Delusions

 Seen on social media, from a college friend who runs a successful public relations agency:

We are in a very bad place right now. It feels like much of what makes Chicago so great is slipping away, at least for awhile.

There are a lot of people I respect making statements on all sides of the issue. I am having a difficult time disagreeing with any of them. There is too much to comprehend right now.

I will just add this point-of-view. While the officer-involved shooting was the impetus for the vandalism and looting downtown, the people protesting the shooting are not the people conducting the vandalism and rioting. These are two different groups of people with different motivations. Social justice and criminal behavior live in different worlds. While it's easy to combine the two, it's a trap that emboldens criminals and hinders social justice.

Also, this is not an organized Antifa movement, because Antifa doesn't exist. Buying into the Antifa myth has really dire consequences for all of us.

Antifa doesn't exist? Seriously? And, more importantly, the idea that social justice and criminal behavior live in different worlds is even a larger delusion. We have seen it repeatedly; organizations that purport to fight for social justice are, in the main, rackets. 

Of all the disheartening things I've seen or read in this year of unrelenting awfulness, these statements are the most disheartening. We're never going to get better if we celebrate lies.

Safety School, Baby!

My alma mater gets a nod from the Style Section of the Washington Post, but not of the sort it would want:

But I’m still at a loss about what to do with a situation like Kyle Kashuv’s. And not in some what-is-the-meaning-of-redemption way. But practically speaking: Unless we seal them all in a cave, people who do bad (but not illegal) things are going to continue to be part of our society. What do we think that should look like? What is your personal vision?

The miscreant in question is Kyle Kashuv, a top student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who had the credentials to get into Harvard, but was drummed out because SJWs don't like 2nd Amendment types (Kashuv spoke in favor of the 2nd Amendment, unlike his classmate David Hogg, who is sailing into Harvard with less stellar credentials but a more correct worldview). The SJW spelunking teams dug up some nasty texts he wrote two years ago, where he apparently used the "n" word and maybe said some other uncharitable things that 16-year-old dudes say as they marinate in testosterone. Harvard doesn't want him now, so what to do with him? Post Style Writer/Moral Arbiter Monica Hesse has some suggestions (emphasis in original):

University of Florida? I saw someone suggest that as a possible destination for Kashuv. The argument went that Kashuv shouldn’t be rewarded with the prestige of the Ivy League, but maybe could go off to some less illustrious institution, where he could then continue to work on himself.

I actually saw a fair number of suggestions like this: Not Harvard. Somewhere else. Somewhere less good. The solution seemed reasonable, but it had a tinge of classism, an element of passing the buck. If you don’t believe that Harvard students should have to attend classes with someone who has used racist terminology within the past two years, then why would you subject University of Florida students to that? Or students from Beloit or Colorado State? Would those universities even admit him, or would they follow Harvard’s lead?

Beloit! My alma mater! The quintessential safety school! Beloit, the self-proclaimed "Yale of the Midwest," known up and down the Acela Corridor as a place to park your kid if he's not smart enough to get into Harvard, or was too busy doing bong hits at Pomfret to crack the code at Princeton. But should my fair school be the place where people who are Not Our Kind, Dear have to serve their penance? For her part, Monica Hesse went to Bryn Mawr, a place where one can sniff the glory of the Ivy League from the Philadelphia Main Line. Her school is a member in good standing of the all-female Seven Sisters, so a brute like Kashuv can't even try to go there. Besides which, elite liberal arts schools on the eastern seaboard are right out, including the other proper places in Bryn Mawr's neighborhood; I suspect Haverford would provide no haven and Swarthmore would swat him away, too, so he'll need to go someplace in District 10, where they keep the livestock. Thus, the Beloit dilemma.

Maybe I'm being churlish about this; perhaps Beloiters should be grateful that Hesse doesn't really want to subject my alma mater with an irredeemable type like Kashuv. After all, the Yale of the Midwest needs to maintain its own smelly orthodoxies and a guy who actually likes guns might scare the other matriculants. Hesse is concerned, though -- something has to be done, you see:

What does it look like to make amends? How do we decide what’s redeemable, for example, and then how does a person actually become redeemed? What kind of roles does our society allow for them, and when?

When I read Baker’s essay, I didn’t know what to do with the bad men. I didn’t know where they should go, or what the right societal reentry would be. I didn’t want to talk about the bad men at all, but eventually we’ll need to.

The Baker in question is Katie Baker, whose essay concerns what to do with men who run afoul of #MeToo. No one has suggested Kashuv has a sexual issue, other than obviously being too in love with guns so he must be compensating for something, I guess.

Ultimately, we're back to the same cultural turf where we encountered the Covington Catholic kids, who were bad by definition, even though those doing the defining, including Hesse's employer, were wrong. Nicholas Sandmann is suing Monica Hesse's employer. Kyle Kashuv won't be, most likely. But I have two questions -- first, why on earth would Kyle Kashuv want "societal reentry" in the world Monica Hesse inhabits? And second, who made Hesse and her ilk the arbiters of such things?

Man of the Moment

You really should read the transcript of Attorney General William Barr's interview with Jan Crawford of CBS News. I'm going to point out two examples of why Barr is exactly the guy we need at this moment:

Honey badger

JAN CRAWFORD: You're saying that spying occurred. There's not anything necessarily wrong with that.

WILLIAM BARR: Right.

JAN CRAWFORD: As long as there's a reason for it.

