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January 23, 2017 $4.99
THE EDITORS DAVID PRYCE-JONES MATTHEW WALTHER The D.C. Circuit’s Mistake The Maligning of Israel Winnie-the-Pooh at 90
MICHAEL KNOX BERAN OuttaOuttaTHOMAS C. DONNELLYHereHere RICHARD FONTAINE $4.99 HENRY OLSEN 04 RAMESH PONNURU LUKE THOMPSON
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www.nationalreview.com base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 12:59 PM Page 1 ARE YOU PREPARED TO REBUILD?
This highly anticipated follow-up to William R. Forstchen’s New York Times bestsellers, One Second After and One Year After, immerses readers once more in the story of our nation’s struggle to rebuild after an electromagnetic pulse wipes out all electricity and plunges the country into darkness, starvation, and terror.
Also Available
“Forstchen is the prophet of a new Dark Age. The wise will listen.” Tackling an issue so important it has become —STEPHEN COONTS the topic of a congressional debate, this series asks what if the US was struck by an EMP thefi naldaynovel.com and how would we rebuild. TOC--ready_QXP-1127940144.qxp 1/4/2017 2:01 PM Page 1 Contents
JANUARY 23, 2017 | VOLUME LXIX, NO. 1 | www.nationalreview.com
ON THE COVER Page 24 Obama’s Young Garden Obama planted a number of political Matthew Walther on Winnie-the-Pooh seeds during his tenure, seeds that p. 22 could, in the hands of a skilled gardener, blossom quickly if Donald Trump and the BOOKS, ARTS Republican Congress don’t govern & MANNERS wisely. If Obama’s strategy played poorly 35 THE SOUL OF MENCKEN in the short term, we cannot yet dismiss Lauren Weiner reviews Damning Words: The Life and Religious the possibility that it will play out quite Times of H. L. Mencken, well over the coming years. Henry Olsen by D. G. Hart. 36 THE FEMINIST ECONOMY COVER: ROMAN GENN George Gilder reviews Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, by Nicholas Eberstadt. ARTICLES 38 INDIAN COUNTRY 16 A NON-TRANSFORMATIONAL PRESIDENT by Ramesh Ponnuru Travis Kavulla reviews The Earth Obama was not the Left’s Reagan. Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the DOCTRINE OF DECLINE by Thomas C. Donnelly 17 American West, by Peter Cozzens. Obama has done lasting damage to the military. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN HERE AFTER THE FALL by Michael Knox Beran 40 19 John J. Miller discusses Sinclair Lewis. Obama’s last sermon. GOING ROGUE THE MALIGNING OF ISRAEL by David Pryce-Jones 42 20 Ross Douthat reviews Rogue One: Obama’s simplistic reversal of American diplomatic tradition. A Star Wars Story. WINNIE-THE-POOH AT 90 by Matthew Walther 22 43 BIRD’S-EYE VIEW Judging Milne’s famous novels as literature. Richard Brookhiser watches pigeons and sparrows. FEATURES 24 OBAMA’S YOUNG GARDEN by Henry Olsen SECTIONS He has planted seeds that progressives might someday harvest. Letters to the Editor RESTRAINT AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Richard Fontaine 2 26 4 The Week Evaluating two terms of Obama’s foreign policy. 33 Athwart ...... James Lileks The Long View ...... Rob Long OUR FAILED CYBERSECURITY POLICY by Luke Thompson 34 30 37 Poetry ...... Lee Oser Russian hacking requires a stronger response than it has received. 44 Happy Warrior ...... Daniel Foster
NATIONAL REVIEW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by N ATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. © National Review, Inc., 2017. Address all editorial mail, manuscripts, letters to the editor, etc., to Editorial Dept., N ATIONAL REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Address all subscription mail orders, changes of address, undeliverable copies, etc., to NATIONALREVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015; phone, 386-246-0118, Monday–Friday, 8:00A.M . to 10:30 P.M. Eastern time. Adjustment requests should be accompanied by a current mailing label or facsimile. Direct classified advertising inquiries to: Classifieds Dept.,ATIONAL N REVIEW, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 or call 212-679- 7330. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to N ATIONAL REVIEW, Circulation Dept., P. O. Box 433015, Palm Coast, Fla. 32143-3015. Printed in the U.S.A. RATES: $59.00 a year (24 issues). Add $21.50 for Canada and other foreign subscriptions, per year. (All payments in U.S. currency.) The editors cannot be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork unless return postage or, better, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors. letters--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 1:52 PM Page 2 Letters
JANUARY 23 ISSUE; PRINTED JANUARY 5
