”

The nation opted for New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created a bureaucratic structure of government, centralized in the nation’s capital, which quickly won the enmity of conservatives. The upheaval of the 1930s drove the partisans of strict constitutionalism and nonintervention in economics and foreign affairs from positions of power and influence.

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending.

In the view of Taft and other noninterventionist conservatives, war would expand government, lead to rationing, and invest FDR with a dangerous amount of authority. The U.S. should defend the mainland and the Caribbean basin, Taft said, but otherwise it should leave the conflagration in Europe to burn itself out. His priority was the home front. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington,” he told a St. Louis audience on May 20, 1940, “than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund.”

Taft neither joined nor spoke for the antiwar America First Committee, but he welcomed its appearance on the national stage. The organization was established in 1940 in Chicago. Its founders included graduates of some of the nation’s elite educational institutions, and it drew support from Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, conservatives and even figures within the Roosevelt administration....

In its protectionism, resistance to immigration, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembles the conservatism of the 1920s—with one significant difference. In the 1920s, the right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions.

A century later, in the early 2020s, the right has been driven from power at the federal level. It has been locked out of the commanding heights of American culture: technology, media, entertainment, the academy. Its rhetoric has often veered into apocalypticism and conspiracy theory...

 

I Can't Leave My Spouse — I'll Lose My Healthcare

It's Jessa Crispin, at the Guardian U.K., "Like millions of Americans, I can never leave my spouse. I’ll lose my healthcare":

It was around the second dose of fentanyl going into my IV bag that I stopped trying to control how much all of this was going to cost. I had been arguing with every decision the caregivers at the emergency room were making – “Is this Cat scan actually necessary or is there another diagnostic tool?” “Is there a cheaper version of this drug you’re giving me?” – and reminding them repeatedly that I was uninsured, but either the opioids in my bloodstream, or the exhaustion of trying to rest in a room next to a woman who, given the sounds she was making, was clearly transforming into a werewolf, forced me to surrender.

I walked out of there four years ago alive, yes. And, as the doctors and nurses kept reminding me, if I had waited another 48 hours to discover I didn’t actually have the magical ability to self-diagnose and self-treat serious problems with Google and herbs, I might have gone septic. But all said and done, I was also walking home to a $12,000 bill, which was approximately half of my annual income as a single woman.

It took me several years of hardship, contributions from my friends and the assistance of the hospital’s charity program to pay off the $12,000.

Then, last month, it started again. I was at home. I turned my head a little, the whole world started sliding away from me, and I crashed to the floor. I tried to crawl back into bed, insisting, “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.” My husband, on the other hand, was raised in a country with compulsory public health coverage, so his first instinct upon something weird happening isn’t to lie down for 48 hours and see if it goes away. He immediately started plotting the route to a hospital on his phone.

I was back, but this time I was married. The whole hospital visit cost us $30, including the prescription. Everything was covered by his insurance. That’s when I realized I can never divorce my husband.

The first emergency room visit might have been an anomaly – a freak health problem that the nurse explained as “sometimes these things happen”. The intense vertigo was the result of the deterioration of the condition of my ears. It has been a problem since childhood, one left in “let’s wait and see what happens” condition until a weird virus last year – yes, I was the big idiot who caught a debilitating non-coronavirus virus during a coronavirus pandemic – forced me to a doctor, who discovered significant hearing loss and structural damage that will require lifelong treatment and intervention.

As a freelance writer who has tried and failed for years now to get a real job with real benefits, the costs of the surgeries and hearing aids and other treatments the doctor sketched out as part of my future would be suffocating. But almost all of it is covered by my husband’s insurance, making my health and ability to access healthcare dependent on his presence in my life.

While I convalesced from the virus last year, I watched the discussion about health insurance take over the Democratic primary debates. I had little hope that the bright, sparkly Medicare for All plan championed by candidates like Bernie Sanders would be made reality. But still I despaired of the excuses other candidates made for why they did not support guaranteed coverage for all. It angered me to see Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and the eventual winner, Joe Biden, defend their plans to largely maintain the status quo – a system in which employment and marriage determine access to healthcare – as though they were protecting our “freedom” to “choose” coverage that was right for us.

The coercions built into American social welfare programs limit freedom, not preserve it. People who are not financially independent are forced to maintain ties with family members who might be abusive or violent unless they want to relinquish their housing, healthcare or other forms of support. And as outlined by Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the dismantling of protections like food and financial aid in the 80s and 90s had the express purpose of increasing familial obligations in the name of “duty” and “responsibility”. Single parents seeking public support for their children’s well-being now had to first seek assistance through their partners, no matter how fraught or harmful those relationships might be. While politicians spoke of “strengthening families” and repairing the social fabric, one of the consequences of these policy changes was to limit the ability for people to make the basic decisions required to live the lives of their choosing, unless they had the money that in this country is our substitute for freedom...

Still more.

 

Ms. Hostetter

I mentioned how once in a while the New York Times does "get it right," or nearabouts, which, as noted, is why I still read the paper (along with the L.A. Times) on most days. 

Now, I'm not saying this article is perfect, but it's pretty good --- and darned interesting --- as it's a story that literally "hits close to home," in the O.C. where I live, and where, actually, there are indeed a lot of crazy nut cases (and while I don't know if Ms. Hostetter is crazy, her husband sounds questionable, which adds to the intrigue here, so, well, that's it). 

At NYT, "A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began":

Kristine Hostetter was a beloved fourth-grade teacher. Then came the pandemic, the election and the Jan. 6 riot in Washington.

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Word got around when Kristine Hostetter was spotted at a public mask-burning at the San Clemente pier, and when she appeared in a video sitting onstage as her husband spoke at a QAnon convention. People talked when she angrily accosted a family wearing masks near a local surfing spot, her granddaughter in tow.

Even in San Clemente, a well-heeled redoubt of Southern California conservatism, Ms. Hostetter stood out for her vehement embrace of both the rebellion against Covid-19 restrictions and the stolen-election lies pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. This was, after all, a teacher so beloved that each summer parents jockeyed to get their children into her fourth-grade class.

But it was not until Ms. Hostetter’s husband posted a video of her marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 that her politics collided with an opposite force gaining momentum in San Clemente: a growing number of left-leaning parents and students who, in the wake of the civil-rights protests set off by the police killing of George Floyd, decided they would no longer countenance the right-wing tilt of their neighbors and the racism they said was commonplace.

That there was no evidence that Ms. Hostetter had displayed any overt racism was beside the point — to them, her pro-Trump views seemed self-evidently laced with white supremacy. So she became their cause.

First, a student group organized a petition demanding the school district investigate whether Ms. Hostetter, 54, had taken part in the attack on the Capitol, and whether her politics had crept into her teaching. Then, when the district complied and suspended her, a group of parents put up a counter petition.