WILLIAM BARR: Whether it's adequately predicated. And look, I think if we -- we are worried about foreign influence in the campaign? We should be because the heart of our system is the peaceful transfer of power through elections and what gives the government legitimacy is that process. And if foreign elements can come in and affect it, that's bad for the republic. But by the same token, it's just as, it's just as dangerous to the continuation of self-government and our republican system, republic that we not allow government power, law enforcement or intelligence power, to play a role in politics, to intrude into politics, and affect elections.

JAN CRAWFORD: So it's just as dangerous- So when we talk about foreign interference versus say a government abuse of power, which is more troubling?

WILLIAM BARR: Well they're both, they're both troubling.

JAN CRAWFORD: Equally?

WILLIAM BARR: In my mind, they are, sure. I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they're there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.

JAN CRAWFORD: And you are concerned that that may have happened in 2016?

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I just think it has to be carefully look at because the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed.

Emphasis mine. Partisanship is one thing, but Barr points out the real danger, which is the certainty of thought that flows from Orange Man Bad. As I've observed the last 3-4 years, the greatest realization I've had to face is discovering that many of the things I believe weren't, ahem, adequately predicated.

The end of the interview is even more important:

JAN CRAWFORD: But when you came into this job, you were kind of, it's like the US Attorney in Connecticut, I mean, you had a good reputation on the right and on the left. You were a man with a good reputation. You are not someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in? And what is your response to it? How do you? What's your response to that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well in a way I did expect it.

JAN CRAWFORD: You did?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, because I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don't care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that's antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life it really doesn't make any difference.

JAN CRAWFORD: You are at the end of your career, or?

WILLIAM BARR: I am at the end of my career. I've you know--

JAN CRAWFORD: Does it, I mean, it's the reputation that you have worked your whole life on though?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, but everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

Emphasis mine. This is a man who doesn't care if he gets dissed in the Washington Post, or doesn't get to hang at the cocktail parties in Georgetown. He understands there is no value in holding the esteem of jackals. He may look like a cross between John Goodman and Roger Ebert, but he is Shane. This is the man of the moment.

UPDATE: if you weren't certain that Barr is the guy we need, consider this: swamp denizen Jonathan Chait is terrified.

The merit of the meritocracy

So what makes the college admissions scandal so infuriating? It's the realization that, in the end, our best and brightest aren't. Even wobbly Jonah Goldberg sees it:

It’s also a searing indictment of the value of an elite college education in the first place. None of these parents seemed remotely concerned about whether their kids could hack it once they got into their dream schools — and rightly so.

It's an open secret -- once you are in an elite college, you get to stay and you get to graduate. You don't have to worry about academic standards, particularly. Harvey Mansfield, a venerable professor at Harvard, notes that the average grade there is an A. And he has a system for dealing with grade inflation:

Mansfield described how, in recent years, he himself has taken to giving students two grades: one that shows up on their transcript and one he believes they actually deserve.

“I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade,” he said, adding that administrators must take the lead in curbing the trend.

That's an admission of defeat. It also should cast doubt on the value of the credential that Harvard provides. But it doesn't. It should be difficult to earn an A in a college course; in my personal experience and the experience of those near to me, it is. But members of my family don't attend Harvard. Perhaps we're better off because of it.

Get your hate on

Victor Davis Hanson, once again, explains the larger forces at play:

[Rick] Wilson was not original in his smear of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. He was likely resonating an earlier slander of Politico reporter Marco Caputo. The latter had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a Trump rally: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

Was the point of these stereotypes that poor white working-class people who supposedly voted for the controversial Trump understandably ate improperly, did not practice proper dental hygiene, or did not visit dentists—or all three combined?

When challenged, Caputo doubled down on his invective. He snarled, “Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch.”

Peel him a grape, too. There's more:

Caputo’s “Garbage people” was also a synonym for the smears that two career FBI agents on separate occasions had called the archetypical Trump voters.

In the released trove of the Department of Justice text communications involving the Clinton email probe, an unidentified FBI employee had texted to another FBI attorney his abject contempt for the proverbial Trump voter and indeed middle America itself: “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [“pieces of sh*t”].” In fact, Trump in 2016 received about 90 percent of all Republican votes, about the same ratio as won by both recent presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.

In the now notorious text communications between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, fired FBI operatives on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, Strzok right before the 2016 election had texted his paramour Page: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

If you want to know why the government shutdown, and the plight of our noble public servants as they struggle with temporary cash flow issues, doesn't seem to be getting much traction, you might want to consider Page and Strzok, and their great love for those they serve.

So if you are a self-proclaimed paragon of tolerance, why the hate? Back to Hanson:

These outbursts were all voiced from highly educated elites (Caputo has a journalism degree from the University of Miami, [Donny] Deutsch graduated from the Wharton School, [Sarah] Jeong from Harvard Law School, Strzok received a master’s degree from Georgetown, Wilson attended George Washington University). And all engaged in vicious and cowardly stereotyping of a demographic in a manner that they assumed involved no downside. Rather, the smears were delivered on the expectation of winning approbation from their peers. And they did in twitter-fueled competitions to find the crudest pejoratives.