EDITORINCHIEF Beliefs of the 99 Percent Richard Lowry Senior Editors Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones Kevin D. Williamson attempts (“Superman Politics,” December 31) to articulate Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts Literary Editor Michael Potemra complex economic policy for the 0.4 percent “who follow these things closely.” Vice President, Editorial Operations Christopher McEvoy That makes me part of the 99.6 percent who don’t and simply go on with our lives Executive Editor Reihan Salam Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson being skeptical of any economic policy. National Correspondent John J. Miller Senior Political Correspondent Jim Geraghty I enjoyed Williamson’s article, as he was definitive in his analysis of Trump- Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors Pence’s Carrier subsidy right up until he states that “there is no broader logic at Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz work.” The 99.6 percent heard a campaign promise to “reduce the corporate tax Production Editor Katie Hosmer Assistant to the Editor Rachel Ogden rate” and “remove every job-robbing regulation” and “accompanying executive Research Associate Alessandra Trouwborst orders.” Those, to us, are the “broader logic” ignored by Williamson. Contributing Editors Shannen Coffin / Ross Douthat / Daniel Foster I also objected to his denouncement of Pence, whom the 99 percent view as a Roman Genn / Arthur L. Herman / Lawrence Kudlow Mark R. Levin / Yuval Levin / Rob Long hero in the debates and a calming force for Trump. I’ll continue to believe that Mario Loyola / Jim Manzi / Andrew C. McCarthy Kate O’Beirne / Andrew Stuttaford / Robert VerBruggen Pence is not a “sniffer” but is the genuine article until proven otherwise. His influ-
NATIONALREVIEWONLINE ence on Trump makes Trump appear more “presidential.” Editor Charles C. W. Cooke Managing Editor Katherine Connell Williamson’s treatment of the Carrier deal’s being “symbolic” is easily under- Deputy Managing Editor Mark Antonio Wright stood by the 99 percent, but we believe it is merely a distraction from Trump’s National-Affairs Columnist John Fund Staff Writer David French broader economic policy. Reporter Katherine Timpf Associate Editors Molly Powell / Nick Tell Digital Director Ericka Andersen Frank Sardina Technical Services Russell Jenkins Web Editorial Assistant Grant DeArmitt Unionville, Va. Web Developer Wendy Weihs Web Producer Scott McKim EDITORS- AT- LARGE Kathryn Jean Lopez / John O’Sullivan KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON RESPONDS: The fact that 99 percent of the people believe NATIONALREVIEWINSTITUTE X, Y, or Z doesn’t make it so. Donald Trump has some good instincts on economic THOMASL. RHODESFELLOW Ian Tuttle policy, such as reforming the corporate tax code and the onerous federal regula-
BUCKLEYFELLOWSINPOLITICALJOURNALISM tory structure. He also has some terrible ideas, such as using the corporate tax Alexandra DeSanctis / Austin Yack code as a political weapon and adding to the onerous federal regulatory structure COLLEGIATENETWORKFELLOW Paul Crookston in ways that accord with his populist sensibilities. He also has a penchant for what amount to cheap publicity stunts, as in the Carrier matter. Given Trump’s history Contributors Hadley Arkes / James Bowman / Eliot A. Cohen and his character, my own inclination is to proceed with caution—lots of it. Dinesh D’Souza / Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter / George Gilder Jeffrey Hart / Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune / Michael Novak Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons Terry Teachout / Vin Weber Deciphering Obama’s Foreign Policy Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Lyudmila Bolotinskaya Business Services Alex Batey When evaluating President Obama’s record and searching for justification for Circulation Manager Jason Ng Advertising Director Jim Fowler various foreign-policy decisions, reductive thinking can go a long way. While Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet Associate Publisher Garrett Bewkes Arthur Herman is fundamentally correct in his review of Jay Solomon’s book Assistant to the Publisher Brooke Rogers on Iran (“Dangerous Gamble,” December 31), an understanding of radical Director of Revenue Erik Netcher
PUBLISHERCHAIRMAN chic would tell you that the nuclear deal with Iran and the U.S. disengagement Jack Fowler John Hillen during the uprising in Tehran in 2009 were derived from a desire to apologize FOUNDER and make tangible amends for the seemingly inexcusable involvement of the William F. Buckley Jr. United States in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh. Remarkable PATRONSANDBENEFACTORS Robert Agostinelli perhaps, but not complicated when the core tendency, embraced by Obama, Dale Brott Mr. and Mrs. Michael Conway was and is to blame America first, consequences be damned. Mark and Mary Davis Virginia James Paul J. Hauptman Christopher M. Lantrip Brian and Deborah Murdock St. Louis, Mo. Mr. & Mrs. Richard Spencer Mr. & Mrs. L. Stanton Towne Peter J. Travers Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].
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n We hope that in retirement Harry Reid keeps up his workout routine.
n Republicans intend to pass what they’re calling an “Obamacare-repeal bill” early. It will get rid of Obamacare’s individual mandate and some of its taxes immediately, and the rest of its taxes and spending after a delay of some years. The bill won’t touch the regulatory heart of Obamacare, though, because Republicans don’t have the 60 Senate votes they think they need for that. They say they will have a replacement plan ready by the See page 14. time their bill takes full effect. In the meantime, though, health markets—already disrupted by Obamacare—will grow more unstable. Policies will still have to comply with Obamacare’s expensive regulations, and those policies will be even more expensive because healthy people will once again be free not to buy them. Look for premiums to rise, insurers to drop out of the exchanges, and Republicans to be blamed for the mess.