“If the district starts disciplinary action based on people’s beliefs/politics, what’s next? Religious discrimination?” it warned.

Each petition attracted thousands of signatures, and San Clemente has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Ms. Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, not to mention shaping young minds in a classroom.

It has not been a polite debate. Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another’s social media posts; some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not — and they have the screenshots to prove it.

Even the local yoga community, where Ms. Hostetter’s husband was a fixture, has found itself divided.

“It goes deeper than just her. A lot of conversations between parents, between friends, have already been fractured by Trump, by the election, by Black Lives Matter,” said Cady Anderson, whose two children attend Ms. Hostetter’s school.

Ms. Hostetter, she added, “just brought it all home to us.”

Complicating matters is Ms. Hostetter’s relative silence. Apart from appearing at protests and the incident at the beach, she has said little publicly over the past year, and did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article. People have filled in the blanks.

To Ms. Hostetter’s backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone’s personal politics. Yet Ms. Hostetter’s politics, while personal, are hardly private, and to those who have lined up against her, she is inextricably linked to her husband, Alan, who last year emerged as a rising star in Southern California’s resurgent far right.

An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, Calif., Mr. Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.”

Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the American Phoenix Project organized protests against Covid-related restrictions up and down Orange County, and Mr. Hostetter’s list of enemies grew: Black Lives Matter protesters. The election thieves. Cabals and conspiracies drawn from QAnon, the movement that claims Mr. Trump was secretly battling devil-worshiping Democrats and international financiers who abuse children.

By Jan. 5, Mr. Hostetter, 56, had graduated to the national stage, appearing with the former Trump adviser Roger Stone at a rally outside the Supreme Court.

His appearance there and the next day at the Capitol prompted some of San Clemente’s more liberal residents to make bumper stickers that read: “Alan Hostraitor.” It also led the F.B.I. to raid his apartment in early February, though he was not arrested or charged with any crime. (He, too, did not respond to interview requests.)

Ms. Hostetter was there every step of the way, raising money and filming her husband as he rallied supporters at protests. When the American Phoenix Project filed incorporation papers in December, she was identified as its chief financial officer.

The Teacher

Ms. Hostetter grew up in Orange County back when locals still joked about the “Orange Curtain” separating its conservative and overwhelmingly white towns from liberal and diverse Los Angeles to the north. In the late 1960s, Richard M. Nixon turned an oceanside villa in San Clemente into his presidential getaway, christening it La Casa Pacifica. John Wayne kept his prized yacht, Wild Goose, docked up the coast in Newport Beach.

“Orange County,” Ronald Reagan once declared, “is where the good Republicans go before they die.”

It also was where surfers and spiritual seekers met cold warriors and conspiracy theorists, where some of the conservative movement’s most virulently racist, anti-Semitic and paranoid offshoots went. In the 1960s, Orange County saw a surge in the popularity of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization that in many ways presaged the rise of QAnon. In the 1980s, its surf spots became a magnet for neo-Nazis and skinheads. And in 2020, the onset of the pandemic produced a new generation of Orange County extremists.

If Ms. Hostetter had any strong political leanings before last year, she did not let on, said her niece, Emma Hall. She only picked up the first hint of her aunt’s rightward drift at small party to celebrate the Hostetters’ wedding in 2016.

“There were about six people, friends of theirs, that did not let up asking me if I was going to vote for Trump,” recalled Ms. Hall’s husband, Ryan.

Neither of the Halls gave it much thought. Ms. Hostetter seemed happy, and her new husband exuded the laid-back charm that typifies a certain kind of Southern California man in the American imagination...

More later.

 

'Seig Heil for Hyatt'? Despicable Twitter Leftists Attack American Conservative Union for Imaginary 'Nazi Rune' at CPAC

I can't even on this one. 

I mean, who even notices this stuff? You'd have to be deranged and sickly obsessed demons pointing to something like this --- which is obviously true --- and clearly just one more attempt to disparage, libel, and destroy the obviously ordinary folks chanting "We Love You" for Donald Trump, and presumable other conservatives speaking at the conference, like awesome South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

And keep in mind, I haven't been to CPAC in over 10 years. It's a fun one-time experience, but it's not cheap. Besides, in the 2010s, lots of longstanding conservatives quit attending, because, for one thing, the place became more of a "meat-market" for teeny-boppers than a forum for serious political engagement. (And that's not to mention the awful treatment that Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were subjected to, among others, basically being banned because they were, allegedly, "Islamophobic.")

So as you can see, I'm not a particularly big fan of the American Conservative Union, and particularly Matt Schlapp, who appears more like a glad-handing "good ole boy" than the leader of a vigorous grassroots movement. And while I like the mans's wife, Mercedes Schlapp, who was White House Director of Strategic Communications in Trump's administration, she's been back on Fox News quite a bit, and honestly, she also sounds like a puffed-up lobbyist for the G.O.P more than an oracle of movement conservatism. 

But all that said, I think the A.C.U. is absolutely right to hit back at the despicable Twitter trolls attacking Hyatt Hotels, and more importantly, repudiating Hyatt's own craven capitulation to ideological evil. See Forbes, for example, "How a Nazi Symbol at CPAC Turned Into a Massive Hyatt Public Relations Disaster."

F*cking leftist ghouls. These are people who actually deserve an American flagpole to the face. 

In any case, here's the response from David H. Safavian, General Counsel to the A.C.U, "A Response to Hyatt Hotels: We Will Not Be Canceled":

Mr. Thomas J. Pritzker 

Executive Chairman 

Hyatt Hotels 71 

South Wacker Drive 

Chicago, Illinois 60606

 

Dear Mr. Pritzker:

Contrary to Hyatt’s own mission statement of inclusivity, your company just attacked its own customer by caving into the pressures of the politically motivated social media agitators who seek to destroy CPAC, our attendees and speakers from across the country, and the millions of Americans who support our work. Hyatt made a decision to issue additional statements late last night after the conference ended that disparaged and defamed us. These statements appear to validate demonstrably false and malicious claims.

When we learned of the orchestrated assault on us, we immediately contacted your senior management to set the record straight. Together, we quickly responded to these slanderous accusations. Your hotel’s senior management was on notice and acknowledged that these claims were false and agreed to share any statement before its release. We agreed that coordination was critical so that the general public would know the truth and that you would treat your customer with honesty. Thus, we were shocked that the Hyatt waited until after the conference concluded to issue additional statements--ones that are irresponsible, untrue, and contribute to a climate of division and hatred.

