Rod Dreher's Blog, page 537

What If Trump Wins?

Writing in The New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a long, provocative piece exploring what would likely happen in the event of a Trump presidential victory. He talked to a number of people involved in politics, government, economics, foreign policy, and so on, asking them practical questions. The answers would be sobering, if sobriety were a thing we did anymore.

Some uneasily pro-Trump Republicans assure themselves that Congress would put the reins on a President Trump. Not so fast:

What, exactly, can a President do? To prevent the ascent of what the Anti-Federalist Papers, in 1787, called “a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America,” the founders gave Congress the power to make laws, and the Supreme Court the final word on the Constitution. But in the nineteen-thirties Congress was unable to mount a response to the rise of Nazi Germany, and during the Cold War the prospect of sudden nuclear attack further consolidated authority in the White House.

“These checks are not gone completely, but they’re much weaker than I think most people assume,” Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. “Congress has delegated a great deal of power to the President, Presidents have claimed power under the Constitution, and Congress has acquiesced.” The courts, Posner added, are slow. “If you have a President who is moving very quickly, the judiciary can’t do much. A recent example of this would be the war on terror. The judiciary put constraints on President Bush—but it took a very long time.”

Besides:

Trump could achieve many objectives on his own. A President has the unilateral authority to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, to order a ban on Muslims, and to direct the Justice Department to give priority to certain offenses, with an eye to specific targets. During the campaign, he has accused Amazon of “getting away with murder tax-wise,” and vowed, if he wins, “Oh, do they have problems.”

Any of those actions could be contested in court. The American Civil Liberties Union has analyzed Trump’s promises and concluded, in the words of the executive director, Anthony Romero, that they would “violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.” Romero has said that the A.C.L.U. would “challenge and impede implementation of his proposals,” but that strategy highlights the essential advantage of the President: the first move. “The other branches are then presented with a fait accompli,” according to a 1999 paper by the political scientists Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell. After the September 11th attacks, Bush signed an executive order authorizing warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency, and, though lawmakers voiced concerns, and lawsuits were filed, the program continued until 2015, when Congress ordered an end to bulk phone-metadata collection. Similarly, Obama has used his powers to raise fuel-economy standards and temporarily ban energy exploration in parts of Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.

Here’s something that will keep us up nights:

For many years, Trump has expressed curiosity about nuclear weapons. In 1984, still in his thirties, he told the Washington Post that he wanted to negotiate nuclear treaties with the Soviets. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “I think I know most of it anyway.” According to Bruce G. Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, Trump encountered a U.S. nuclear-arms negotiator at a reception in 1990 and offered advice on how to cut a “terrific” deal with a Soviet counterpart. Trump told him to arrive late, stand over the Soviet negotiator, stick his finger in his chest, and say, “F*ck you!” Recently, a former Republican White House official whom Trump has called on for his insights told me, “Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

We talk about how Hillary Clinton is “Nixon in a pants suit” (I have used that phrase on multiple occasions), but in a way, Trump is a more reckless version of Tricky Dick:

Watching Trump on the campaign trail, Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, said, “Trump tweets what Nixon knew not to say outside his inner circle, and we know what he said from the tapes. What Nixon would do is project onto situations the conspiracies that he would have concocted if in the same position. Nixon was convinced that the Democrats were spying on him. So he spied on them. To himself, he rationalized his actions by saying, ‘I’m only doing what my enemies are doing to me.’ ”

Surprisingly, the Chinese will probably be pretty chill with President Trump:

In some cases, Trump’s language has had the opposite effect of what he intends. He professes a hard line on China (“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said in May), but, in China, Trump’s “America First” policy has been understood as the lament of a permissive, exhausted America. A recent article in Guancha, a nationalist news site, was headlined “trump: america will stop talking about human rights and no longer protect nato unconditionally.”

Shen Dingli, an influential foreign-policy scholar at Fudan University, in Shanghai, told me that Chinese officials would be concerned about Trump’s unpredictability but, he thinks, have concluded that, ultimately, he is a novice who makes hollow threats and would be easy to handle. They would worry about the policies of a President Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, oversaw Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, intended to balance China’s expansion. “She is more predictable and probably tough,” Shen said. “Human rights, pivoting—China hates both.”

There’s a lot more, so read the whole thing. I have a few reactions.

1. This piece is the voice of the Establishment speaking out against Trump, who threatens it. It is rich reading Michael Chertoff, who served in the administration of the president who took us into Iraq after 9/11, warning how “reckless” President Trump would be. Also, the economic alarms sounded in the piece by Larry Summers ought to be considered in light of the fact that he, along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan , set the economy on a course for the 2007-08 crash. A committed Trump voter will not be persuaded by this piece, simply because he discounts the authority of the people quoted in it.

2. But that’s as foolish as taking everything they say at face value. Not everybody quoted in the piece is ideological, and some even work for Trump. The people Osnos quotes may not be infallible, but they know a lot more about their fields than you or I do. Is it really wise to doubt the top financial analyst who said if a President Trump repeated candidate Trump’s reckless public speculation that the US would consider defaulting on its sovereign debt, the global economic consequences would likely be calamitous?