 Cue the Dobie Gray:

I'm in with the in crowd 
I go where the in crowd goes 
I'm in with the in crowd 
And I know what the in crowd knows

Hatred can wear academic regalia, or it can wear the cloak of professionalism. But at bottom, it's all the same. Hanson:

Those who slander the deplorables and irredeemables assume that they can say almost anything and expect no pushback, given the white working classes lack the romance of the poor and the supposed panache of the elite. A race to the bottom develops in which the more the hatred, the more the clicks and the media exposure. Minority critics expect their own identity politics affiliations to shield them from criticism. Wealthy white elites virtue-signal their disgust for those without privilege as a way of ensuring that those like themselves, who most certainly enjoy privilege, are rewarded with ideological exemptions for it.

Finally, we are learning that the entire idea of political correctness was never much about universal ideas of tolerance of the other, or insistence that language and protocols must not stigmatize individuals by lumping them into stereotyped and dehumanized collective groups.  What we are witnessing, instead, is that it is fine to demonize millions, from their appearance to their purported hygiene and smell to affinities with feces and apes—if it serves political or cultural agendas.

In sum, cultural progressivism is about raw power, not principle.

It's also the realization that, no matter how many degrees and credentials one obtains, we all will revert to junior high social norms when we can get by with it.

Let them eat climate change

I am still thinking about what's happening in France, which seems more consequential than the kabuki in DC. I have never been to France, but based on what I know, this piece rings true:

Many still understand France through the lens of Vogue magazine covers: a nation of affluent, happy people who live in elegant homes, with endless holidays, wine and food.

A 24/7 utopia of chic, elegance and style.

Important to note: that France does exist. It is the world of the French ruling class, less than 1% of the population.

This small group of citizens have dominated the business, banking, legal and political scenes for decades.

So how does the ruling class perpetuate itself?

The ruling class comes from a small group of grandes ecoles, or elite colleges. There are only 3 or 4. The top of the top? L’Ecole d’Administration Nationale (ENA).

Emmanuel Macron’s journey is typical of the ruling class. He completed a Master's of Public Affairs at Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (called "Sciences Po"), the #2 elite college, before graduating from ENA in 2004, age 27. He then worked as a senior civil servant at the Inspectorate General of Finances (The Treasury), before getting a high paid gig ad an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.

See how fast Macron worked his way into the senior civil servant position in the Treasury, before flipping into an exclusive investment bank? That is normal in France. It's a never-ending protected cycle of patronage, promotion, favors and cronyism.

A technocratic Ivy League. There's more:

The French elites are young men and women who have been told that they are not just the intellectual creme de la creme, but morally superior. Better human beings than their inferiors.

These people are arrogant. But they are also ignorant. Raised in very wealthy families and cosseted in the networks those families are part of, they have no understanding of ordinary people and their real lives.

Arrogance and ignorance is a very toxic mix. Macron’s tone-deaf appeal to climate change to justify the rise in diesel taxes, as well as his outrageous suggestion that ordinary French folk must drive less, is a classic example of the problem.

Does this sound familiar to you? I'm certain it does. Read the whole thing.

Yes and no

As is typically the case, Andrew Sullivan is on to something:

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning.

Damn right. But there's more:

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

Ask Kevin Hart, just the latest comedian to come a cropper. There's more:

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

But for a guy who can be as spot-on in his observations as these are, he still misreads other things in the very same essay. He starts out well, to wit:

So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.

Then he gets to Trump and steers into the ditch:

Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. 

How is that, Andrew?

Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.

This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do.

It's important to define who "they" are. The Trump supporters I know don't view him as a demigod at all; his popularity is contingent on his message, which is less about a search for meaning than about calling out the steady, ever-ratcheting imposition of the desires of those in power and trying to reverse the ratcheting. There is no Trump in Europe, but the yellow vests are on the scene for many of the same reasons the MAGA hats are on display in the United States. The Robert Muellers and James Comeys and Amy Klobuchars of the world may not arrive in Washington from the same locales, but they have the same mindset and the same self-appointed sense of being a surety, along with the overweening self-regard of the Pharisees, if you want to take a historical-religious tack on the matter. Macron and Trudeau are of the same caste.

But that last sentence of Sullivan is worth note: And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do. Perhaps those are the cultists Sullivan believes he sees, but that statement suggests he needs to dig a little deeper. Yes, if  you were to survey a regular churchgoer at St. Joan of Arc, or at any number of dessicated mainline Protestant churches in town, it would be difficult to find a Trump supporter. But if you expect fidelity to that ol' time religion in such precincts, you'll not find it. Jesus is just all right with them, but He's not the center of things. And while believers keep their focus on eternal salvation, they aren't necessarily ignoring the world they inhabit right now.

As always, Sullivan can be a fascinating read. He's worth a click. But he's not necessarily the go-to for taxonomy.

il miglior fabbro

The shorthand criticism of last week's beatification of John McCain was that it culminated with a Wellstone Funeral. It was certainly a partisan event, although not by party. Rather, it was an event in which our betters celebrated their superiority. Writing for the Asian Times, David "Spengler" Goldman gets to the marrow:

Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at “the pointedly un-invited President Trump,” as the New Yorker noted, calling the event “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”

McCain’s daughter Meghan contrasted what she called her father’s “real greatness” with the “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice,” a reference to Trump. Politics, though, were less important than the American elite’s collective exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of its policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.