For months we have collaborated with your team on logistics, including sharing, reviewing, and approving the stage design that was created by one of our subcontractors. The fact that no one on the Hyatt staff ever raised concerns during the process shows the ridiculous nature of your statements. Moreover, your statements falsely conceal your oversight role. In fact, the Hyatt Hotel, with our organization and subcontractors, approved and worked collaboratively to build this stage. Only after a coordinated far-left assault to destroy our conference arose did you succumb to lies and compound them with your own.

During this difficult time for our nation, we believe in Americans getting back to work and helping companies like yours to flourish. Indeed, you recruited us. We sought to work with you in good faith to help Hyatt workers and the Florida economy. In fact, countless employees expressed their immense gratitude for bringing CPAC to the Hyatt in Orlando, many stating that this very conference was the sole reason they had a job.

Our Jewish Board Members, staff, speakers, and attendees are appalled by the Hyatt leadership for not standing with us as we fight against antisemitism (a term that Hyatt fails to use in its statements). We would have hoped that our 10th annual Shabbat Dinner, daily Jewish prayer services, and speeches on the main stage from Jewish leaders, such as Ambassador David Friedman, Former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, and Rabbi Yitz Tendler would be enough to put an end to these outrageous falsehoods.

The theme of CPAC 2021 was “America UnCanceled.” It is tragic and reckless that Hyatt would choose to abandon its own mission statement of inclusivity and play into the hands of those who are attempting to silence legitimate political views.

Sincerely,

David H. Safavian

General Counsel

 

Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio's Conservative Pioneer, Dies at 70

At Fox News, via Mediagazer (with all its links to Twitter commentary on the "Great One's" death), "Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer."

Indeed, Nicole Hemmer, the author of Messengers of the Right, has a great thread hereself, here: "Rush Limbaugh radically transformed the Republican Party. He elevated conservative media into a coequal branch of party politics, and pioneered a style of rhetoric, argument, and entertainment that would come to define conservative politics.... The things we now think of as particularly Trumpian features of conservatism — the insults, the conspiracies, the blend of entertainment and politics and anger — Limbaugh had been doing it for a quarter-century before Trump showed up to the party."

And see the obligatory leftist grave-dancing, at Twitchy, "‘I’m glad he’s dead’: ‘Rest in piss’ trends as compassionate, tolerant liberals dance on Rush Limbaugh’s grave."

California's Beach Lockdowns Could Continue Into Late-2021

I'm freakin' gobsmacked at the Democrats' tone-deaf politics here.

Remember from the other day, "Beach Lockdowns" (PHOTOS).

People are not wearing masks, and folks are only slightly better at "social distancing."

Tonight my young son and I went down to the Balboa Peninsula, in Newport, and it was the same thing again.

At the Wedge, the beach and the parks are closed and taped off. You can't even sit on a bench on the sidewalk. But people ignore the signs and few, if any, wear masks. And especially at Balboa, it's not just young people. Perhaps it's mostly local residents who pay local property taxes and feel like they own the place, but older couples were just cruising along without regard to the protocols set in Sacramento.

Which leads me to question recent polls showing overwhelming numbers of Californians down with the lockdown mandates, the distancing protocols, and especially the closed beaches. It's not just hippie protesters down in Huntington Beach. I suspect the numbers of anti-lockdown types are not shown in recent data. Here's the L.A. Times' piece from last week, which purported to show a 75 percent acceptance rate (or "approval rate," if you could call it that) of Governor Gavin Newsom's "stay-at-home" order: "Californians broadly trust state government on coronavirus — but mistrust Trump, poll finds."


The Times's poll, conducted along with the U.C. Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, uses a massive online panel of essentially non-randomized respondents. The I.G.S.'s methods disclaimer says that "stratification" techniques are used to adjust normally anticipated sampling errors, but of course less well-off respondents are already less likely to be included, and frankly, affluent Californians, especially at the beaches, have more time and knowledge important to political participation, and are thus more likely to give a big F.U. to Newsom's mandates. And given the dire straights of polling in recent years, in any case, folks should interpret these results with a large dose of salt.

And now the "experts" are saying it could be a year or more until Newsom's stay-at-home mandates are completely lifted. And about enforcement? No doubt the Newsom regime's "suede-denim secret police" will be coming for your "uncool niece."

See, from yesterday's paper, "California reopening would start slow, not be complete for a year or longer, expert estimates":

Ridiculous: #California reopening would start slow, not be complete for at least a year, expert estimates. @MelissaTweets #HuntingtonBeach #NewportBeach #TheOC 🏖☀️😷 https://t.co/efoS1GtXUH

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 4, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO —  So when might California be ready to really loosen up its statewide stay-at-home order?

One expert told The Times it would be a slow process that could take more than a year. But as some counties have pushed to reopen faster, Gov. Gavin Newsom is moving ahead with initial steps in the second stage of his previously outlined four-stage plan.

Newsom, who has said he understands frustrations with the projected pace of reopening, announced on Monday plans to allow some retail businesses to reopen as early as Friday for curbside pickup. And he said some counties would be able to move faster than others to reopen more types of businesses.

Some health experts on the local and national level have cautioned that some coronavirus restrictions — like sports teams not being allowed to play to packed stadium crowds — may need to continue through the rest of this year and into next year...

Stage 4: Full opening:

The full end of the stay-at-home order, allowing the resumption of:

* Sports with live audiences
* Convention centers
* Concerts

Expert forecast: This may not be implemented until the middle or latter part of 2021, Kim-Farley said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said that, even under the most optimistic scenarios, it would take 12 to 18 months for a vaccine to become available.

Last week, Fauci said it might not be possible for sports teams to resume play this year.

“Safety, for the players and for the fans, trumps everything,” Fauci said in an interview with the New York Times. “If you can’t guarantee safety, then unfortunately you’re going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘We may have to go without this sport for this season.’”

Still more.

Orange County's beach communities are some of the last bastions of conservatism in the state, and yet Republicans still couldn't hold these seats in the 2018 midterm elections. As long as the Democrats maintain their one-party dictatorship in Sacramento, it's hard to see the overall political balance shifting any time soon.

We may be in for some more rowdy protests in the near future, and I'm not ruling out political violence if radical leftists refuse the kind of compromises necessary to govern such a diverse state, one with a large minority of gun-toting Gadsden flag-waving patriots. Talk about one "long, hot summer."

Realignment: A Tectonic Demographic Shift is Under Way

It's Yoni Appelbaum, at the Atlantic, "How America Ends":

“How America Ends’

A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?

by Yoni Appelbaum via The Atlantic https://t.co/S7eahHw7Jl

— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) December 1, 2019

The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests. If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Yet those precedents are hardly comforting. Many of these renegotiations sparked political conflict or open violence, and few were as profound as the one now under way.