3. A Trump presidency would be destabilizing in a way we have never seen before. Trump is not a conservative; he’s a radical. That’s why so many people like him. But we should think hard about whether or not we can afford for someone as powerful as the American president to be a radical. True, Ronald Reagan was a transformative president who struck fear into the heart of Establishment Washington. Reagan understood that the sclerotic Establishment needed shaking up. Trump, though, is no Reagan. Reagan had a vision, and he had convictions. Trump only has attitude, and a very thin skin.

4. On the other hand, the Establishment needs destabilizing. From the Osnos piece:

Randall Schweller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told me, “I think we’re just at a point in our history where he’s probably the right guy for the job. Not perfect, but we need someone different, because there’s such calcification in Washington. Americans are smart collectively, and if they vote for Trump I wouldn’t worry.”

There was a reason Trump beat what pundits had considered the best GOP presidential field in ages: a plurality of Republican voters didn’t want what they were selling. If you find this mystifying, then I would suggest that you are out of touch with what’s happening in this country. Trump (and Sanders) didn’t come from nowhere. A large number of Americans have waning confidence in the system as it is. Perhaps the most depressing thing about Hillary Clinton is the sure confidence that she means Four More Years Of Staying The Course. The only thing more depressing is the idea that the only thing standing between that and America is Donald Trump. If Hillary wins, I expect her term to be like Francois Hollande’s in France: desultory, tiresome, and tired.

5. On the other hand, giving the power of the American presidency to a man of such vanity, arrogance, incuriosity, and recklessness — negative qualities that the destabilizing visionary Ronald Reagan never had — could be catastrophic. Osnos concludes that nervous Trump voters who tell themselves not to worry, that Congress and other forces will restrain him, are fooling themselves:

Trump presents us with the opposite risk: his victory would be not a failure of imagination but, rather, a retreat to it—the magical thought that his Presidency would be something other than the campaign that created it.

6. By the way, for those who think Trump will chart a new, unorthodox economic course should note that his chief economic adviser is Stephen Moore, the founder of the Club For Growth and an unreconstructed supply sider. Excerpt from the Osnos piece:

Moore visited Trump on his plane, and, during a series of meetings, he and others crafted an economic plan based on the cornerstone of supply-side economics: cut taxes to encourage people to work and businesses to invest. “That’s basically the theory there,” Moore said. “This is the signature issue for conservatives since Reagan went into office. This has been the battle between the left and the right. The liberals say tax rates don’t matter”—for stimulating growth. “We say they do.”

“This is the signature issue for conservative since Reagan went into office.” Huh. Not for this conservative. The idea that what America really wants and needs is more Reagan-era supply-side economics; the concept that this is the message of the 2016 campaign season — well, it’s remarkable. And this is who Trump is listening to on economics.

7. Economics, foreign policy, domestic policy are all on Osnos’s radar — but he completely ignores culture. That’s huge. This may well be because he’s deep inside the liberal cultural bubble and can’t even imagine how it feels to be a Deplorable. He should read Ross Douthat today. Ross talks about how fed up a lot of people are with the kind of social liberalism that jumps down professional goofball Jimmy Fallon’s throat for having treated his guest Donald Trump like a normal person, instead of History’s Greatest Monster. Excerpt:

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

Douthat says these gains create problems for the Democrats. For one, it makes liberals confident that they can roll over cultural conservatives, and will be pushing elected Democrats to do just that. For another:

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

That, plus this analysis by Notre Dame law professor Rick Garnett (who, like me, is not planning to vote for either candidate this fall), points to something even smart liberals like Evan Osnos can’t seem to grasp about why lots of people fear Hillary more than Trump:

Although Trump is a dangerously unfit and morally objectionable candidate, I am clear-eyed, I think, about the law-and-policy consequences of Clinton’s election and administration. Many of these will be, from my perspective, bad. The Democrats’ platform this year has moved to the left and, in particular, that party’s stated position on abortion rights and funding is deeply unjust. More important than a party’s platform, however, are an administration’s personnel. A Clinton administration will be carefully staffed with well-credentialed, competent, ideologically motivated people. They will interpret regulations, enforce rules, exercise discretion, and control funds in a wide range of consequential departments and agencies. In the modern administrative state, and particularly after President Obama’s embrace of an expansive view of executive power and regulatory authority, this is where the action is.

And so, whether or not the Democrats control Congress, committed but largely unaccountable activists, lawyers, and think-tankers will aggressively and creatively use a variety of tools, including litigation, accreditation, licensing, contracting conditions, funding-eligibility determinations, and “Dear Colleague” letters, to pursue their goals. I expect they will do what they can—which is a lot—to undermine or overturn reasonable limits on abortion, remove barriers to and increase support for embryo-destructive research and physician-assisted suicide, hamstring school-choice and education-reform efforts, narrow the sphere of religious freedom, and continue divisive “culture wars” campaigns.