Do you remember the week-long series of events upon the death of George McGovern, who fought with great distinction in WWII, became a senator, ran for president and lost, then continued on in the Senate for many years thereafter? McGovern died in 2012. You don't remember the show? Heck you may not have even heard he died. But as you suspected, this really wasn't about John McCain, either. Back to Goldman:

By civility and bipartisanship, the Establishment refers to the policy consensus that squandered America’s dominant position in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. America had no military competitors of importance when George W. Bush took office in 2001, and an edge in high technology that made the American economy seem insuperable.  Since then:

• China has taken America’s place as the leading exporter of high-tech equipment;
• America faces credible military competition from China;
• Real median household income hasn’t grown since 2000;
• The civilian labor force participation rate has fallen from 67% in 2000 to 63% today;
• Productivity growth has languished at 1% a year since the global financial crisis;
• US federal debt has between 2000 and 2018 has doubled as a share of GDP;
• The American economy became “cartelized, corrupt and anti-competitive,” dominated by a handful of tech monopolies who combined to crush competition.
• Bush, supported by Senator McCain and the Republican mainstream, spent $5.6 trillion chasing the phantom of democracy in the Middle East, not to mention more than 6,700 American dead, more than 50,000 wounded and millions of lives disrupted.

That is why American voters elected Donald Trump in 2016. The bipartisan Establishment had circled the wagons to protect itself from accountability for its blunders. The same pool of public officials managed a failed foreign policy, and the same revolving door of bankers and regulators bailed out the banks.

The establishment intends to take it all back in November. And they want you to know it's going to happen. Get your mind right.

There's a whole lot more at the link, including a meditation on the straight line from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush. You should read it all.

To the point

Kurt Schlichter, making the point that needs to be made, yet again:

The post-war order did not start out as a massive scam, but we’re really far post the war today, and different times require different arrangements. Back in the late 1940s, with Europe in ruins and America relatively unscathed – actually, ascendant – it made sense for us to pick up the slack to help our allies get on their feet again. It was a hand-up, not a hand-out. The Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe, was genius – it created a bulwark against communism while ensuring prosperity.

But that was 70 years ago. Things change. The USSR is gone (a spectacular victory of the postwar order). Germany and the rest of Europe are no longer smoldering piles of rubble (another success). In fact, they are now prosperous and complacent, and of course they don’t want the American subsidy to end. It allows them to pay-off their barren, soul-dead populations via their bloated welfare states with the money they don’t have to contribute to their own defense. America snapping a ball and chain around its ankle in the form of the noxious climate pact lets them virtue signal, while unequal trade arrangements let them take advantage of our markets while blocking access to theirs. They can posture by importing half the Third World because our generosity (and gullibility) gives them the flexibility to do it.

It's rarely about virtue any more. It's always about virtue signaling. More at the link.

She seems nice

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

For what it's worth, I don't watch Battlestar Galactica either

That's some of the collected wisdom and deep thoughts of Sarah Jeong, freshly minted member of the New York Times editorial board. Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

• I don't have any say over who joins the editorial board of the Gray Lady.
• If this is the sort of person the Times thinks ought to help guide their efforts, that's their business.
• I do think they ought to own the decision, though.
• Apologies in advance for being just another dog pissing on a fire hydrant, but my opinion about the Times in general and Ms. Jeong in particular? To hell with them.

Divide

When Donald Trump began his campaign in 2015, I was disgusted with him. During 2016, I publicly identified myself as a NeverTrumper. For however long Trump is president, I'll never be very comfortable with him. But he is the president. And many of the people who oppose him are far worse than Trump is. 

John Kass, writing for the Chicago Tribune, makes the salient point:

So, what is bothersome isn’t that reporters and many pundits don’t understand Trump. I really don’t know who does understand him. He wasn’t my choice for president.

But what concerns me are his voters, our countrymen and women. That’s half of our nation. And what bothers me is that I really don’t think many in journalism want to understand them.

Shame them? Yes. Understand them? No.

Pharisees come in many packages. Back to Kass:

But Trump’s voters know what put him in the White House. It wasn’t merely that Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. It was that Trump voters detested the crowd that backed her, loathed them; and those voters in turn were viewed as something to be stepped on, to be ridiculed for heresy.

By not wanting to understand them, I worry that journalism blinds itself to something very real, critical and, in the long term, dangerous in our nation: A simmering resentment against the establishment in much of red state America.

And it’s not going away even if Trump goes away.

I've spent the better part of the past 18 months trying to grapple with these issues, especially in this feature. Kass is correct -- from what I see, the concerns of many Trump voters are somehow illegitimate, at least to those who make their living telling us how the world is. And that leads to a bad place. Victor Davis Hanson senses it, too:

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world.

One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. That was a strange development. After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof?

In many cases, people who voted for Trump provided the services Hanson describes. My job requires me to market products and services that people who lay tile require. I can't ignore their concerns and stay in business. And those who earn their living in media shouldn't, either. But too often they do. Back to Kass:

Think back on that laughter, on that giggling when she talked of “deplorables.” What followed were the snickers of the clique who get the joke at the expense of those who don’t.

That laughter stuck. And Trump voters took the memory of it to the polls on Election Day. Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump voters overwhelmingly gave him the Electoral College victory.

Now, Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump.

Let’s say their Manafort fantasies come true, and he cuts a deal, and he serves Trump to special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the orange presidential head is placed upon a platter.

Then what?

What do you do with the millions who voted for Trump? Mock them into submission? Have them grovel and beg forgiveness before they’re re-educated?

You don’t have to understand Trump. But it’s dangerous not to understand the 63 million who voted for him. They’re not going into exile. They’re here.