Within the living memory of most Americans, a majority of the country’s residents were white Christians. That is no longer the case, and voters are not insensate to the change—nearly a third of conservatives say they face “a lot” of discrimination for their beliefs, as do more than half of white evangelicals. But more epochal than the change that has already happened is the change that is yet to come: Sometime in the next quarter century or so, depending on immigration rates and the vagaries of ethnic and racial identification, nonwhites will become a majority in the U.S. For some Americans, that change will be cause for celebration; for others, it may pass unnoticed. But the transition is already producing a sharp political backlash, exploited and exacerbated by the president. In 2016, white working-class voters who said that discrimination against whites is a serious problem, or who said they felt like strangers in their own country, were almost twice as likely to vote for Trump as those who did not. Two-thirds of Trump voters agreed that “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline.” In Trump, they’d found a defender.

In 2002, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John Judis published a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that demographic changes—the browning of America, along with the movement of more women, professionals, and young people into the Democratic fold—would soon usher in a “new progressive era” that would relegate Republicans to permanent minority political status. The book argued, somewhat triumphally, that the new emerging majority was inexorable and inevitable. After Barack Obama’s reelection, in 2012, Teixeira doubled down on the argument in The Atlantic, writing, “The Democratic majority could be here to stay.” Two years later, after the Democrats got thumped in the 2014 midterms, Judis partially recanted, saying that the emerging Democratic majority had turned out to be a mirage and that growing support for the GOP among the white working class would give the Republicans a long-term advantage. The 2016 election seemed to confirm this.

But now many conservatives, surveying demographic trends, have concluded that Teixeira wasn’t wrong—merely premature. They can see the GOP’s sinking fortunes among younger voters, and feel the culture turning against them, condemning them today for views that were commonplace only yesterday. They are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilities.

The Republican Party has treated Trump’s tenure more as an interregnum than a revival, a brief respite that can be used to slow its decline. Instead of simply contesting elections, the GOP has redoubled its efforts to narrow the electorate and raise the odds that it can win legislative majorities with a minority of votes. In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places. And while gerrymandering is a bipartisan sin, over the past decade Republicans have indulged in it more heavily. In Wisconsin last year, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes cast in state legislative races, but just 36 percent of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans tried to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had struck down a GOP attempt to gerrymander congressional districts in that state. The Trump White House has tried to suppress counts of immigrants for the 2020 census, to reduce their voting power. All political parties maneuver for advantage, but only a party that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.

The history of the United States is rich with examples of once-dominant groups adjusting to the rise of formerly marginalized populations—sometimes gracefully, more often bitterly, and occasionally violently. Partisan coalitions in the United States are constantly reshuffling, realigning along new axes. Once-rigid boundaries of faith, ethnicity, and class often prove malleable. Issues gain salience or fade into irrelevance; yesterday’s rivals become tomorrow’s allies.

But sometimes, that process of realignment breaks down. Instead of reaching out and inviting new allies into its coalition, the political right hardens, turning against the democratic processes it fears will subsume it. A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up...

Trump Has the Moral High Ground

From David P. Goldman, at Pajamas, "President Trump Has the Moral High Ground Against the Democrats":

ABSOLUTE MUST READ> President Trump Has the Moral High Ground Against the Democrats https://t.co/jljJa2rxkZ #Spengler via @pjmedia_com

— Roger Simon (@rogerlsimon) July 17, 2019

I'm tired of hearing conservative friends apologize for President Trump's "go back to where you came from" tweets about the likes of Ilhan Omar. The president has the moral high ground, and the weasel war dance of the mainstream media shouldn't distract us from this fact.

Even his worst enemies (e.g. ex-conservative David Frum) concede that Trump's attacks on the anti-American extremists in the Democratic Party are smart politics. As Tucker Carlson observed in his June 16 keynote at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, a new Axios poll gives the Jew-baiting Somali an approval rating of 9%: "Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view." Not a typo, indeed. When is the last time any American politican had a 9% approval rating? Americans really detest this wretched character, and with good reason. It has nothing to do with race, but with rhetoric that breaks the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, America-hating and Jew-baiting.

But this isn't about trolling the Democrats. It's about principle. President Trump has a gift for asking the obvious questions that the elites avoid, for example: What idiot let Omar into the United States in the first place? Come to think of it, why should we admit immigrants who hate us and hate everything we stand for? I believe that new Americans are as good as old Americans, and sometimes better, if they become Americans with a passion for our principles and love for what we represent. But we are under no obligation to open our national home to our enemies. The liberal globalist idea that we need to bow, scrape and apologize to every foreigner with a grudge against us rankles the American people. That inanity appeals to a few Americans--maybe about 9%, judging from the Axios poll. The rest of us have had it up to here.

Where were our holier-than-thou Democrats when the detestable Ilhan Omar dismissed the murder of thousands of Americans on 9/11 with a wink and a nod and the words, "Some people did something"? We know where they were then Omar claimed that Jews buy the votes of congressmen with cash ("It's the Benjamins, baby"). The Democratic-controlled House passed a limp-noodle resolution deploring anti-Semitism along with hostility to Muslims after 9-11 -- in response to overtly racist statements by Omar. That's right -- racist. Mind if I say it again? Rep. Ilhan Omar is a racist, because anti-Semitism is a species of racism. The false allegation that Jews buy pro-Israel votes with money is an old racist caricature. No-one in the Democratic leadership has the honesty to denounce Omar as a racist.

President Trump's remarks had NOTHING whatever to do about race. He attacked America haters. The color of their skin is irrelevant. By attacking him as a racist, the Democratic leadership has debased the concept of racism. Racism is a wicked and terrible thing. People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Race hatred and race prejudice are detestable. But the racist here is NOT the president of the United States, but rather Rep. Ilhan Omar.

Omar's racism has consequences. Synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego were the victims of recent mass shootings. Physical assaults against Jews are routine in parts of New York City. Omar's racist rabble-rousing puts lives in danger. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews comprised 58% of all hate crimes in the United States during 2018, although Jews are about 1% of the U.S. population. Anti-Semitic lies of the sort that Omar propounds are an incitement to murder and mayhem. The Democrats refuse to discipline their own rogue elements. Someone had to call them out, and President Trump did...

Keep reading.

Andrew Sullivan on George Will (REVIEW)

Andrew Sullivan is pretty much psycho, but he's a dang good writer.

This review, at NYT, is worth your time.

Will's book is at Amazon, The Conservative Sensibility.

In a 600-page book on conservatism George Will does not mention Donald Trump, which tells you something about what he thinks of recent political developments https://t.co/fLRKNRvthz

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) June 20, 2019

Liel Leibovitz on the Ahmari/French Debate Over Conservatism

A big story on Twitter right now is Steven Crowder getting demonetized by YouTube, after a homosexual dude known as @GayWonk got his feelings hurt and mounted an all-out jihad against Crowder, claiming "homophobia," "racism," and who knows what else?