n With 20 days left in his presidency, Barack Obama finally decided to get tougher on Russia. In late December, the outgoing president expelled 35 Russian intelligence operatives from the U.S.; imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies— Russia’s pro-Trump propaganda. The truth is that voters made an the GRU and FSB—and four officials; and insinuated that he uncoerced choice with access to a lot of information; and that would take additional, secret actions against Russia in retaliation some of that information might have come from Russian hack- for its hack of the Democratic National Committee, its attempted ing. Trump is not taking the hacking seriously, and is reinforced hack of several states’ voter databases, and other “malicious in this insouciance by Democrats who use it to cast doubt on the cyber activity related to our election cycle in previous elections,” legitimacy of his election. in the words of the White House. These actions are welcome. They are also several years too late. In 2010, a Russian spy ring n At his year-end press conference, Vladimir Putin had many operating in Washington, D.C., was exposed, but rather than hold opinions, including some about Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, the spies for interrogation, President Obama bundled them back and the recent American elections: “It is important to know how to Russia, where Vladimir Putin praised them for “risking them- to lose gracefully.” Trump immediately tweeted this out, adding, selves and those close to them” “to benefit their motherland’s “So true!” Putin does not lose, gracefully or otherwise, because interests.” In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, he does not allow genuine electoral competition in Russia. He is and Russian-backed separatists shot down an airliner over more apt to murder political opponents than to compete with Donetsk Oblast, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members them. (Ask the late Boris Nemtsov, the onetime deputy prime on board—and the U.S. was largely silent. Since then, Russia has minister.) Is it more alarming if Trump does not know this con- adventured far beyond its own neighborhood, facilitating Iran’s text, or does not care about it? nuclear aspirations and shoring up Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, and the Obama administration’s response has n Do Donald Trump’s worldwide business dealings constitute been to wag a limp finger. Barack Obama’s presidency has been emoluments, as proscribed by the Constitution, Article I, a cycle of Russian aggression followed by American feckless- Section 9? “No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust ness. Eight years in, his indefatigable naïveté has finally given under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of the way. Better late than never, even very late. Congress, accept of any present [or] Emolument . . . from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Foreign companies can some- n A recent poll by YouGov neatly illustrated the pathology of our times represent states, as in command economies; in crony debate over Russia and the election. It found that 52 percent of economies, the lines are blurrier. Does the president fall under Democrats believe that Russia “tampered with vote tallies” to this provision of the Constitution? Maybe not; George Wash - elect Trump—a view for which there is no evidence. Meanwhile, ington, scrupulous about constitutional niceties, accepted pre- 73 percent of Republicans refuse to believe that Russia hacked sents from foreign sovereigns when he was POTUS. Whatever Democratic e-mails to help Trump: something many in the intel- the legalities, Trump and his family should put the Trump ROMAN GENN ligence community are reported to believe and that fits with empire into a blind trust for the duration. Otherwise the ques-
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tions and the lawsuits will be endless, and the optics will be n Barack Obama, the great constitutional scholar, has discov- shady. A man of keen sensitivity to the public good and to his ered within Article II a presidential power that had inexplica- own honor would not hesitate. bly eluded all of his predecessors: the no-backsies clause. Obama has made a determination that certain parts of the n The evidence mounts up: Trump, beauty-contest impresario, Atlantic and Arctic will be forever off-limits to oil-and-gas values looks in casting his administration. He said of Mike Pence exploration, and also has determined that this decision is irre- early on that “he looks very good.” He considered Mitt Romney versible. It isn’t. Though the matter never has been litigated, for secretary of state because he “looks the part.” And he rejected there is little reason to suppose that President Trump cannot John Bolton for the same job in part because of his “brush-like” issue his own order reversing President Obama’s; in the event ’stache (there goes one-quarter of Mount Rushmore). “He’s that this were deemed insufficient, Congress could reverse very aesthetic,” a Trump intimate confided to the Washington Obama. The Obama administration has had a strange love/hate Post. Trump is on to something: Looks, which include bearing, relationship with the energy business: The president hates fos- are an inescapable element of public personalities. The eyes sil fuels (he famously promised to throw coal miners out of have it, at least initially. But many odd ducks—Lincoln, work and then wondered why they voted for Trump), but he Gandhi, Kissinger—have played their looks effectively in off- loves the energy industry’s substantial contribution to GDP beat ways. And looks are simply the point of entry: There has to growth and employment. Two things should happen: Obama be something in the brain behind the face, the heart within the should be reversed, and Congress should revisit the Outer chest. A Miss Universe presidency is bound for lousy ratings. Continental Shelf Lands Act, under which this action was taken, as part of a broad effort toward developing a frankly n Celebrities, and some performers who are not famous, are pro-energy national policy oriented not only toward ensuring refusing to participate in Trump’s inauguration. They do not ample energy production for the domestic market but also wish to endorse, or to be taken to endorse, things they oppose. toward empowering U.S. energy exporters through the develop - They should reconsider. The pageantry around an inauguration ment of necessary infrastructure such as oil pipelines and West is a celebration of the peaceful transfer of power at least as Coast coal-export terminals. That this can be done in an envi- much as it is of a president. But if these artists persist in their ronmentally responsible fashion is not in question—the prob- refusal, there are some Christian bakers and florists who lem here is an environmentalist lobby that opposes new energy deserve a kind word from them. production and infrastructure per se.