And the lesson I've learned? They are me.

Althouse cuts to the quick

Why do people love Trump? Or at least some people? As Ann Althouse suggests, maybe it's not who he is, but rather who he isn't. More to the point, he's not Richard Cohen, whose WaPo column Althouse eviscerates: This is one of the better takedowns of smug liberalism that you'll see:

Cohen has exactly one sentence that tries to say why people like Trump, and it's incredibly weak:

My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. 

Yes, yes, I know. You're so sure you and your friends are the good people. Your unshakeable love for yourself and your friends is glaringly evident, as usual. By the way, if the Trumpsters are raging against the sexually tolerant, why are they they tolerating Trump's sexual behavior?

It's that "unshakeable love for yourself" that gets liberals in trouble. Self-regard is never attractive and while Trump himself is a vast sea of self-regard, he finds ways to give people a wink that shows he knows it's a game. Consider this tweet, which sent one of my lefty college friends into a paroxysm of sputtering rage :

Everybody's favorite!

 "Your favorite President" is a wink to his audience. Trump knows full well that millions of Americans, like my college friend, go ballistic at such rhetorical tropes. Not in My Name, you orange-y Hitler! Back to Althouse:

A more accurate headline would be a question, "Why do people like Trump?," not what looks like a promise to answer that question. Elite media people like Cohen should finally come around to asking the question humbly, confessing to their abject failure even to admit that they've needed to ask it and rejecting their imperious concentration on telling people what they should think. Look at all these reasons to loathe Trump. Come on, you idiots, you're embarrassing yourselves by not loathing him yet. It hasn't worked, and yet you continue to do it.

And because they continue to do it, they are Bourbons, forgetting nothing and learning nothing.

Fair reading

Writing for the American Spectator, former federal prosecutor George Parry provides a valuable service by pointing out what is obvious:

So, what did Trump do that for the thousandth time has summoned the furies of Le Résistance de la Gauche?

He — gasp — declined to publicly scold and insult Putin to his face and questioned the probity of our intelligence community, i.e., the deep state cabal who have been trying for the past three years to frame him for colluding with the Russians. In doing so, he pointed out the obvious fact that these ongoing efforts to destroy him have complicated and impeded his ability to conduct foreign policy especially in regard to this nation’s fraught relations with Russia, the world’s second largest nuclear power.

He was even so unpatriotic as to question the basis for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s latest pretend indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers which — to put it kindly — appears to be the product of questionable investigative work. Most tellingly, he asked how Team Mueller had determined that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer when the DNC has forbidden law enforcement access to its server. This is a not inconsiderable question. 

Parry is reading things correctly I noticed one thing about Trump's remarks that stand out. He tweeted the following:

"MY" does not equal John Brennan

Trump also mentioned Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, by name. Coats has to manage a lot of people who are gunning for his boss, but he can't really get rid of those people easily, or even at all in many cases.

It may not be possible to completely reform the Swamp. Its denizens are intelligent, resourceful, remorseless, and ruthless. There are thousands of Peter Strzoks in Washington, willing to do whatever they can to stop this administration from succeeding. Cleaning them out is a big job.

Good riddance

The Iran deal is dead, at least for now. And we can only hope the arrogant worldview that brought it about is gone as well. Matthew Continetti:

The worldview Trump opposes privileges therapy and dialogue over realism and hard decisions. It imagines that the Iranian theocracy is a reliable or trustworthy hedge against Sunni power and will liberalize gradually as the arc of justice progresses. These are the ideas that motivated the presidency of Barack Obama. The Iran deal was the signature achievement of Obama's second term, and it is now gone. In truth, though, Obama's legacy was disappearing long before Trump made his announcement. Obama's legacy, like much of his self-presentation, was a mirage, a pleasing and attractive image that, upon closer inspection, loses coherence.

You didn't have to inspect it that closely, actually. There's more:

Because he governed so extensively through executive order and administrative fiat, because he was so contemptuous of criticism and had a "my way or the highway" approach to negotiations with Republicans (though not with Iranians), the longevity of Obama's agenda depended heavily on his party winning a third consecutive term in the White House. As Tom Cotton warned the Iranians years ago, an agreement entered into by a president and not submitted to the Senate as a treaty can be abrogated by the next man who holds the office. Hillary Clinton's failure doomed the Iran deal and the reputations it had established. It was Barack Obama and John Kerry who allowed Donald Trump to exit the deal by rejecting longstanding procedure. Perhaps it was knowledge of this fact that inspired Kerry in his desperate attempt to preserve the agreement.

For all the claims we hear about his autocratic ways, Donald Trump isn't a tenth as imperious as his predecessor. And the timing of getting out of this deal is good, too. Iran took the money it received from Obama and used it on the battlefield in Syria. That hasn't worked out so well. There has always been plenty of unrest in the country, too. While no one loved the Shah, life was, in the main, better for a lot of Iranians back then. Consider this image from Tehran University in the early 1970s:

Could just as easily be the U.S.

 These women, assuming they still are alive, would be approaching the age of 70 today. I'm guessing the life they had then would look pretty good now. Watch what happens.