The Other McCain blogged on this a couple of days ago: "Totalitarian @GayWonk Is Attempting to Silence Conservative @SCrowder."

Meanwhile, I'm very interested in the debate Sohrab Ahmari kicked off with his blistering essay at First Things. I blogged about it here: "Our Existential Struggle."

I'm on Sohrab's side, but boy is this debate getting testy.

I'll have more, no doubt, but definitely read this piece from Liel Leibovich, at the Tablet, "Why Jews Should Pay Attention to the Recent Debate Rocking American Conservatism":

One of the best entries to the fun conservative debate of the moment. Among other things, it looks at whether NeverTrumpism is as civil as it loudly claims to be. https://t.co/HS3JyYCnEG

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 4, 2019

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

It is therefore particularly strange to find that David French lent his considerable conservative credibility to the Russiagate lunacy. Here he is, for example, mocking those calling Russiagate a hoax by accusing them of being complicit with Trump receiving oppositional research from a foreign power—which, ironically, is precisely what the Clinton campaign had in fact done, in compiling the “dossier” in the first place. And here he is cheering for the now highly contested BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump instructed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress, an allegation that is contradicted by the Mueller report itself. And here he is dismissing the suggestion, by then backed by mounting evidence, that Russiagate may be a hoax or itself some kind of conspiracy.

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale.

Which, really, wouldn’t be much of a problem if the Never Trumpers were all as genuinely committed to gentility as David French. Sadly, they’re not, and you needn’t go much further than Stephens’ column to understand why. Stephens and Ahmari are friendly. It was Stephens who helped Ahmari get his first job at The Wall Street Journal. And Stephens is thanked in Ahmari’s recent memoir, a candid, thoughtful, and deeply moving account of his journey to Catholicism. And Bret Stephens is a gentleman, in a way that Donald Trump surely is not. Yet it is possible to imagine Stephens as the wrong kind of gentleman when reading his column contra Ahmari: Sounding every bit like a bigoted member of a 19th-century gentleman’s club railing against the papists, Stephens casually and cruelly robs his former protégé of the intricacies of his faith-based argument for the pleasure of painting him as “an ardent convert” merrily rolling along on his way to a Handmaid’s Tale-like future for America.

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

On the subject of dissenters, the Never Trumpers eternal and immovable contempt merely apes that of their newfound pals on the left, for whom the president is a Nazi, the Republicans are perennially in the throes of a War on Women, and anyone who doesn’t fully subscribe to the latest lunacies of the identity politics-driven college campus cult is a racist creep. You may believe such an approach to politics is effective, but to pretend it is somehow morally superior is dishonest at best and, at worst, nefarious—a sleazy attempt to portray anyone who disagrees with you as not quite clean enough to be admitted into the league of enlightened gentlemen.

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

Presumably, the Never Trumpers and their ilk were simply manipulating the rubes and making bank when they denounced tenured radicals and liberal judges and the like under Clinton and Obama. In reality, they are perfectly content to live in a culture in which universities reject scientifically sound peer-reviewed papers for fear of offending the transgender community; in which pro-Israel speakers are routinely shouted down on campuses, and people with unpopular views are physically attacked; in which large technology platforms actively censor speech; in which journalists giddily defend the doxxing of a private citizen who created and shared a video they didn’t like; in which faith and those who practice it in earnest are dismissed as benighted bigots; in which the whims of unelected bureaucrats trump the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Never Trump was therefore a misnomer; they were simply elitist progressives who did an awkward kind of dance before arriving at their predestined home in the Democratic Party.

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American...

RTWT.

The Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost -- In Australia

The Chronicle of Higher Education did a recent feature on Quillette, with the totally unexceptional knee-jerk headline, "The Academy’s New Favorite Hate-Read: Is ‘Quillette’ an island of sanity — or reactionary conservatism for the Ph.D. set?"

(It's behind the paywall, but you get the gist of it from the embedded tweet there.)

Claire Lehmann's the founder and editor-in-chief, and it turns out she's a darned good writer and analyst. I enjoyed this piece from a couple of weeks back on the Australian national elections.

See, "At Australian Ballot Boxes, the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost":

For as long as champagne socialists incessantly attack the values & cultural tastes of working class folk, centre-left parties cannot take their votes for granted. My piece on the Australian election result https://t.co/51UeV6M2Yg

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) May 20, 2019

The result of Saturday’s federal election in Australia is being treated as the most staggering political shocker in my country since World War II. Scott Morrison, leading the Liberal Party, looks to have won a majority government—a result that defies three years of opinion polling, bookie’s odds and media commentary.

In the aftermath, analysts on both sides are trying to explain what went wrong for the centre-left Australian Labor Party, and what went right for the centre-right Liberals. Some attribute the result to Morrison’s personal likeability, and his successful targeting of the “quiet Australian” demographic—the silent majority whose members feel they rarely have a voice, except at the ballot box. Others cast the result as Australia’s Hilary-Clinton moment: Bill Shorten, who resigned following Saturday’s loss, was, like Clinton, an unpopular political insider who generated little enthusiasm among his party’s traditional constituencies. In 2010 and again in 2013, he roiled the Labor Party by supporting two separate internal coups, machinations that cast him as a self-promoter instead of a team player.

The swing against Labor was particularly pronounced in the northeastern state of Queensland—which is more rural and socially conservative than the rest of Australia. Many of Queensland’s working-class voters opposed Labor’s greener-than-thou climate-change policies, not a surprise given that the state generates half of all the metallurgical coal burned in the world’s blast furnaces. Queensland’s rejection of Labor carried a particularly painful symbolic sting for Shorten, given that this is the part of Australia where his party was founded by 19th century sheep shearers meeting under a ghost gum tree. In 1899, the world’s first Labor government was sworn into the Queensland parliament. Shorten’s “wipe-out” in Queensland demonstrates what has become of the party’s brand among working-class people 120 years later.

*   *   *

Picture a dinner party where half the guests are university graduates with prestigious white-collar jobs, with the other half consisting of people who are trade workers, barmaids, cleaners and labourers. While one side of the table trades racy jokes and uninhibited banter, the other half tut-tuts this “problematic” discourse.

These two groups both represent traditional constituencies of mainstream centre-left parties—including the Labour Party in the UK, the Democrats in the United States, and the NDP in Canada. Yet they have increasingly divergent attitudes and interests—even if champagne socialists paper over these differences with airy slogans about allyship and solidarity.