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In 2013, when the Senate Republicans’ stooping to the same level—and they’ll realize it, in debated the “Gang of Eight” immigra- four or eight years. tion bill, Sessions both introduced and was the only vote for an amendment n New York governor Andrew Cuomo commuted the minimum that would have capped legal immi- prison sentence of Judith Clark from 75 to 35 years, thus making gration at 33 million over a decade. her eligible for parole. Clark belonged to a radical gang that mur- Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, dered Brink’s guard Peter Paige, Sergeant Edward O’Grady, and elected in 2014, is, to his credit, filling Officer Waverly Brown during a 1981 stickup of an armored car that void. In the New York Times, he and a subsequent shootout. Clark, who drove a getaway car, was wrote that low-skilled immigration convicted of robbery and second-degree murder. In the years should be curbed to boost wages for since, she has reputedly become a model prisoner, earning col- Americans with high-school diplomas lege degrees and leading courses for fellow inmates. She has or less. It beats raising the minimum much to atone for. British cops speak of ODCs—ordinary decent wage, which would at the very least reduce job growth for these criminals—the burglars and pickpockets who take what is not very Americans. And it would also promote the assimilation of theirs, but who are neither bloodthirsty nor comprehensively those legal immigrants whom we let in. Polls on immigration lev- antisocial. Clark and her comrades were both. They gunned els are few and far between—a sign of how little the subject down a citizen doing his job and two policemen as if they were enters the minds of political and journalistic elites—but in 2015 dogs; during her trial, Clark called court officers “fascist dogs.” Pew found that a third of the public wants less. If another senator She hated America and all who did not share her hatred; her joined Sessions and Cotton, perhaps that percentage would grow. enraged rancor helped snuff three lives. She should spend the rest of hers pondering that fact, behind bars. n A couple from New York City spied Ivanka Trump traveling with her family over the holidays. “Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, n New York City celebrated the opening of the Second Avenue flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass Subway—prematurely. The project is one-quarter complete, and them #banalityofevil” tweeted Matthew Lasner, a college pro- carries passengers only between 96th Street and 63rd Street. The fessor. Shortly thereafter Lasner’s husband, a lawyer, succeeded project is a textbook case of municipal misgovernance in the in angrily confronting Ivanka while she was seated with her chil- United States: It was proposed in 1919 and begun in 1929, with dren aboard a JetBlue flight. He berated her for her father’s the work being interrupted for the remainder of the 20th century “ruining the country” until the crew intervened and deplaned by a series of New York City financial crises. (New York City him and his husband. Some defenders of the man insisted that government is a series of financial crises.) Even though only Ivanka’s role as an adviser in Trump’s incoming administration about 25 percent completed, it is, in real terms, already more than made her a fair target. For criticism, surely, but not for personal four times more expensive than originally projected. It is a half- abuse. Liberals who worry that Trump’s presidency will degrade billion dollars over the city’s most recent estimate, and, if indeed civil society should try not to illustrate the point. it is ever completed (there are no hard commitments to complet- ing it at this time), it will be well more than a century after the n In a special session following the election, North Carolina’s project was begun. It is far more expensive than comparable Republican legislature passed, and outgoing governor Pat projects around the world: Barcelona has achieved a high-tech McCrory signed, a slate of reforms intended to limit the power of automation and subway expansion at one-tenth the cost of New incoming governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat. The content of York’s project. The main driver of these higher expenses is labor these changes—far from being an indication of the “spirit of costs: New York City is dominated by Democrats, and the city Confederacy,” as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie absurdly suggested—is pays the party’s most important constituency—government not especially outrageous. Some are overdue, such as restoring workers—a lot to do a little. And sometimes very slowly. party labels in state-supreme-court elections (which were re - moved by the state’s Democrats in 2002, for partisan reasons). n On Capitol Hill, Missouri Democratic representative Lacy Some are potentially healthy, such as the creation of an eight- Clay praised the painting his district selected to be in the annual person, bipartisan state election board to replace the five-person congressional art competition, a painting that depicts police offi- board dominated by gubernatorial appointees. And some, such as cers as pigs. The painter, high-school senior David Pulphus, illus- stripping the power of the governor to appoint trustees of the trated the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., on the night Officer Darren University of North Carolina system of schools, are outright pay- Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown—but he embraces the back for similar Democratic machinations dating back to the narrative of “hands up, don’t shoot,” even though Brown first 1970s, but hardly the stuff of which banana republics are made. reached for Wilson’s gun. For now, the work hangs in the U.S. It is true, though, that the process by which these changes have Capitol, just steps away from the Capitol Police, who protect GETTY IMAGES / been pushed through is unseemly and probably politically members of Congress, even those with atrocious taste. unwise. By national standards, North Carolina’s governor is weak, so further changes to the state’s balance of power were not n On December 19, Anis Amri, a radicalized young Tunisian, MARK WILSON urgent. Policy changes such as these should generally take place murdered the driver of a semi and drove the dead man’s truck into 6 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 12:09 PM Page 1 Week-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 2:04 PM Page 8 THE WEEK a Christmas market in the heart of Berlin, killing twelve and n While the world’s gaze was fixed on the unfolding tragedy in injuring 56. Amri was killed four days later in a shootout with Syria, the Obama administration was busy losing