This summer I hear the drumming

The best observer of the current moment continues to be Victor Davis Hanson. And what he's observing is, well, frightening:

Each cycle of hysteria demands another, as the race to the bottom has descended into which celebrity or politician can discover the most provocative — or crude — Trump expletive. “S***” and “f***” are now the ordinary vocabulary of angry Democratic politicos and officeholders. Are we reaching a point in the so-far-failed Resistance where little is left except abject violence in the manner of the Roman or French Revolution? The problem for Trump’s pop-culture foes is not whether to imagine or advocate killing the president. That’s a given. They just need to agree on the means of doing so: decapitation (Kathy Griffin), incineration (David Crosby), stabbing (the Shakespeare in the Park troupe), shooting (Snoop Dogg), explosives (Madonna), old-fashioned, Lincoln-style assassination (Johnny Depp), death by elevator (Kamala Harris), hanging (a CSU professor), or simple generic assassination (a Missouri state legislator).

There's more:

After the prior era of hysteria, between 2005 and 2008, when books and docudramas staged the imagined assassination of George W. Bush, and celebrities like Michael Moore and activists such as Cindy Sheehan reduced Bush to the status of a war criminal, the Left in 2009 demanded a return to normal political discourse and comportment, with the election of Barack Obama. A newly contrite and apologetic America was abruptly worth believing in again. In 2009, the CIA and FBI suddenly were reinvented as hallowed agents of change.

And there's more, with the next two words being the crucial ones:

Bush careerists, including Clapper and Brennan, were now damning the very counterterrorism practices that they once helped put in place, while offering Obama-like politically correct sermons on the benign nature of Islamism. Surveillance and jailing were appropriate punishments for suspected Obama apostates (ask James Rosen or Nkoula Basseley Nakoula). The IRS was weaponized for use against Obama’s ideological opponents. Suggestions that the president was unfit or worse became near treasonous. Unity was the new patriotism. The assumption was that Obama had ushered in a half-century of progressive norms, not that he so alienated the country that he birthed Donald Trump.

Trump won because he wasn't part of the cabal. But in order for Trump to have any chance of curing the fever, we need to see something Hanson despairs we'll see:

We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

It is. I sense a long hot summer ahead. And, of course, hit the link.

Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to

Victor Davis Hanson is asking questions:

For all his gossip and intrigue, [Michael] Wolff offers little insight into why such a supposedly disruptive and dysfunctional campaign team won the presidency. The victory, according to Wolff, was to the surprise of Trump and his advisors themselves! The logic of Wolff’s argument is that a pathetic Trump team that did not really wish to beat Clinton, Inc. If true, that paradox would say what exactly about Hillary’s fate? That wasting a mere year to win something you do not want is preferable to spending 17 years scheming in vain for your life’s ambition?

Wolff’s ogre purportedly sloppily eats Big Macs in bed, golfs more than Obama did, has no hair at all on the top of his head, and at 71 is supposedly functionally illiterate. OK, perhaps someone the last half-century read out loud to Trump the thousands of contracts he signed. But what we wish to know from Wolff is how did his trollish Trump figure out that half the country—the half with the more important Electoral College voice—was concerned about signature issues that either were unknown to or scorned by his far more experienced and better-funded rivals?

And more:

Why did not a well-read Marco Rubio or later Yale Law graduate Hillary Clinton focus on unfair trade and declining manufacturing, illegal immigration, unnecessary and optional overseas interventions, and the excesses of the deep administrative “swamp” state?

Who discovered these issues or knew how to develop them? Was it really the feisty Corey Lewandowski? The genius Paul Manafort? How, then, could Wolff’s idiot grasp that these concerns were the keys to flipping purple swing-states that had previously been written off as reliably Democratically patronized clinger/irredeemable/deplorable territory by far better informed and more tech-savvy campaign operatives?

Wolff doesn't care about any of that, really. We just need to know the Leader of the Free World is icky. We did know all that -- Le Grand Orange has been in the news since the early 1980s -- yet he got millions of people to vote for him. Why? Hanson is not done asking questions:

Furthermore, given that Wolff argues that the Trump inner circle seems to be little different from the Trump of “The Apprentice” reality TV fame, why, then, would half the country vote for someone who has orange skin and combed over yellow hair, and is supposedly paranoid to the degree of eating junk food out of fear of being poisoned?

What does that ribaldry say about the voters lack of confidence in the more normal Harvard or Yale Law alternative nursery of properly schooled presidents? Is Trump’s crudity tolerable given the 2016 alternative of breaking federal law by setting up a home-cooked email server, and lying about it, but doing so with the fawning admiration of bicoastal elite culture?

If, in reductionist terms, half of the country accepted the crude antithesis of refined New York-Washington establishment expertise, why exactly was that?

I've come to believe what's happening here is an exercise in negation, a Goodbye To All That to technocracy and the cult of expertise that has been building along the Potomac since Herbert Hoover, or even Woodrow Wilson. If the meritocracy has no evident merit, the whole thing collapses.

Get Your Mind Right

Joel Kotkin, making an important point about the state of play:

America’s authoritarian shift did not start with Trump’s election, but has been brewing for years. In the Obama years, we lived under “pen and phone” rule by decree that largely disempowered both Congress and local control. The former president’s legacy to the progressive coalition — paused briefly when power unexpectedly went to the GOP — means continued Democratic support for agglomeration of power in the executive.

This form of executive dictatorship is now more likely to return to the White House in 2020. The notion of enlightened rule from above may have even been further justified by the very fact that what Time’s Joe Klein has called “a nation of dodos” voted for Trump in the first place. The hoi polloi can be appealed to and cajoled, it appears, but not really trusted.

