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PARTY OF ONE John Kasich eyes 2020 by JOHN MCCORMACK

WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM THIS IS A COMBINED ISSUE. THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD WILL APPEAR IN TWO WEEKS. Contents April 2 / April 9, 2018 • Volume 23, Number 29

2 The Scrapbook The Barbara Boxer Prize, mocking Mike Pence, & more 5 Casual Eric Felten: no quiet, no peace 6 Editorials What to Do About Putin • Forced Speech 8 Comment Hurrah for the First Amendment, but . . . by Andrew Ferguson

The decline and fall of Elizabeth Warren by Fred Barnes

It’s not easy being attorney general by Philip Terzian

Still a Republican by William Kristol 5 Articles

14 A Constructive Populism by Andrew Egger Josh Hawley’s star rises in Missouri

16 Saying the Unsayable by Mark Bauerlein Why Amy Wax’s Penn Law colleagues revile her

22 Who Will Save Detroit’s Schools? by Ingrid Jacques The task is daunting

23 Good and Evil, Right and Wrong by Natalia Dashan School massacres and the conscience supply & David Gelernter

23 Features

25 Party of One by John McCormack John Kasich, ‘positive populist,’ eyes 2020

30 Double Jeopardy at Yale by Stuart Taylor Jr. Saifullah Khan was exonerated in court but now faces a campus committee

34 Murders Most Foul by Dominic Green Russia’s poisonous aggression in the U.K.

34 Books & Arts

38 The Pope’s Mess by Stephen P. White Five years into his papacy, assessing the Francis record

42 Maturing with Cole by James Gardner The course of the great landscape painter’s career

44 Postmortem Power Struggle by John Podhoretz Slapstick, satire, and terror in ‘The Death of Stalin’

45 Taking Offense at the Opera by Nicholas M. Gallagher ‘Turandot’ is musically irresistible, but can it survive today’s cultural sensitivities?

38 48 Not a Parody Elon Musk raids ‘The Onion’

COVER: THOMAS FLUHARTY THE SCRAPBOOK Announcing: The Boxer Prize n 2005, as readers may remember, Bob Honey meets with a drug lord I Democratic senator Barbara Boxer who has just escaped from prison. In published a novel, A Time to Run. The another passage, Penn—or, rather, book was a flop, largely owing to its Bob Honey—writes a letter to the confusing plot, sick-makingly senti- president of the United States, clev- mental prose, and the obviously self- erly termed “Mr. Landlord,” and the serving tone of the whole story. The attitude sounds just a tad like a cer- story’s protagonist, Ellen Fischer, is an tain crude and outspokenly left-wing idealistic and principled liberal who movie star: reluctantly runs for office and risks her career to stand up to the extreme right- Many wonderful American people in wingers dominating Washington. We pain and rage elected you. Many Rus- sians did, too. Your position is an aster- can’t imagine who Ellen Fischer might isk accepted as literally as your alter- have been based on. (The novel’s fail- native facts. Though the office will ure didn’t stop Sen. Boxer from follow- remain real, you never were nor ing it up with another, Blind Trust, four will be. A million women so dwarfed years later. We confess we didn’t read your penis-edency [sic] on the streets the second one.) Who Just Do Stuff. This work is the of Washington and around the world on the day of your piddly inaugura- It occurs to The Scrapbook that outgrowth of an audiobook Penn tion. . . . You are not simply a presi- this could very well be a genre in made two years ago under the nom dent of impeachment, you are a man need of recognition: spectacularly de plume “Pappy Pariah.” The pro- in need of an intervention. We are not bad novels whose righteous heroes tagonist, Bob Honey, doesn’t immedi- simply a people in need of an inter- are rather too obviously based on ately sound like the actor Sean Penn; vention, we are a nation in need of an their famous authors. And if it’s a he is a “man of many trades—sewage assassin. . . . Tweet me bitch, I dare you. genre of its own, it must deserve its specialist, purveyor of pyrotechnics, own literary prize. We propose the contract killer for a mysterious gov- Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, pub- creation of the Boxer Prize. ernment agency that pays in small lished by Atria Books, will go on sale On the shortlist to be this year’s bills.” Other facets of the character, next week. The price is $24. The cost, Boxer laureate would surely be Sean however, suggest a kinship with his in terms of things you could do besides Penn, for his debut novel Bob Honey creator. In one passage, for instance, reading it, only you can determine. ♦

The Perils of Nomenclature hen companies change their W names, it often means that the business wants to shed an old, other happy things that aren’t oil. negative image and replace it with The new name, according to Bloom- something more in tune with mod- to the vaguer BP and giving itself a berg News, was “acquired from an Oslo ern sensibilities. Hence Philip Mor- green logo shaped like a sunflower. veterinary practice specializing in ris, the tobacco giant, gave itself the But it doesn’t always work. Con- horses” for an undisclosed sum. The much less tobacco-y name Altria, sider a couple of Scandinavian oil vet, it turns out, offers “serv­ices from and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new, companies—sorry, a couple of Scan- equine dentistry to castration.” The updated name, KFC, conveniently dinavian wind and solar companies new name was widely derided by ana- avoids the word “fried.” that also happen to drill for oil. This lysts and unions. And in Denmark, Oil companies, perhaps sensing that month, Norway’s state-owned oil com- the new name of the state-owned many people think of “oil” and “big pany, straightforwardly named Statoil, oil company is Orsted. That name oil” in negative terms, now want to announced that it plans to change its change was, however, a little more use their names to suggest that they do name to Equinor, which company defensible. The old name of the com- more than sell oil. British Petroleum officials believe better emphasizes pany was Danish Oil and Natural Gas,

started the trend by changing its name its commitment to clean energy and or DONG. The name had become MALAN DAVE TOP:

2 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 something of a distraction in English- speaking markets. It’s just another reminder that you can’t be too careful when you name a large enterprise. We’re told, though we weren’t able to confirm, that when the Fayetteville, N.C., bus system was first proposed in 1976—it’s now smartly called the Fayetteville Area System of Transit, or FAST—administrators suggested calling it Fayetteville Area Rapid Transit. ♦ A Very, Very Witty Book, We’re Sure n March 18, the top-ranked O Amazon item was a brand-new children’s book titled A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. The book is cred- ited to the late-night TV host John Oliver’s show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so we assume Oliver is the author. It’s a “children’s picture book about a Very Special boy bunny who falls in love with another boy bunny.” Readers may or may not be aware that Marlon Bundo is the name of a pet rabbit owned by Vice President Mike Pence and his family, and that Karen Pence and daughter Charlotte have just published a children’s book titled Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President. But Pence opposes same-sex mar- riage and has thus made himself repugnant to liberal entertainers and their fans. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed same-sex marriage, children’s book is, therefore, in the name is Mike Pence. But this story too, but unlike them Pence still holds minds of the vice president’s critics, isn’t going to be about him, because to his view. His wife and daughter’s fair game for the razor-sharp wit and he isn’t very fun. This story is about satirical genius of Team Oliver. me, because I’m very, very fun.” From the book description: “Meet We’ll take their word for it. ♦ Marlon Bundo, a lonely bunny who lives with his Grampa, the Vice Presi- Anna Campbell, RIP dent of the United States. But on this Very Special Day, Marlon’s life is about any young people in the to change forever. With its message of M wealthy nations of Europe and tolerance and advocacy, this charming North America, having been taught children’s book explores issues of same by their elders to equate morality sex marriage and democracy. Sweet, with risk-free virtue-signaling, have funny, and beautifully illustrated, this plenty of strong opinions about injus- book is dedicated to every bunny who tice and oppression, but the will to do has ever felt different.” anything about it often seems lacking. The Scrapbook took just a peek It wasn’t so with Anna Camp- inside the book. A typical line: “My bell, a 26-year-old from Sussex, Eng- The Pence original: Accept no substitutes. Grampa is the Vice President. His land. Campbell studied at Sheffield

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 3 www.weeklystandard.com Stephen F. Hayes, Editor in Chief Richard Starr, Editor Fred Barnes, Robert Messenger, Executive Editors Christine Rosen, Managing Editor Peter J. Boyer, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, National Correspondents Jonathan V. Last, Digital Editor Barton Swaim, Opinion Editor Adam Keiper, Books & Arts Editor Kelly Jane Torrance, Deputy Managing Editor Eric Felten, Mark Hemingway, John McCormack, Tony Mecia, Philip Terzian, Michael Warren, Senior Writers David Byler, Jenna Lifhits, Alice B. Lloyd, Staff Writers Rachael Larimore, Online Managing Editor Hannah Yoest, Social Media Editor Ethan Epstein, Associate Editor Chris Deaton, Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editors Priscilla M. Jensen, Assistant Editor Andrew Egger, Haley Byrd, Reporters Holmes Lybrand, Fact Checker A vigil honoring Anna Campbell in her hometown of Lewes Adam Rubenstein, Grant Wishard, Editorial Assistants Philip Chalk, Design Director Barbara Kyttle, Design Assistant University but decided academic life Dirk Campbell, told the Guardian, Contributing Editors wasn’t for her, so she trained as a black- “but I remember when she was 11, Claudia Anderson, Max Boot, Joseph Bottum, Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti, Jay Cost, smith and later as a plumber. She read she protected a bumblebee from being Terry Eastland, Noemie Emery, Joseph Epstein, David Frum, David Gelernter, Reuel Marc Gerecht, about the struggle by Kurds in the tormented by other kids at school. She Michael Goldfarb, Daniel Halper, Middle East to create an independent did it with such strength of will that Mary Katharine Ham, Brit Hume, Thomas Joscelyn, Frederick W. Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, secular state—how the Kurds are they ridiculed her. But she didn’t care. Yuval Levin, Tod Lindberg, Micah Mattix, Victorino Matus, P. J. O’Rourke, fighting the governments of Turkey, She was absolutely single-minded John Podhoretz, Irwin M. Stelzer, Charles J. Sykes Syria, and Iraq for independence, on when it came to what she believed in, William Kristol, Editor at Large one side, and fighting ISIS for survival, and she believed what Turkey is doing MediaDC on the other. is wrong.” Ryan McKibben, Chairman Stephen R. Sparks, President & Chief Operating Officer So Campbell left England and trav- ♦ Jennifer Yingling, Audience Development Officer eled to Syria to join the women’s unit Kathy Schaffhauser, Chief Financial Officer Sentences David Lindsey, Chief Digital Officer of the U.S.-backed People’s Protection Alex Rosenwald, Director, Public Relations & Branding Mark Walters, Chief Revenue Officer Units, or YPG, the Kurdish mili- We Didn’t Finish Nicholas H. B. Swezey, Vice President, Advertising T. Barry Davis, Senior Director, Advertising tia. She learned to use high-powered hile many transgender art- Jason Roberts, Digital Director, Advertising weaponry and dyed her blonde hair ‘W ists have achieved signifi- Paul Plawin, National Account Director Andrew Kaumeier, Advertising Operations Manager black to look less obviously Western. cant success in music, including Brooke McIngvale, Manager, Marketing Services Campbell fought for a time in Syria Teddy Geiger (who has written for Advertising inquiries: 202-293-4900 Subscriptions: 1-800-274-7293 in operations against ISIS, but when One Direction and James Blunt) and The Weekly Standard (ISSN 1083-3013), a division of Clarity Media Group, she heard about the Turkish offensive Sophie (a recording artist who has is published weekly (except one week in March, one week in June, one against the Kurdish city of Afrin, she produced songs for Madonna and week in August, and one week in December) at 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005. 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No material in The Weekly insistence on aligning her idealism Standard may be reprinted without permission of the copyright owner. with her actions. The Weekly Standard is a registered trademark of Clarity Media Group. TOP: GARETH FULLER / PA IMAGES / GETTY; BOTTOM: IMAGES / GETTY; BIGSTOCK GARETH FULLER / PA TOP: “It seems a small thing,” her father,

4 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 CASUAL

Alas, every one of these projects The Building Racket creates its own din. Walking to get a sandwich is like wandering into a symphony for power tools written by Charles Ives. f our scribblings here at The the muffle-eared construction crews When the noise gets to be too Weekly Standard have, for the to be able to hear the warning bleats, much, I take refuge in writing from last two years, had a jittery, anx- it’s not enough for the forklifts to home. Or at least I used to. ious quality, it might be because beep, they have to shriek. Which they My once-quiet neighborhood, out Iwe haven’t had a minute’s calm. And do, all day long. on the northwest corner of the Dis- I don’t mean the mad whirlwind that We’re not the only people suffering trict of Columbia, was mostly built is the Age of Trump. I refer to the from construction clatter these days. about a century ago. The typical Pali- daily slam-bang from the construc- The monumental architecture of the sades house, handsome in its working- tion site next door. class modesty, was made by Sears, It was fun at first, watching an or rather, Sears sold the plans and iron menagerie of Jurassic demo- provided everything from pre-cut lition beasties destroy a building lumber to plumbing, windows, and with their concrete-hammering shingles for a local contractor to snouts and steel-rending claws. assemble on site. Now many of the Every other day would bring a old charmers are being torn down fireworks display of showering to make room for flashy four-level sparks as the masked man with mansions that hulk up against the the acetylene torch did his thing. property lines. (If I sound miffed, There was, as well, a certain pleas­ that’s because I am. One of these ure in watching what had been monsters—its design based on the the Washington Post headquar- principle that if your neighbors can ters being torn down. Once it was still see the sun, you didn’t make it razed, you could see that the build- big enough—is going up next to ing had backed up to the rear of my happy little 1927 house.) the Russian ambassador’s resi- With the space invasion has dence. There were jokes about come yet another assault on the whether the wrecking crew had ears. No doubt home-building was bulldozed the secret tunnel that noisy back in the day when carpen- allowed the Post editors to get ters hammered and sawed by hand, their marching orders in person. rabbeting the lintels and whatnot. But the joke turned out to be on But now we listen all day to the us: Days of jackhammering turned capital remains timeless, but the mod- explosive report of the pneumatic nail into weeks and then months. ernist boxes of lobby-and-lawyerland gun and the ear-searing skirling of the Nor was the noise over once that have not aged well. Just about every table saw. And don’t forget the boom last load of rubble had been trucked block in downtown Washington has boxes. The crews working the site out of the big dirt hole. After the its own 1970s atrocity, the architec- can’t seem to settle on a soundtrack. deconstruction came the new con- tural equivalent of the maroon dou- When their workday begins at 7:30 struction, every stage of which has ble-knit leisure suit worn with white we’re sometimes treated to scream- been announced with its own special belt and shoes. But instead of a full ing ’80s hair-bands, sometimes to drumming or thumping or banging teardown it’s often cheaper to gut the ranchera music, and sometimes to a or clanging. Which is why the work- old embarrassments and strip away Twisted Sister/Pepe Aguilar mashup. ers’ rig includes not just helmets and their façades, leaving bare skeletons The D.C. building boom, whether goggles, orange vests, steel-toed boots, of iron columns and reinforced-con- it’s new office space for lawyer-lobby- and harnesses, but hearing protec- crete slabs. Then the whole thing can ists or grand new houses with double- tion (I guess I should be happy that be draped with a new sheath of glass garages for their Range Rovers, tells someone is getting relief from the in a fashionable hue, et voilà!—a fresh you the swamp hasn’t been drained. noise). But their earplugs are at odds triumph of modernism is born. This Such is Washington. I just wish they’d with other safety measures, such as architectural style is something we keep the racket down. the relentless hurdy-gurdy of forklifts might call “ecdysiast”—buildings

BRITT SPENCER proclaiming they are backing up. For that shed their skin. Eric Felten

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 5 EDITORIALS What to Do About Putin e would have more respect for Vladimir Putin of Trump’s favorable and even laudatory statements about if he simply dispensed with his country’s elec- the Kremlin autocrat. The most egregious of these rhetori- W tions and declared himself president-for-life. cal offenses came on March 20 when Trump congratulated This would spare us the idiotic burden of discussing the Putin on his victory in a rigged election—this despite the fact Russian state’s sexennial public-relations stunts. Everybody that his briefing material for the call, according to reports, inside and outside the country knows the March 18 elections included the reminder “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” were rigged. Nonetheless news outlets around the world felt White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sand- obliged to report that Putin received 76 percent of the vote— ers rationalized Trump’s congratulatory call with a bit of a marked increase from the 64 percent he received in 2012! moral nonchalance. “We don’t get to dictate how other A dictator’s power comes from nowhere. It’s based countries operate,” she said. “What we do know is that on force, and only on force. Putin is not a monarch who Putin has been elected in their country, and that’s not rules by orderly succession; he has received no religious or something that we can dictate to them, how they operate. divine sanction and certainly doesn’t rule by virtue of pop- We can only focus on the freeness and fairness of our elec- ular consent. He rules because his regime has power and tions.” Trump didn’t focus on the “freeness and fairness” the means to keep it. In the dictatorial worldview, there are of our elections, either, neglecting to raise the issue of Rus- only ruler and ruled. “The whole question is—who will sia’s interference in U.S. elections with Putin or its ongoing defeat whom?” as Lenin observed. Or, as usually short- attempts to meddle in the 2018 election. ened: “Who, whom?” One could argue that the administration’s actions are But Putin knows it is far more effective, both in keep- what counts. But the president himself doesn’t believe ing domestic order and in international relations, to cover that—if he did, he wouldn’t post defensive tweets every that severe reality with the soothing rhetoric of democracy. time he’s criticized for making nice with Putin; he would Hence the Russian elections. And hence all those totalitar- simply keep quiet and let Putin guess at his intentions. But ian regimes calling themselves the “people’s republic” of Trump is not remaining quiet. this or that. “I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him If we look beyond the trappings of Russian democracy, on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). what we see is an increasingly aggressive bully. Putin’s The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me regime has invaded or otherwise arrogated sovereign to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Rus- states; murdered and tried to murder its critics on foreign sia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump soil; flouted agreements around the globe; sabotaged the tweeted on March 21. “They can help solve problems with elections of free nations; carried out cyberwarfare against North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the com- the U.S. government and its allies; and supplied some of ing Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didn’t have the world’s most sinister dictatorships—from Venezuela to the ‘smarts.’ Obama and Clinton tried, but didn’t have Syria to North Korea—with military aid and money. the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE Despite what Trump’s fiercest detractors claim, his THROUGH STRENGTH!” administration has not been soft on Russia. It has imposed Russia could help solve many of these problems because sanctions on an array of Russian tycoons and companies, Russia—by invading Ukraine, covering for Syria’s chemi- including two Putin cronies. The State Department is sup- cal-weapons attacks, blocking for Iran in the U.N. Secu- plying Ukraine with lethal weaponry to counter Russian rity Council—has a great deal of responsibility for them. incursions and sending antimissile systems to Poland— To hope publicly that Russia will play a constructive role both contrary to the Kremlin’s wishes. In February, the resolving problems created by your appeasement of Putin U.S. military struck a convoy of Russia-backed merce- is like proudly announcing your own foolishness. naries in Syria. And on March 15, the Treasury Depart- But Trump is Trump, so we can assume that his rhetori- ment announced sanctions on the individuals and entities cal genuflections to Putin will continue. All the more reason indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury; then to counterbalance them with policy and action. There those indicted include Russia’s two intelligence agencies. are many more individuals and entities the Treasury Depart- The president’s words, though, run counter to the ment can sanction. Oligarchs associated with Russia’s defense actions of his administration. One could compile a long list ministry, and particularly those with connections to Syr-