military ground police near Milan. He had been bumbling around Europe for six in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after 9/11 and four years after the years, committing a string of offenses. He was on the radar of Obama administration’s own Afghan troop surge, the Taliban German intelligence, which dismissed him as small fry. Even have retaken the city of Sangin in Helmand province. This is before the influx of Syrians welcomed by Angela Merkel, Europe ground that American and British troops fought and died to take, lay separated only by a navigable sea and a porous Turkey from and now it’s back in Taliban hands. This kind of military reversal hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing failed Muslim states. is a habit for the Obama administration, which gave back entire Europe struggles to assimilate them, and until recently was provinces in Iraq before finally acting to save the country from unwilling even to stanch the flow. Jihadists and sinister parties of ISIS. It’s impossible to achieve peace when one side continues to the right both find recruits in the situation. World War II and the fight, and make no mistake: The Taliban want to rule again. It Cold War were far greater challenges; can Europe meet this one? falls to the incoming Trump administration to make a difficult choice: Commit more resources to America’s longest war, or n The regime of Bashar al-Assad claims that its recovery of watch as our enemy reestablishes terrorist safe havens in the very Aleppo, the country’s largest and most important city after country that launched the worst attack in our nation’s history. Damascus, is an irrevocable step in putting Syria together again, the way it was—except that parts of it will never be habitable n Danilo Maldonado is a well-known street artist in Cuba, again, and millions have lost their lives or their homes, or both. nicknamed “El Sexto” (meaning “The Sixth”). He is also a Imagining that the wreckage signifies victory, the regime sees no dissident, who has been in and out of prison for years. Our need to negotiate, which means that the fighting will soon be Jay Nordlinger profiled him in an issue last June. After the smashing up some other place, probably Idlib. President Obama death of Fidel Castro in November, Maldonado spray- predicts that the Russians will find themselves in a quagmire. His painted a short sentence: “Se fue,” or “He went” (or “He’s policy is to supply so-called moderate rebels with enough gone”). For this, Maldonado was weapons to extend the fighting, but not enough to move the violently arrested and has been needle. President Putin and the Russians believe only in bomb- imprisoned ever since. The ing. While buses were transporting survivors out of Aleppo, the American human-rights law - fanatics of ISIS were reoccupying Palmyra, out of which they yer Kimberley Motley was had been driven shortly before. Turks and Kurds are still at one engaged to represent him, but another’s throats after four decades. More and more migrants she was denied the right to arrive to baffle a Europe that has no idea what to do with them. see him. In fact, she herself The fall of Aleppo changes everything and nothing. was arrested, and then kicked out of Cuba. Fidel may be n The job of Andrey Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, gone, but his brother was to smooth over a relationship between the two countries that is not, and nei- the fighting in Syria had made volatile. One part of this tricky ther is their process was an exhibition with the title “Russia through Turks’ dictatorship. Eyes,” put on in a fashionable art gallery in Ankara. A camera- man happened to be there, and his film shows that, shortly after Karlov began his opening address, a young man in a smart dark n Gao Zhisheng is one of the bravest and best men in China. He suit stepped forward and shot him dead. Standing over the is a lawyer, and he was once a pride of the government: honored corpse, the gunman is seen raising an index finger in Islamist for his work. But then he started defending Falun Gong practi- style and raving the Islamist war cry, “God is the greater,” fol- tioners, and the government turned against him, hard. Gao is a lowed by “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria.” In an Christian and lives according to his conscience. The government exchange of fire with security agents, he was himself shot dead. imprisoned and tortured him for years. They tortured him almost Identified as Mevlut Mert Altintas, he was a 22-year-old police- to death. Later, they kept him under house arrest. In this period, man whose ID card had authorized him to enter the gallery with Gao managed to write a book, called “Year 2017: Stand Up, a gun on him. In the terrorist mayhem afflicting Turkey, this China.” It was smuggled out of the country and, last summer, murder is particularly menacing, because it is not known published in Taiwan. Recently, some friends sent the author a whether he was acting on his own or on behalf of others. copy. Government agents ripped it up and disappeared the author. He has been disappeared before. One day, probably, he will not n In the 1950s, three Japanese prime ministers visited Pearl reappear. But there will likely be monuments to him in a freer Harbor. But last month, Shinzo Abe became the first to visit the China, while the memories of his persecutors are despised. memorial itself: the USS Arizona Memorial. He gave a beautiful and wise speech. One cavil: He said, “We must never repeat the n “I will raise a feminist boy,” writes Polly Dunning in the horrors of war.” You could also say that we must never repeat the Canberra Times, in an essay on her distress that she is pregnant horrors of expansionist dictatorship, or the horrors of aggres- with an unborn child bearing that dreaded Y chromosome, a rar- sion against civilization. In any case, Abe did very well, and he ity in her extended family. One of two daughters and six grand- pointed out that the Japanese have built “a free and democratic daughters untainted by the existence of male siblings, Dunning country that values the rule of law.” Indeed, Japan is one of the already has two daughters and assumed that her third child would OSLO FREEDOM FORUM happiest stories of the post-war era. follow the pattern. Alas. Daunted, she nonetheless gathers her- 8 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 12:20 PM Page 1 Meet the Beauty in the Beast Discover this spectacular 6½-carat green treasure from Mount St. Helens! or almost a hundred years it lay dormant. Silently building strength. At F 10,000 feet high, it was truly a sleeping giant. Until May 18, 1980, when the beast awoke with violent force and revealed its greatest secret. Mount St. Helens erupted, sending up a 80,000-foot column of ash and smoke. From that chaos, something beautiful emerged… our spectacular Helenite Necklace. 