Progressive politicians like to assume that, on election day at least, blue-collar workers and urban progressives will bridge their differences, and make common cause to support leftist economic policies. This assumption might once have been warranted. But it certainly isn’t now—in large part because the intellectuals, activists and media pundits who present the most visible face of modern leftism are the same people openly attacking the values and cultural tastes of working and middle-class voters. And thanks to social media (and the caustic news-media culture that social media has encouraged and normalized), these attacks are no longer confined to dinner-party titterings and university lecture halls. Brigid Delaney, a senior writer for Guardian Australia, responded to Saturday’s election result with a column about how Australia has shown itself to be “rotten.” One well-known Australian feminist and op-ed writer, Clementine Ford, has been fond of Tweeting sentiments such as “All men are scum and must die.” Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who also has served as a high-profile newspaper columnist, argues that even many mainstream political positions—such as expressing concern about the Chinese government’s rising regional influence—are a smokescreen for racism.

In an interview conducted on Sunday morning, Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek opined that if only her party had more time to explain to the various groups how much they’d all benefit from Labor’s plans, Australians would have realized how fortunate they’d be with a Labor government, and Shorten would’ve become Prime Minister. Such attitudes are patronizing, for they implicitly serve to place blame at the feet of voters, who apparently are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.

What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement.

Taking stock of real voters’ needs would require elites to exhibit a spirit of empathic understanding—such as by way of acknowledging that blue-collar workers have good reason to vote down parties whose policies would destroy blue-collar jobs; or that legal immigrants might oppose opening up a nation’s border to migrants who arrive illegally. More broadly, the modern progressive left has lost touch with the fact that what ordinary people want from their government is a spirit of respect, dignity and hope for the future. While the fetish for hectoring and moral puritanism has become popular in rarefied corners of arts and academia, it is deeply off-putting to voters whose sense of self extends beyond cultish ideological tribalism.

*   *   *

The class-based realignment of party politics isn’t unique to my country. All over the world, left-wing parties increasingly are being co-opted by politicians who reflect the attitudes and priorities of voters with higher incomes and education levels, while right-wing parties increasingly attract blue-collar workers who’ve become alienated by parties that once championed the little guy. It’s been three years since Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, and so this phenomenon no longer can be described as new or dismissed as transient. Yet progressives seem to imagine that it can be dispelled, as if by a magic spell, simply by incanting the right hash tags or bleating mantras about anti-racism...

Keep reading.

Battle Looms Over Gray Wolf Protection

This is interesting.

I don't support hunting wildlife simply for bragging rights and Instagram/ Twitter selfies. At one point there were millions of gray wolves covering every corner of the United States. Now, there's about 6,000. They're on the federal Endangered Species List. I don't have an opinion on whether federal protection is better or not, but it's worth considering. Conservatism is about conservation, and smart use of our natural resources is conservative.

In any case, at the Los Angles Times, "Plan to remove gray wolves from Endangered Species Act sparks battle":

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes. https://t.co/xgg8fQastb

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 28, 2019

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes.

“If the agency’s proposal gets finalized, we will see them in court,” Michael Robinson, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity said on Wednesday. “Delisting is simply out of the question.”

Surprisingly, however, in the latest chapter of a long-running battle to keep an estimated 6,000 gray wolves safe from trophy hunters and trappers, the center and the Humane Society of the United States are suggesting a compromise.

“We are proposing an alternate path forward — downlisting the gray wolf from federally endangered to threatened status,” said Brett Hartl, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. That action, he said, “would maintain federal protections the animal needs to survive in certain areas, while allowing states to share management oversight.”

His organization doesn’t oppose state management of wolves, but it does oppose hunting wolves for sport, he said. “Free-for-all hunting of wolves is not management, it’s slaughter.”

Similarly, Nick Arrivo, an attorney with the Humane Society of the United States, said, “We don’t oppose the idea of state management. The problem is that certain states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan have shown that they are not inclined to maintain healthy populations of gray wolves.”

Federal wildlife authorities removed protections from gray wolves in the Great Lakes region in 2011, allowing thousands of gray wolves in those three states to be hunted or trapped. The protections were restored by federal court decisions in 2014.

The prospect of removing wolf protections aroused rage yet again earlier this month when the Fish and Wildlife Service touted the species' recovery as "one of the greatest comebacks for an animal in U.S. conservation history,” a characterization that some conservation groups called misguided and premature.

David Bernhardt, acting secretary of the Department of Interior, said the plan to delist the species “puts us one step closer to transitioning the extraordinary effort that we have invested in gray wolf recovery to other species who actually need the protections of the Endangered Species Act, leaving the states to carry on the legacy of wolf conservation.”

However, the Humane Society, in a statement, warned that the plan catered “to a narrow group of special interests: the trophy hunters and trappers who want to kill wolves for bragging rights, social media opportunities and to increase deer and elk populations.”

It pointed out, for instance, that in November, “Americans were heartbroken” by the killing of the famous Yellowstone black wolf, Spitfire, by a trophy hunter in Montana.

It also argued that gray wolves are worth millions of dollars to the economies of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, studies show, because of the visitors they attract to national parks in the northern Rocky Mountains...

Keep reading.

A Strategy to Save the Liberal International Order

A great piece, from Jennifer Lind and William Wohlforth, at Foreign Affairs, "The Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative: A Strategy to Save the System":

Saving the liberal world order requires a conservative approach, argue @profLind and William C. Wohlforth. The U.S. should aim to preserve what has been won and minimize the chances that more will be lost.https://t.co/oo5i0zOzpk

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) February 15, 2019

The liberal world order is in peril. Seventy-five years after the United States helped found it, this global system of alliances, institutions, and norms is under attack like never before. From within, the order is contending with growing populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Externally, it faces mounting pressure from a pugnacious Russia and a rising China. At stake is the survival of not just the order itself but also the unprecedented economic prosperity and peace it has nurtured.

The order is clearly worth saving, but the question is how. Keep calm and carry on, some of its defenders argue; today’s difficulties will pass, and the order is resilient enough to survive them. Others appreciate the gravity of the crisis but insist that the best response is to vigorously reaffirm the order’s virtues and confront its external challengers. Bold Churchillian moves—sending more American troops to Syria, offering Ukraine more help to kick out pro-Russian forces—would help make the liberal international order great again. Only by doubling down on the norms and institutions that made the liberal world order so successful, they say, can that order be saved.

Such defenders of the order tend to portray the challenge as a struggle between liberal countries trying to sustain the status quo and dissatisfied authoritarians seeking to revise it. What they miss, however, is that for the past 25 years, the international order crafted by and for liberal states has itself been profoundly revisionist, aggressively exporting democracy and expanding in both depth and breadth. The scale of the current problems means that more of the same is not viable; the best response is to make the liberal order more conservative. Instead of expanding it to new places and new domains, the United States and its partners should consolidate the gains the order has reaped.