If you aren't sure who the hoi polloi are, you're one of them. Back to Kotkin:

Unlike Trump, whose political methods are both offensive and self-defeating, the mandarins can count on support from most of the media, the non-profit world and the ascendant techie wing of the tech/media oligarchy, what Daniel Bell called “the priests of the machine.” Unlike the factionalized Republicans, the new mandarinate — entertainment, news media, law, software — share a strong commitment to a common progressive ideology.

More important still, the mandarins control most of the means of communication, particularly those that attract younger people. This will assist, as our secular pontiff, Jerry Brown, put it, efforts to successfully “brainwash” the masses. China’s recently anointed emperor, Xi Jinping, admired by Brown and many other American mandarins, may emerge as the new role model. That is, after Xi has shown how control of education and media can work on getting the masses to embrace “right thinking.”

What is true and proper is whatever our betters tell us is true and proper. Better get your mind right.

Everybody must get zoned

Back in the early 1990s, before we moved to to the Twin Cities, I lived in the Chicago area and worked for a big law firm in Chicago that had over 300 attorneys. Much of the firm's work was in real estate, including big real estate deals for properties like shopping malls. One of the attorneys at the firm was an expert in zoning and he was proud to tell anyone who would listen that he was going to be helping the city of Houston develop its first zoning laws. I don't think he got very far.

Houston has been in the news because it took a huge shot from Hurricane Harvey. As you may know, among the many features of Houston is that the city doesn't have the sorts of zoning laws that you find in other areas. This has always bothered the bien pensants of the world, who equate Houston with being benighted and profligate, the embodiment of urban sprawl and bad carbon footprints, like that. And because Houston suffered so much damage from Harvey and had so many problems, the bien pensants are blaming Houston's lack of zoning for exacerbating the problems. Here's a typical example from the website Quartz.com:

Largely unobstructed either by rules or by natural features such as mountains, the Houston area sprawled. Between 1992 and 2010 alone nearly 25,000 acres (about 10,000 hectares) of natural wetland infrastructure was wiped out, the Texas A&M research shows. Most of the losses were in Harris County, where almost 30% of wetlands disappeared.

Altogether, the region lost the ability to handle nearly four billion gallons (15 billion liters) of storm water. That’s equivalent to $600 million worth of flood water detention capacity, according to the university researchers’ calculations.

Sounds bad, right? But would it have made much difference? The invaluable Joel Kotkin doesn't think so:

Much blame for Harvey has been linked to development on the fringe, a major component of the region’s growth. Over an 18-year period, Houston lost about 25,000 acres of wetlands, which took away about 4 billion gallons of storm water detention capacity. In contrast Harvey dumped about 1 trillion gallons, meaning those wetlands could have only absorbed about 0.4% of Harvey’s deluge. Many flooded roads were consciously designed to hold storm water temporarily when there is nowhere for it to drain.

And would zoning have helped? Kotkin is skeptical:

The zoning argument is, simply put, bogus. Cities in the area that were heavily zoned, like West University, or intensely planned like Sugarland, got hit as hard as more haphazard areas. Harvey, it turns out, was an equal opportunity devastator. Similarly, Sandy dropped barely one-third the rain from Harvey, yet overwhelmed a dense and very zoned area. New Orleans before Katrina was dense and zoned; a lot of good it did them.

There can be advantages to zoning; I wouldn't want my neighbor to sell his property to someone who turned it into a micro-sized oil refinery, nor would I want to move my house a mile or so north so I'd be downwind from the telephone pole yards. But rules and rulemaking aren't what make a city work. It's the sense of people in the community itself, the commitment to making the community a place where you can live and thrive, that makes the difference. Back to Kotkin:

In the decades before Katrina, as southern cities like Houston and Atlanta were burgeoning, New Orleans stagnated. Joel Garreau in his Nine Nations of North America described the Crescent City as a “marvelous collection of sleaziness and peeling paint.” The aristocracy enjoyed the city’s unparalleled culture while many ambitious people from its neighborhoods migrated elsewhere. Without a strong, engaged business community and middle class, there was little attempt to fix the infrastructure. This weak civic culture has left a city with huge economic challenges that a regenerated local business community is now gamely trying to address.

Houston performed very differently during Harvey. Mayor Turner and the Harris County Judge, Ed Emmett, epitomized level-headed leadership. Gov. Abbot, unlike Louisiana’s dithering Gov. Kathleen Blanco, swung immediately to action. Local volunteers pitched in, so much so, notes Houston-based analyst Tory Gattis, that many found themselves unable to participate because each Facebook call for help spurred more volunteers than could be accommodated. Houston can also count on something New Orleans lacked: a strong, and philanthropically inclined business establishment who are pouring millions into recovery efforts.

We won't be talking much about the recovery in Houston in a year or so, because the people there will be making it happen without commentary. We're still worrying about the fate of New Orleans a dozen years after Katrina. You can plan all you want, but if people aren't buying the plan, it won't matter.

The proper thought experiment

Writing for WaPo, Eugene Volokh comes up with the right hypothetical regarding this week's scandal to end all scandals:

Say that, in Summer 2016, a top Hillary Clinton staffer gets a message: “A Miss Universe contestant — Miss Slovakia — says that Donald Trump had sexually harassed her. Would you like to get her story?” The staffer says, “I’d love to,” and indeed gets the information, which he then uses in the campaign.