Also unfortunate, in my view, will be the effect of a third consecutive Democratic administration on the federal courts. About a third of federal judges are Obama appointees and the next administration will replace hundreds who were selected by Reagan and the first President Bush. Both the Supreme Court and the courts of appeals will move significantly to the left, and the effects of this shift will not be limited to, say, a more permissive stance regarding gun control and campaign-finance regulation. There is every reason to think that a 6-3 “liberal” Court could backtrack on letting parochial schools participate in voucher programs, on allowing states to ban euthanasia, and on permitting limits on late-term abortions. The Court’s role in civil society and in our country’s moral and policy arguments, which is already unhealthily outsized, would increase.

This is huge. To be fair to Osnos, his piece is about what a Trump administration would likely do, not what a Clinton administration would do. The truth is, it’s hard to predict what kind of people Trump would fill the federal bureaucracy with, and what kind of impact they would have on culture, in the sense Garnett means. Personnel is policy, though. From a cultural conservative point of view, though, as repulsive and vulgar as Trump is personally, there’s no question that the kind of militant liberal ideologues that would come with a Hillary Clinton administration will be out in the cold under Trump. And for some of us, that’s the best thing — maybe the only good thing — about him.

Trump Killed Outrage

If Donald J. Trump becomes president, we’re going to stumble towards 2020 preparing apologies to Warren G. Harding. Is there anybody else in the country whose political career would survive revelations like this? The Washington Post writes:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

There are more examples. And then:

More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

Whole thing here. 

Last week, Jonathan Martin wrote in the NYT:

In fact, this past week offered a vivid illustration of how little regard Mr. Trump has for the long-held expectations of America’s leaders. He is not only breaking the country’s political norms, he and his campaign aides are now all but mocking them.

More:

Routine falsehoods, unfounded claims and inflammatory language have long been staples of Mr. Trump’s anything-goes campaign. But as the polls tighten and November nears, his behavior, and the implications for the country should he become president, are alarming veteran political observers — and leaving them deeply worried about the precedent being set, regardless of who wins the White House.

“It’s frightening,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. “Our politics, because of him, is descending to the level of a third-world country. There’s just nothing beneath him. And I don’t know why we would think he would change if he became president. That’s what’s really scary.”

Stephen Hess, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, could not even contemplate the prospect of Mr. Trump as commander in chief.

“It’s incredibly depressing,” Mr. Hess said of Mr. Trump. “He’s the most profoundly ignorant man I’ve ever seen at this level in terms of understanding the American presidency, and, even more troubling, he makes no effort to learn anything.”

In 1998, in his book The Death Of Outrage: Bill Clinton And The Assault On American Ideals, conservative moralist Bill Bennett wrote:

In the end, the President’s apologists are attempting to redefine the standard of acceptable behavior for a President. Instead of upholding a high view of the office and the men who occupy it, they radically lower our expectation.

Last month, Bennett chastised anti-Trump Republicans, calling them people “who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”

Did somebody say something about moral decline?

UPDATE: I believe that if Trump becomes president, he will eventually be impeached, and on solid grounds. He cannot help himself. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.

Killing Terence Crutcher

What on earth did poor Terence Crutcher do to deserve killing? He was standing by his car, with his hands up. He was not armed, and had no gun in his car. From NPR:

In the recording from the Tulsa police helicopter, an officer is heard saying of Crutcher as he walks in front of Shelby, “Looks like that’s a bad dude, maybe on something.”

Officers had been called to the scene by passers-by who had reported a vehicle abandoned in the road. “He took off running,” a woman told a 911 operator, saying that the man said his vehicle might blow up. She added, “I think he’s smoking something.”

Shelby, who is white, was one of four police officers who were standing at the rear bumper of Crutcher’s car as he stood next to his vehicle around 7:45 p.m. Friday. She’s also the officer who shot him once, in the upper body — and who then radioed, “Shots fired.” Police say another officer used his Taser on Crutcher at nearly the same time he was shot.

More:

Tiffany Crutcher then went on to tell the media gathered in Tulsa, “You all want to know who that big ‘bad dude’ was. That big ‘bad dude’ was my twin brother. That big ‘bad dude’ was a father. That big ‘bad dude’ was a son. That big ‘bad dude’ was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud.

“That big ‘bad dude’ loved God; that big ‘bad dude’ was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week. That’s who he was.”

Tiffany Crutcher said her brother’s future was taken away because of negligence and incompetence — “and because he was a big ‘bad dude.'”

Three police officers were present, with weapons drawn, when Crutcher was shot dead. What kind of threat was he, really? The attorney for Ofc. Betty Shelby, who fired the shot, said:

Shelby’s attorney, Scott Wood, said Crutcher was not following the officers’ commands.

“He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that’s when she fired her shot,” Wood told the Tulsa World for a report Tuesday.

He must have done something, because a different officer tasered him at almost the same instant. But we don’t know yet. It’s not possible to see from the video. We should have learned by now to wait for the investigation before drawing conclusions. (A federal investigation is underway.) Whatever the outcome of the official inquiries, the fact remain that an unarmed black man was shot dead on the highway by a police officer. And that is at the very least a tragedy. We will see if it was a crime.

UPDATE: Oh, man:

Tulsa Police Sgt. Dave Walker later told the Tulsa World that investigators did recover a vial of PCP, the hallucinogen also known as Angel Dust, in Crutcher’s SUV.

But Crutcher family lawyers noted Tuesday that no drug tests had yet been done on the body.

“The toxicology has not come back,” said Crump. “She knew nothing about Terence Crutcher. For all she knew, he could have been the choirboy, the preacher, he could have been a drummer.”

Jasper said the drugs would not have been like Terence.

“It would have been out of character, he came from a faith-based family,” he said. But Jasper also noted that, even if his old friend was on drugs, “He deserved to be housed at a correctional facility, not a morgue.

Not so fast. Wait till the toxicology report comes back. If he was on PCP, that changes a lot.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Y

ou write: “What on earth did poor Terence Crutcher do to deserve killing?”

I think I am in general more sympathetic to the BLM crowd than most conservatives. However, I think it’s important to recognize that while most victims of police shootings don’t “deserve” to be shot, nevertheless many (at least) of the officers involved are justified in shooting, especially considering that they have quite literally sworn to enforce the law – including laws that compel citizens to comply with their orders in certain situations.

Consider the following thought experiment: i am in a public park playing with my children. I am licensed to carry a concealed weapon and am doing so. My son’s shop teacher, whom I have never met and never seen, sees my son playing in the park and, knowing my son’s enthusiasm for axes in shop class, runs toward my son brandishing a new axe that he wants to show him. All I see is a strange man running toward my son brandishing an axe, and I shoot and kill him.

Did the shop teacher “deserve” to die? Obviously not. Was I “justified” in shooting him? Obviously. Is it a tragedy? Manifestly.

I think cops are in situations analogous to this a lot more often than people understand. And I see this tacit and false dichotomy – between what victims “deserve” and what officers are “justified” in doing – on social media all the time. It makes the waters of the discourse more murky and exacerbates the already considerable tension in our country these days. Had to say something.

Good point.

Milo Is Coming To LSU

That’s Courtney Murr, president of an LGBT student group at LSU, on a planned protest against Milo Yiannopoulos when he comes to campus on Wednesday night. The stupid, it burns. This comment just goes to show that the words “diversity” and “inclusion” are nothing more than left-wing terms that signal ideological uniformity and the exclusion of viewpoints the left dislikes. What’s funny is that the minds of people like Courtney Murr are so marinated in this rhetoric that they say nitwit things like this above, and do not grasp the contradiction.

Whenever I see or hear the words “diversity” or “inclusivity,” I know that somebody is up to no good. It’s not that there is anything essentially wrong with actual diversity, or actual inclusivity. It’s that these terms have been entirely vacated of real meaning by cultural politics.

Amusingly, left-wing protesters trying to prevent students from hearing Milo speak were punked into signing up for fake tickets.  Outrageously, LSU’s “Chief Diversity Officer” suggested ways the university could ban Milo from campus, citing him as a security threat. In other words, the Chief Diversity Officer wanted to prevent a controversial speaker from appearing at a public forum, to protect the campus from violent protest by the intolerant Diversity mob.

I have no interest in anything Milo Yiannopoulos has to say. But I am going to go to his speech, if only to support by my presence his right to speak at my alma mater. When I was an undergraduate there, I was the main guy who brought Sixties radical Abbie Hoffman to campus to speak. This was the 1980s. The College Republican group was strong and active. It was a very conservative campus. And to the best of my knowledge, no conservatives opposed to Hoffman tried to get Daddy the college administration to intervene to stop his speech. Those were better, more authentically liberal times.

Mayors And Muslim Migration

New York, Paris, and London have all been major targets of Islamic terrorists. Today, all three cities are governed by left-wing mayors: New York has Bill de Blasio (Democrat), London has Sadiq Khan (Labour), and Paris has Anne Hidalgo (Socialist). In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, they declare that immigrants are “our strength.” More:

But it is wrong to characterize immigrant and refugee communities as radical and dangerous; in our experience, militant violence is vanishingly rare.

Notice the use of language here to obscure plain meaning. They are talking about Muslim migrants, but won’t say the M word. More:

Therefore, we must continue to pursue an inclusive approach to resettlement in order to combat the growing tide of xenophobic language around the globe. Such language will lead only to the increased marginalization of our immigrant communities, and without making us any safer.

Got it? The West needs to welcome more Muslim migrants to fight xenophobic language. And hey, if Europe’s Jews are too afraid to go to their synagogues on the High Holy days, too bad for them. The important thing is to fight xenophobic language by bringing in more foreign-born Muslims.

Our cities pledge to continue to stand for inclusivity, and that is why our cities support services and programs that help all residents, including our diverse immigrant communities, feel welcome, so that every resident feels part of our great cities.