The debate over U.S. grand strategy has traditionally been portrayed as a choice between retrenchment and ambitious expansionism. Conservatism offers a third way: it is a prudent option that seeks to preserve what has been won and minimize the chances that more will be lost. From a conservative vantage point, the United States’ other choices—at one extreme, undoing long-standing alliances and institutions or, at the other extreme, further extending American power and spreading American values—represent dangerous experiments. This is especially so in an era when great-power politics has returned and the relative might of the countries upholding the order has shrunk.

It is time for Washington and its liberal allies to gird themselves for a prolonged period of competitive coexistence with illiberal great powers, time to shore up existing alliances rather than add new ones, and time to get out of the democracy-promotion business. Supporters of the order may protest this shift, deeming it capitulation. On the contrary, conservatism is the best way to preserve the global position of the United States and its allies—and save the order they built.

A REVISIONIST ORDER

Since World War II, the United States has pursued its interests in part by creating and maintaining the web of institutions, norms, and rules that make up the U.S.-led liberal order. This order is not a myth, as some allege, but a living, breathing framework that shapes much of international politics. It is U.S.-led because it is built on a foundation of American hegemony: the United States provides security guarantees to its allies in order to restrain regional competition, and the U.S. military ensures an open global commons so that trade can flow uninterrupted. It is liberal because the governments that support it have generally tried to infuse it with liberal norms about economics, human rights, and politics. And it is an order—something bigger than Washington and its policies—because the United States has partnered with a posse of like-minded and influential countries and because its rules and norms have gradually assumed a degree of independent influence.

This order has expanded over time. In the years after World War II, it grew both geographically and functionally, successfully integrating two rising powers, West Germany and Japan. Supporting liberalism and interweaving their security policies with the United States’, these countries accepted the order, acting as “responsible stakeholders” well before the term was optimistically applied to China. As the Cold War played out, NATO added not just West Germany but also Greece, Turkey, and Spain. The European Economic Community (the EU’s predecessor) doubled its membership. And core economic institutions, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), broadened their remits...

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Jonah Goldberg on Conservatism

I don't care for the never Trumpers. I do appreciate an intellectual argument, and Jonah Goldberg's an accomplished intellectual (IMHO).

This is a follow-up to my piece from earlier this week, "What's Become of Conservatism?"

Here's the "G-File" from Goldberg, at NRO, "Conservative Facts -- Many Toss Facts & Embrace Meanness":

For liberals/progressives who follow me, I recommend this Jonah Goldberg riff on the meaning & history of neoconservatism. It cuts through a lot of misapprehensions. Warning: If you've never read @JonahNRO it may take a few grafs to get acclimated. https://t.co/oI8WdQpcuO

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) December 22, 2018

There was always a yin-yang thing to conservatism. Its hard-headedness and philosophical realism about human nature and the limits it imposes on utopian schemes appealed to some and repulsed others. For those who see politics as a romantic enterprise, a means of pursuing collective salvation, conservatism seems mean-spirited. As Emerson put it: “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” That’s what Ben Shapiro is getting at when he says “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” The hitch is that the reverse is also true: Feelings don’t care about your facts. Tell a young progressive activist we can’t afford socialism and the response will be overtly or subliminally emotional: “Why don’t you care about poor people!” or “Why do you love billionaires!?”

The problem conservatism faces these days is that many of the loudest voices have decided to embrace the meanness while throwing away the facts. This has been a trend for a long time now. But Donald Trump has accelerated the problem to critical mass, yielding an explosion of stupid and a radioactive cloud of meanness.

It’s as if people have decided they should live down to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” epithet. More on that in a moment. But first, since I already wrote the section below, allow me a not-quite-brief, not entirely non-sequitorial aside about neoconservatism. Feel free to skip ahead to the screed at the end if you’re not interested in the eggheadery.

What Is Neoconservatism?

Well, it depends on whom you ask. But let’s work on some common definitions, or at least descriptions.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon when labelling its adherents) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party, and the growing New Left and counterculture, in particular the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society.

This isn’t terrible, but it gets the chronology and emphases somewhat wrong (the Encyclopedia of American Conservatism gets it right, btw). The first neocons were intellectual rebels against the Great Society and the leftward drift of American liberalism (The Public Interest, the first neocon journal, was launched in 1965. It was dedicated entirely to domestic affairs, not foreign policy). Unable to reconcile the facts with the feelings of liberalism, a host of intellectuals decided they would stick with the facts, even if it meant that former friends and allies would call them mean for doing so.

The socialist writer Michael Harrington is usually credited with coining the term in 1973 as a way to disparage former socialists who moved rightward, but people have found earlier mentions of the term (Norman Podhoretz, for instance, called Walter Lipmann and Clinton Rossiter “neoconservatives” in 1963. And Karl Marx(!) called Lord Beaconsfield a Neo Conservative in 1883). It’s certainly true that Harrington popularized the label. Harrington’s essay supports my larger point, though. The Harrington essay that cemented the term “neoconservatism” in American discourse was titled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” In other words, the original neoconservative critique wasn’t about foreign policy, but domestic policy.

According to William F. Buckley, the neoconservatives brought the rigor and language of sociology to conservatism, which until then had been overly, or at least too uniformly, Aristotelian. The Buckleyites (though certainly not folks like Burnham) tended to talk from first principles and natural laws and rights. The neocons looked at the data and discovered that the numbers tended to back up a lot of the things the Aristotelians had been saying.

The original neocons’ gateway drug to conservatism was the law of unintended consequences. Once eager to tear up Chesterton’s fences wherever they saw them, they discovered that reforms often yielded worse results. As Francis Fukuyama wrote over a decade ago, “If there is a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques carried out by those who wrote for The Public Interest, it is the limits of social engineering. Ambitious efforts to seek social justice, these writers argued, often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted organic social relations; or else produced unanticipated consequences.”

Another understanding of neoconservatism is that it was a movement of ex-Communists who moved rightward. There’s a benign version of this story and a malignant one. The harmless version is basically descriptive. Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, et al., were once briefly socialists or Trotskyists, and as they grew more disillusioned with such utopianism they moved rightward. The invidious version of this story, still common in some feverish and swampy corners of the Right, is that they never let go of their underlying Trotskyist tendencies and were some kind of fifth column on the right. This version has sizable overlap with anti-Semitic fantasies about neoconservatism. More on that in a minute.