6 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 ian president Bashar al-Assad and the war effort in eastern To any ordinary American, this is an instance of the Ukraine, deserve a high place on the list of sanction targets. state requiring citizens to make a political speech whose Other, less conventional responses suggest themselves, content they abominate. The Supreme Court has a long too. The United States and its European allies might con- history of striking down laws that require objectionable sider pressuring FIFA, the international soccer association speech. In Wooley v. Maynard (1977), for instance, the that puts on the World Cup, to move this summer’s event Court held that New Hampshire could not require driv- from Russia. The British foreign minister (who we are con- ers to display the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” and in fident cares far more about soccer than the average Ameri- Riley v. National Federation of the Blind (1988), the Court can) has remarked that Putin will use the 2018 World Cup rejected a North Carolina law requiring fundraisers to the way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics. He’s right. Action relay specific information to potential donors. should accompany such a view. FACT, the law now at issue, further requires the More is at stake here than international virtue-signaling. centers to declare to pregnant women that the center is By meting out punishments to the Putin regime and to the not licensed by the state of California. This is yet more dictator’s friends and allies, the United States can weaken required speech and almost certainly unconstitutional his position within his country. Some of Putin’s wealthy according to past High Court decisions. But it’s also just backers, as Garry Kasparov argued in these pages recently, nasty: The whole point of state licensing laws is to pro- may deem sanctions too costly and flee the country alto- tect the public from negligent or fraudulent service pro- gether. Putin’s opponents may gain more and bolder follow- viders. Does the state believe Californians need protec- ers as the dictator’s reckless power plays lead the country tion from crisis pregnancy centers? into isolation. Several of the Court’s liberal justices—Elena Kagan, It’s not a question of avoiding confrontation with Vladi- Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor—seemed during oral mir Putin. He has sought confrontation repeatedly. And so arguments to take a skeptical view of the California posi- far, he’s mostly gotten his way. Behind those blue expres- tion, and this suggests that the law will almost certainly sionless eyes, he’s smiling. ♦ be declared unconstitutional. But that doesn’t mean the issue is decided. What about state laws that require abor- tion providers to specify the health risks of abortion or explain alternatives to it? The Supreme Court’s 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey famously upheld these “informed consent” laws, but aren’t they the Forced Speech same as California’s law requiring pregnancy centers to explain alternatives to adoption—namely abortion? merican liberals love the First Amendment’s “free- The justices seemed to indicate the answer is “No,” dom of speech” clause. They remember their brave but mainly because the California law was so manifestly A forerunners—muckraking journalists, civil rights written to target pro-life pregnancy centers. What if activists, religious and political dissidents—and venerate the law were more fairly written? The pro-life side will the constitutional right that enabled their eventual vin- argue that the cases are completely different inasmuch dication. Yet it’s striking how often today’s most flagrant as “informed consent” explanations take place before a desecrations of free-speech rights are perpetrated not by serious medical procedure, and pregnancy centers don’t right-wing rubes in Southern school districts but by highly offer medical procedures. We agree, but the Court won’t educated and allegedly forward-thinking liberal elites. answer that question in NIFLA v. Becerra. Consider NIFLA v. Becerra, a case that came before the The most extraordinary thing about NIFLA v. Supreme Court on March 20. Becerra is the existence of the FACT Act in the first The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates place. California lawmakers don’t like pro-life pregnancy (NIFLA), a pro-life group, brought the suit in response to centers and sought a way to punish them. Why? Because a California law called the FACT Act. It requires pro-life frightened women sometimes wander into these pregnancy centers—organizations that exist to oppose and welcoming places mistakenly believing them to be mitigate the effects of legalized abortion—to post notices abortion clinics. Some leave with a brighter outlook and that the state provides free and low-cost abortions. The a determination not to abort their unborn child. Liberal notice reads as follows: California lawmakers would rather that didn’t happen. Their remedy was to force pregnancy-center workers to California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning ser- parrot state-sponsored talking points about “free or low- vices (including all FDA-approved methods of contracep- cost” abortion. tion), pre-natal care, and abortion for eligible women. To If we could compel left-wing California lawmakers determine whether you qualify, contact the county social to recite their own follies, we’d be sorely tempted. But services at [phone number]. thank God for the First Amendment. ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 7 COMMENT

ANDREW FERGUSON Hurrah for the First Amendment, but . . .

t is a fact of history that we Ameri- Last year, the pollster Karlyn Bow- the face of particular kinds of speech. cans believe all kinds of dumbass man and her team at the American The ambivalence spans generations. I things. Different Americans Enterprise Institute looked into the In 1997, before many of today’s college believe different dumbass things at history of our support for the right to students were born, one national poll different times, but each of us must free speech. They found a Gallup poll showed that 75 percent of respondents sooner or later fall for an urban myth, dating back to 1938, the very dawn of said people should not be allowed “to a lunatic philosophy, an obvious exag- scientific polling. It showed that 96 say things in public that might be geration, a prophecy of doom, or some percent of those responding—pretty offensive to racial groups.” Some evi- other delusion. Speaking dence even suggests that young people for my part, as a teenager today are less touchy than their parents. I believed that Yoko Ono A 1938 Gallup poll Not long ago Pew asked a large sam- was an artist, and I was not ple of Americans to choose between alone. Even today some of showed that two statements: first, that “too many us (I’m not naming names) 96 percent of those people are offended these days”; and think the French are right second, that “people need to be more about Jerry Lewis, and still responding believed careful about the language they use to others believe all such mad- avoid offending others.” Older people ness is traceable to fluori- in freedom of speech. were more likely than young people dation of our water supply, Meanwhile, more to agree with the second statement; like the effects of lead in young people favored the first by a ancient Rome. than half insisted that large majority. Sometimes these mis- ­Communists shouldn’t So the kids are all right—or no taken beliefs are alarming; worse than the rest of us, anyway. sometimes they look more be allowed to ‘express But this month’s Gallup poll went alarming than they truly their views.’ a little deeper. The truly alarming are. Earlier this month, finding received much less atten- a general hubbub arose tion in press accounts. The pollsters when Gallup released a poll of col- much everybody—said they believed asked the students this question: lege students showing, as the Chronicle in freedom of speech. Meanwhile, “If you had to choose, which do you of Higher Education put it, “they are more than half of them insisted that think is more important—a diverse more committed to free speech in the Communists shouldn’t be allowed and inclusive society or protecting abstract than in reality.” Overwhelm- to “express their views in [their] com- free speech rights?” ingly, students told Gallup’s pollsters munity.” Another survey 16 years The first thing that strikes you about that they value free speech on cam- later showed the same overwhelming this question is that it’s not a very good pus and off. Yet when presented with declarations of devotion to the First question. It is a “false choice,” to use particular examples of speech that has Amendment. Even so, 89 percent of President Obama’s favorite phrase. traditionally been protected by the respondents thought a Communist The two goals, a diverse society and Constitution—“hate speech” or eth- caught teaching in a college should be one that protects free speech, ought to nic slurs or other language meant to fired, and a majority thought books by be perfectly compatible. wound—large percentages favored the Communists should be removed from But are they? By 53 percent to use of campus speech codes and a ban the public library. 46, the students in the Gallup poll on inviting potentially offensive speak- Communists don’t seem so threat- favored an inclusive society over ers. A headline in the Washington Post ening as they did during the days one that guarantees the right to free read: “College students support free of the Hitler-Stalin pact or the Cold speech. Even more disturbing, the speech—unless it offends them.” War, and for the last decade polls have groups most inclined to choose the This news might seem disquieting. shown that we are happy to let them inclusive society—black students, On the other hand, it isn’t really news. teach, talk, and haunt our public librar- female students, and students who In their ambivalence about free speech, ies to their hearts’ content. Yet the pat- identify themselves as Democrats— college students are following a long tern continues: We like free speech in were likewise the people most likely and not terribly honorable tradition. theory, but lots of us get squirrely in to favor speech codes and keeping

8 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 potentially offensive speakers from COMMENT ♦ FRED BARNES campus. Evidently they see a trade- off between the two values: As free speech declines, diversity flourishes. The poll did not define what an The decline and fall inclusive society is, leaving the stu- dents’ minds to caper in that vast, of Elizabeth Warren unmapped Shangri-La that the words diversity and inclusion are meant to he Trump era has been tough hand in 2018 is undisputed (except by embrace. A few things are clear, on Senator Elizabeth Warren Trump), and they want to maximize though. A foundational assumption T (D-Mass.), and no one has their gains. They’ve held on tightly of the dogma of diversity, as prosely- been tougher on her than President to liberal positions on immigration tized on college campuses, is that a Trump himself, with his references to and social issues, but other policies community becomes stronger when her as “Pocahontas.” adopted in the Obama years are no its members don’t have much in com- With the nickname, the president longer sacrosanct. mon. And further: When we dwell is playing brass-knuckles politics to Politico headlined a recent story upon—indeed, fetishize—the superfi- remind voters of her undocumented “Warren at war with fellow Dems.” cial differences of sex, race, or ethnic- claim to Cherokee Indian ity, we will be stronger still. heritage. To be politically This is a dumbass idea. Yet it is correct, Warren says she Guess what? seldom held up for examination or is “part Native American” debate. It should be obvious that no through her mother’s side of She’s a poor loser. multicultural paradise would be pos- the family. She said the vote sible at all if its citizens weren’t free to Warren says she’ll fight peaceably express their diverse views. back against Trump. “I went by the 16 defectors Free speech is prior to diversity, as to speak to Native Ameri- ‘felt like a stab in the philosophers say. It is a necessary can leaders, and I made a condition of diversity, and probably promise to them,” she said the heart—not for diversity’s greatest guarantor. To extol in a TV interview. “Every me, but for all the inclusion at the expense of speech is time President Trump wants incoherent and unserious—a mere to throw out some kind of homeowners who reflex of campus ideology in our era racial slur, he wants to try to of discontent. attack me, I’m going to try were cheated and Unserious, yes, but not unprece- to use it as a chance to lift up the taxpayers dented. Let’s look on the bright side: their stories.” We’re not hearing any crazy talk about That won’t petrify Trump. who bailed out Yoko Ono. ♦ He’s clever, relentless, and those banks.’ enjoys verbal brawls. He usually prevails. And he doesn’t mind taking gratuitous shots. Indeed she is, and what’s notewor- ‘Suffer the flummoxed At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he thy is she’s losing the most serious to come unto me’ advised the news media they’d face of the battles. low TV ratings if he’s not reelected in It involves a bipartisan measure 2020. “Can you imagine covering Ber- to ease the sweeping banking regula- nie or Pocahontas?” he said. tions—the Dodd-Frank Act—passed ? While Trump is an irritant to War- after the 2008 financial crisis. Sixteen ren, she has bigger problems. The Democrats joined Republicans to push most serious is what appears to be the new bill ahead. Warren, along with an openness by her party to lean a her left-wing allies, was furious. Ask bit toward the center. This is not And guess what? She’s a poor loser. unusual before a midterm election. At the Congressional Progressive Cau- Matt But Warren is bound to view it as a cus, she said the vote by the 16 defec- weakening of both her influence on tors “felt like a stab in the heart—not Capitol Hill and her prospects of for me, but for all the homeowners Labash winning the Democratic presidential who were cheated and the taxpayers at weeklystandard.com nomination in 2020. who bailed out those banks.” That Democrats have the upper That wasn’t all. “It’s so hard to

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 9 fight against all the money and all the able. Given these traits, Lamb was tent she won’t have one, though her lobbying, so hard when we fight and called a “Trump Democrat” by a few speech last month to the National lose,” she said. “But, yeah, it’s worse folks on the left. “Sounds like a Repub- Congress of American Indians when some of our teammates don’t lican to me,” Trump said. Lamb’s dis- defending her claim to an Indian her- even show up for the fight.” That trict is in western Pennsylvania. itage suggested otherwise. moderate Democrats might vote for A candidate Trump likes won’t be It’s not that political events since deregulation to aid their reelection Warren’s favorite. My assumption is Trump entered the White House in Trump states didn’t appear to cross Lamb won’t rush to sign up for War- stand in the way of a Warren candi- her mind. ren’s presidential campaign, or Ber- dacy. But she’s hardly on a winning But it’s not just Democrats who nie Sanders’s either. Warren is insis- streak. She needs one. ♦ find themselves on Warren’s enemies list. Her pride and joy in the nation’s capital is the Consumer Financial COMMENT ♦ PHILIP TERZIAN Protection Bureau (CFPB). It was her idea, and it’s an extraordinary piece of work—an agency free from congres- It’s not easy being sional accountability or significant oversight by anyone in Washington attorney general, and not except the president, who only gets to name a new CFPB head once every just in this administration five years. When Richard Cordray, the first confess to a weakness for the powers and prerogatives of Repub- director, departed to run for gover- attorney general, Jeff Sessions. I lican presidents. Accordingly, as the nor of Ohio, White House budget I say this despite the fact that I dis- South ceased to be solidly Democratic director Mick Mulvaney stepped in agree with him on various issues​—​ in the 1970s and ’80s, resentful Sen- as acting boss. As Warren saw her civil-asset forfeiture, for example, and ate Democrats were especially hostile creation coming apart, Republicans the opioid crisis. But as is often the to presidential appointees who hap- rejoiced. She tweeted that Mulvaney case in politics, certain whimsical rea- pened to be Southern Republicans. would have to answer her queries sons recommend him. To my mind, Sessions got caught in the crossfire. or he’d be hauled before the Senate his very name​—​Jefferson Beaure- After his District Court nomina- Banking Committee and made to gard Sessions III​—​is exactly the sort tion failed in the Senate​—an​ injustice testify under oath. of moniker a senator from Alabama followed, not long after, by the churl- This episode was dubbed “Eliza- ought to have. And once upon a time, ish rejection of Judge Robert Bork’s beth Warren’s Boomerang” by the he turned Groucho Marx’s famous elevation to the Supreme Court—​ ​Ses- Wall Street Journal. Warren had for- aphorism​—​“I don’t want to belong sions returned to his duties as U.S. gotten that she’d constructed CFPB to any club that would accept me as a attorney for the balance of the Reagan so it wouldn’t have to answer to Con- member”​—​on its head. years and George H. W. Bush’s term gress. Mulvaney was free to ignore Let me explain. When I briefly lived as president. In 1994 he was elected her tweets. Under Cordray, the CFPB and worked in Alabama, a very long attorney general of Alabama and then, was anti-business. In Mulvaney’s time ago, Sessions had a good reputa- two years later, joined the ranks of the hands, it’s not. tion as a federal prosecutor in Mobile, very same World’s Greatest Delibera- Nor was Warren’s vision of a new later burnished by his tenure during tive Body that had disdained him a America reflected in Democrat Conor the Reagan-Bush years as U.S. attor- decade earlier. Lamb’s election to the House seat in ney for the southern district of Ala- There he remained until 13 months Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which bama. Yet for reasons having more to ago. Sessions was the first Republican Trump won in 2016 by 20 percentage do with partisan politics than personal senator to endorse Donald Trump in points. Lamb, 33, won by 627 votes, qualification, he ran into difficulties the primaries and as such was surely enough for him to he anointed as a when Ronald Reagan nominated him entitled to some reward when Trump model Democratic candidate. in 1986 to the U.S. District Court. beat Hillary Clinton. Yet I felt a cer- An ex-Marine, Lamb is not a War- It’s difficult to remember now, tain pang on his behalf when, barely ren acolyte. He will not be joining but in those days Congress was still a week after the election, Sessions’s the Democratic “resistance,” which largely the Democratic branch of gov- appointment as attorney general opposes everything associated with ernment: Democrats had controlled was announced. Not because of the the president. “I will work with any- both houses of Congress—​ ​almost con- near-constant uncertainty that must one to protect our people and bring tinuously and with prohibitive major- accompany any sinecure in the Trump good jobs here,” he says on his website. ities​—​from the early 1930s until the administration​—​which, at the time, He’s a centrist, pro-union, and lik- mid-1990s and relished limiting the was not yet obvious​—​but because elec-

10 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 tion victories sometimes cause lapses There’s a reason why John F. Ken- lete concept of executive privilege. of judgment in the political class. nedy appointed his startlingly unqual- At other times, however, the alli- To be sure, it is possible, even likely, ified 35-year-old younger brother/ ance can be delicate. President Clin- that on the eve of his 70th birthday campaign manager Robert to head ton was never especially comfortable Sessions sought to cap his career in the Justice Department, and Richard with Janet Reno, the Miami pros- public service with a senior cabinet Nixon tapped his law partner/cam- ecutor who rose from obscurity to post. But as Rex Tillerson is the most paign manager John Mitchell for the become attorney general when Clin- recent to discover, appoint­ees in the same purpose. When conflicts arise, ton’s first two choices for the post​—​ executive branch serve at the pleasure it’s useful for the nation’s chief law- Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood—​ ​fell by of presidents, and as attorney general, enforcement officer to be your friend. the wayside, and Reno evolved into a Jeff Sessions not only sacrificed a safe Sometimes, in history, the com- media heroine. By any measure, the Senate seat but positioned himself bination runs smoothly: Attorney president would have been entitled to squarely (and uncomfortably) in the General Francis Biddle opposed the end her tenure at the start of his sec- middle of the Washington food fight internment of Japanese-Americans ond term; but by that time Clinton over Trump-Russian “collusion” in the after Pearl Harbor but acceded to was so ensnarled in official inquiries 2016 election. and scandal​—​a veritable Arkansas By recusing himself from ­Laocoön​—​that Reno was immovable. any federal inquiry into the There’s a reason JFK Which leads to the present uneasy matter, the new attorney Trump-Sessions alliance. It is possible​ general did the only thing appointed his brother —​indeed, probable​—​that the presi- he could responsibly do and Richard Nixon his dent, a novice in government if not under the circumstances. politics, has failed to comprehend the But I have to assume that law partner. When extent to which Sessions has a con- the fact that Sessions’s conflicts arise, it’s stitutional duty to perform, regard- Senate seat is now held​ less of the CEO in the White House. —​even temporarily​—​by useful for the chief It is equally possible that the periodic a Democrat, coupled with law-enforcement Twitter grenades lobbed down Penn- his chief ’s periodic public sylvania Avenue​—​“DISGRACE­ rebukes, must inspire the officer to be FUL!”​—​are a peculiarly Trumpian occasional second thought. means of letting off steam, a necessity For the fact is that the your friend. for any president. office of attorney general is Still, Jeff Sessions’s recent response not only uncomfortable in the Trump the judgment of the Roosevelt White bears repeating: administration but a decidedly mixed House and the War Department. J. blessing under most circumstances. Howard McGrath was a loyal party As long as I am the attorney gen- Cabinet secretaries are instructed, by man and convenient fixer​—​and was eral, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, the Constitution, to carry out the laws just as conveniently dropped when and this department will continue of the land; but while politics and stat- scandals imperiled President Tru- to do its work in a fair and impar- utes are more successfully mixed in man. When President Eisenhower tial manner according to the law and other departments, the balance is espe- found himself in conflict with Joseph Constitution. cially awkward when the laws pertain McCarthy, Attorney General Her- to the Law. bert Brownell revived the obso- Nothing disgraceful about that. ♦

Worth Repeating from WeeklyStandard.com:

he newest member of Donald Trump’s would soon be working for. And his future boss, ‘T legal team, Joseph diGenova, has lately President Trump, was there too. been appearing on cable news to blast the Mueller ‘At the white-tie Gridiron Club dinner on investigation as part of a “brazen plot” to “frame” March 4, diGenova was one of the event’s the president—revenge of the Swamp and the “ringers”—non-members who are brought in to Deep State, if you will. But earlier this month supplement the singing sketches that are part of diGenova was yukking it up with Washington’s the 133-year-old dinner’s program.’ elite journalists about the administration he —Michael Warren, ‘The Ringer’