“Inclusivity” and “diversity” are Orwellian words, in the sense that Orwell meant in his great short essay on “Politics and the English Language”. They are euphemisms meant to obscure what is actually being said by the speaker — in this case, “We need to bring in more Muslim migrants.” That’s a difficult thing for a politician to advocate in a time of random Muslim terror inflicted on those cities, so the politicians reach for euphemisms to manipulate public opinion.

More:

In New York and Paris, for example, municipal ID programs

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio (a katz / Shutterstock.com)

have achieved great success in increasing a sense of belonging among immigrants and allowing for greater access to services like bank accounts and veterans benefits and city resources like libraries and cultural institutions. In less than two years, New York’s municipal ID program, known as IDNYC, has signed up over 10 percent of the city’s total population and garnered strong praise from a diverse coalition of community members, advocates and institutional partners.

Programs like IDNYC build safer cities because immigrants and refugees know that they are included and recognized by their governments.

That’s the theory, but how do we know these programs have worked? Obviously I don’t know that they haven’t worked, but simply asserting that these programs have reduced terrorism ought to be treated skeptically.

And, here we go:

Investing in the integration of refugees and immigrants is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. Refugees and other foreign-born residents bring needed skills and enhance the vitality and growth of local economies, and their presence has long benefited our three cities.

The general issue of immigration is a big deal, but that’s not what the public is objecting to in this case. It is afraid of Muslim immigration. What “needed skills” do refugees from the Muslim world bring to European cities? Only a week ago in Germany, industrialists brought the bad news to Mama Merkel:

Germany’s blue-chip companies will have to explain to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday why they have managed to hire fewer than 100 refugees after around a million arrived in the country last year.

Merkel, fighting for her political life over her open-door policy, has summoned the bosses of some of Germany’s biggest companies to Berlin to account for their lack of action and exchange ideas about how they can do better.

Many of the companies say a lack of German-language skills, the inability of most refugees to prove any qualifications, and uncertainty about their permission to stay in the country mean there is little they can do in the short term.

A survey by Reuters of the 30 companies in Germany’s DAX stock market index found they could point to just 63 refugee hires in total. Several of the 26 firms who responded said they considered it discriminatory to ask about applicants’ migration history, so they did not know whether they employed refugees or how many.

Of the 63 hires, 50 are employed by Deutsche Post DHL, which said it applied a “pragmatic approach” and deployed the refugees to sort and deliver letters and parcels.

“Given that around 80 percent of asylum seekers are not highly qualified and may not yet have a high level of German proficiency, we have primarily offered jobs that do not require technical skills or a considerable amount of interaction in German,” a spokesman said by email.

Germany needs workers. Its unemployment rate is only 4 percent. And still, it cannot find jobs for these refugees, largely because they cannot speak German and don’t have demonstrable skills. The economic situation is much worse in France, where

the unemployment rate is 10 percent overall, and a staggering 24 percent among youth. Hidalgo’s city, Paris, has a massive problem assimilating the Muslims who are already there. Where, exactly, are the benefits of which the mayors speak?

Finally:

We know policies that embrace diversity and promote inclusion are successful. We call on world leaders to adopt a similar welcoming and collaborative spirit on behalf of the refugees all over the world during the summit meeting this week. Our cities stand united in the call for inclusivity. It is part of who we are as citizens of diverse and thriving cities.

Diversity! Inclusion! Inclusivity! Who can possibly take these left-wing politicians seriously? Again: they are using this shopworn cant not to inform the public discussion, but to pre-empt it. And it’s not even good propaganda. It’s like the op-ed was generated by the Human Resources Department at Dunder Mifflin.

De Blasio, Khan, Hidalgo and politically correct politicians like them live in a bubble. By refusing to speak clearly about the challenges before us, they leave the platform open for people like Trump and the European populists.

UPDATE: I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand. Of course there is a moral argument for welcoming Muslim migrants. I don’t know how persuasive that argument is, but it’s there, and it’s a serious one. That is not the argument that these mayors make. They are making an economic argument — and it’s extraordinarily weak. Padding it with “diversity” and “inclusivity” cant only makes it more transparently feeble. You can’t very well respond to me pointing out that the economic argument the mayors make is terrible by saying, “Yeah, but morality! Christianity!”

Against Stepford Politics

A reader left this comment:

I’m a leftist. I’ve long been disillusioned with the political elite, but this election is something altogether new in my experience. Maybe it’s that the disillusionment is more personal and closer to home. I feel like I’m in a desert. It’s as if friends and co-workers and the common “thought communities” I normally traffic in have become Stepford versions of themselves, sputtering predictable (and predictably lame) defenses of Clinton and everything she and the democratic party stand for. Yelling at anyone who disagrees because obviously it can only be ignorance or childishness. I’ve recognized the tendency on the left toward identity politics and usually have seen it as sincere, but insular and reductive and therefore unhelpful (and at times annoying). But now I really *see* it, and get what I didn’t get before: how a comfortable, non-reflective class, that is used to having nothing at stake in an election (it’s all a game), uses the emotion of identity politics so pervasively and smugly to distract from and never have to face its own failings and naked hypocrisy. It’s so obvious and disgusting to me now. And suddenly I’m on the other side of it! The mechanical rush-to-judgment and policing of boundaries of what is an acceptable view. If one good thing comes out of this election — and I don’t know that it will, but I hope so, and if what I’m experiencing isn’t actually in isolation — maybe it will be that we learn to finally see each other, on the left and the right, as just folks just trying to find and sort through what’s real and honest and sincere.

I find myself here, at TAC, for the first time with some regularity. I find myself searching for voices that are trying to interpret the strange and momentous events unfolding around us with some humanity — humanity toward those we may not share everyday perspectives or experiences with but may yet still have some things in common — rather than assuming an inevitable reversion to the mean, and slouching into worn prejudices. Reading columns at TAC, at times I feel a familiar reflex to disagree with this or that, but the disagreement seems different, less charged because more and more I find common cause and solidarity here. For example, the Benedict Option. It makes perfect and immediate sense to me, even if my version might more resemble a hippie organic vegan commune.

Dear Reddit: About That ‘VERY VIP’…

Hoo boy. Some Reddit users have done a bit of sleuthing. Via US News & World Report:

An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton’s private email server from users of the popular web forum.

A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a “VERY VIP” individual’s email address from archived content.

The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Here’s the text of the initial reddit post by stonetear, dated July 24, 2014:

Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out.

I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort.

Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?

As US News helpfully points out:

On July 23, 2014, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records, according to an FBI report released earlier this month on the bureau’s probe of her email use.

There’s more.  And The Hill adds:

The identity of the “stonetear” user is not confirmed. Reddit users point to the fact that an account on the online marketplace Etsy for a Paul Combetta has the username “stonetear” and the inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com.

If stonetear is Combetta, well, gosh, it’s almost as if Secretary Clinton sent down an order to destroy evidence that the State Department had agreed to turn over to the House committee. Nixon in a pants suit.

If there’s one thing you can count on the Clintons for, it’s skeezy drama. Whoever wins this fall, America’s executive branch is going to be governed by a liar.

UPDATE: A number of readers in the comments section says there is a benign explanation for this. Read the details in the comments, but basically they say Stonetear was simply trying to strip the e-mail address not to protect Hillary Clinton, but rather to keep the address from being made public when the documents were, to protect it for future use.

Identity Politics Of Deepest Trumpistan

A blogger named unagidon at the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal has a short reflection on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book about white voters in a southwest Louisiana parish. Hochschild set out to figure out why these white people vote against their interests (in her view). Here’s what unagidon says:

What interested me about the book is that I come from an urban version of the same place.  I’m a working class boy.  When I was growing up, everyone’s aspiration was to become the supervisor or the detective.  If college entered the picture (and I was the first on either side of my family to go) then becoming a teacher or an accountant became possible.  Most of my family consider themselves conservative.  Since I know them all well, I’ve never considered them as stupid or even misguided.  So why Trump? And why now?

Unagidon takes a quote from the book from one of its subjects, then comments:

At first reading, a quote like this might look like what is going on here is simply racism.  These people are white people afraid that they are becoming a minority in the United States and that they are going to lose their privileged status.  However, I would argue that behind this is a belief that there is a finite set of resources available to the government that are not being allocated to them in the proportions that they deserve.  Their judgement of what those proportions could be skewed by racial beliefs.  Or it could be skewed by the simple fact that they don’t see their own communities and issues being addressed.  (Remember that Liberals tend to speak of blacks, gays, immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, and the Syrian refugees yet to come as communities as well).  When these conservatives identify themselves as communities, based on race, religion, history, region, or almost anything else, they are mocked by the Left (who they see as running the government and the media) as backward, primitive, rednecks, hillbillies, etc.  And they feel insulted.

Trump is appealing to these people.

Unagidon continues:

We have to recognize that everyone has their own interest; that they feel part of their own community; that they see their communities as different from other communities…

If you’re not familiar with Commonweal, I should point out to you that it is very much not a pro-Trump magazine. Unagidon says it’s a shame that these people are turning to Trump to speak for them, but he (unagidon) makes a very good point here about white identity and the Left. I hate identity politics, but I really hate the double standard many on the Left have when it comes to practicing them. Trump is bad news for the country, for sure, but I don’t understand why it is considered normal and defensible for blacks, or gays, or Hispanics, to vote for Hillary because they perceive it to be in their interest as blacks, gays, Hispanics, etc. — but wicked for whites to do the same thing.

 

He Was Once Possessed

The Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby has said, “Before technology becomes an instrument, it is fundamentally a way of regarding the world that contains within itself an understanding of being, nature, and truth.” If you want to know the truth of this insight in a way that every single one of us can grasp, consider this must-read essay by Andrew Sullivan, about how technology nearly killed him. 

Before we dive into it, let me testify to the accuracy of what Sullivan says in this piece about himself. We had coffee in Boston in the spring of 2015. It was the first time I had seen him since he abruptly left his highly successful blogging gig. He looked like a different man: radiant with serenity, skin glowing, in physical shape, with a palpable sense of inner peace about him. What on earth happened to you? I asked.

He told me that he got offline, and that it had made all the difference in the world to his health and well being. Now, in that essay, Andrew tells all. Excerpts:

A year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

Eventually he checked himself into a meditative retreat center for a kind of information detox experience. It was really hard at first, living in the silence, without his smartphone or an online connection. But then:

Soon enough, the world of “the news,” and the raging primary campaign, disappeared from my consciousness. My mind drifted to a trancelike documentary I had watched years before, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence, on an ancient Carthusian monastery and silent monastic order in the Alps. In one scene, a novice monk is tending his plot of garden. As he moves deliberately from one task to the next, he seems almost in another dimension. He is walking from one trench to another, but never appears focused on actually getting anywhere. He seems to float, or mindfully glide, from one place to the next.

He had escaped, it seemed to me, what we moderns understand by time. There was no race against it; no fear of wasting it; no avoidance of the tedium that most of us would recoil from. And as I watched my fellow meditators walk around, eyes open yet unavailable to me, I felt the slowing of the ticking clock, the unwinding of the pace that has all of us in modernity on a treadmill till death. I felt a trace of a freedom all humans used to know and that our culture seems intent, pell-mell, on forgetting.

Andrew goes on to talk about how he had a sudden breakthrough at this retreat, one in which he had to face painful memories of childhood trauma. It overwhelmed him emotionally. He struggled to deal with his feelings, but the counselor at the retreat told him to hold on, that this is normal, and it will pass.

And in time, it did. Over the next day, the feelings began to ebb, my meditation improved, the sadness shifted into a kind of calm and rest. I felt other things from my childhood — the beauty of the forests, the joy of friends, the support of my sister, the love of my maternal grandmother. Yes, I prayed, and prayed for relief. But this lifting did not feel like divine intervention, let alone a result of effort, but more like a natural process of revisiting and healing and recovering. It felt like an ancient, long-buried gift.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do, and pass it on to everyone you know. It’s one of the best things Andrew has ever written. This is far from a generic anti-technology, anti-Internet screed. There is profound religious insight in this essay. The gist of it is here:

In his survey of how the modern West lost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.

Andrew says that if churches stopped trying to outdo the secular world with light shows and racket, and instead offered a place of silence from which to escape the noise of modernity, they might draw more people. Maybe he’s right.

Andrew’s recollection of his experience at the meditation retreat reminded me of this passage from A Time For Silence, a thin book the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote about his stays at monasteries. He was not a religious man, but he sought the silence of the abbeys:

The period during which normal standards recede and the strange new world becomes reality is slow, and, at first, acutely painful.

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon. The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the house I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the church — Mass, Vespers and Compline — were almost my only lucid moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy  and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity. This new dispensation left nineteen hours a day of god-like freedom. Work became easier every moment; and, when I was not working, I was either exploring the Abbey and the neighbouring countryside, or reading. The Abbey became the reverse of a tome — not, indeed, a Thelema or Nepenthe, but a silent university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the reach of ordinary troubles and vexations. A verse from the office of Compline expresses the same thought; and it was no doubt an unconscious memory of it that prompted me to put it down: Altissismum posuisti refugium tuum …. non accedet ad te malum et flagellum non appropinquabit tabernaculo tuo. [Thou hast made the Most High thy refuge … no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. — RD]

Along these lines, here is a relevant passage from the philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek, from her book A Little Manual For Knowing:

Many people don’t think much about how we know because we take it for granted. But we tacitly presume some things about knowing. We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, “content,” true statements — true statement justified by other true statements. And while this isn’t exactly false, we tend to have a vision of knowledge as being only this. We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information — and we’re done — educated, trained, expert, certain.

This is a philosophical orientation, an unexamined one. It has a lot of appeal, because it is quantifiable, measurable, assessable, and commodifiable. It offers control and power. But we’ll see that the knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.

What Meek is saying, and what Andrew discovered, is that our insatiable craving to consume data, we are actually making it impossible to know some truths that only become accessible in silence and stillness. Decades ago, I went with a friend out to Wimberly, Texas, far from the lights of Austin. I was stunned to see so many stars in the sky. They were there all along, but I had always lived in places that had too much light pollution for me to see them. It was a revelation. This is how silence works.

St. Benedict begins his Rule with this call:

Listen carefully, my child, to your master’s precepts, and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).

If the ear of our heart is not inclined to listen, we will be lost. This is why Benedictine monks traditionally keep silence: so they can listen for the voice of God. In writing my book on The Benedict Option, I have come to believe that the chapter on Technology, which tracks closely with what Andrew discovered, is perhaps the most important one.

What does this have to do with the Michael Hanby quote with which I started this essay? Let’s recall it:

“Before technology becomes an instrument, it is fundamentally a way of regarding the world that contains within itself an understanding of being, nature, and truth.”