Part of the problem with even the benign version of this story is that there are so many exceptions that the explanatory power bleeds away. For instance, Bill Kristol, the supposed Demon Head of neoconservatism these days, was never a Communist or any other flavor of leftist (and he still isn’t). Neither were John Podhoretz, William Bennett, Jean Kirkpatrick, James Q. Wilson, David Brooks, and many, many others often described as neoconservatives. Another problem: If being a Communist-turned-conservative makes you a neocon, then many of the founders of National Review were neocons too. Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, and James Burnham were all far more committed and accomplished Communists than Irving & Co. ever were. Eastman was one of Trotsky’s close friends and his English-language translator. Burnham co-founded the American Workers Party with Sidney Hook. Chambers was a Soviet agent.

The idea that neoconservatism was primarily about foreign policy, specifically anti-Communism, further complicates things. Part of this is a by-product of the second wave of neoconservatives who joined the movement and the right in the 1970s, mostly through the pages of Commentary. These were rebels against not the welfare state but détente on the right and the radical anti-anti-Communists of the New Left (National Review ran a headline in 1971 on the awakening at Commentary: “Come on In, the Water’s Fine.”) Many of those writers, most famously Jeane Kirkpatrick, ended up leading the intellectual shock troops of the Reagan administration. But, again, if vigorous anti-Communism and hawkish military policy in its pursuit that defines (or defined) neoconservatism, then how does that distinguish those neocons from National Review conservatism and the foreign policy of, say, Barry “Rollback, not Containment” Goldwater?

It is certainly true that the foreign-policy neocons emphasized certain things more than generic conservatives, specifically the promotion of democracy abroad. In ill-intentioned hands, this fact is often used as a cover for invidious arguments about the how the neocons never really shed their Trotskyism and were still determined to “export revolution.” But for the most part, it can’t be supported by what these people actually wrote. Moreover, the idea that only neocons care about promoting democracy simply glosses over everything from the stated purpose of the First World War, the Marshall Plan, stuff like JFK’s inaugural address (“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”), and this thing called the Reagan Doctrine.

And then there are the Joooooz. Outside of deranged comment sections and the swampy ecosystems of the “alt-right,” the sinister version of this theory is usually only hinted at or alluded to. Neocons only care about Israel is the Trojan horse that lets people get away with not saying the J-word. Those bagel-snarfing warmongers want real Americans to do their fighting for them. Pat Buchanan, when opposing the first Gulf War in 1992, listed only Jewish supporters of the war and then said they’d be sending “American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown” to do the fighting. Subtle. (By the way, Leroy Brown must have ended up fighting in the Gulf War after all. How else can we explain how quickly it ended? He was, after all, the baddest man in the whole damn town.)

Even the non-sinister version of the “neocon equals Jew” thing is a mess. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of the most vilified neoconservatives were people like Michael Novak, Father Richard Neuhaus, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Bennett, and later, even George Weigel. During the Iraq war, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, John Bolton, and virtually everybody who supported the war were called neocons. Funny, they don’t look neoconnish.

Whatever neoconservatism is, or was, its time as a distinct thing has been over for a while. In his memoir, Irving Kristol, “the Godfather of the Neoconservatives,” argued that the movement had run its course and dissolved into the conservative movement generally. This strikes me as inarguably true. Most of the people I’ve checked off — who are still alive — including Bill Kristol, don’t call themselves neoconservative anymore, and the few who do mostly do so as a nod to nostalgia more than anything else.

So today, neoconservatism has become what it started out as, an invidious term used by its opponents to single out and demonize people as inauthentic, un-American, unreliable, or otherwise suspicious heretics, traitors, or string-pullers. The chief difference is that they were once aliens in the midst of liberalism, now they are called aliens in the midst of conservatism. And it’s all bullsh**.

American Smallness

Which brings me to Chris Buskirk’s ridiculous manifesto of conservative liberation in response to the demise of The Weekly Standard. The editor of American Greatness, a journal whose tagline should be “Coming Up with Reasons Why Donald Trump’s Sh** Doesn’t Stink 24/7” opens with “Neoconservatism is dead, long live American conservatism” and then, amazingly, proceeds to get dumber.

Nowhere in his essay does Buskirk reveal that he has any real grasp of what neoconservatism was or is — and the best defense of his insinuation that neoconservatism was un-American is that it can be chalked up to bad writing.

But Buskirk doesn’t need to demonstrate fluency with the material because for him, “neoconservative” is an anathematizing word and nothing more. He says, “the life and death of The Weekly Standard is really the story of the death and rebirth of American conservatism, which is nothing more than the modern political expression of America’s founding principles.” A bit further on, he asserts that “for years, neoconservatives undermined and discredited the work of conservatives from Lincoln to Reagan . . .” This is so profoundly unserious that not only is it impossible to know where to begin, it’s a struggle to finish the sentence for fear the stupid will rub off. Does he have in mind the Straussians (Walter Berns, Robert Goldwin, et al.) at that neocon nest the American Enterprise Institute who wrote lovingly about Lincoln at book length for decades? Does he think Irving Kristol’s essay “The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution” was an indictment of the founding? Were these essays, on Abraham Lincoln published in The Weekly Standard or by its writers elsewhere, perfidious neocon attempts to topple him from his historic pedestal? What about Andy Ferguson’s loving book on Lincoln?

And what of the scores of neoconservatives who worked for Ronald Reagan and helped him advance the Reaganite agenda? Were they all fifth columnists? Or perhaps they were parasites attaching themselves to a “host organism,” as Buskirk repugnantly describes Kristol?

He doesn’t say, because Buskirk doesn’t rely on an argument. Save for a couple of Bill Kristol tweets out of context, he cites no writing and marshals no evidence. Instead, he lets a wink, or rather the stink, do all of his work. He knows his readers want to hear folderol about neocons. He knows they have their own insidious definitions of what they are and crave to have them confirmed. Bringing any definition or fact to his argument would get in the way of his naked assertions and slimy insinuations.

And what absurd assertions they are. I’m not a fan of tu quoque arguments, but the idea that American Greatness has standing to position itself as an organ dedicated to larger principles and ideas is hilarious, given that the website’s only purpose is to attach itself like a remora to Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t even call himself a conservative, even for convenience, anymore. Just this week, American Greatness’s Julie Kelly mocked Nancy French’s childhood trauma of being sexually abused. When I criticized her for it, Kelly snarked back something about how “Never Trumpers” have a problem with the truth. It’s like these people don’t see it. You cannot claim to care about the truth while being a rabid defender of this president’s hourly mendacity...

There's more.

Chris Buskirk's really looking like an idiot, that's for sure.

Ross Douthat's 'Conservatism' Syllabus

I found this at the American Conservative, "Cormac McCarthy’s Conservative Pessimism."

I could quibble with the argument there that McCarty's America's great living conservative novelist, but that's not as interesing as Ross Douthat's syllabus.

I'm posting here for posterity, via Samuel Moyn: