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October 25, 2018
The message couldn’t have been clearer: Republicans in Congress don’t care about the territorial integrity of the country they run. Democratic leaders share this view. Hundreds of U.S. municipalities run by Democrats have declared themselves
“sanctuary cities,” barring police from cooperating in any way with federal authorities in enforcing immigration statutes, even against immigrants caught breaking U.S. law. The attorney general of California announced it is now illegal for private citizens in the state to assist federal immigration authorities in any way. Violators will be prosecuted.
One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to
Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America. Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”
Boot became a top foreign policy advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016. He continued to churn out well-received articles for Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
On an unexceptional June morning in 1914, a second-string Austrian nobleman was murdered by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. In response, Austria prepared to attack Serbia. Russia in turn decided to defend Serbia, Germany supported its ally Austria, France supported Russia, Great Britain somehow became involved, and soon a small war over a single nobleman’s death had sucked in every European great power.
The New York Times was back with its
Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
Not all of that was Obama’s choosing. He didn’t start the wars in Iraq
were nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, and Hollywood stars routinely bashed President Bush’s foreign policy. On January 21, that all evaporated. Popular culture seemed oblivious. In 2016 there wasn’t a single antiwar song in the top 100 pop hits.
More than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. This explains much of official Washington’s hostility to Donald Trump.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.
one of the founders of neoconservatism. Like most early neoconservatives, Irving Kristol was a former leftist, a childhood Trotskyite who became progressively disillusioned with failures of government social policy, and with the left’s infatuation with the Soviet Union.
Unbeknownst to his staff, Bill Kristol had no intention of being merely a magazine publisher, or a disseminator of conservative ideas. He saw himself as the ideological gatekeeper of the Republican Party.
After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. He started pushing immediately.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.
Free speech is the enemy of authoritarian rule. That’s why the Framers put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. That’s also why our ruling class seeks to crush it.
the summer of 1917, a Socialist Party official in Philadelphia named Charles Schenck spent $150 to have fifteen thousand political pamphlets printed. The United States had entered the war in Europe that spring, and Schenck was hoping to convince draft-age men not to serve.
Schenck was one of thousands of Americans prosecuted by the Wilson administration for disagreeing with its policies. Remarkably, this did not seem to strike most Americans as strange or unconstitutional. Charles Schenck did not become a folk hero. His appeal, when it finally arrived at the Supreme Court, was unanimously denied. He died in obscurity.
Maybe the most reviled client the ACLU ever took was an American Nazi leader named Frank Collin. In 1977, Collin and a small group of self-styled fascists applied for a permit to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois. More than half of Skokie’s residents were Jewish; several thousand had survived Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis had chosen the venue to cause maximum outrage, and they succeeded. The town of Skokie denied the permit; an Illinois judge later ratified that decision. The ACLU took the case.
Their dedication succeeded. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that even publicly marching with the swastika was protected speech.
Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Clarence Brandenburg had a constitutional right to say what he did.
The opposite is also true. There’s nothing more infuriating to a ruling class than contrary opinions. They’re inconvenient and annoying. They’re evidence of an ungrateful population. They impede the progress of your programs. Above all, they constitute a threat to your authority; disagreement is the first step toward insurrection. When you’re in charge, you’ll do what you can to suppress dissent. The modern establishment has done exactly that. Once they took over the institutions they formerly opposed, liberals abandoned their historic support for the First Amendment and became its enemies.
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Berkeley’s campus became synonymous with unfettered speech. It remained that way for the next fifty years.
More than two hundred ACLU employees signed a letter complaining that the group’s “broader mission” was being undermined by a “rigid stance” on free speech. The national ACLU caved, ending almost one hundred years of First Amendment absolutism.
But what happened to James Damore is more than a legal matter. It raises the most basic civic question of all: what kind of society do we want to live in?
For a moment in time, the taste-making
class in America claimed to believe all of this, and the country was a better place for it. The majority of journalists and intellectuals in 1975 would never have accepted the lame excuse that silencing, firing, and ruining people for holding an opinion was fine, as long as it wasn’t specifically the government doing it.
But the main reason the press lost interest in holding the permanent government accountable is that they had more in common with its members than with the rest of the country. They share the same life experiences and cultural assumptions as the people they cover. The people in power are the neighbors and former classmates of the members of the press. On the most basic level the two groups have become indistinguishable.
Ryan Zinke, may have once endorsed the principle of meritocratic hiring. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, apparently said out loud that diversity was less important than “having the right person for the right job.”
Michael was referring to the story of Rachel Dolezal, the racial poseur forced to resign from the NAACP after it was revealed that she was pretending to be black.
Coates was born and raised in a tough part of West Baltimore known for crime and
Coates’s writings focus heavily on history, poverty, and crime, all from a black perspective. But his audience isn’t black readers, the poor, or historians. Coates’s most enthusiastic fans are affluent white professionals who live in coastal cities. Coates is the court theologian of the ruling class. That’s not really his fault. Coates is just making a living. It’s still embarrassing.
The solution is reparations. Despite the length of the essay, Coates never describes a mechanism for redistributing tax dollars to the descendants of slaves. Nor does he describe how much it might cost. He suggests the amount might be infinite.
Listening to Obama, it was easy to forget that the killer was a black man, and that the cops he murdered had been protecting a Black Lives Matter protest.
Was it sexism? Russian propaganda? Hillary’s failure to campaign in the upper Midwest? Almost nobody suggested the obvious: if voters think you hate them for how they were born, they won’t vote for you.
Identity politics is based on the premise that every American is a member of a subgroup, usually a racial category. The point of achieving political power is to divert resources to your group. Another word for this is tribalism.
Right now, the fault line is between whites and nonwhites. But as America grows more racially diverse, rifts will inevitably open between more groups. In a tribal system, every group finds itself at war with every other group. It’s the perfect perversion of the American ideal: “Out of many, one” becomes “Out of one, many.” This is the unhappy, blood-soaked story of countless civilizations around the world. It never ends well.
Americans,” made it into the Democratic
The economy may continue to hum along. We’ll still have elections and fire departments and stop signs, many of the trappings of the country you remember. But the sense that we’re all in this together, united by citizenship in a common endeavor of some kind, as Americans? That will end forever. We’ll miss it.
What if a small group of unhappy people got to write the rules for your personal life?
If you were looking for someone to tell you how to live, you’d screen candidates based on the success of their own lives.
Many of their ideas about these things are ludicrous. Some are fail-safe recipes for tragedy. But you can’t flout their rules in public without fear of being punished. How did this happen?
What began as a liberation movement has narrowed to become cultish and sectarian, a strange parody of its former self. Betty Friedan argued that all women should have the widest possible range of life choices.
When organizers of the march discovered that last fact, they revoked the group’s credentials.
It’s not obvious why abortion should be the one nonnegotiable value of feminism,
You can’t simultaneously argue that pregnancy is meaningful, and that ending a pregnancy is as morally significant as an appendectomy. Both can’t be true. When motherhood is less valuable to society, so are women.
They clearly believe that having children is less impressive than working at an investment bank.
next morning. Divers estimated that she had survived for several hours in the Oldsmobile, her head in an air pocket, until she finally suffocated from lack of oxygen. She could easily have been saved if Kennedy had called for help.