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 11 COMMENT ♦ WILLIAM KRISTOL tive to the charms of Donald Trump, then I can certainly imagine support- ing an independent presidential can- didate in 2020 against, say, a Republi- Still a Republican can ticket led by Donald Trump and a Democratic ticket led by Elizabeth he other day I signed an acknowledged it was his wife’s doing. Warren. But it would surely be better online petition sponsored More broadly, it’s a plausible argu- first to take a shot at reclaiming the T by Republicans for the Rule ment that it would be better for the Republican party. It’s not just nostal- of Law. It’s addressed to Donald country if Democrats won control of gia for the good old days of Reagan Trump: “Mr. President: Firing Rob- the House in 2018. and Bush and McCain and Romney ert Mueller would gravely damage Still, I checked the “I am a Repub- that leads one to balk at giving up the Presidency, the GOP and the lican” box on the Republicans for the the Republican party to the forces country. Please don’t do it.” Since this Rule of Law website. of nativism, vulgar populism, and is an effort to rally Repub- authoritarianism. It’s also the fact licans behind allowing the that it would be bad for the country if Mueller investigation to go For now at least one of our two major parties went in forward, I was asked by the this direction. website, after signing the I’m choosing not And the Republican tradition is petition, to check a box: “I to get with the well worth defending. To have been am a Republican.” right about the Cold War, right about I’ve got to acknowledge times or go with the the need to revive constitutionalism, that I hesitated for a min- times. I’m choosing right about resistance to “progres- ute. Gordon Humphrey, the sivism” in all of its illiberal modes— former Republican senator not to leave the for a party that at its best embraced from New Hampshire and GOP. I’m choosing much of what was admirable about a staunch conservative, says both classical liberalism and classi- that he no longer consid- not to accept the cal conservatism—is no small thing. ers himself a Republican. Trumpification And most Republican members of George Will, surely the pre- Congress remain alive to that tradi- eminent conservative col- of the GOP as an tion, even as they (temporarily?) suc- umnist of his generation, is cumb to the pressure to accommo- no longer a Republican. My irreversible fact. date Donald Trump. friend Pete Wehner, a val- So for now, I—along with many ued contributor to the conservative Am I just a backward-looking con- others—prefer to fight rather than to cause for three decades, a veteran of servative, refusing to face new reali- switch. the Reagan and both Bush adminis- ties? Perhaps. But one thing conser- Of course things could change. I trations, writes that he is now a man vatism teaches is not to embrace new remember Jeane Kirkpatrick writing without a party. And I myself didn’t realities too quickly. Some of those a piece in 1979 on why she remained vote for the Republican presidential new realities turn out to be transient; a Democrat. In fact, she stayed a candidate in 2016. others prove harmful. Isn’t conserva- Democrat when she joined Ronald Furthermore, in just this past tism in part about resisting so-called Reagan’s cabinet. She did not switch week, the Republican Congress has new realities when you sense they parties until 1984. By then the Rea- thrown together a $1.3 trillion spend- might be questionable, even as peo- gan Republican party was one that ing bill that’s vulnerable to all the ple lecture you that you’ve got to get was becoming increasingly hospita- complaints Republicans have made with the times? ble to a Hubert Humphrey Democrat over the years about how Democrats So for now at least I’m choosing like Jeane Kirkpatrick. Are Reagan in Congress govern. And individual not to get with the times or go with Republicans going to find an equally Republican members have contin- the times. I’m choosing not to leave welcoming home in the Democratic ued to make fools of themselves. Rep. the GOP. I’m choosing not to accept party of the 2020s? I’m doubtful, Claudia Tenney of New York, try- the Trumpification of the GOP as an though life is full of surprises. ing to defend HUD Secretary Ben irreversible fact. In the meantime, the Republican Carson’s purchase of a $31,000 din- It’s not as if the Democratic party party, it seems to me, is very much ing room set for his office, claimed presents a particularly attractive worth fighting for. Despite the cur- that “somebody in the deep state” alternative. It seems to be moving rent climate, the fight is not hope- had ordered the table in order to set toward the left, not to the center. If less, and the stakes are high. So I still Carson up—even though Carson it does so, and if the GOP stays cap- check the box: “I am a Republican.” ♦

12 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 Senate Republicans, who are itch- ing to oust two-term Democrat Claire A Constructive McCaskill this year, pricked up their ears. After congresswoman Ann Wag- ner decided last year to defend her Populism House seat rather than challenge McCaskill, state and national Republi- cans convinced Hawley to try his luck. It already looks like a tight race, with Josh Hawley’s star rises in Missouri. polls breaking for both candidates, by Andrew Egger generally within the margin of error. So here Hawley is at the family- Chesterfield, Mo. picture of his lover as an incentive for owned Stemme Farms, making the case t’s a mild March evening at her to keep quiet about the affair, an that he knows and loves “the heartland Stemme Farms just outside act for which he now faces a felony way of life,” a way that revolves around I St. Louis, and Missouri attorney invasion-of-privacy prosecution. The love of God and country and the dig- general Josh Hawley is holding forth state party’s response has been to sug- nity of work, that those values have in a corrugated metal barn. He’s up gest that the criminal charge against made him the man he is today, and that on a makeshift stage, flanked by a Greitens is a “political hit job” that it’s high time someone carried those huge green tractor and an oversized can be traced back to money from values into the lion’s den of Washing- American flag. It’s a fit- Democratic megadonor ton, D.C. ting backdrop to the George Soros. In some ways it sounds like your salt-of-the-earth pitch This helps to explain garden-variety populist pitch, the he’s about to make. It’s why the locals who pack kind that’s all the rage in Republican opening day of Hawley’s into the barn today radi- circles this primary season. A Hawley campaign for the Sen- ate such a strong sense skeptic might reasonably wonder how ate, and he’s delivered of cheer, even relief. a Stanford- and Yale-educated consti- this speech in Kansas Hawley, 38, is the kind tutional law professor makes for an City and Springfield of guy they can get authentic populist. To which a Haw- already. Thanks to day- enthusiastic about. ley supporter might point out that the light saving time, there’s Start with his Manhattan billionaire Donald Trump plenty of sun left for the résumé: Smart, good- pulled it off. St. Louis leg. looking, and charis- But there’s an important differ- “We embark today on matic, Hawley pairs ence in the populism Hawley’s hawk- a great journey in serv­ Josh Hawley small-town roots with ing from the foreboding “American ice to a high calling,” he impressive policy chops. carnage” vision Trump sold dur- says. “And there is only one way to do He grew up in Lexington, population ing the 2016 presidential campaign. that: standing shoulder-to-shoulder 4,500, and was a standout student at Hawley’s populism is a constructive with friends and fellow believers in Stanford en route to a law degree from enterprise, a matter of reminding the the cause of liberty. I am honored to Yale. He clerked for Chief Justice of “coastal elites” what’s important and stand here with you.” the United States John Roberts and good about small-town America. In The crowd eats it up. One man’s served as senior counsel to the Becket his speech, Hawley leans into the con- shout is audible through the cheers: Fund for Religious Liberty, where he trast as he speaks of his childhood in “Now that’s the kind of language I’m worked on such high-profile Supreme Lexington, “a working-class town full looking for!” Court cases as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby of hardworking people.” He recalls It would be an understatement to Stores, Inc. and Hosanna-Tabor Evan- his respect for a man named Norman say that 2018 has been a discouraging gelical Lutheran Church and School v. Vialle, who owned and operated the year for Missouri Republicans. Gover- Equal Employment Opportunity Com- local Maid-Rite diner and drive-in. nor Eric Greitens, an ex-Navy SEAL mission. In 2011, he returned home “Mr. Vialle wore an apron to work, who swaggered into office in 2016 to teach at the University of Missouri and the work he did was hard—often promising to clean up corruption, School of Law. In his first foray into thankless, I’m sure, and never glam- is embroiled in a nasty scandal over politics, the 2016 attorney-general orous. But I never knew a more gra- an extramarital affair. He’s accused race, Hawley trounced Democrat cious man,” Hawley says. “And I saw of snapping a surreptitious nude Teresa Hensley with 61 percent of the in him what the Scripture means when vote. (He even outperformed Donald it says that labor in the Lord is not in Andrew Egger is a reporter Trump, who collected 56 percent of vain. Work performed with excellence

at The Weekly Standard. the vote in Missouri.) and with honesty confers a dignity and WHITNEY CURTIS / GETTY

14 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 independence that no man can buy which seems to have worked out just Stemme Farms sits just west of and no government can take away.” fine. Last November, Trump casu- St. Louis, and it’s an astute locale for a When Hawley went away to col- ally endorsed Hawley during a tax- rally: just far enough from the city to lege and law school, he goes on, he reform speech in St. Charles, and, maintain the rural aesthetic, but still met many impressive people who were on March 14, he flew to St. Louis close enough to make it a reasonable destined for high-flying public careers. for a Hawley fundraiser, calling him trip for suburban Republicans. “But I never met anybody whose work “a wonderful guy who’s running who And, for that matter, for local Dem- had more value than Mr. Vialle’s, and knows what it’s all about.” ocrats: Hawley’s event attracted a I never heard any call to service more Hawley doesn’t style himself substantial cohort of protesters, who profound than the one I saw modeled a Trumpian candidate precisely; gathered across the road holding signs in the place I called home.” rather, he speaks of Trump’s ascend­ with slogans like “Ladder-Climbing This isn’t to say Hawley’s stump ancy as a sign that the times are Politician” and occasionally embark- speech isn’t full of bombs when it changing, and conservatives need to ing on anti-Hawley chants. One ring- comes to McCaskill. “Hollywood and change with them. leader told me they were there to Wall Street and the D.C. political estab- “We are at a generational turning protest Hawley’s handling of the lishment have worked together to rig a point, and that’s true for us as con- Greitens investigation: “He’s declined system that favors them, the wealthy servatives,” he tells me. “The postwar to seriously investigate his biggest and well-connected, while ignoring the politics that ran roughly from 1948 donor.” (This was a misguided refer- rest of us,” he says in his speech. “And until 2001, that era’s over. We’ve been ence to Hawley’s office’s finding that Claire McCaskill is their eager ally. in a transitional time, and I think the Greitens’s staff had not violated Mis- More than that, she’s their icon.” election of President Trump has made souri laws in their use of a texting app This last is a bit of a stretch: this very clear, that the postwar era is called Confide; the Greitens investiga- McCaskill’s nobody’s beau ideal of finished. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s tion remains ongoing.) a progressive. Hawley justifies the just to say it’s done.” McCaskill and the Democratic Sen- claim by pointing to McCaskill’s sub- According to Hawley strategist Brad ate Majority PAC are making similar stantial campaign contributions from Todd, Hawley and Trump represent criticisms, seeking to tie the attorney Hollywood and the financial indus- “complementary” populist visions general to the beleaguered governor try: “Those are the people that she driven by concern for the interests of his office is investigating. One TV spot works with,” adds Hawley’s press the middle class rather than those says that Hawley “proclaimed Greitens secretary Kelli Ford. “You don’t get of large institutions. “In 10 or 15 years innocent” and ends by asking, “Is Josh the money unless you’re doing some- when you look back on this time in Hawley bought and paid for?” thing to make them happy.” The sim- history, everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, “That’s total nonsense,” Hawley pler explanation is that McCaskill is a remember when the media sort of tells me, “the idea that we softballed Democratic senator in an increasingly joked that populism was just a tool to anything. Look, I’m a prosecutor. Republican state, and Democrats are get Trump elected?’ ” Todd says. “No, I’m proud of my record in the attor- keen to hold on to the seat in a closely it turns out there was a real movement ney general’s office,” he says. “We’ve divided Senate. that became sort of the animating already brought four major public cor- Despite Hawley’s populist streak, spirit of the conservative movement. I ruption prosecutions in my first year his relationship with President think that’s where we are.” in office. Those were all underway by Trump has been complicated. After Hawley himself frames contem- last fall, including against members of the release of the Access Hollywood porary populist unease in constitu- my own party. I have an active inves- tape during the 2016 campaign, tional terms. tigation into the governor, so I don’t which contained old audio of Trump “We’ve got a long tradition in our want to say too much more about bragging about sexually assaulting country that reaches back all the way that, currently pending, but I’ll just women, Hawley called the comments to the founding, and even before, of say: This is classic Senator McCaskill “shocking, repulsive, and utterly understanding that one of our most trying to change the subject from her indefensible.” Then, last August, for- fundamental rights is the right to self- own terrible record.” mer senator John Danforth, one of government,” he says. “There’s a real The Greitens affair is a headache Hawley’s mentors, wrote a blister- sense in which we are not governed for Hawley and has the potential ing op-ed attacking Trump, saying by our elected officials in this country. to hurt him in the general election. that the Republican party “has been We’re governed by administrators who Today, though, the Republicans corrupted by this hateful man, and report to nobody. That is a big, big inside don’t seem too bothered by it is now in peril.” Trump allies and problem in this country constitution- the party crashers across the street opponents alike pressed Hawley to ally. And people know that—that’s from Stemme Farms. “You know how embrace or denounce Danforth’s posi- why they’re concerned about the ‘deep important this is,” a man in a Viet- tion. Judging discretion to be the bet- state,’ that’s why they’re concerned nam cap tells his friend with relish. ter part of valor, Hawley did neither, about their voice not being heard.” “There’s protesters out there.” ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 15 letter that began, “We write to con- demn recent statements our colleague Saying the Unsayable Amy Wax . . . has made in popu- lar media pieces.” The letter didn’t attempt to refute anything Wax had Why Amy Wax’s Penn Law colleagues revile her. written—“We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they wrote—it simply by Mark Bauerlein condemned her for writing it. Now, Wax’s critics are again f you work for the companies that supposed to do—carve out the differ- incensed. A video interview Wax did produce standardized tests, as I ences among the strong, middling, last September with Glenn Loury I have done for many years (creat- and weak. A good test produces a good on Bloggingheads.tv has surfaced in ing and evaluating exams in the area bell curve. It predicts how well a test- which Wax states, “I don’t think I’ve of English and reading), taker will do at the next level. If ever seen a black graduate student in you will eventually racial achievement gaps show the top quarter of the class and rarely, identify a significant up, well, that’s because of the rarely in the top half.” flaw in our nation’s intentional sorting effect of You can imagine the outrage. Penn meritocratic system of the assessment. alumni circulated a petition decrying higher education and Colleges rely on tests to “the false and slanderous nature of in the highest-ranked do just that. But the process these statements.” Like the earlier fac- schools that frequently that identifies an applicant as ulty letter, the petition offered no coun- trumpet their ratings. Yale-worthy puts even the best terargument to what Wax had said or Standardized tests African-American students in any evidence for the supposed slander are a crucial compo- the second tier. You see of which Wax is accused. It was purely nent of the system; the problem. an expression of high indignation. and yet, with implac­ This is the As well, the dean of Penn law school able consistency, when proper context removed Wax from teaching a course test developers meet and for understand- required of first-year students, stating, review the results from past ing the continued “These claims are false: black students tests, the awkward moment harassment of University have graduated in the top of the class at arrives when they must of Pennsylvania law profes- Penn Law.” But he, too, failed to pro- address an uncomfort- sor Amy Wax. Last year, with her vide any data about student rankings able fact: Without excep- coauthor, University of San Diego and grades, claiming the school’s con- tion, whites and Asians law professor Larry Alexander, Wax fidentiality policies prevented it. score significantly higher wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia This isn’t merely a disagreement than blacks and Hispanics Inquirer arguing that social dysfunc- over grades. If the dean is right, then on these tests. The gap is tion in America is due, in part, to the Wax is facing a serious allegation: not large, and it’s persistent. decay of 1950s-era bourgeois values. that she merely said something inap- Test developers are “All cultures are not equal,” they propriate in public, but that she’s an never quite sure what wrote, thereby violating the active bigot. Wax has taught the man- to say. Nobody talks sacred dogma of cultural rel- datory course for many years, which about the possibil- Amy Wax ativism that prevails in aca- means she has graded a large per- ity that the tests demia. It didn’t matter that centage of the students who’ve been are culturally biased, or that the stu- the behavioral norms they empha- admitted to the law school. From her dents taking them might suffer from sized—work hard, don’t have chil- statements we may conclude that she stereotype threat, or any of the many dren out of wedlock, respect authority, has never put black students in the top other popular rationalizations for the eschew drugs and crime—are the ones quartile and only rarely in the upper low scores. We accept the validity of applicants must follow if they hope half of her class. How can this be when, the data. But we aren’t comfortable to get into a selective university like according to the dean, many black stu- with the group differences we have the University of Pennsylvania and the dents place at the very top of the class documented. America is an antidis- ones that elite universities already by graduation time? crimination nation, but our work as enforce in their admissions process. Professor Wax must be biased in test-makers is highly discriminatory. Merely saying so is tantamount to put- her teaching. That’s essentially the That’s what standardized tests are ting other cultures down. charge the dean makes in his letter, The fallout from the op-ed was which says that black students “may Mark Bauerlein is professor of English immediate. Half of Wax’s colleagues legitimately question whether the

at Emory University. at the law school signed a public inaccurate and belittling statements GARY LOCKE

16 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 she has made may adversely affect students’ scores, she responded that Institutions such as Penn Law are their learning environment and career although there were African-Amer- liberal and diverse. They say so all prospects.” A story in Inside Higher Ed ican test-takers who scored “above the time. But they are also maniacally quoted an education professor at Penn the LSAT scaled scores of 171 and competitive. Despite frequent nods and self-described expert in minority- 170” (she did not say how many), they to diversity, administrators at these serving institutions who put it more weren’t included in the graphs in the schools want to be super-selective, bluntly, stating that students “should report because “they were dropped not inclusive, because being selec- not have to be required to learn in a from the graphical display by the tive boosts their rankings. If a school hostile environment.” smoothing method employed due to admits students who can’t handle the Is it possible that Wax has been dis- the sparseness of data in that region work and drop out, a school’s gradu- criminating against black students all of the score scale.” When I pressed ation and retention rates go down, as these years? Consider that the grad- her on this, asking if this meant does its all-important U.S. News & ing of first-year exams is blind—pro- that no African-American students World Report ranking. U.S. News also fessors have no idea of the names of scored above a 172, I did not receive factors in admissions test scores in students to whom they assign grades. a response. The key finding, then, is its rankings. The higher the average They only find out who is who after that far fewer African-American test- ACT score for the Class of 2022, for the grades are sent in, when they takers scored above 172 in 2014 com- example, the higher a school climbs receive a list of their students’ final pared with students of other races, the rankings ladder. grades by name. It’s nearly impossible while a number of whites and Asians Achievement trumps diversity, to discriminate under that arrange- scored in the mid- to upper-170s. even in the admissions office. The ment. Besides, if Wax’s grades were Penn is a highly selective law results might leave some professors so out of line with other professors’ school, with a 2017 acceptance and deans feeling nervous and guilt- assessments, it’s unlikely to have gone rate of only 17.6 percent, accord- ridden, but they all benefit from unnoticed. Others would have com- ing to AdmissionsConsultants. The the prestige of working for a selec- mented on the gross discrepancy and median LSAT score for entering tive school. The 31,000 youths who raised concerns or lodged complaints. Penn students last year was 169. applied for one of the 1,300 slots in Wax has been teaching at Penn since This means that half the incoming Princeton’s freshman class next fall 2001, and no formal allegations of rac- class has higher LSAT scores than didn’t do so because, as Princeton’s ism have ever been made against her. the top-scoring or most promising admissions dean claims, successful In other words, Penn has not African-American students. In other applicants have a “diverse range of opened an investigation into Wax’s words, the standardized test scores skills, ideas, backgrounds and beliefs.” grading practices, which suggests that match Wax’s experience with her They longed to be one of those happy, no such grading discrepancies exist. students. True, the LSAT is merely chosen few at the apex of the merito- In fact, the statements she made in the “predictive,” that is, it is a projection cratic food chain. Bloggingheads.tv interview are quite of how students will perform once This is a taboo subject because of close to the data we do have on law they enter law school. But the Law the profound liberal guilt that academ- students nationally. The Law School School Admissions Council per- ics suffer over the very policies their Admissions Council has tracked forms regular studies of the LSAT’s own schools follow, such as requiring LSAT scores by race for several validity and finds that the LSAT is a test scores in the admissions file. We years, producing one report that cov- better predictor of first-year achieve- are at the point now at which merely ers the years 2005-2012 and another ment in law school than are under- mentioning the failings of affirmative that spans 2007-2014. The data in graduate grades. action is itself an act of racism. If only those reports show a wide and stable No one is happy about this. The troublemakers such as Wax would achievement gap between whites and existence of racial achievement gaps keep quiet, the problem of the achieve- Asians on the one hand and African runs against the American egalitar- ment gap could be papered over with Americans on the other. Mean scores ian ideal. We want fair prospects voluminous talk about diversity, a new for those groups differ consistently by and no race-based disadvantages. diversity course requirement, and a 10 to 11 points. But the gaps persist despite various couple of minority hires every year. Other charts in the reports show forms of social engineering over the Just stop telling the truth. The ready the percentage of students in each years, including affirmative action in and swift charge of racism lodged racial group who earned different higher education. They are a constant against Wax is a sign of desperation, standardized test scores. The report embarrassment to selective colleges not righteousness. That’s the real sin does not offer a granular breakdown and universities, which not too long Professor Wax committed when she of individual test scores by race or ago were convulsed by Black Lives talked about her classroom experi- ethnicity. When I asked Lynda Reese, Matter protests and student demands ence. She shined a spotlight on the a psychometrician at the LSAT, for that left administrators feeling cor- pretense at the heart of contemporary clarification about African-American nered and anxious. academic liberalism. ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 21 above proficiency in fourth-grade reading. The average score for large Who Will Save districts is 27 percent. Detroit’s students don’t fare any better on Michigan’s own standard- Detroit’s Schools? ized test. In 2017, just 9.9 percent of third graders in Detroit scored at pro- ficient levels in language arts. That means only 332 students out of the The task is daunting. 3,361 students assessed met grade- by Ingrid Jacques level expectations, says Mary Grech, a data and policy analyst with the Edu- Detroit are being denied their right of access cation Trust-Midwest, an advocacy lijah Craft is a 6-foot-6-inch to literacy. But a lawsuit alone is not group based in Michigan that seeks bear of a young man who loves going to solve this illiteracy epidemic. to close achievement gaps for low- E playing football. Yet less than Elijah Craft recently spoke at a lit- income and minority students. two years ago as a Detroit high school eracy summit at the city’s Mumford Detroit’s student population is senior, he was afraid to travel more High School, and his message to the 83 percent African-American and than a few blocks from home. And he students in the auditorium was one more than 50 percent live in pov- was ashamed. He was 17 years old and from the heart. “I couldn’t read, I erty. In the last two decades, families could barely read at a first-grade level. couldn’t do nothin’. I was in school who could leave for the suburbs did. Everything changed for him in and cheating on tests and every- Charter schools in Detroit have fur- the fall of 2016 when he thing. It didn’t help me ther skimmed off a large percentage got focused reading help one bit,” he said, shar- of the more motivated students since through one-on-one tuto- ing how learning to read the mid-1990s, when charters first rials at his school. He changed his life. “It takes opened in Michigan. More than half went from the bottom of a lot of hard work and a of Detroit’s students today attend his class to graduating lot of dedication to do charter schools. 25th, and he went on to anything you want to put They are still behind their peers college. His story none- yourself into.” around the state, but they are doing theless remains jarring. Thousands of chil- better than their counterparts in the How can a student make it dren in Detroit could use Detroit Public Schools Community almost all the way through the kind of tutoring that District. A recent analysis found that high school and not be Nikolai Vitti Craft received, and esti- charter-school students scored over able to read? mates are that it would 20 percent proficient on the state third- Beyond Basics, the nonprofit lit- take about $135 million to reach grade reading test—twice the score of eracy organization that provided them all. (Michigan spends $12 bil- the traditional public school students. Craft with tutoring, estimates that lion on K-12 public schools annually.) And charter schools do this with 93 percent of the 50,000 children Beyond Basics currently works with less money per student. Ben DeGrow, in the Detroit Public Schools Com- about 500 students and can get them an education-policy expert at the munity District (DPSCD) are years up to grade level in less than 12 weeks, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, behind their grade level in what they but the program is at capacity. has crunched the numbers, and in the can read and comprehend. Many can’t Schools in large cities struggle 2016-17 school year, DPSCD spent read at all. “This is a problem that all across the country. Yet Detroit is about $15,000 per student, when has gone unaddressed for decades, firmly at the bottom of the 27 urban including all state, local, and fed- impacting generations of people,” says districts measured by the National eral funding. Detroit’s charters spent Pam Good, president and executive Assessment of Educational Progress, about $10,000. director of Beyond Basics. “Ninety a federal standardized test. This test It’s clearly not just a funding percent of the kids in Detroit schools of reading and math skills is given problem. can’t read the written word. It is a for- every other year to fourth- and eighth- After years of mismanagement and eign language to them.” grade students. Since 2009, when the financial and academic failure, the state Dismal reading scores sparked a federal government began comparing took control of the DPSCD in 2009. lawsuit on behalf of seven Detroit stu- the largest districts, Detroit students Over seven years, the state proved lit- dents in 2016, arguing that students have consistently posted the lowest tle better at running the troubled dis- scores—often by a wide margin. trict, which edged closer and closer to Ingrid Jacques is deputy editorial page editor In 2015, only 6 percent of students bankruptcy. In 2016, the legislature

of the Detroit News. in Detroit public schools were at or stepped in and offered the DPSCD a LARRY A. PEPLIN

22 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 $617 million bailout and a return to local control. Last year, a newly elected school board chose Nikolai Vitti Good and Evil, as superintendent. Vitti comes from a large district in Jacksonville, Florida, that he helped Right and Wrong transform into one of the better-per- forming urban districts in that state. Tackling illiteracy is one of his first goals, and he’s been going from School massacres and the conscience supply. school to school, ensuring that teach- by Natalia Dashan & David Gelernter ers and principals have the tools they need to both measure and address t’s sad that following the mas- beliefs to the broader community. the reading deficiency. That includes sacre of their classmates, the What do “gun rights” actually mean? implementing a new reading diagnos- I students of Marjory Stoneman Why do we differ so sharply from the tics test so teachers can identify the Douglas High School in Florida rest of the West on this issue? Because struggling students and making sure should immediately turn to govern- we are free men by no one’s leave; we the district’s curriculum aligns with ment for action instead of to their were born this way. state standards. own communities. The obvious ques- We need never prove that we Vitti argues that years of shift- tion suggested by these crimes is: deserve some right or other, whether ing leadership and diminishing or not it makes sense to the resources led the district to become general population. If the com- increasingly isolated and take a “sur- munity wants to take that right vivalist approach.” And the schools away, it better have a good rea- alone can’t be blamed for their stu- son. The burden of proof is on dents’ shortfalls. The majority of the the taker-away, not the owner. student population in Detroit falls The essence of American below the poverty line. Students face democracy shines through in tough home lives that make success our gun laws; they are beauti- at school difficult. Hunger and lack of ful, if we only took the trouble clothing are often more pressing than to explain them. academic achievement. Many kids in Of course if we have dem- the city grow up in homes without a onstrated to ourselves that single book and with parents, often Students evacuate in Parkland, Florida, February 14. we just can’t control certain illiterate themselves, who lack the weapons, such as rapid-firing skills to read to their children. What’s wrong with us? Do I know rifles that accept large magazines, Another pitfall is chronic absentee- potential mass murderers who would then we had better stop selling them. ism. The city’s students rank among kill if they had a weapon? How could If we can’t keep them away from chil- the highest in the country for skip- we have failed to notice—and failed to dren and from evil or mentally ill ping class. A 2016 report found nearly demand action when our police and adults, yes: Let’s get rid of them. But 60 percent of DPSCD’s students the FBI were too criminally negligent we had better notice at the same time missed at least 15 days of school. to take the necessary steps? If there’s that our new limitation is a defeat for Vitti is aware of all these factors. a pothole on your corner, you’re not mutual trust and therefore democ- Looking to the future, he says he likely to tell yourself, as you go slam- racy. Democracy is mutual trust. If we needs time to rebuild a broken sys- ming through it every morning, month don’t notice and ponder such defeats, tem, but that he expects students to after month, “There’s one problem I we are mere disciplinarians who show real gains within three years. no longer need to worry about. After know how to punish bad children but “We don’t like to talk about the all, I’ve told the highway department!” can’t see what’s wrong with a family impact of poverty. You start to believe It’s equally sad that gun-owners, in which the children are always in that students can’t do it,” he says. conservatives, and libertarians, have need of punishment. “But you have to believe that all chil- failed so dramatically to explain their No child should have to ask his dren can learn and succeed. We can’t mother whether he is likely to die make poverty an excuse for why the Natalia Dashan is a recent Yale graduate and today at school. But no mother should students can’t do better.” an independent analyst in Seattle. David wonder whether her child is apt to The thousands of Detroit students Gelernter, a Weekly Standard contributing kill someone either. If the shadow of who can’t read are waiting for some- editor, is a professor of computer science at Yale a doubt exists, we’d best have put the

JOE RAEDLE / GETTY one to believe in them. ♦ and chief scientist at Dittach. child in a place for the mentally or

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 23 morally ill long ago. And the bigger and Youth). The Adult area is the only and heroes worshiped God and read question, the elephant in the room segment with an increase over the time the Bible. trumpeting constantly as we ignore period.” And so on. But nowadays we send fewer and him: Who rears our children nowa- We enthuse over the sanctity of fewer children to Sunday school. And days? Where does a child get his con- human life—and every year, fewer their weekday schools treat religion science? Who supervises children children know what we are talking and the Bible as toxic substances to be day-to-day while they learn to be about. Sanctity? A recent Yale gradu- avoided at all costs. human beings? ate (one of the very sharpest) wrote Children who used to grow up with Religion used to give parents a rea- one of us, regarding sanctity: “If I Christianity and the Bible are not likely son to discuss good and evil, right and hadn’t read [some particular book], to read Aristotle or Kant instead. Too wrong with their children. Religious the concept would not have occurred many grow up morally illiterate. Not schools used to help fill the gaps in a to me and I would not have picked it true, some people say; they learn the child’s moral worldview. Yes, some up elsewhere.” The whole idea, she law! But the law was never intended to children figure it all out for them- says flatly, “is not in the zeitgeist of supply Americans with a conscience. It selves—but many don’t. our culture.” doesn’t, and it can’t. This used to be a religious coun- The Cultural Revolution of 1945‑70 This nation needs either a religious try, and still is. But children learn less left our public schools hollow and our revival (unlikely though not impos- about religion than they used to. Does Sunday schools looking and feeling sible) or a group of substitute moral religion matter, in practical terms? ridiculous. We look back in regret. But codes on which we all (basically) agree. What made Americans such a stub- this is no historical problem for aca- The Bible was the most important uni- bornly religious people in the past? demic debate; it’s an event that hap- fying force in American history: Puri- Perhaps those old-timers agreed pens every day, every year. We are in tans and Catholics, evangelicals and with the Founding Fathers that the replacement period, when persons the poshest Episcopalians, trailer-park democracy is a delusion unless the of one sort die out and are replaced by residents and mansion-dwellers, old population is religious; unless people a different sort. Those who were edu- WASP stock and Jewish immigrants can trust each other to treat serious cated before the Cultural Revolution from Poland, blacks and whites read things in a serious way. Some children got a different kind of education from the good book. But we have shrugged show good moral judgment, gener- those who came after—an education off the moral education of our children. ally because of their families. Some focused (unlike today’s) on duties as What do we think will happen now? children don’t. But if they are sent to much as rights, in which Christianity Unless we are just as serious about religious school or Sunday school, and the Bible were seen to be the guid- fixing educational failures as we are they all stand a chance of learning to ing stars they are, keeping America about tightening gun control, we have think things over from a moral view- on course as it wanders through the taken one big step away from democ- point. Their families are the best cosmos. They were not in themselves racy towards the kind of intellectual- places for such thinking. But their topics for public school discussion, ocracy that many liberals seem to families might be too busy—might but neither were they avoided like the want. They work towards it by pro- be exhausted getting a living; might be plague, as they seem to be nowadays. moting the power of judges, of the embarrassed and not know where to Judaism and Christianity were (of press, of the schools and colleges. And start; might feel incompetent to dis- course) discussed in religious schools; most conservatives can’t be bothered cuss the topic. Or they might not give and they were in the air. After all this to oppose them. We’re happy, and a damn after all. In any case, Sunday is a biblical republic, born out of the should be, when a Neil Gorsuch joins school is better than nothing. intensely biblical devotion of Puritan the Supreme Court, or some compara- It’s hard to find integrated statis- settlers in the North and Anglicans ble hero steps onto a lower rung of the tics, but it’s clear that over the long in the South. Everyone used to learn hierarchy. But we barely even bother term, fewer children are going to Sun- about the Pilgrims and the dangerous to insist anymore that this nation is day school. USA Today reported in journey and murderous conditions not supposed to be run by judges. March of 2015: “From 2004 to 2010 . . . they faced so they could practice their This is a biblical republic, and we Sunday school attendance dropped religion. Everyone used to learn about need morally literate children. The nearly 40 percent among Evangelical Lincoln’s profound devotion to the moral blank of modern America, Lutheran churches in America and Bible and hear for himself that Lin- where Christianity has been deleted almost 8 percent among Southern Bap- coln’s greatest speeches are theologi- in much of the educational world and tist churches.” A study by J. Clifford cal reflections, sermons, on this nation replaced by Ecology and other modern Tharp Jr., “Reflections on Southern and its struggles. “With malice toward religions (but where are the Ten Com- Baptist Sunday School Enrollment,” none, with charity for all, with firm- mandments of Ecology?), is only one notes, “Since 1980 [through 2004] the ness in the right as God gives us to see cause among many for the plague of enrollment trends for three of the age the right . . . ” They heard for them- murder we are suffering. But we are in groups are down (Preschool, Children, selves that these American Founders no position to neglect it. ♦

24 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 Party of One John Kasich, ‘positive populist,’ eyes 2020

By John McCormack that we may be seeing “the end of a two-party system.” The unspoken implication: He’s just the guy to hurry that New York process along. Asked if he’s going to run as an independ­ hio governor John Kasich is riding shot- ent, Kasich tells me: “I honestly don’t know. But we do gun in a large black SUV that’s rolling have a political organization. We’re not taking any options through midtown Manhattan when he off the table, because we don’t know what’s going to hap- pulls out his smartphone and assumes pen tomorrow.” the role of disc jockey. First up is Lou Like his taste in music, Kasich’s politics and person- OReed’s “Perfect Day,” a piano-based melody. “I think ality are an eclectic mix that has put him out of step with about my wife when I hear this,” Kasich says. “Isn’t that the Republican party: elements of conservatism, liberal- a beautiful song?” He then switches to some- thing more upbeat. “Remember this one, Doug?” Kasich asks his political aide Doug Preisse, who traveled everywhere with Kasich during his 2016 presidential campaign. Doug is stumped. “Bowie!” Kasich exclaims before switching songs again halfway through David Bowie’s “Starman.” “I’ve really recorded a lot of good stuff here. How about this one, Doug? Who’s this?” Kasich asks, as the hand holding the smart- phone bounces from side to side to the beat of the new song. “This is your little boyfriend, Justin Bieber,” Preisse replies. “Aren’t you a Belieber?” As Bieber’s late-2015 hit “Sorry” plays in the background, Kasich laughs and asks: “Did you see where Selena Gomez and Bieber are Kasich on ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers,’ January 29 going to church now?” When we get out of the SUV, I ask Kasich if his teen- ism, and populism mixed together with an infatuation age daughters turned him on to Bieber. “No, that’s what with bipartisanship and a strain of moralism that annoys everybody wants to say: His wife dresses him, and his daugh- many conservatives but earns him strange new respect ters give him his music. Sheesh! from some liberals. “I find my own music and I dress myself.” While Kasich and his team insist he’s open to the possi- It’s not every day you meet a grown man, let alone a bility of running in a Republican primary, with or without 65-year-old sitting governor, who admits to enjoying the Donald Trump in the race, his swing through New York music of a Canadian tween idol. But Kasich likes march- has more the feel of an independent proto-presidential- ing to his own tune. Barred by Ohio’s term limits from campaign trip. Instead of jumping from coffeehouse to seeking a third term as governor in 2018, he is increas- American Legion hall in New Hampshire, Kasich bounces ingly open about the possibility of running for president from green room to green room in Manhattan for six on- in 2020 as an independent. camera interviews: MSNBC (twice), CNN, CNBC, and For the last few weeks, Kasich has mused in interviews websites Now This News and TheStreet.com. Kasich attends a town hall at Stuyvesant High School; he was invited by a

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. young 2016 campaign volunteer named Hugo Smith and BISHOP / NBC / NBCU PHOTO BANK / GETTYLLOYD

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 25 his father (BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith). Conspicu- Kasich is upfront about his estrangement from the ously absent from his schedule is any appearance on Fox Republican party under Trump. “I just don’t support News, where Kasich hosted his own show and filled in for the current agenda: the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, not Bill O’Reilly from 2001 to 2007. worried about debt—I don’t like any of that. Is that tempo- Whenever Kasich has popped up on TV over the past rary? I don’t know,” Kasich says. “I do think that partisan- year, he has tended to discuss issues that put him at odds ship has become a substitute for religion—‘I’m clinging to with Republicans—gun control, a no-strings-attached bill my party’—you know? ‘I used to cling to my Presbyterian- to protect from deportation illegal immigrants who arrived ism,’ and now, you know, well, that’s sort of out the win- as minors, his opposition to GOP legislation to partially dow, so now: ‘It’s my party!’ ” The last three words drip with repeal Obamacare,­ and an unapologetic defense of his deci- resentment as he mimics an angry partisan. sion to expand Medicaid in Ohio under Obamacare.­ “I think our audience agrees with me: You’re one of the good wenty-one years ago, John Kasich was featured ones,” Bill Maher told Kasich during a 2017 appearance on on the cover of this magazine under the headline: Maher’s HBO show, a comment that was met with whoops T“It’s His Party.” Kasich “is running for president,” and applause. “Look at that. That’s pretty good for a liberal Andrew Ferguson reported in June 1997, and “no one California audience.” seems to think his running is a During his March 12 appearance thoroughly ridiculous idea even on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, As an independent though he is a relatively obscure Kasich touts his support for gun candidate, “Kasich congressman from Ohio. And the control, noting that he voted for the reason no one thinks it’s ridicu- assault weapons ban back in 1994 (a would need to think of lous is that John Kasich, more minority position in the Republican himself as the American than any other Republican poli- party then, it is almost nonexistent Emmanuel Macron,” says tician, more than Newt Gingrich within the congressional GOP now). Henry Olsen of the Ethics even, occupies the center of grav- When Hayes presses Kasich on the and Public Policy Center: ity of the Republican party these bills he backed expanding gun rights days.” Times have changed. and the NRA’s support for Kasich “ ‘I’m going to run as all Not only is the Ohio gover- in 2014—an endorsement scrubbed flavors of center—from nor on the outs with the GOP, a from Kasich’s website following the center-right to center- Kasich 2020 presidential cam- Parkland massacre—Kasich defends left—and it will be a paign would strike some as quix- the legislation he signed: “Concealed genuine coalition.’ ” otic, if not ridiculous. So I turned carry is not what has led to this kind to two of the best political analysts of problem.” In a hallway outside the in the country, Henry Olsen of the studio afterwards, I ask Kasich if he misses hosting his Ethics and Public Policy Center and Sean Trende of Real own TV show. “No,” he replies. “I’m governor. I have a Clear Politics, to assess Kasich’s presidential prospects. TV show. It’s called ‘Governor.’ ” They agreed about Kasich’s chances of defeating Trump The next morning, in the green room at MSNBC, head-to-head in a GOP primary. “As of today, Kasich Kasich learns of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s fir- would have no shot,” says Olsen. “The lesson of 2016 is ing, and he criticizes the chaos in the Trump administra- that you never put a zero-percent chance on anything, but tion during his hour on air. After the show, I ask him if pretty close,” says Trende. he has any regrets about rebuffing a reported overture They disagreed about Kasich’s odds in a Republi- from Donald Trump Jr. to serve as his father’s vice presi- can primary in which Trump, for whatever reason, wasn’t dent and missing the opportunity to influence the president running. “In 2016, [Kasich] had very limited appeal. He from the inside. “There was never any chance I would do appealed primarily to moderates who were educated,” says anything like that,” Kasich says. “I’m governor of Ohio, I Olsen, but “if Kasich runs more as what he is—which is a have a big job. We just fundamentally disagree.” Trump Jr. garden-variety center-right politician—he could very well has disputed the claim that he floated the VP offer to a beat” Republicans running to the right in a Trump-less pri- top Kasich adviser: “You know the way I conduct myself,” mary. “I don’t think he can win a Republican primary hav- he told CNN in 2016. “Do you really believe I would say, ing been as what Republican voters will perceive as disloyal ‘[John Kasich] is in charge of foreign and domestic policy as Kasich has been,” says Trende. and [Donald Trump] will focus on making America great But the two agreed that an independent bid could again’? What am I, a meathead?” be serious under plausible circumstances. “Two major

26 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 pre-requisites for a non-farcical Kasich campaign are Yet there are all kinds of difficult ideological and policy Trump’s job approval stays in the low 40s and Democrats questions that would make it hard for a centrist coalition to nominate someone like [Bernie] Sanders,” says Trende. hold. What kind of Supreme Court nominee could voters “There’s a bunch of weird questions” in this scenario, he expect from a third-party president? Which sitting or for- adds. For example: “What happens in Connecticut? You mer Supreme Court justice does Kasich find to be a model? can see Sanders getting the liberal and maybe the inner- He doesn’t answer the question, pointing only to the “rea- city vote, and then Trump getting eastern Connecticut sonable” judges he’d nominated to the Ohio supreme court. where he ran well last time and some of the areas outside What does he think about Neil Gorsuch? “I think he’s fine. of New Haven where the Italians moved, and then Kasich I mean, I don’t know that much about him,” Kasich replies. cleaning up in western Connecticut. Who wins that? I He wouldn’t simply outsource the decision to the Federalist don’t know.” Society, but says: “I’m gonna want to have a conservative. . . . “Kasich would need to think of himself as the American I’m not gonna have some liberal. I don’t agree with them.” Emmanuel Macron,” says Olsen. “ ‘I’m going to run as all Should Roe v. Wade be overturned? “I’m pro-life and, flavors of center—from center-right to center-left—and it you know, I’m not in the Congress now, and we’re mov- will be a genuine coalition.’ That could win if there is some- ing probably more and more towards putting limits on the body so far left that the center-left feels late-stage [abortions]. That’s probably they have a better shot with an inde- where we are right now,” Kasich says. pendent than with a Democrat. It all “I just don’t know what will happen.” depends on what the establishment of Would he like to see Roe over- the Democratic party wants to do.” turned eventually? “I’m pro-life, so So you may think a Kasich can- that’s all I can tell you,” he says. “Rape, didacy would be good or bad, but incest, the life of the mother ought there’s a decent chance it could mat- to be the exceptions. That’s kind of ter. Even protest candidates (think of where I come down.” Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Ralph As governor, Kasich signed bills Nader) can shape the dynamics of a defunding Planned Parenthood and race in important ways and potentially banning late-term abortion and abor- tip the election one way or the other. tion targeting children with Down There are of course all sorts of rea- syndrome. But he doesn’t want to sons why a third-party victory would talk about any of it. “Look, let me just be unlikely even in the best of circum- explain,” he says. “I have my posi- stances. We live in a polarized country, tions on it, but there are other things and the Constitution militates toward The way we were: June 16, 1997 I’d rather focus on and concentrate on. a two-candidate race by requiring the These are big hot-button wedge issues winner to get a majority of Electoral College votes (or a that Billy Graham said he himself avoided. If he could majority of congressional delegations in the House in the avoid them, I can avoid talking about it as much. I don’t absence of an Electoral College victor). want to be focused on things that automatically divide peo- Then there’s the lack of a party infrastructure and orga- ple. I say what I have to say about it. I do what I have to do, nization. When I ask Kasich how a third party would get and that’s the end of it.” off the ground, he says: “Rich people that say they’ve had enough and they’re willing to put money into it—that’s here has actually always been a strong streak of how it gets started.” It’s unclear whether Kasich met with moralism in John Kasich’s rhetoric, just not about any such rich people during his trip to New York, but there T the issues that most concern social conservatives. were a few hours in his schedule reserved for meetings In 1997, when he chaired the House Budget Committee, about which his staff wouldn’t provide any details. Kasich was known as a deficit hawk who had just inked “There are many donors and corporate executives who a deal with Bill Clinton to balance the budget. The year have grown tired of the chaotic clown car,” Kasich’s politi- before, Kasich helped lead the effort to reform welfare and cal strategist John Weaver tells me, without naming names. was praised as one of the best communicators in the GOP. “I don’t have a doubt that if there was a serious and real pos- As Andrew Ferguson reported then in these pages: sibility, that there would be more than enough money to On welfare reform he is particularly artful. “I once told this challenge the president early in either the primary or the roomful of rich people,” he told the roomful of rich peo- independent line on ballots across the country.” ple in Iowa, “Look, we didn’t reform welfare for you.” The

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 27 Republicans looked disappointed, but only momentarily. up the entire tab at first, but that drops to 90 percent.) “We did it for Joe. You know Joe? Maybe you’ve seen him But Hederman praised Kasich for cutting taxes, freezing when you forgot your briefcase one night and went back green-energy mandates, and trying (but failing) to curb to your office on the 31st floor and there he was sweeping up and emptying the trash. And we did it for Carol, who’s the power of public-employee unions. (Kasich signed a pouring Starbucks coffee at the airport for just above mini- bill in 2011 that went further than legislation in Wiscon- mum wage, and she’s wakin’ up at 6 a.m. to take her kids to sin to curtail public unions’ collective bargaining power, day care, ’cause her husband left her, and when she goes but it was repealed 62 percent to 38 percent in a referen- to work she parks in a parking lot that’s closer to Mars than it is to the terminal where she works. dum before it could take effect.) “So I tell you, we didn’t reform welfare for rich people. Kasich suggests that there’s not much of a contradic- We reformed it for Carol and Joe. Because it is immoral— tion between what he was saying about welfare in the it is a sin—to take money from Carol and from Joe and 1990s and what he’s saying about Medicaid now. He says give it to people who don’t want to work.” work requirements for Medicaid are fine and that Med- icaid and Medicare need to be reformed to balance the budget. But he’s vague on spe- cifics. “I have no idea what Paul Ryan pro- posed” to reform Medicare, Kasich says. “If you just move from a fee-for-service to coor- dinated-care system as a default option, that would be a really good thing. . . . I don’t have a Medicare plan right in front of me. But we would dig in and say what works and what doesn’t, what’s acceptable and what isn’t.” The common thread between Kasich’s case for cutting welfare in the 1990s and expanding welfare now is the moralism behind each argument. It’s this rhetoric, when aimed at other Republicans, along with his criticism of Trump, that makes Kasich anathema to so many GOP voters Kasich campaigning in Rockville, Maryland, April 25, 2016 and leaders—not his ideological heresies. Trump himself, after all, campaigned on not Today, the issue for which Kasich is probably best touching entitlements, called the House GOP bill to par- known is his decision to expand Medicaid, the coun- tially repeal Obama­care “mean,” and endorsed an assault try’s biggest welfare program. But this is an example of weapons ban and a bill to protect “Dreamers” in various Kasich moving with the Republican party, not against White House meetings (comments that were never acted it. Mike Pence expanded Medicaid in Indiana. So did upon). Kasich seems to recognize that they both color Republican governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and outside the lines when it comes to conservative dogma. Iowa. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker was the only Rust-Belt “I understand Trump’s negative populism,” he says. But Republican who didn’t. “I’m a positive populist. I’ve always been a populist.” His What set Kasich apart from other Republicans on heterodoxy certainly seems to have worked to his political Medicaid was the argument he made. “Now, when you die advantage in Ohio: He won a second term as governor by and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not 31 points in 2014; four years earlier he squeaked by with a going to ask you much about what you did about keeping 2-point victory. government small,” Kasich said in 2013. “But he is going Kasich frequently talks about the need to restore cer- to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a tain moral values and civility. These goals are sometimes good answer.” To fulfill the heavenly mandate, Kasich did in tension, as demonstrated by the implication that those an end-run around the full legislature and had Medicaid who opposed expanding Medicaid are immoral. “It was expansion approved by a panel controlled by the legisla- probably not right for me to do it because it put people ture’s leadership. off,” Kasich tells me, referring to the Saint Peter sound- Rea Hederman of the free-market Buckeye Institute bite. “At the same time, I didn’t tell you to feel like I’m says that Medicaid expansion will be a long-term “fis- judging you. . . . But if I had thought it was going to be

cal drag on our state.” (The federal government picked really offensive, I would not use that.” ALEX WONG / GETTY

28 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 he breakdown of civil society and the need for a go thinking I’m trying to lead some crusade here or some- moral awakening were themes of Kasich’s 2016 thing like that,” Kasich tells me over lunch in Manhattan. T presidential campaign and remain so in his speeches “When I talk about an awakening, I’m talking about sort of today. But his rhetoric is closer to moralistic therapeutic a movement of manners and respect. . . . I haven’t studied deism than anything offered by the religious right. “One of them, but they have happened, right? They have happened the most important things in life is to like yourself,” Kasich throughout human history.” told high-school students during his townhall at Stuyvesant. “How did Wilberforce do that [change social mores in The first half of Kasich’s 7,500-word final state of the Britain]? I don’t know how,” he says. But “the problem state address, delivered on March 7 to the Ohio legislature, with talking about this awakening in religious terms is reli- was a scattershot survey of theology, philosophy, and poli- gion has been so discredited that the minute—if you start tics. “In uncertain times, we reflect, and I just want us to go with that—it gets you nowhere.” back for a moment to those days when many of us were in That’s not to say Kasich isn’t interested in religion. college. Do you remember being in the He’s enthusiastic about dinner dorm?” Kasich said. “Do you remem- plans that evening in Manhat- ber late at night when you would look at Kasich’s values rhetoric tan with Fleming Rutledge, an your friends and you would say, ‘What’s is unusual for a 81-year-old Episcopal priest, life all about? Why are we here? What is author, and theologian. Most our purpose? What is my responsibility politician and may not recently, he’s been reading about as a human being?’ ” appeal to conservatives Gnosticism, a Christian heresy, in He then devoted a few words or a who would like more one of Rutledge’s books. “It’s a few sentences to (take a deep breath): social solidarity without non-flesh, non-body—it’s kind of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche, feeling like they have a metaphysical—is that the right, Camus, Kierkegaard, Locke, Augus- word, metaphysical?” he asks. “It’s tine, Aquinas, Luther, Wilberforce, to literally hug their spirit-based,” he says. “It’s that the Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, neighbors. But it’s flesh and the body can do no good, Die trich­ Bonhoeffer, Natan Sharan- just weird enough so it’s all about the spirit. It’s been sky, Ronald Reagan, whistleblowers to convince you it’s around forever—forever—and I at Wells Fargo and the Department authentic and sincere. think it’s an evolving definition of of Housing and Urban Development, what it means.” and heroes from recent American trag- “It’s one of the early parts of this edies in Houston, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, and Parkland. book I’m reading. Man, I read some weird stuff.” “We, human beings, created by the Lord, we’re unique The conversation circles back to Kasich’s state of the and we are made in our creator’s image. That’s what the state speech. “I made a speech, I talked about these vir- theologians say, and I buy it,” Kasich said. “When we’re tues, and right away a newspaper article comes out and made in God’s image, there’s a natural pull to all of us to says, ‘Well, is he really living up to them?’ ” Kasich says reflect the traits of our creator’s character. Think about it. between bites of a caprese salad. “The answer is no! The Because we know Him, we know what His character is. We reason nobody wants to talk about it is because the minute know what His values are. And, folks, these are not these you talk about it somebody calls you a hypocrite.” hot-button issues that we yell and scream at each other Kasich’s values rhetoric is unusual for a politician and about. Those hot-button issues in many ways have driven may not appeal to conservatives who would like more the young away from these kinds of considerations.” social solidarity without feeling like they have to literally The values Kasich wanted to talk about were not the hug their neighbors. But it’s just weird enough to con- rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but the vince you it’s authentic and sincere. It’s a message he seems importance of love, humility, forgiveness, responsibil- intent on preaching in 2019 and 2020, one way or another. ity, and justice—values he’d acted upon by lowering the When I ask him if he can imagine doing anything “number of people who are uninsured” and focusing on that would have as much of an impact as running for drug addiction, mental health, criminal justice and prison president, he replies: “You kiddin’? Look at—you ever reform, human trafficking, and creating jobs. “Live a life a watch YouTube? Look at the YouTube channels. Look at little bigger than ourselves,” Kasich said. “And you know the ability of people to maintain an amazing voice using what it’s all about is human connectedness, that we’re con- social media. And if you combine social media with tradi- nected to one another.” tional media, including radio or whatever, yeah, you can “I’m just calling for an awakening. I don’t want you to have a very big voice.” ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 29 Double Jeopardy at Yale A criminal court cleared Saifullah Khan of the charge of raping a fellow undergraduate, but he’s about to face a campus committee

By Stuart Taylor Jr. Numerous Yale students, journalists, and champions of rape victims’ rights have trashed the trial and especially he March 7 acquittal by a New Haven jury the defense lawyer’s cross-examination of the accuser as of a suspended Yale student on charges of “every survivor’s worst victim-blaming nightmare,” in the raping a classmate has been much lamented words of Jess Davidson, interim director of the advocacy on campus and in the national media. But group End Rape on Campus. a review of the evidence shows that the The article reporting the verdict in the New York Times, Ttrial was fair, the defense was ethical, and there was much which exhibited bias throughout its coverage of the trial, more than a reasonable doubt about the disapproved of Khan’s lawyers working accuser’s claim that she was so drunk as “relentlessly to discredit the account to lack the capacity to consent. of the woman. . . . They asked repeat- The facts of this he-said, she- edly how much she had to drink. . . . said case are that Saifullah Khan, a They showed off her Halloween cos- then-22-year-old Yale senior, and his tume, a black cat outfit, and asked her accuser, also a senior, had Halloween why she had not chosen a more mod- dinner together at the dorm’s dining est one, such as ‘Cinderella in a long hall on October 31, 2015, and crossed flowing gown.’ ” Time called its piece “A paths later that night—first at a drink- Yale Student Accused Her Classmate ing party and then at a Yale Symphony of Rape. His Lawyers Asked What Orchestra concert—ultimately ending She Was Wearing and How Much She up in her room at 1:11 a.m. and having Drank.” An online magazine for young sexual intercourse. women, Refinery29, ran its account of The trial centered on the credibility the trial under the headline “Jurors of the accuser’s testimony—which was Bought Stale Victim Stereotypes—Just halting, tearful, and contrary to proven Like the Defense Hoped.” facts on some points—and of her claim Yet defense lawyers are required to that she was so drunk that she could do their best to discredit accusers who barely stand or walk, flitted in and out Saifullah Khan leaving court are trying to put their clients behind in New Haven, March 6 of consciousness, and awakened in her bars—Khan faced a maximum prison bed for just long enough to feel Khan on top of her and to sentence of 46 years and deportation back to Afghanistan, try to push him off. where he believes he would have been executed, stoned, or Khan, an Afghan who was recruited to an American lashed under the country’s laws. And wasn’t it part of the prep school (Hotchkiss) and then to Yale because of his defense’s duty to probe the accuser’s claim that she had academic gifts, testified that the accuser did not seem at all had so much to drink that she was losing consciousness intoxicated to him during the six hours they were in her several hours later? The lead defense lawyer, Norman Pat- room, flirted with him at the concert and on the walk back tis, called the reaction “a form of mass hysteria.” to the dorm, invited him into her room, and initiated both His question about the costume that the accuser chose oral sex and, more than two hours later, full intercourse. for her Halloween get-together with Khan spurred particu- lar outrage among the accuser’s advocates. “A misogynistic Stuart Taylor Jr. is coauthor, with KC Johnson, of tactic that men habitually use to silence women . . . by blam- The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due ing them for their own assaults,” raged Amelia Nierenberg,

XXX Process at America’s Universities. a Yale Daily News columnist. Out of a variety of costumes PETER HVIZDAK / HEARST CONNECTICUT MEDIA

30 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 from a Yale storage closet, the woman had opted for the that are typically filed by university students to be sent on sexy cat, pairing a sequined black miniskirt with matching to a public prosecutor. The only plausible explanations tube top and tail. In pointing this out, Pattis stressed that here are that Yale officials felt the accusations in this case his purpose was not slut-shaming but spurring skepticism (unlike in most) to be serious enough to qualify legally about the accuser’s testimony that she was uninterested in as sex crimes or that the accuser herself, as was her right, Khan sexually and was afraid that he was stalking her and decided to press criminal charges. trying to get into her room. Yale suspended Khan on an emergency basis on In any event, the jurors appear to have paid little atten- November 9, 2015, a week after the accuser reported him. tion to the costume. They were far more interested in the It also threw the Afghan native, who had few connections grainy security videos that the prosecution made a focus in the United States, out on the street on very short notice. of its case, claiming that they showed the accuser in such an inebriated state that she was stumbling, with her eyes uch of the national coverage of the case has closed and her left foot dragging behind her (as she testi- suggested that the verdict was a miscarriage of fied), and needed Khan to hold her up while walking from M justice, but that belies any review of the trial the concert to her dorm. She emphasized that she was a evidence, little or none of which would have been uncov- dancer and did not normally walk that way. ered and considered in a Yale disciplinary proceeding. The jurors had the videos replayed numerous times, At a time when the accuser testified she was con- and those who have spoken publicly saw cerned that Khan was becoming aggres- nothing of what the prosecution suggested. sive in pursuing her—and had tried to “We looked at and we looked at and we Jurors had the enter her dorm room uninvited and had looked at that video of them walking,” one responded angrily when she told him anonymous juror told the New York Times, videos replayed to leave—she was also sending playful but “we could not see her leg dragging. We numerous times, texts to him sprinkled with smiling and could not see her eyes shut.” Juror James and those who giggling emoticons. She even texted him Galullo told Alice B. Lloyd of this magazine: have spoken a Shakespeare poem, “From fairest crea- “We all agreed that she was walking hand-in- publicly saw tures we desire increase,” the first of the hand, arm-in-arm, smiling.” Alternate juror so-called “procreation sonnets.” Elise Wiener told Robby Soave of Reason: nothing of what The accuser’s claim that after the “She was strolling with him with a big grin.” the prosecution two had met for Halloween dinner, This did not prevent news outlets, includ- suggested. Khan followed her into her entryway ing the New York Times and the Yale Daily and tried to push his way into her room News, from repeating the prosecution’s char- is almost impossible to reconcile with acterization of the videos. Both papers could have obtained Yale’s electronic dorm card-key system. She swiped into and posted the footage to let readers judge for themselves. her entryway at 6:47:31 p.m.; he swiped into his just seven They chose not to do so. seconds later. For her story to be accurate, he would have Hours after the alleged rape, the accuser told a Yale had to follow her into her entryway, try to push his way health center nurse that she needed a Plan B morning- into her room while “I was trying to push him back,” and after pill due to having had consensual sex with a regular then go off to his own entryway and swipe his card-key, all partner. At the trial, she explained that she was “too trau- in seven seconds flat. matized” to tell the nurse of the alleged assault. The timeline of the evening suggests it was unlikely After meeting later that day and the next day with sev- that the accuser could have been completely incapacitated eral friends—including a former boyfriend who took her by alcohol at the time of the alleged rape as she claimed. phone, dialed Yale’s sexual-misconduct office, and handed By her own account, she had five drinks containing vary- the phone back to her—the initially irresolute accuser ing amounts of alcohol at the party. While friends testified filed a complaint against Khan with the sexual-miscon- that she was somewhat—one said extremely—intoxicated duct office and then went to the Yale police department. when she left the party for the concert, it appears clear from The details of the process are unclear, but university the testimony that she stopped drinking between 10:50 p.m. officials, the university police, and the accuser decided to and 11:40 p.m. The timeline is complicated by the fact ask the New Haven state’s attorney’s office to prosecute that clocks were turned back at 2 a.m. due to daylight sav- Khan criminally rather than rely on the internal disciplin- ings time, but it seems the accuser had her last drink at ary process. least four-and-a-half hours before the alleged rape, which It is rare for the kind of sexual-misconduct accusations apparently occurred after a phone call that Khan placed at

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 31 1:55 a.m. from the accuser’s sofa to his longtime girlfriend concert. If true, this would be direct evidence that Khan was in Maryland (a call that lasted 141 minutes). trying to isolate the accuser. But he denied taking or using The two have an open relationship, and the girlfriend her phone. This was a he-said, she-said standoff—and the testified that she already knew the accuser from a sum- jury clearly believed that he was the more credible witness. mer physics class at Yale. She and Khan both stated that he handed his phone to the accuser at one point and the hat happens now? Saifullah Khan’s lawyers two women spoke briefly. “I said, ‘Hi,’ and she said, ‘Hi,’ ” have requested that Yale readmit him and allow the girlfriend told the court. She recalled the complainant W him to complete his last semester as a cogni- used the girlfriend’s name when saying “Hi” to her. She tive-science major. There is also an online petition circulat- said this was the extent of their conversation, and that she ing that demands “that Yale University continue to follow and Khan then continued talking for another hour and a the guidelines laid out by the Obama administration, and half. Khan testified that the accuser had already given him continue to uphold Saifullah Khan’s suspension.” It had oral sex before the phone call and asked him to “come to nearly 50,000 signatures as this magazine went to press. bed” after it ended. It seems most likely that Yale’s University-Wide Com- One friend, Josh Clapper, initially told university police mittee on Sexual Misconduct (UWC) will employ a secre- that the accuser “did not seem intoxicated” at the concert, tive campus proceeding to pass judgment on Khan with which came after her final drink. At trial, minimal due process, no speaking role his recollection had changed and he, for defense lawyers, no meaningful cross- like other friends of the accuser, said she examination of the accuser, and no tran- needed support walking. script of the proceedings. The apparent passage of those four- The UWC defines “sexual miscon- and-a-half hours, during which the duct” as “a range of behaviors includ- accuser said she vomited two or three ing sexual assault (which includes rape, times, casts doubt on her assertions such groping and any other non-consensual as “I tried to say ‘stop’ but I’m not sure if sexual contact), sexual harassment, inti- anything came out. I couldn’t communi- mate partner violence, stalking, and any cate because I was that inebriated.” other conduct of a sexual nature that is The accuser testified “he was pinning non-consensual, or has the purpose or my legs and arms so I couldn’t move.” But effect of threatening or intimidating a Pattis noted that in her 61-page statement person or persons.” The policy adds: to police, she had never suggested that “Much sexual misconduct includes non- Khan pinned her arms. consensual sexual contact, but this is not An ornamental judge and scales After the alleged rape, the accuser from a Yale building a necessary component. For example, awakened with Khan in her bed and told threatening speech that is sufficiently him she was embarrassed and disgusted by her behavior, by severe or pervasive to constitute sexual harassment will his account. After he departed, leaving two condoms that constitute sexual misconduct.” bore his DNA in her room—not the sort of oversight one Any reasonable penalty would have to take account of might expect from a man who feared he might be accused the fact that Khan’s education has already been derailed for of rape—he sent her a text at 6:14 a.m. She texted back two-and-a-half years by an unwarranted accusation and a “LOL.” Then Khan responded with a winking emoticon criminal proceeding. and she replied, “Go to sleep and this will stay between us It can fairly be said that Khan was insensitive in hav- that goes for you too.” ing sex with a woman he did not know well a few hours Jurors also took notice when a prosecution expert wit- after she had downed a lot of alcohol and vomited repeat- ness had to admit that the DNA found in a swab of the edly and in placing a 141-minute phone call to his girl- accuser’s anus the day after the alleged rape had come friend in the accuser’s presence, in between having oral from a male other than Khan. This was particularly rele- sex and sexual intercourse with her. But by his account, vant as the accuser had told police that she had not had sex the accuser was eager to have sex. And Yale’s rules do not in six months. The news media completely ignored this mention insensitivity or any other violation of its policy crucial fact. less damning than “sexual misconduct,” a vaguely defined The accuser also claimed that she discovered after Khan phrase that surely requires more than insensitivity and in left that he had taken her phone and used it to send mes- many circles carries a connotation of sexual predation.

XXX sages declining her friends’ invitations to meet up after the Some longtime observers of Yale’s process consider it

32 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 possible—even probable—that despite the verdict of the 2017 article in the Yale Law & Policy Review. While focusing criminal trial, the UWC will still find Khan responsible for mainly on threats to freedom of expression at Yale, he also “sexual misconduct” and expel him. assailed the university for its handling of sexual-misconduct Indeed, his lawyers have appropriately called the UWC accusations. “Today, as a matter of Yale University law, . . . “a political entity draped in the presumption of guilt” in a sexual-misconduct proceeding, even for an allegation of that “rushed to judgment in this case” and that has more non-criminal conduct,” there is, Cabranes wrote: broadly “embarked upon a secretive Jacobin-style crusade n in which complainants were pressured to come forward, No right to a public hearing, or even to a complete record of the private hearing; procedural due process was ignored, and exculpatory evi- n No right to have counsel speak on one’s behalf; dence was casually and conveniently displaced.” n No right to call friendly witnesses, much less confront They have also pointed out that the chief of the Yale and cross-examine adverse witnesses; and n Police Department, Ronnell Higgins, recently told the Yale To top it all off, no assumption of innocence until proven guilty—merely a finding of wrongdoing that Daily News that his officers “are trained to ask the right rests on a preponderance of the evidence (the lowest questions . . . placing emphasis on a victim advocacy standard of proof known to American law). approach.” That sounds inconsistent with our legal cul- ture’s hallowed presumption of innocence—which is Conroy did not mention these aspects of Yale’s process. nowhere mentioned in the UWC’s proce- And while touting the “trained panel- dures. Not one of the sexual-misconduct ists” who pass judgment on accused complaints filed by female Yale students Some longtime students, he also failed to mention the against males since the university’s cur- observers of Yale’s fact that Yale (like many other universi- rent reporting system started in 2012 has ties) has taken great pains to keep secret been found to be false. process consider the materials it uses to train them. Asked by email for comment on the ver- it possible or even Why so secretive? As KC John- dict and on what Yale might do now, Yale probable that son and I detailed in these pages last spokesman Tom Conroy responded: “It despite the verdict September, the training regimes are would not be appropriate for Yale to com- of the criminal designed more to put a thumb on the ment on the verdict in a criminal case, espe- scales toward guilt than to ensure a cially one that involved two Yale students. In trial, the school fair inquiry. The programs we were regard to internal adjudications, Yale’s ability will still find Khan able to review were permeated with to comment on individual cases is limited by responsible for unsupported assertions about how federal privacy law and Yale’s confidentiality ‘sexual misconduct’ false complaints are rare and that policies. The University believes that con- and expel him. an accuser who contradicts her own fidentiality is critical to the integrity of our prior accounts or established facts processes, and, for that reason, it does not should be seen not as deceptive but confirm or deny that a specific allegation has come before as a victim of “trauma.” the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct.” Cynthia Garrett, a lawyer who is co-president of Fami- Defending Yale’s overall handling of sexual-miscon- lies Advocating for Campus Equality, a group supporting duct allegations, Conroy said that critics do “not take into students who say they were falsely accused, sat through the account the process that Yale provides, which includes whole Khan trial and spent much time giving moral sup- written and specific notice of the charges; the right to an port to the defendant. She came away from New Haven, adviser, who may be an attorney; the opportunity to pres- she says, “with the disturbing realization that, as a whole, ent evidence and suggest witnesses; a written investiga- the Yale community is insular, dogmatic, and intolerant of tive report prepared by an impartial fact-finder; a hearing diverse perspectives. It became apparent from my interac- before a trained panel of members of the Yale community; tions with at least one Yale Daily News reporter that any the opportunity to submit questions through the panel to who dare expose alternate viewpoints are quickly shamed witnesses and the opposing party; a written panel report; the into silence.” opportunity to respond in writing to the panel report; a writ- Saifullah Khan himself is far more upbeat. I asked him ten decision by a decision maker separate from the panel; about the trial, and he wrote, “As dark as this experience the right to submit a written appeal to a second decision has been so far, the foundation of this democratic republic maker; and a written appeal decision.” kept my beliefs strong. And as divided as this country may Judge José Cabranes, a U.S. circuit judge and Yale’s first seem online, I have found love and hospitality at every cor- general counsel, expressed another view in a devastating ner of this country.” ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 33 Murders Most Foul Russia’s poisonous aggression in the U.K.

By Dominic Green British prime minister Theresa May expelled 23 dip- lomats from the Russian Federation’s London embassy, he poisoning of Russian defector Sergei and Vladimir Putin responded in kind. Russian minis- Skripal and his daughter Yulia with one of ters and diplomats have, as in previous instances, issued the deadly Novichok series of nerve agents smirking denials. Vladimir Chizkov, Russia’s ambassador has plunged relations between Britain and to the European Union, even suggested that the nerve Russia to their lowest level since Soviet agent came from Britain’s secret defense laboratory at Ttimes, sparking tit-for-tat diplomatic moves and a war of Porton Down, which is near Salisbury. words. The crisis has raised talk of a “new Cold War.” It has also drawn attention to more than a decade of Russian t’s impossible to get hold of Novichok from any- assassinations in Britain, only one of which elicited a pub- one else,” Sir Malcolm Rifkind says. “Nobody else lic response from the British government. ‘I produces the stuff.” As Britain’s defense secretary British investigators at first suspected that the poison from 1992 to 1995, Rifkind was a close observer of the had been inserted into Yulia Skripal’s luggage before she decommissioning of Soviet chemical and nuclear weap- ons. “Novichok was manufactured in Uzbekistan during the Soviet period as part of their chemical weapons program. That project was closed down in the early nineties after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The question is: What happened to the stocks? They were sup- posed to have been destroyed, but I think we always assumed that the Russian government would have held on to some of them.” Rifkind, speaking on the phone from his apart- ment near the Houses of Parliament, identifies three “possible hypotheses” that would explain the attempted murders of the Skripals. “The first pos- sibility is that Putin directly ordered the assassina- tion attempt. The second is that he didn’t expressly Sergei Skripal with daughter Yulia authorize it but made it known that this was what he wanted, so that people who wanted to please him flew from Moscow to London to visit her father. But on might do it. The third possibility is that elements in the March 18, ABC News cited three intelligence officials’ opin- FSB or the GRU might have been working with criminals.” ion that a “dust-like powdered form” of Novichok had been Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn subscribes to this third circulated through the air vents of Sergei Skripal’s BMW. possibility. To uproar in the House of Commons, some of The same day, foreign secretary Boris Johnson declared it from his own party, Corbyn hypothesized a “loss of con- on BBC Television that Britain has proof that Russia has trol,” linking “elements within the Russian state” to “mafia- been “creating and stockpiling” Novichok over the “last like groups and oligarchic interests in London.” 10 years” as part of a program “investigating the delivery of “This is theoretically possible,” Rifkind allows, “but nerve agents for the purposes of assassination.” it misses the point. Putin, as an ex-KGB man, keeps a very tight grip on the agencies. He’s not like Gorbachev Dominic Green is a frequent contributor to The Weekly or Yeltsin. The Russian intelligence agencies, the FSB and Standard. His books include The Double Life of Dr. Lopez: the GRU, have links to the Russian criminal underworld. Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I. They’re not part of it, but they have links with it, and they

34 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 sometimes use it for their own objectives. So the hypothesis the death in March 2013 of the anti-Putin oligarch Boris that Skripal was poisoned by Russian criminal elements, or Berezovsky, who was found hanged in his mansion outside the Russian mafia in the U.K., begs the question: Where London, and eight men linked to Berezovsky, Litvinenko did they get the stuff?” among them. In 2007, Yuri Golubev, cofounder of Yukos oil corpo- think we can be pretty certain that this comes from ration and an associate of Berezovsky, died of an apparent the highest level,” says Tom Tugendhat, the Con- heart attack after flying to London from Moscow. In 2008, ‘I servative parliamentarian who leads the Foreign Berezovsky’s friend and partner Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Affairs Committee. “This is a weapon that can do enor- Georgian tycoon and opposition politician, died of an appar- mous harm, and the Russian state is entirely aware of that. ent heart attack at 52. In 2012, Alexander Perepilichnyy, It’s extremely unlikely that they would have let it fall into an oligarch who had given Swiss prosecutors evidence of the wrong hands.” the defrauding of the Russian treasury by senior officials, “The Russian government has form,” Tugendhat says, dropped dead while jogging outside London at the age of pointing to recent history. We are talking on the phone, 44. All these men had made fortunes in Russia in the 1990s and the British police have just opened an and then fallen out with Vladimir inquiry into the death of Nikolai Glushkov, Putin after he won the Russian a Russian businessman who had received One report claimed presidency in 2000. political asylum in the U.K. “It’s not only that U.S. agencies In 2014, the Scottish busi- Litvinenko, but also others.” nessman Scot Young, who had In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, an ex- suspect 14 mysterious “fronted for Berezovsky in a FSB officer who had received asylum in and sudden deaths series of deals,” left a London Britain, was poisoned after highly radio- on British soil to apartment via a fourth-floor win- active polonium-210 was slipped into be assassinations dow, impaled himself on a spiked his tea at a meeting with ex-KGB officer by ‘Russia’s secret fence, and bled to death. Young and businessman Andrey Lugovoy. On had previously told police that his deathbed, Litvinenko dictated a let- services and powerful he “believed he was going to be ter accusing Putin of having ordered his mafia groups.’ The assassinated by gangsters and killing. In May 2007, following a British cases include the death the Russia mafia.” The police police investigation into Litvinenko’s in March 2013 of the declared his death to be a suicide. death, Britain submitted a request for anti-Putin oligarch Nikolai Glushkov, found asphyxi- Lugovoy’s extradition and expelled four ated in his home last week, was diplomats from Russia’s London embassy. Boris Berezovsky, who close to Berezovsky too. The Russian constitution forbids the was found hanged in British police concluded that extradition of Russian subjects. Putin his mansion outside only Litvinenko’s death was foul further protected Lugovoy from extra- London, and eight men play. The incompetence of the dition by placing him in the Duma, the linked to him. police and the sophistication of Russian parliament, as the second-high- the methods of assassination are est candidate on the list of Vladimir two possible explanations for this. Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party But there are other, less creditable possibilities. An ocean of of Russia. In 2008, Lugovoy told El País that anyone “who money has flooded out of Russia since the Cold War, some has caused the Russian state serious damage . . . should of it in the hands of Vladimir Putin’s enemies, some of it be exterminated.” in the hands of his friends. Much of it has washed through After Litvinenko’s murder, Theresa May, then Brit- London, where it has been laundered through shell compa- ain’s home secretary, wrote to his widow, Marina. “We will nies and property investments. take every step to protect the UK and its people from such A little of it has even pooled in the coffers of the Con- a crime ever being repeated,” May said. But the killing of servative party. In 2014, Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Russian spies and dissidents in Britain accelerated. ex-Aeroflot director Vladimir Chernukhin, was reported to have paid £160,000 at the Conservatives’ summer ball for n June 2017, a BuzzFeed report claimed that U.S. the privilege of playing tennis with David Cameron and agencies suspect 14 mysterious and sudden deaths on Boris Johnson. Before Vladimir Chernukhin fell out with I British soil to be assassinations by “Russia’s secret Putin in 2000, he was Putin’s deputy finance minister. services and powerful mafia groups.” The cases include Russian money turned London into the capital of the

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 35 global rich. It also exported the conflict between the ever- sudden ends on its soil, and you can see why Putin might expanding regime of Vladimir Putin and anti-Putin oli- have felt that deploying a chemical weapon in a NATO garchs like Berezovsky. It was bad for the London property state might be a novelty, but not one likely to provoke a cri- market and the stock exchange for Brits to get unduly sis. But what is Putin’s point of view? involved in the Russians’ private business—and dangerous, “Putin has never reconciled himself to the loss of an too. Meanwhile, the Conservative party under David Cam- empire,” Malcolm Rifkind says. “He’s on record as saying eron and Theresa May called for sanctions against Putin that the greatest geopolitical disaster in Russian history was while accepting donations from anti-Putin exiles. the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By that, he meant the Neither Labour nor Conservative governments wanted Russian empire, built up since Peter the Great.” to stop the flow of funny money into the London markets. The Western consensus on Russia is that Putin’s The clearer it became that Putin was determined to execute domestic tyrannies and foreign aggressions are compensa- his enemies, regardless of where they lived, the riskier it tions for economic and demographic weakness. “Putin’s became to confront him. The expulsion of diplomats after not a master strategist,” Rifkind says. “He’s a superb tacti- the Litvinenko killing did nothing to deter Putin; it might cian. He’s not a Hitler, he’s not looking to make wars. He’s even have encouraged him. In an opportunist.” that 2006 murder, he had com- Putin is also a judo black-belt. missioned an act of nuclear ter- In 2008, he issued a DVD, Let’s rorism on British soil. Britain Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin. responded with a symbolic ges- The judoka wins by throwing ture. The killings continued, and his opponent off balance and by Britain said nothing. As the body turning his opponent’s strength count rose, so did the cost of con- into a weakness. It was not Putin fronting Russia. who caused the United States to In 2012, Theresa May, then lose its balance in the world; the home secretary, successfully rise of China, the decay of Amer- withheld material from the Pere- Vladimir Putin Theresa May ican institutions, and a general pilichnyy inquest on grounds of softening of the imperial waist national security. The inquest failed to develop into a mur- were enough. But Putin has exploited the United States’ der investigation. “It’s so obvious that it’s an assassination,” unsteadiness, just as he has exploited the uncertain stance Chris Phillips, the ex-head of Britain’s National Counter- of the European Union. Where the United States stepped Terrorism Security Office, told BuzzFeed in June 2017. back under President Barack Obama, Putin stepped for- “There’s no way it wasn’t a hit. It’s ridiculous.” ward, in the Middle East and in Europe. Last week, Amber Rudd, Theresa May’s home secre- Putin has turned the strengths of Western democra- tary, told a BBC reporter that “there will come a time” when cies—their trust in a rules-based international order and the police and MI5 should reopen these cases. their wariness of conflict—into their weaknesses. When It may be a while coming. Investigating the deaths of the European Union stepped towards Ukraine, Putin piv- Putin’s enemies will inevitably draw attention to the politi- oted on a solid footing—Russia’s historic claim to the cal donations of anti-Putin oligarchs in Britain. Since 2012, Crimea—and flipped the European Union back to Brus- Lubov Chernukhin has donated £554,000 to the Conserva- sels. Ukraine was also the weak point of the United States’ tives. When Theresa May became prime minister in 2016, regional strategy—it was in Eastern Europe but outside she promised to distance her party from Russian money. NATO. Putin has calibrated his aggressions to achieve tac- But since then, the Conservatives have accepted donations tical goals without reaching a threshold that would pro- totaling £820,000 from the exiled oligarchs and their associ- voke aggressive countermoves. ates. In February, Lubov Chernukhin paid £30,000 for din- “He knows, and it happens to be true, that neither ner and a private tour of Churchill’s War Rooms with Gavin America nor Britain nor France nor Germany would ever Williamson. He is Theresa May’s defense secretary. contemplate going to war with Russia over Georgia, or the Crimea, or the Donbass,” observes Rifkind, who was Brit- ook at those donations from Putin’s point of view, ain’s foreign secretary from 1995 to 1997. “We’ve imposed and the British government does not look as neu- sanctions and other measures to put pressure on him, but L tral as its property market and its ask-no-questions he calculates correctly that there would be no willingness financial sector might suggest. Look at the blind eye that to take his actions as a casus belli. They’re not NATO

the British government turned as Putin’s enemies came to members, we have no treaty obligations, and though we JACK TAYLOR RIGHT: MIKHAIL SVELTOV; LEFT:

36 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 wish these countries well and give them all sorts of diplo- reintegrated tactical nuclear weapons into the Russian matic and economic aid, we’re not going to war with Rus- Federation’s military doctrine. sia over them.” “We all need to update our Russia strategy,” Tugend- Putin has also used the Western democratic advan- hat says. “We need to realize that Russia is now a hostile tages of open debate and a free press to harm Western actor in the world and we need to be prepared to address societies. Again, he is manipulating our weakness, rather the challenges that raises. We can’t just pretend that Rus- than imposing Russia’s strength. It was the failings of the sia is just another peaceful country. It’s not, I’m afraid; it’s European Union that fostered the nationalist movements just not. Its actions over the last decade have been incred- that now threaten the E.U.’s future. Putin only sends ibly hostile, not just to the United States and the United money to the nationalists, to broaden and embitter the Kingdom, but to our interests and allies. We must be pre- internal schisms in the E.U. states and block the develop- pared to defend those who ask for our support.” ment of the E.U. before it turns its economic edge over In 2017, after Putin had annexed the Crimea, NATO Russia into a political and military one. sent Enhanced Forward Presence battle groups to Poland “He’s trying to undermine the ability of the West to and the Baltic states as a tripwire in case of Russian act collectively,” Tom Tugendhat says. “He’s spreading aggression. Britain’s contingent is in Estonia. Tugend- ‘fake news’—which is information warfare, and we should hat, a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, served with call it what it is. He’s seeking to undermine the demo- American forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. cratic process. We’ve seen it in France, in Germany, in the He has a warning for Vladimir Putin: Don’t send troops United States, and possibly”—before the Brexit referen- across the border, whether in uniform or, as in the inva- dum of 2016—“in the U.K. as well.” sion of Ukraine, without. The tactics are the strategy: to keep the West on the “They should be under no illusion that if they cross back foot, to prevent it massing its focus, to set its ener- the border in Estonia, British troops will fight, and if gies against each other. Perhaps Putin did not expect the they attack one British soldier, they are fighting NATO. ferocity of Britain’s response to the Skripal poisoning. There’s no question about it: If they attack one NATO Now, however, he will respond tactically, just as he has country, they are fighting NATO.” ♦

As Election Looms, Business Optimism Soars

THOMAS J. DONOHUE ever in optimism in the first quarter of Many factors, of course, contribute PRESIDENT AND CEO 2018. Further, a Gallup poll in January to this uptick in optimism. Yet pro- U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE found small business optimism to be business members of Congress deserve at an 11-year high, and the National a significant share of credit for rallying Pro-business members of Congress Federation of Independent Business around pro-growth policies and passing have an extraordinary story to tell reported that small business leaders them into law. Last week the Chamber as they turn their attention to the have the second-highest level of recognized 297 members of Congress 2018 midterm elections. Hundreds optimism in the 45-year history of its with the Spirit of Enterprise Award, of members of the U.S. House of monthly survey. which honors legislators from both Representatives and dozens of It isn’t just small businesses that parties with outstanding records of U.S. senators have fought tirelessly have a positive outlook. The quarterly support on critical business issues. We over the past 15 months to deliver RSM US Middle Market Business Index, encourage voters to look closely at these legislative victories for Main Street presented by RSM in partnership with lawmakers’ records of achievement businesses—and those efforts are the U.S. Chamber, found that midsize when they go to the polls this year. paying off. Job creators throughout businesses in America are experiencing Sky-high optimism among business the country are now reporting a record-high levels of optimism. It leaders is a major indicator that our renewed sense of confidence in the also showed how that confidence is country and our economy are moving future of our economy. translating into measurable gains in the right direction. The Chamber Following the first significant for employees. More than 60% of believes that the leaders in Congress tax reform in 30 years and the most middle market leaders said they who worked so hard to benefit our job dramatic regulatory rollback in a plan to raise wages over the next 180 creators not only deserve credit for generation, numerous indicators have days, while roughly half have already their efforts, but they deserve a chance shown a historic spike in economic done so during the first quarter. An to return to Washington for another confidence. For example, the quarterly increasingly positive outlook will also term to continue their hard work. Small Business Index conducted by lead to more jobs, with 58% of business MetLife and the U.S. Chamber of leaders planning to increase hiring Learn more at Commerce recorded its largest surge over the next 6 months. uschamber.com/abovethefold.

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 37 Books&Arts

The Pope’s Mess Five years into his papacy, assessing the Francis record.

by Stephen P. White ope Francis’s pontificate did divisions have not been resolved; in not begin with doctrinal con­ To Change the Church fact, they have become so aggravated troversy. It began with the Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism that the worst version of each side is by Ross Douthat appearance of an amiable Simon & Schuster, 234 pp., $26 often on display. Ross Douthat, in his PArgentine on the balcony of St. Peter’s new book, To Change the Church, looks and endearing stories about a pope at Francis’s pontificate, examining who rides the bus and pays his own its best, represents a legitimate, ortho­ both the missed opportunities and the hotel bills. His papacy seemed to pre­ dox vision of Catholicism. Each, at its ongoing search for a new, stable syn­ sent an opportunity to draw together worst, flirts with dissent, rupture, and thesis. In even admitting the promise two competing visions of Catholi­ even schism. Like brothers who some­ of this pontificate, Douthat is showing cism’s proper disposition toward the times quarrel, each tends to be wary of more good will and sense than many of contemporary world. At the risk of the other. As inadequate as the political the pope’s critics do. And Douthat is oversimplifying, the first vision wants terms “liberal” and “conservative” are certainly himself a critic, if a thought­ the church to be more open and demo­ to this purpose, they can work as short­ ful and pious one. Regular readers of cratic. The other has more traditional hand: If Francis’s immediate predeces­ his New York Times column will not and hierarchical emphases. Each, at sors were more or less conservative, be surprised to learn that Douthat has the newly elected pope appeared to be written the most balanced and least Stephen P. White is a fellow in more or less a liberal, but well within polemical of the recent critiques of this the Catholic Studies program at the the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. pontificate. Pope Francis tends to elicit

Ethics and Public Policy Center. Five years later, these longstanding strong reactions from commentators, ALESSANDRA BENEDETTI / CORBIS GETTY

38 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 and Douthat offers if not a dispassion­ cis’s charm. If the Argentine pope’s He wanted a church that is less self- ate assessment then at least one that politics have more of a Peronist flavor, referential, less closed in on itself; he takes seriously the limits of assessing it’s also true that he is hardly the first wanted a church that leads with tender­ the legacy of any pontificate after just bishop of Rome to warn against con­ ness rather than judgment; he preferred five years. sumerism and the exploitation of cre­ a church that is “bruised, hurting, and To help his readers understand this ation or to remind the affluent of their dirty” from having been in the streets papacy’s initial promise and the con­ obligations to the poor, the sick, the over a church that is “unhealthy from troversies it has engendered, Douthat migrants. As Douthat points out, such being confined and from clinging to begins by walking them through the remarks mostly seemed to threaten “a its own security”; he wanted shep­ last few decades of Catholic history. particularly American marriage of con­ herds “who smell like their sheep”; In the years following the Second servative Catholicism and free market he said he wanted a church “that is Vatican Council (1962-65), all manner ideology, which given the state of con­ poor and for the poor.” He envisioned of weirdness (and worse) wafted into servative politics in America perhaps the church as a field hospital, where the church—some of it revealing how deserved a period of papal challenge those shattered by a “throwaway cul­ fragile and vulnerable the church had and self-critique.” A pope with a mod­ ture” can receive mercy’s balm. In all already become by the time the council erately leftist view of the world might of this, Pope Francis sought to move began. A manic spirit of experimenta­ the church toward the very same goal tion and worldliness spread through his predecessors had desired: a “new the church, eventually exhausting The new pope knew evangelization” for the world and a itself in jaded cynicism. Seminaries “new springtime” for Catholicism. emptied; religious orders imploded. that for the church to Catholic catechesis and sacramental be what she must be, he decisive shift in Francis’s pon­ discipline entered a long slump. This T tificate toward doctrinal brinks­ was when the sexual abuse of minors she couldn’t spend manship arose, it seems, not out of deep by Catholic clergy was at its diaboli­ ideological commitment to theological cal peak, although most of it wouldn’t all her efforts looking liberalism, but from his genuine fervor come to light for many years. inward. An overly for bringing mercy and compassion to In 1978, Pope John Paul II was the fore. On the question of commu­ elected. He set about restoring order defensive church can nion for the divorced and remarried, after a decade of dissolution. Like a easily forget that it has the pope looked to aging German theo­ trauma doctor presented with a critical logians whose pastoral conclusions— case, the young pope set about stabiliz­ a mission. if not the Hegelian theology used to ing the patient. Bleeding was stanched, reach those conclusions—enthralled bones were set, splints and casts and him, ultimately convincing him to braces were applied. It took decades, not be such a bad thing after 35 years push the doctrinal envelope in ways but by the time John Paul’s successor, of relative conservatism. As the Italians very few of his predecessors ever have Pope Benedict XVI, abdicated in 2013, say, “A fat pope follows a thin one.” and in ways his most immediate prede­ the patient appeared stable. There were Beneath all this, Pope Francis still cessors had rejected outright. In doing crises, to be sure—the long-overdue clearly shared his predecessors’ convic­ so, Douthat writes, the pope threw reckoning on the sexual-abuse prob­ tion that the church exists to preach away a golden opportunity lem, notably—but the church had sur­ the gospel to a world desperately in by wedding his economic populism vived the worst of its internal injuries. need of it. In other words, he knew that instead to . . . the moral theology of the Sooner or later, splints and casts and for the church to be what she must be, 1970s, making enemies of conserva­ braces have to come off. Limbs that she couldn’t spend all her efforts look­ tives (African, American, and more) who might have been open to his haven’t borne weight need strengthen­ ing inward. Chronic dysfunction and social gospel, treating economic mor­ ing and exercise. Joints that have grown corruption in the Vatican curia, new alism not as a complement to personal stiff need to become flexible and limber waves of sex-abuse scandals in Europe, moralism but as a substitute . . . and again. If one is to become healthy, sta­ and the long war of attrition between driving the church not toward synthe­ bility must sooner or later give way to the church and secular culture—espe­ sis but toward crisis. a new stage of vulnerability. But if one cially on issues like same-sex marriage The “marriage problem,” as Douthat proceeds too quickly and incautiously, and abortion—had left the Catholic calls it, was the focus of two synods old wounds can be reopened. church in a decidedly defensive pos­ (large meetings of bishops) that con­ Enter Pope Francis. From the begin­ ture. An overly defensive church can vened in Rome in 2014 and 2015. The ning, it was clear that his style was easily forget that it has a mission. synods were supposed to highlight earthier, less formal, than that of his And so Pope Francis’s early priori­ the more collegial, less hierarchi­ predecessors, especially the professo­ ties reflected a refreshing reemphasis cal style of governance Pope Francis rial Pope Benedict. That’s part of Fran­ on the church’s primary mission. wished to exemplify, but they instead

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 39 became moments of intense contro­ what the church clearly taught in prin­ ambiguous enough to prevent a doc­ versy. Douthat covers the machina­ ciple. Something had to give: Christ’s trinal crisis while still allowing room tions and politicking at these synods own words on the indissolubility of for more permissive pastoral practices. in great detail, but what matters is that marriage and the nature of adultery; And that approach might have suc­ the pope and his handpicked manag­ or St. Paul’s teaching about the need ceeded, if not for the fact that differ­ ers went to great lengths to achieve the to receive the Eucharist worthily, and ent bishops around the world began outcome they preferred: some version thus not in a state of serious sin; or interpreting the ambiguous footnote of the German proposal to allow com­ the church’s perennial teaching that in radically different ways. Even those munion for the divorced and remar­ real repentance is required to receive who praised the new teaching couldn’t ried. In the end, they were frustrated, absolution in confession; or her infal­ agree on just what was being taught. but the fight exposed and solidified the lible teaching that the commandments The sacramental discipline and moral deep divisions between those opposed are never impossible to keep, no matter teaching of the Catholic church began to such changes and those in favor. how trying the circumstances. to divide along national and diocesan It’s difficult to overstate the impor­ In early 2016, Pope Francis pub­ boundaries almost immediately. tance of this disagreement for Fran­ lished the longest papal document in In Poland, for example, the bish­ cis’s papacy and for the future of the history, an apostolic exhortation called ops reiterated existing teaching that church: Supporters of opening a new the divorced and remarried could not path to communion for the divorced receive communion. Other bishops, and remarried claimed the matter was As the gaps in hoping to use the wiggle room created simply a question of “updating” and by Amoris Laetitia to push for far more “reforming” church discipline in cer­ teaching and practice radical changes, got straight to work. In tain limited circumstances; opponents from diocese to diocese Germany, where declining to pay the insisted that the proposed changes church tax gets you excommunicated would create a rupture with the set­ have widened, it has and where pews are empty but cof­ tled doctrine of the church. But the fers are overflowing, the bishops have changes Francis and his allies hoped become clear that pushed for opening communion to cer­ to institute stretched the limits of what something more than tain non-Catholics and have floated the is doctrinally possible, even for a pope. idea of blessing same-sex partnerships. The question of communion for the the pope’s wink-wink- In light of the more radical inter­ divorced and remarried has profound nudge-nudge approach pretations of the pope’s teaching, more implications for nearly every aspect of traditionalist prelates have made official theology. Standing in the way of the is required. requests for the pope to clarify just what permissive, pastoral approach Pope it is supposed to mean. These requests Francis seemed to favor are the explicit have been ostentatiously ignored, and teachings of numerous popes and ecu­ Amoris Laetitia, which in Douthat’s the inquirers treated like ecclesiastical menical councils, two millennia of words “yearned in the direction of pariahs. As the gaps in teaching and Catholic Christianity, and, above all, changing the church’s rules for com­ practice from diocese to diocese have the unambiguous words of Jesus him­ munion . . . its logic suggested that widened, it has become clear that some­ self: “Whoever divorces his wife and such a change was reasonable and thing more than the pope’s wink-wink- marries another commits adultery.” desirable. Yet [Pope Francis] never nudge-nudge approach is required. The When two baptized Catholics marry, said so directly.” In the document, the pope retroactively elevated to magiste­ nothing except death, not even the most fraught and contentious ques­ rial status a private letter he had written pope himself, can dissolve that union. tion of the synods—the source of so to the bishops of Buenos Aires praising And so long as you’re married to one much friction, drama, and division— them for their guidelines for interpret­ person, you can’t go starting a new was reduced to a single, studiously ing and implementing Amoris Laetitia marriage with someone else. Adultery, ambiguous footnote. When it came and claiming “no other interpretations like any other serious sin, precludes a to the church’s pastoral care for those are possible.” This includes—presum­ Catholic from receiving communion in irregular marital situations, the ably—the Argentine bishops’ claim that until that sin is confessed and absolved. pope noted, “In certain cases, this can in certain circumstances, it is “not feasi­ The reformers insisted their pro­ include the help of the sacraments.” ble” to not commit adultery and that in posals would not change any of that. Which sacraments? Under which such cases folks might be able to receive But they could not explain how their conditions? Was this a restatement communion. The pope could not be less plan—to permit people who, as far as of prior teaching or a reversal? The interested in explaining how this inter­ the church was concerned, were not document didn’t say. Pope Francis pretation squares with the Council of married to receive communion while apparently settled on a do-what-I- Trent’s teaching that following the com­ still living together as husband and mean-not-what-I-say approach. He mandments is never impossible. wife—did not contradict in practice may have hoped to leave the matter So far, the debates over Amoris

40 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 Laetitia have involved mostly bishops, about sexuality or church discipline, the crisis precipitated by the recent priests, and theologians; Pope Francis actually cut very deep—to the very synods and Amoris Laetitia is not going has left the defense of his ambiguous bones of Christianity, the very words away anytime soon. Too much is at of Jesus Christ. magisterium to a coterie of advisers stake. In the meantime, Pope Francis’s and subordinates who enjoy the defer­ Toward the end of his book, Douthat hopes for a genuinely outward-looking ence afforded them by their proximity turns to history and attempts some church, a church less turned in on to him. Meanwhile, the acrimony of synthesizing of his own, trying to find itself, have likely diminished: the marriage debate seems to have sur­ some precedent for or analogue to the prised the pope and pushed him away season of division in which the church The theological crisis that [Pope Francis] set in motion has made from consensus-seeking and more finds itself. He focuses on two past con­ Catholicism more self-referential, solidly toward the reform-minded troversies—between Athanasians and more inward-facing, more defined prelates who supported him through Arians in the 7th century and between by its abstruse internal controver­ the synods and who are now eager to Jansenists and Jesuits in the 17th—as sies and theological civil wars. The cement Francis’s legacy, lest it all be templates for thinking about how the early images of the Francis era were missionary images, an iconography washed away in the next conclave. current crisis might resolve itself in of faith-infused outreach. The later As Douthat notes, looking back at the long term. Applying the lessons images have been images of divi­ the last several years, “Francis’s apolo­ of these episodes, Douthat guides the sion—warring clerics, a balked and gists knew very well that they weren’t angry pope, a church divided by just defending simple pastoral flexibil­ regions and nationalities, a Catholic Christianity that cannot preach con­ ity against the rigor of conservatives. fidently because it cannot decide Flexibility they surely wanted, but what it believes. there was also clearly a more revolu­ tionary vision implied and waiting It’s not really the case that Catholi­ underneath.” How far they will be able cism can’t decide what it believes. In to press that revolution, and whether the end, the church is not merely a col­ Pope Francis will eventually try to lection of ideas and doctrines—about slow the revolution being waged in his this Pope Francis is surely right—and name, remain open questions. her faith is not in men, nor even popes, but in the One who said to the first here is little sign that Catholics pope: “You are Peter, and on this rock Tin the pews on Sunday—or not I will build my church, and the gates of in the pews, as the case may be—are hell will not prevail against it.” Fran­ much concerned with the debates cis is Peter, for better or worse (most over Amoris Laetitia. But the stakes are likely both). The same will be true too high and the interpretations of its of the next pope. If looking to history teachings too diverse for the current Ross Douthat reminds us that crisis and schism are situation to remain stable for long. real dangers to the church, history is The church can tolerate, and for a long reader through various permutations, also a reminder, to Catholics anyway, time, a great deal of diversity in pasto­ balancing one interpretive narrative of the old adage that the greatest proof ral practice. But diversity in principle? with another and offering likely, or at for the truth of the Catholic church Deep disagreement about the moral least possible, scenarios. is that 2,000 years’ worth of Catholics law, the sacraments, and the limits of To his credit, Douthat is willing haven’t managed to destroy it. The next doctrine itself? Divisions on issues to entertain the idea that he is sim­ conclave, the conclave that chooses so fundamental have a way of lead­ ply wrong and that others—Pope Francis’s successor, whenever it comes, ing to deep and lasting damage to the Francis and his advisers—are right. will be important. But it will not be, to unity and credibility of the church— The Spirit, after all, blows where coin a term, a Flight 93 conclave. to schism and worse. On this point, it will. And for all the clarity of the Douthat concludes by pointing Douthat takes a pessimistic view: pontificates of John Paul II and Bene­ out that, at least for now, we have a dict XVI, they didn’t stem the rising bishop of Rome who has taken to The church has broken in the past, tide of secularism or restore the con­ . . . not once but many times, over ten­ heart his own advice: “Hagan lío! sions and issues that did not cut as fidence and vitality of the church in ‘Make a Mess!’ In that much he has suc­ deeply as the questions that undergird the West. Doctrinal clarity may be ceeded.” Douthat, for his part, has today’s Catholic debates. Other com­ necessary to the church’s mission, but succeeded in helping make at least a munities have divided very recently it’s hardly sufficient. little sense of that mess, in ways that over precisely the issues that the pope has pressed to the front of Catholic Douthat shows more confidence in are both disconcerting and, taking debates. And for good reason: Because his evaluation that while it may not a long enough view, reassuring. His these issues, while superficially “just” play out in any of the ways he imagines, readers will be grateful. ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 41 Like most critics, I usually write on art that I have come to know as an adult. B&A But I first encountered Cole’s master­ piece, The Course of Empire series, when I was 7 years old. This series of five Maturing with Cole canvases (1833-1836), which is a major focus of the Met show, usually hangs The course of the great landscape painter’s career. in the New-York Historical Society, by James Gardner a few blocks from where I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And the central painting in the series, slightly larger than the others, is perhaps the first work of art I ever loved. The Course of Empire charts the prog­ ress of an unspecified nation (although the United States is clearly intended) from its primitive inception to its glo­ rious apogee and ultimate decline. Each painting depicts the same place (as indicated by the constant presence of a cliff in the background) but pro­ foundly altered by each wave of human society that passes through. A different time of day appears in each work, from dawn as it rises over the first primor­ dial landscape to the serene dusk that descends on the ruins of the final work, devastated by the barbarian invasions depicted in the preceding canvas. I have been returning to these five Two of The Course of Empire paintings: The Consummation (top) paintings at various points through­ and Destruction­ (both 1836) out my life, and in the course of that encounter, my responses have changed many times. Nothing, it turns out, is more mutable than a painting. Each time we stand before it, the painting becomes, to some degree, a different work of art. My earliest response was perhaps the most interesting. Being at an age when one is apt to feel things with a greater vividness and force than is usually granted to adults, I thought that the central painting was the finest work of art I had ever seen. Of course, that may not have been far from the literal truth, since, like most 7-year-olds, I had not seen much. But ne of the reasons most art selves. It goes without saying that this I distinctly recall being astonished by writing is not worth read­ tendency is to be strenuously resisted, what seemed, in the central painting, ing—and there are several if not punished, but I am about to to be Cole’s superhuman virtuosity reasons—is the irritating engage in a bit of it myself. For I feel I in depicting the empire at its zenith. Ohabit of critics of personalizing their have a special relation to the subject of Here pure, radiant sunlight floods the subject and make it all about them­ this article, Thomas Cole, the foremost pristine marble façades of Roman tem­ American landscape painter of the first ples massed in almost inconceivable James Gardner is completing The Louvre: half of the 19th century and the focus density. The multitudinous crowds A History, to be published by Grove Atlantic of a new show at the Metropolitan rejoice, and the painting itself is a tes­

in 2019. Museum of Art. tament to joy. MUSEUM IMAGES COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN

42 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 In my twenties, however, when I knew a bit more about art, this paint­ ing appeared somewhat diminished. I still admired its hyperbolic happiness, but I was more aware of the dryness of the drawing and the sketchiness of the figures in the landscape. I far preferred the final painting in the cycle, whose majestic composition is dominated by a shattered column on the left, rising over a devastated landscape that has been reclaimed by nature. Revisiting that final painting in the context of the present exhibition, I was once again struck by the magisterial authority of its composition—the best that Cole ever devised—but I was also aware, for the first time, that the column in Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato (1837) the foreground was drawn somewhat weakly, especially in the garbled ren­ Although the Metropolitan exhibi­ dering of its Corinthian capital. Thomas Cole’s Journey tion is not a retrospective, it manages Atlantic Crossings to cover each period of Cole’s career Metropolitan Museum of Art uite aside from this changefulness through May 13 with an abundance of contemporary Qin our response to art, each exhi­ documentation, including the artist’s bition seeks to alter, rather than sim­ notebooks and palettes. As a result, ply to ratify, our sense of what we are after associated, he was immediately Cole emerges as a more interesting seeing. It does this either by introduc­ enchanted. “Nature,” he wrote, “has and varied artist than some of us may ing us to new art or by offering a new shed over this land beauty and mag­ have appreciated. Even though he perspective on art we already know. In nificence, and although the character was largely self-taught, as were most the case of this exhibition, the curators of its scenery may differ from the old American painters of his day, he had present us with a reading of Thomas world’s . . . still it has features, and an early and instinctive grasp of the Cole that is radically contextualized. glorious ones, unknown to Europe.” Grand Manner that most of his com­ He is a creature, and a far-sighted But even in a work as serene as The patriots lacked. As he matured and as critic, of the first phase of the Indus­ Oxbow, a work that superficially his voyages resulted in a deeper famil­ trial Revolution. Born in the manu­ seems to celebrate the land, the cura­ iarity with the art of England, France, facturing town of Bolton le Moors in tors usefully draw our attention to a and Italy, the last traces of provincial­ Lancashire, England, in 1801, Cole tiny detail in the distance: It looks ism evaporated from his paintings. lived there until his father—after like wisps of clouds, but is really By his untimely death in 1848, he had failing at various business ventures— smoke rising from fires that are defor­ mastered many of the most advanced moved the family to the United States esting the area in preparation for its lessons in the art of his time. It is in 1818. In this context, two of Cole’s development and exploitation. true that his draftsmanship was never most famous projects, the Course of The Met exhibition is also effective exemplary—as I now appreciate— Empire series and The Oxbow (also on in framing its subject in the context and he could succumb to the pietistic view at the Met) can be seen as cri­ of American, British, and continen­ moralizing of his Voyage of Life series, tiques of industrialism. Painted after tal art in the early 19th century. Art­ which is not included in the present one of several trips to England and ists like Turner and Constable, both show. At the same time, however, he the Continent—hence the title of the included in the present show, influ­ could paint a work like View of Flor- exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: enced Cole through their responses to ence from San Miniato (1837), which Atlantic Crossings—they are a response industrialization. Whereas Constable is—to me at least—one of the revela­ to the America that confronted him turned his back on it, Turner, like the tions of the Met’s show. Marked by a after several years abroad, an America Impressionists half a century later, supreme sense of competence and self- that was governed by Andrew Jackson could glimpse something of poetry and confidence, it possesses a subtler and and had begun to turn away from the beauty in these modern intrusions. As more subdued quality than many of land itself. This was a matter of great for Thomas Cole, he took a different Cole’s other works. This quality not concern to the artist. When, in 1825, tack: He looked industrialization in only is the fruit of full maturity, but he first encountered the Hudson River the eye, then countered it, and finally it may also demand of the viewer an valley, with which he would be forever retreated into the purity of nature. equal maturity to perceive it at all. ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 43 inspired to take on this project in part if not wholly by the hilarious Python epi­ B&A sode in which Palin plays the clueless outdoorsman Mr. Pither, a nerdy cyclist who rolls mistakenly into Communist Postmortem Russia and finds himself in front of the most incompetent firing squad ever assembled. “After a few moments I per­ Power Struggle ceived a line of gentlemen with rifles. They were looking in my direction,” Slapstick, satire, and terror in The Death of Stalin. Pither narrates. “I looked around but could not see the target.” (His great­ by John Podhoretz est concern is that the Mars Bar in his backpack not be damaged.) he Death of Stalin is a I can’t praise The Death of Stalin blacker-than-black comedy The Death of Stalin highly enough . . . except that it gets Directed by Armando Iannucci about the members of the really boring after a while. The movie Central Committee of the runs a little over an hour and 40 minutes, TCommunist Party of the Soviet Union but there are no stakes here. The only and how they jockey for power way for any story to succeed is for after the demise of Joseph Vissa­ it to take hold of you and make rionovich in 1953. The movie is you care about the outcome. Since sometimes gaspingly hilarious— the movie posits that everyone and at all times audacious and we see is evil, by definition we’re original. It centers on a battle not going to care about who suc­ of wits and wills between Nikita ceeds and who fails. That’s mor­ Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) ally sound on Iannucci’s part, but and Lavrenti Beria (the British strictly as a storytelling matter, it’s stage actor Simon Russell Beale). self-defeating. After all, even in Armando Iannucci, who the midst of the lunatic silliness cowrote and directed, is a Glas­ of the Python episode, you kind of wegian of Italian descent best felt sorry for Mr. Pither. Above, a poster for The Death of Stalin, with pre-erasure known for creating HBO’s Veep. Jeffrey Tambor in the middle. Below, a scene from the film. If you know what actually As in Veep, he sugarcoats noth­ happened after the death of Sta­ ing. Every Soviet leader we see lin, the movie’s divergence from here is a petty, craven mass mur­ reality is a bit annoying. It com­ derer or an accessory to same. presses a complex series of events Iannucci triumphs by turning that took place over nine months them all into objects of sport and into a week’s time, which was an ridicule without ever letting us effort on Iannucci’s part to keep forget how evil they are. When things moving propulsively. But Khrushchev and Beria join their it just makes them seem hurried. fellow monsters in trying to lift And if you don’t know what Stalin’s inert mass off the floor actually happened, the final of his office while desperately outcome isn’t at all affecting avoiding various forms of bodily or interesting because you’ve discharge, we get uproarious already gotten the idea they slapstick that brings with it the star­ and even despite knowing she’s heard should all drop dead. (I know this tling sting of a real slap. him, embraces her fondly and says because I used to know what happened In one particularly inspired bit, he’s missed her. Molotov is played but I forgot until it came back to me the old ideologist Vyacheslav Molo­ with surreally brilliant comic timing about 20 minutes before the end cred­ tov denounces the wife he thinks is by Michael Palin, one of the original its, which meant I was in both camps.) dead for her counterrevolutionary Monty Python performers. Palin’s One genuinely discomfiting aspect activities and then, upon seeing her presence reinforces the sense that of The Death of Stalin has nothing to do The Death of Stalin is the best Python with what is onscreen, and it likely hap­ John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, sketch never performed. pened without Iannucci’s involvement.

is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic. Indeed, I suspect Iannucci was In the movie, Jeffrey Tambor plays EONE FILMS

44 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 Malenkov, who nominally takes charge cheek by jowl with Buscemi, Beale, and who has taken a vow: No man shall of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s pass­ Palin. After the accusations, Tambor wed her who cannot answer three rid­ ing. Tambor, of course, is the comic actor disappeared from the poster—replaced dles—and those who fail shall be put who found himself feted and lionized by a secondary player. In other words, to death. As our story starts, the body for playing the transgendered Maura on the advertising for a movie about the count stands at 25, though soon a new the celebrated Amazon show Transpar- evils of Stalinism adapted a purge- victim, the prince of Persia, is added to ent. He was fired after he was accused of era technique and literally erased an the tally, his head carried onstage and sexually harassing two trans performers inconvenient person from an exist­ impaled on a pike. Just as the suitor on the set (which he denies). ing image. There’s a degree of savage is condemned, however, Calàf, the Before the accusations, the posters irony here that The Death of Stalin itself disguised prince of Tartary, catches a for The Death of Stalin featured Tambor never even begins to approach. ♦ glimpse of Turandot and falls head- over-heels in love. Despite the protests of his deposed father Timur and Liù, B A a slave who has faithfully followed & Timur due to her own semi-hidden love of Calàf, Calàf takes up the chal­ lenge of the three riddles. Taking Offense In the second act, Calàf appears before the court and—wouldn’t you know it—guesses the three riddles cor­ at the Opera rectly. Turandot is devastated, for she had taken her radical vow in memory Turandot is musically irresistible, but can it survive of an ancestor who was enslaved and murdered by a conquering prince. She today’s cultural sensitivities? by Nicholas M. Gallagher begs her father, “You can’t give me to him . . . like a slave.” The emperor, who hen French presi­ just rung a temple bell, then said to a seems relieved that the slaughter he dent (then-candidate) companion, “ ‘the temple bells, they has been forced to oversee is at an end, Emmanuel Macron say / Come you back, you English sol­ is inflexible: The same vow that made waxed lyrical about dier.’ Remember that?” Which seems him an executioner will now make hisW passion for the composer Gio­ like a natural enough invocation. her a wife. But Calàf, feeling his oats, achino Rossini in spring 2017, the Meanwhile, two of the compositions makes a counter-offer: If she can guess transatlantic chattering classes gushed Macron namechecked are Rossini’s his name by morning, she can execute in admiration (and made snide com­ Maometto II (about the Turkish sultan him. If not, she shall wed him. parisons to Donald Trump). But when Mehmet II) and Mosè in Egitto (Moses Enraged and scared, Turandot has British foreign minister Boris Johnson in Egypt). Among the Italian compos­ her soldiers toss the city, while the was caught on a hot mic a few months er’s other works are L’Italiana in Algeri prince sings the famous, soaring “Nes­ later quoting Rudyard Kipling’s impe­ (The Italian Girl in Algiers), Il turco in sun dorma” aria, boasting that they rial-era poem “Mandalay” on a trip Italia, Semiramide, and several others will never learn his secret. The sol­ to Myanmar, the reaction was swift, with similar East-meets-West themes. diers come across his father and Liù, sharp, and negative. Not all cultural lit­ If you follow the late Edward Said, as whom they torture. When the princess, eracy, it seems, is created equal. many in the intellectual firmament impressed by the slave’s resistance, Seems like there’s a straightforward still do, the very act of enjoying some­ demands to know why she holds out, rule at play here, right? We want a thing like this partakes of and enables Liù confesses her love for the prince. cultivated elite, but not a bigoted one. the oppression of the Eastern “other.” Then, fearing she will no longer be Know your culture, but stay away from These thoughts were in my head as able to endure, she commits suicide. the less-enlightened stuff—particu­ I watched the last of the great Italian Timur mourns her and chastens the larly if you’re representing your coun­ operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, excited onlookers. try abroad. But on closer inspection, at the Met this season. Turandot has Then follows what is widely con­ the division may not be so clear. While been performed more than 300 times sidered the least believable, most trou­ “Mandalay” has a disparaging refer­ at the Met, and Franco Zeffirelli’s bling part of the opera: Calàf, who ence to Buddha (the poem is written in ultra-lavish staging, which premiered has seen all of this and not stopped the voice of a former enlisted soldier), in 1987, is one of the Met’s staples. It it, issues one or two lines of protest Johnson didn’t quote that bit. He had is also, as my fellow millennials say, and then immediately goes back on very “problematic.” the offensive. Only this time, he grabs Nicholas M. Gallagher writes on opera, Turandot is the story of the epony­ Turandot roughly and kisses her. This culture, and politics from New York. mous (and fictitious) princess of China somehow causes Turandot’s icy heart

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 45 Marcelo Álvarez as Calàf in Puccini’s Turandot this season at the Metropolitan Opera to melt, whereupon Calàf realizes he archetypes—as well as some of the and which would be audible in even the wants her to choose him freely, and so cruelty. Fairytales, pre-Disney, were most “cleaned-up” presentation. tells her his name, putting his life in as bloody as they were magical: In the Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, her hands. Standing before the impe­ original story of Cinderella, the stepsis­ that squeamishness about Turandot is a rial throne again, Turandot declares ters cut off parts of their feet in order bit of a cottage industry at this point. she does know the stranger’s name—it to fit the slipper; the original Sleeping Every revival of the Met’s Turandot for is “Love!” From torture to betrothal Beauty story involves a rape, spousal the last few years has prompted hand- takes about 20 minutes. murder, and attempted cannibalism. wringing from critics over its sexual Even for opera, this is fast work, And of course, fairytales are often politics, cultural imperialism, or both. and ever since its 1926 premiere, cross-cultural: Nizami’s original tale Recent productions by the Opera Com­ Turandot has been labeled a “flawed that became Turandot is told by a Slavic pany of Philadelphia and Lyric Opera masterpiece.” In Puccini’s defense, he princess to her Persian husband. of Chicago led to calls to mothball the died just before completing it (the last Today, between the sexual politics whole opera. duet and final scene were finished by and the cultural ones, Turandot feels But if worrying over Turandot is a Franco Alfano), and it’s impossible to something like opera in a minefield. cottage industry, Turandot is an indus­ say what revisions Puccini might have How much of this is due to the opera try, full stop. The Zeffirelli production, made before it premiered; on the other and how much due to the production much like his production of La Bohème, hand, it is clear the ending reflects his is an important question. On the one remains a mainstay of the Met’s reper­ overall vision. hand, the crowds of cowering peasants toire. It’s not hard to see why: The sets and scowling guards whipping them are visually stunning, particularly the he key to all this, I think, is that back, the half-naked headsman, the second act’s imperial throne room, and T it’s not just an opera, it’s also a advisers with their exaggerated Fu Man­ the public likes faithful productions fairytale. Puccini and his librettists chu facial hair are all part of this par­ far more than most critics ever will. adapted the story from plays by Schil­ ticular production. But it was Puccini, Economically, these are the gold stan­ ler and 18th-century Venetian play­ after all, who named Turandot’s three dard for opera productions, paying off wright Carlo Gozzi, who in turn got ministers Ping, Pang, and Pong, char­ 30 years after the initial investment— it from the 12th-century Persian poet acters whom a 1926 review labeled as and helping to keep the Met open to Nizami’s Haft Peykar (Seven Beau- “three prattlers who have escaped from experimentation in other areas. And ties), a collection of erotic and philo­ a perverted dream of Gilbert and Sulli­ the backlash that hit in 2012, when a sophical stories built from pre-Islamic van.” It was Puccini too who added the modern Tosca displaced a Zeffirelli tales. Therein lies the key to some of Oriental tones to the music, which arise production, put the management on

the unreality—fairytale characters are in both dramatic and comic moments notice not to try to replace the classics. OPERA IMAGES: MARTY SOHL / METROPOLITAN

46 / The Weekly Standard April 2 / April 9, 2018 Ultimately, it’s Puccini who has put us way: Starting at the post-WWII reimagination of the opera, revealing in this bind; the music is simply too Bayreuth Wagner festivals, Regietheater different but not unfaithful subtleties good not to stage. (“director’s theater”) has allowed direc­ from the usual version. Meanwhile, tors to stage operas in ways that fly in China, where Turandot was banned an the current state of affairs against the text and are often absurdist until 1998 because of its depiction of C last? Is it possible for the great or surrealist. But the Met is justly the Chinese, the opera has achieved and the good to go on enjoying Turan- famous for the (nonpolitical) conserv­ something of the status of a “national dot and the rest of the operatic reper­ atism of its audience, and judging by opera” and was performed at great toire while their children—figurative the boos that greeted a recent produc­ public expense in conjunction with the and literal—have been allowed to grow tion of Siegfried in Bayreuth, wherein 2008 Olympic games—but notably, it into would-be Thomas Cromwells, humping crocodiles interrupted the has also featured revisions that make bent on self-righteous iconoclasm, main duet (yes, this was recently a it more dramatically believable while even as the whole thing gets keeping the story arc intact. papered over with a little conde­ You can see the room for scension and a lot of hypocrisy? middle ground here. Insofar as This isn’t to say that Turandot in the Zeffirelli Turandot can be particular is going to be the target uncomfortable, it’s often because of our next lightning-strike cul­ the blocking is so wooden as tural contretemps. It’s to say that to make the acting cartoonish. opera is a target-rich environment. In 1987, the Met did not have Just in the main run of the reper­ its seat-back translations—these toire alone, Aida, Madama Butter- would not come in until 1995— fly, Die Zauberflöte, Die Entführung and so the shows needed to be aus dem Serail, L’Italiana in Algeri, (literally) spectacular, while the Otello, Carmen, and Il Trovatore, acting could be of the just-face- among others, present “cultural the-audience-and-sing variety. imperialism” and “Orientalism”- Today, since you can follow the style problems, while everything drama word-by-word, the lack from Don Giovan­ ni­ to Cav/Pag has of emotion in some scenes and questionable sexual politics. And rough blocking in others (par­ don’t even get me started on Wag­ ticularly the final duet) produce ner. If you took out everything jarring results. This could be that jars with modern sensibilities, fixed by a new, still somewhat you’d be left basically with Don faithful production or, though it Carlo and La Bohème, the latter of isn’t the done thing at the Met, From earlier this season, Oksana Dyka which is only acceptable because in the title role of Turandot reblocking within Zeffirelli’s broad stereotypes of Paris don’t traditional set. (Why not make offend us in the same way that broad thing), there’d probably be riots in an exception for the master?) stereotypes of Peking do. Lincoln Square if Regie were attempted Still, there is reason to worry. Short Of course, nuanced reevaluation of on a consistent basis. of a total departure from the story, it the canon, through sensitive new pro­ The ideal approach is to trust is difficult to imagine a restaging of ductions, is possible—even desirable. that anyone cultured enough to see Turandot that would not invite accusa­ But nuance is not our era’s forte. In an opera, even for the first time, is tions of racism or sexism. Certainly, I the millennials (of whom I am one), probably sensible enough to get the can’t see a production team not fearing we have a giant demographic cohort, difference between watching Puc­ such accusations. That will probably of increasing economic power, con­ cini’s Peking and going off to conquer keep the Zeffirelli production with us vinced that it knows The Truth about China. There are signs that such dis­ indefinitely. As far as the production our horrible history and what must be tinction-making is possible. Notably, goes, that’s not in and of itself the worst done about it. Our enervated center- Aleksandrs Antonenko, who, in the of worlds, but this kind of caution, left cultural elite nurtured and toler­ first half of this season’s run of Turan- when repeated, can lead to stagnation. ated these attitudes in universities. dot, played Calàf in the traditional We have one consolation, those of The resulting protests, which have costume—which involves exagger­ us who think that the canon is better escaped the bounds of the academy, ated, curved eyebrows—refused two preserved with its faults than scrapped have not been pretty. years ago to wear blackface for a new because of them: the transcendent Germans, in response to uncom­ production of Otello, suggesting some music. It is hard to imagine Turandot fortable historical echoes in the texts level of differentiation on his part. being lost over the long term. But in the of some operas, have adopted another The Otello was a highly successful short-to-medium term, I am worried. ♦

April 2 / April 9, 2018 The Weekly Standard / 47 NOT A PARODY

April 2 / April 9, 2018