We who immerse ourselves in information technology become a people who regard the world at the level of sensation. What does surrendering to this technology teach us about being, nature, and truth? It is not a neutral tool. As Andrew’s essay makes plain — and this is something he had to discover for himself from experience — the particular content of the data we take in is not as important as the form in which we receive it. You might even say that the medium is the message. 

I wonder how my life and my physical health would improve if I did what Andrew Sullivan had the courage to do, and just cut the cord to the Internet. I can’t afford to do it now. I make my living via the Internet, and I have a family to support. But I hope that if the day ever comes that I do have that option, that I will have the good sense to do what he has done. Look, I love being on the Internet. Andrew’s experience of finding pleasure in it is my own. But it’s a disordered, and disordering, pleasure. At some point you have to face up to the fact that if you keep going like this, you’re going to lose if not your health, then at least your humanity — and maybe even your soul.

Ultimately, Andrew’s essay is a humanist religious testimony, bearing witness against one of the most powerful gods of our place and time. It is an essay about possession and deliverance. One lesson I take from the piece is that we don’t have to wait for genetics laboratories to abolish man, in the sense C.S. Lewis meant. We are doing it ourselves, one click at a time.

The Uneasy Conscience Of Closeted Conservatives

Princeton’s Robert P. George put this on his Facebook page yesterday:

Closeted conservative colleague: “I don’t feel I can say what I think, at least not at this stage. I have a family to care for and other responsibilities, you know.”

Me: “Sure. I’m not criticizing you.”

CCC: “I’ve seen people’s careers ruined for saying what they think.”

Me: “I have, too. I’m really not criticizing you. I assume you’re following your conscience.”

CCC: “You say what you think and you’ve survived. But your the exception.”

Me: “I’ve been very fortunate. That’s true. But there are plenty of others. I’m not unique. There’s Harvey Mansfield, Hadley Arkes, Mary Ann Glendon, Jim Ceaser, and others. Even some people they’ve tried hard to destroy have survived. Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, Austin,” for example. They threw everything they could find at him, every calumny imaginable. They tried to get him formally investigated and fired. But he has beaten them. I predict he’ll be promoted to full professor this year.”

CCC: “Yes, but there have been lots of victims, too.”

Me: “Yes. Alas. Lots of victims.”

CCC: “You think I should say what I think.”

Me: “I think you should follow your conscience.”

CCC: “That’s just your way of saying I should say what I think.”

Me:; “Look, as I said, I’m not criticizing you. Only you can discern the demands of your own conscience. I didn’t even bring this whole subject up, you did.”

CCC: “I know what you tell your graduate students to do. You tell them not to hide their politically incorrect views.”

Me: “Well, yes, I hardly hide my advice to them. They initially find it counterintuitive. Their natural instinct is to hide their dissenting beliefs or downplay them. I think that’s risky from a character point of view and also not the best strategy for success.”

CCC: “You ARE judging those of us who keep our opinions to ourselves, then.”

Me: “For heaven’s sake, I’m just saying that there is a certain moral hazard in not speaking your mind. As scholars, we’ve got a special obligation to truth and a vocation to truth-telling. Of course, everybody has a basic obligation to honor the truth, as best they grasp it, but our obligation is even more central to who we are. So, speaking for myself, I don’t see what the point of being a scholar is if we’re not willing to speak the truth as best we understand it. I mean, there are lots of other fields we could go into. We could be lawyers, or doctors, operate hedge funds. There’s the insurance business. Wendy’s franchises. Anyway, again speaking for myself, if I felt I couldn’t speak the truth out loud, I would abandon academic life and go do something else.”

CCC: “You’re not afraid to say what you think because you’ve been able to get away with it without your academic career being ruined.”

Me: “That’s exactly backwards. I’ve been able to get away with it because I’m not afraid to say what I think. Fear empowers the bullies. They’re far less bold and aggressive when they know you’re not afraid of them.”

CCC: “Well, I am afraid of them.”

You should be afraid of them in one sense. In many cases, they do have the power to destroy your career. But if a Christian, you should be more afraid of denying Christ, or appearing to deny him. And if you are a man or woman of integrity, you should be more afraid of what it stands to do to your soul to live under so much intimidation without speaking up.

George is right not to judge conservatives (Christian and otherwise) who choose to live closeted lives in hostile workplaces. There is not a bright, clear line here. Sometimes prudence requires silence, or at least justifies it. And it is possible that one can do more good for the sake of Truth by working quietly and diligently to subvert its lies. Still, when you see things like the progressive lynch mob that went after the Christakises at Yale last fall, and you choose out of self-protection to remain silent while good men and women are being eviscerated in the public square, you stain your conscience.

In the comments boxes, I would like to read the reaction to George’s piece from conservatives, closeted or uncloseted in their workplaces. If uncloseted, at what point did you decide to come out, so to speak? If still closeted, why aren’t you out? What do you think will likely happen to you if you come out?