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HEL-04, - J. from Orlando, FL Stauer Burnsville, Minnesota 55337 www.stauer.com Stauer Client Smart Luxuries—Surprising Prices Week-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 2:04 PM Page 10 THE WEEK self, recognizing that she can “do feminism a great service” by 30 sellers three months before its publication date. Whether exercising her maternal authority to teach her son to reject male Yiannopoulos is “dangerous” is debatable; he is certainly canny privilege, which, given her ideology and the degree to which he about getting lucrative attention. will find himself outnumbered in the Dunning household and clan, is not a temptation he is likely to have much occasion to n Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted resist in his formative years. It should come as no surprise, but “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide” and was astounded might to Ms. Dunning, that a boy who grows up with sisters is to receive a hostile reaction. He attempted to clear things up, say- more likely than other boys to be conservative in adulthood, ing, “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the according to research published in The Journal of Politics Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” Surprisingly, (2013). Ms. Dunning, we look forward to your update in 2037. this did not improve matters, and the university issued a state- ment calling his comments “reprehensible.” Having claimed that n Trump supporters attacked college student Yasmin Seweid on his intent was to mock white nationalists (“white genocide” is a the New York City subway, calling her a “terrorist” and screaming term they use to decry race-mixing), Ciccariello-Maher should at her to “take that thing off”—a reference to Seweid’s hijab; have recognized that praising an actual massacre of white people shamefully, no one on the crowded subway car came to her aid. In as a way to “clarify” would have the opposite effect. His intended Ann Arbor, a man threatened to set a University of Michigan stu- targets and he deserve each other. dent on fire unless she removed her head covering. In Louisiana, two men, one wearing a Trump hat, beat another Muslim college n State motor-vehicle bureaus are a symbol of inefficiency that student before stealing her wallet and her hijab. “I was very shak- was often invoked in the Obamacare debate: “Would you put en up . . . I’m definitely traumatized,” Seweid told the New York the DMV in charge of your health?” This reputation may some- Daily News. “I’m really scared.” The only problem? None of the times be deserved, but spare a thought for the dilemmas they three incidents actually happened. Seweid lied to her parents, the face. A man showed up at a Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles press, and the NYPD (she has been charged with filing a false office with a pair of goat horns affixed to his head and applied police report, a misdemeanor), all to avoid trouble for staying out for a state ID card to reflect his new name, Phelan MoonSong, past curfew and drinking with friends. There are acts of bigotry chosen to reflect his Pagan religious beliefs. MBMV regula- in America (more are directed at Jews than Muslims), but crying tions require applicants to remove hats and headgear for their wolf about Islamophobia only feeds the Left’s fever dreams photos, but the rule makes an exception for nuns who wear while causing normal Americans to take the next claim with an habits, and Mr. MoonSong said he deserved similar treatment extra grain of salt. Threats and assaults—religiously mo ti vat ed as a Pagan priest who wears horns for his job (presumably or not—should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. As Wagnerian sopranos would qualify for the same indulgence). In should the hijab hoaxers’ filings of false police reports. support of this request, he provided documentation of his beliefs, including a copy of Pagan Religions: A Handbook for n In December, a 23-year-old self-described prankster posted Diversity Training (that’s an actual book, and the next time you on his YouTube channel a video shot in the aisle of a Delta gripe about your job’s HR department, remember that they may Airlines plane, from which he excitedly reported that he, along someday have to read it). After much back-and-forth with state with a friend, was being removed because he spoke Arabic to officials, finally the word came down from Augusta: Give the his mother on the phone. Airline officials said that he had man his ID. So, for more reasons than one, if you worship trees, “sought to disrupt the cabin with provocative behavior, includ- Maine is the place to be. ing shouting.” That account was corroborated by an Arabic- speaking passenger who told the Washington Post that there n WFB took great pleasure in the founding of The Weekly had been no phone call. “If someone’s being racist, I would Standard in 1995. He was always endeavoring to expand the gar- stand up right away,” he said. “It wasn’t like that. I mean, this den of conservatism, and here was another flower. An impressive guy was trying to antagonize people.” Taken in by the cynical one. For more than 20 years, TWS has been edited by William young vlogger, social-justice warriors rushed to Twitter to reg- Kristol. In a sense, he is irreplaceable—unique—but magazines ister their indignation over a fictitious case of Islamophobia. survive founding editors and flourish, as NR, among others, has The prankster got the reward he clearly sought: a spike in on- proven. Kristol will now be editor-at-large, while Stephen Hayes line mentions. Which is why he goes unnamed here. becomes editor-in-chief and Richard Starr editor. May their tenure be wonderful, and may our garden grow. n Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart.com provocateur and self-styled “Dangerous Faggot,” has signed a book deal with an imprint of n Thomas Sowell, economist, academic, and author, announced publisher Simon & Schuster, promising “a string of waspish one- that he has given up his column. “Age 86 is well past the usual liners and bitchy put-downs from America’s favorite mischie- retirement age,” he wrote, “so the question is not why I am quit- vous gay conservative.” Titled “Dangerous” and slated for ting, but why I kept at it so long.” He kept at it because he wanted release in March, the book, according to a press release, will earn to save readers, and the nation, from the mistakes that arise from Yiannopoulos “a mid-six figure sum.” The response to the news ideology, ignorance, and inexperience. He kept being published has been entirely predictable: Comedians Sarah Silverman and because he had the gift of stating complex