Did the staffer and the Miss Universe contestant just commit a crime? Yes, under the analysis set forth in the past couple of days by some analysts, such as my University of California colleague and leading election law scholar Rick Hasen (UC Irvine School of Law) and by Common Cause; Hasen was cited by the Wall Street Journal and CNN; similar arguments were quoted by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate).

If this theory is true, why have a First Amendment? Volokh makes the salient point:

If a Slovakian college student who is studying in the United States called the Clinton campaign with such information, that would be a crime. If the Clinton campaign heard that Mar-a-Lago was employing illegal immigrants in Florida and staffers went down to interview the workers, that would be a crime.

And it would make opposition research on much possible foreign misconduct virtually impossible. Say that Clinton’s campaign heard rumors that the construction of a Trump resort in Turkey might have involved some shenanigans. It’s likely impossible to effectively follow up on that without soliciting some valuable information from foreign nationals, such as foreign government officials who were (hypothetically and allegedly) bribed, or rivals who may have a motive to provide information (recognizing, of course, that any such information may be untrustworthy unless it’s otherwise corroborated). Or say that Bernie Sanders’s campaign heard rumors of some misconduct by Clinton on her trips abroad — it wouldn’t be allowed to ask any foreigners about that.

Volokh has the answer:

 First, noncitizens, and likely even non-permanent-residents, in the United States have broad First Amendment rights. See Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945) (“freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country”); Underwager v. Channel 9 Australia, 69 F.3d 361 (9th Cir. 1995) (“We conclude that the speech protections of the First Amendment at a minimum apply to all persons legally within our borders,” including ones who are not permanent residents).

Second, Americans have the right to receive information even from speakers who are entirely abroad. See Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301 (1965). Can Americans — whether political candidates or anyone else — really be barred from asking questions of foreigners, just because the answers might be especially important to voters?

The Supreme Court did affirm (without opinion) a federal court decision in Bluman v. FEC, 800 F. Supp. 2d 281 (D.D.C. 2011), that upheld a ban on contributions and independent expenditures by non-citizen non-permanent-residents, on the theory that the government can use such a ban to limit foreign influence on American elections. But the panel decision expressly stressed that it was limited to the restriction on spending money. And it seems to me that restrictions on providing information to the campaigns — or on campaigns seeking such information — can’t be constitutional. Can it really be that the Clinton campaign could be legally required to just ignore credible allegations of misconduct by Trump, just because those allegations were levied by foreigners?

More to the point; if Fredo Trump cannot talk to Russian lawyers, then how could anyone at all have talked to anyone about the infamous Steele dossier, which also included (purportedly) foreign sources? It's nonsense.

Much, much more at the link, including the dissembling response from Hasen as he defends his nonsensical interpretation of the law.

I have only come here seeking knowledge

Things they would not teach me of in college:

Colleges have been perceived as liberal bastions for decades, but the latest round of campus culture warring—beginning around 2014 and continuing through the present day—has had a sudden and dramatic impact on conservatives’ perceptions of the Ivory Tower. According to a new Pew survey, Republicans saw colleges and universities as having a “positive effect on the way things are going in the country” by about a 20 point margin until 2015. In the last two years, however, GOP esteem of America’s higher education institutions started to collapse. Today, Republican [sic] 58 percent of Republican voters say colleges have a negative effect on American society, compared to just 36 percent who say they have a positive effect.

Writing for the American Interest, Jason Willick explains the current dynamic well:

Most campus lefties will probably look at these numbers as evidence that Republicans are even more anti-intellectual than they thought, and that the #resistance against them needs to be taken up a few notches. This would be a big mistake. The homogenization of leftwing views on college campuses, and the obvious hostility to conservative ones was bound to produce a backlash from conservative voters. That backlash has been wrapped up in class conflict between a highly-credentialed professional class and a working class that finds higher education and the well-paying jobs it provides to the elite increasingly out of reach.

And, more importantly, the conservatives hold the purse strings:

Meanwhile, Republicans control an overwhelming share of America’s statehouses, and so have unprecedented power to defund and restructure public higher education. And Congressional Republicans could restrict the flow of student loans that academia depends on or subject massive university endowments to ordinary tax rates (most are currently exempt). In other words, America’s higher education system, as currently structured, depends on consensus support from both parties. If universities continue to torch their reputation with the right, they may find that some of the privileges and resources and social prestige they have become accustomed to will go up in flames as well.

This is why Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is feuding with the UW system; he'd prefer more money go into undergraduate instruction and less into the scholarly research that fills the obscure journals of academe. He's not wrong in wanting that, and he doesn't particularly care whether the denizens of the UW system excoriate him about his preferences, since they would find another thing to complain about if he weren't digging in their sandbox.

I'm not sure if the Pew survey is correct, but there's little question academe is full of leftists. And as a parent with one child a year away from graduating from a liberal arts college, and also about to send a second child off to college, it's a bit of a conundrum. There are only a couple of explicitly conservative colleges in the country, but my kids never seriously looked at those schools. We haven't been trying to steer the decisions our kids make; as it happens, one school which has had significant issues with protests and outright fakery in the reasons for the protests, was on my daughter's list, but she has already eliminated that school on other grounds. All of the schools on her list are to the left, but at least two are ranked highly for ensuring free speech and avoiding the shouting down of opposing views. My son's school is liberal, but the college president, on my son's orientation day, explicitly said "we must listen to conservative voices" and asserted that conservative views had a place on campus. And her promise has held true. It's a start.