or profound insights Judd Apatow are spearheading a campaign to get Simon & clearly and persuasively. A thought of Sowell’s, the moment you Schuster to back out of the deal; the Chicago Review of Books has read it, seemed like a thought you had long known yourself but stated that it will not review any Simon & Schuster titles in 2017, had unaccountably forgotten. “Men more frequently require to be in protest; and Yiannopoulos’s book has shot into Amazon’s top reminded than informed,” wrote Dr. Johnson; Sowell was a 1 0 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 12:15 PM Page 1 Week-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 2:04 PM Page 12 THE WEEK reminder par excellence. His many admirers cannot adequately Kardashians. But unlike them, she had talent (John Huston repay him for his good work, but we can and do wish him many called her acting “creditable”). Also unlike them, she was inten- happy years. tionally funny, even about herself (nine times wed; she boasted that she was a “marvelous housekeeper—every time I leave a n On hearing of the death of his friend Carrie Fisher, Steve man I keep his house”). Zsa Zsa would never have made and Martin jotted a tweet: “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher leaked a sex tape. If you give it away, how will you get more was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to houses, dah-link? R.I.P. be witty and bright as well.” Many reacted harshly to this tweet, calling it sexist, or lookist, or whatever the appropriate “ist” is. Martin felt compelled to delete it. A country in which a tweet such THE FIRST AMENDMENT as his is verboten is a country that’s a little cuckoo. A Setback for Free Speech n In 1926, back when American Communists could aspire to EAR the end of the year, the D.C. Court of Appeals issued something more than tenure, Earl Browder, a veteran radical, its decision in Michael Mann’s defamation case against went to Moscow to be instructed in the true faith. While there, he N us and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The court met and married another Communist stalwart, and they had a son, dismissed Mann’s claims for intentional infliction of emotional whom they named Felix. Back in America, Earl navigated the distress, and also dismissed his claims based on an open letter Byzantine internal politics of the Communist Party USA expertly written by our editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, taking Mann to task enough to run twice as its presidential candidate; meanwhile, for threatening to file this bullying lawsuit in the first place. At the Felix became a math prodigy, earning a doctorate from Princeton same time, the court refused to dismiss the defamation claims at age 20. The post-WWII era was hard for anyone with a back- against NR and CEI based on blog posts by Mark Steyn and Rand ground like his, and when he was drafted, the Army gave him Simberg respectively, criticizing Mann’s infamous “hockey only menial jobs. But as the mathematician Norman Levinson stick” graph, which is widely touted as providing lead-pipe-cinch told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, scientific proof of man-made global warming. Browder “has been anti-Communist. He has opposed criticism of In refusing to dismiss these claims, the opinion is badly mis- music in the Soviet Union; the [Lysenko] genetics business. He taken. Worse, it represents an unprecedented threat to freedom of regards the group running Russia as a bunch of dictators, un - speech in our nation’s capital. There’s a reason that a broad coali- scrupulous men.” Felix went on to receive numerous honors, tion of groups including the ACLU, the Washington Post, the including the National Medal of Science, and this son of hard- Cato Institute, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the core Communists was the father of Bill Browder, who became a Press filed briefs in support of NR in the case. billionaire investing in the former Soviet Union before running Properly understood, the First Amendment provides broad afoul of the authorities there for his anti-corruption activism. protection for free expression on matters of political and scien- Only in America. Felix died late last year at 89. R.I.P. tific controversy. It protects vigorous debate not only over the merits but also over the ethics of politically controversial sci- n The My Lai massacre of March 1968 was possibly the worst entific enterprises. In particular, it protects the right of all atrocity in American military history. As many as 500 unarmed Americans—scientists, journalists, and even bloggers—to ex - villagers—more than the Nazis killed at Lidice in World War II— press caustic criticism of scientific theories that purport to resolve were slaughtered by a company of soldiers, some acting willingly hot-button political controversies on matters as sweepingly con- and some unwillingly, upon orders from their commander, sequential as the extent and cause of global warming. Lieutenant William Calley. Yet even this horrific event had its The court’s decision badly neglects these principles. It holds heroes: An Army helicopter crew discovered the massacre in that NR may be subjected to a judicial trial and possible sanctions progress and, after an angry confrontation with Calley, threatened for publishing a blog post arguing that the infamous “hockey to fire on the soldiers if they didn’t stop. The crew then returned stick” graph is misleading and that the underlying scientific to base to refuel and report the killings. Hellish as it was, My Lai techniques are so badly deceptive that they deserve to be was kept from being even worse by these three brave soldiers— denounced as a form of misconduct. The court’s decision thus Captain Hugh Thompson and Specialists Glenn Andreotta and declares open season on anyone who dares to criticize Mann for Lawrence Colburn—who were belatedly awarded the Soldier’s “molesting and torturing data” and (in the court’s words) engaging Medal in 1998. That award was posthumous for Andreotta, who in “deception and wrongdoing” or “serious misconduct.” died in combat a few months after My Lai; Thompson died in By holding that such subjective characterizations are the type 2006 and Colburn at the end of 2016. Colburn and his two crew- of “provably false” statements that can be stripped of First mates never forgot that their highest duty was to humanity and to Amendment protection, the court’s decision breaks chilling new the law. Dead at 67. R.I.P. ground. It creates the Orwellian prospect of a legal proceeding in which a jury is asked to impose significant penalties on journal- n Zsa Zsa Gabor, last of a trio of socialite sisters, has died at age ists who have the “wrong” opinion on highly controversial issues 99. She was born in Budapest and died in Hollywood; the latter such as: What counts as “wrongdoing” in the realm of scientific was her spiritual home, but her Hungarian accent was always inquiry? Is the “hockey stick” graph deceptive and misleading, or part of her shtick. Zsa Zsa appeared in a few movies and on does it fairly and accurately demonstrate a trend of man-made numerous TV shows, but she was famous mainly for playing the global warming? Are the techniques that Mann employed prop- part of herself—pretty, pampered, and genteelly promiscuous; erly characterized as “molesting and torturing data” (a phrase she was a way station on the celebrity highway that leads to the itself open to interpretation), or are they appropriate methods of 1 2 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 11/14/2016 2:47 PM Page 1 BOOKEARLY&SAVE PP TNBSUDPOTFSWBUJWFXSJUJOHBOEUIPVHWe’re taking our seafaring accomplishmentsIUGVMFOHBHFNF to land-basedOU GSPNQPMJUJDTUPDVMUV tours. Think aboutSF X FIPQFan excitingZPVXJMMKPJOVTPOPOF trip, with like-mindedPGUIFTFUFSSJmDJUJOFSBSJFT conservatives, and a leadingC NR ONSERVATIVEwriter or editor joining you to discuss the most important issues. If you are a conservative TRAVEL who likes to travel, if you’re a fan of NR Vacations will feature one or two of the following speakers: John O’Sullivan, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Rich Lowry, Jim Geraghty, Jonah Goldberg or Charlie Cooke Vacations IBERIAN12 Days I Apr 12 –ELEGANCE 24, 2017 I $5,327 P.P. Twin I $7,094 P.P. Single IRISH8 Days I May ELE 16 – 24,GANCE 2017 I $3,748 P.P. Twin I $4,439 P.P. Single Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, Alhambra Palace, Cordoba, Dublin, Blarney, Killarney, Ring of Kerry, Cliffs of Moher, Seville, Lisbon, Fatima, Salamanca, Toledo & Madrid Galway, Connemara, Loch Corrib & Ashford Castle C13 DaysANADIAN I July 15 – 28, ROCKIES 2017 I $7,431 P.P. & Twin NORTHWEST I $9,339 P.P Single NEW7 Days I Oct ENGLAND 17 – 24, 2017 I $3,814 FALL P.P. Twin FOLIAGE I $4,975 P.P. Single Vancouver, Victoria, Jasper, Banff, Glacier National Park, Boston, Williamstown, Stowe, North Conway, Portland & Coeur d’ Alene & Seattle White Mountains FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL . . OR VISIT NRVACATIONSCOM TERMS: Pricing shown is land only, per person based on a twin share or single occupancy. Airfare additional. A deposit of $750 per person is required at time of booking, with full payment due 90 days before departure. Insight Vacations CST No. 20687545-20, The Cruise & Vacation Authority CST No. 1004999-10. Week-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 2:04 PM Page 14 THE WEEK reconstructing global historical temperature trends? Should this Indeed, since the West Bank hasn’t been part of a sovereign type of scientific technique be considered misconduct, or is it nation since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the so-called occu- morally and ethically appropriate? pied territories aren’t truly occupied under international law. These are precisely the types of contestable, value-laden They’re more accurately termed “disputed” territories, with inquiries that the First Amendment leaves to be resolved through the precise resolution of the dispute to be negotiated by the free and open debate, not punitive litigation. It does not allow our rele vant parties. But now, according to the U.N., it is an alleged legal system to impose coercive penalties on people who express violation of international law that the Western Wall remains in the “wrong” view. Nor can that conclusion be altered by the fact Israeli hands. that certain self-proclaimed authorities may claim to have con- In a speech delivered a few days later in Washington, D.C., ducted “official investigations” that provide “definitive” answers Secretary of State John Kerry sought to defend the adminis- to these eminently debatable questions. The idea that such offi- tration’s actions, arguing that the status quo in the Israeli– cial pronouncements may be used to shut down debate and to Palestinian conflict is “leading toward one state, or perpetual stifle dissenting opinions on pain of legal penalty runs against occupation.” But the status quo that he decried is an artifact of the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment. ongoing Palestinian terror campaigns, not Israeli settlements. Where does this leave NR, and what’s next? The court’s Jews have just as much right to live in the disputed territories decision comes at a very early stage, addressing only the ini- as members of any other ethnic group. Additionally, twice in tial question of whether the case should be dismissed because this young century Palestinians have been offered their own the speech in question is categorically protected by the First state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Amendment as a matter of law. By itself, that threshold issue is Jerusalem, and twice they have refused. Twice Israel has crucially important for the vibrancy of free expression in our offered to dismantle substantial numbers of settlements as the nation’s capital, because the litigation process itself is often the price of compromise, and twice the Palestinians have refused. punishment, and nobody should be subjected to the expense Kerry simply repackaged Palestinian propaganda and remind- and hassle of legal proceedings for exercising his right to speak ed listeners one last time that the Obama administration, in freely on matters such as this. For that reason, we intend to seek which he serves, is willfully blind to the truth of the situation: a prompt rehearing from the full D.C. Court of Appeals, fol- that the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the persis- lowed if necessary by the filing of a petition for review in the tent failure of Israel’s enemies to accept that it has a right to United States Supreme Court. Given the Supreme Court’s broad exist, as a Jewish state and within defensible borders. Israel’s protection of First Amendment rights in recent years, we like our enemies sought to exterminate it on the very day of its decla- chances on that front. But even after that, several rounds of liti- ration of independence (when there were no settlements and gation would still remain standing between Mann and any recov- the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands), and they seek to ery against NR. We will aggressively assert the full panoply of exterminate it today. legal and factual defenses available to us. The Obama administration, rather than work toward a mean- Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that the legal ingful peace, has perverted international law, rewarded Pal es tin - terrain is favorable, and we will fight for every inch. ian violence, and ensured Israel’s continued place as the nation most persecuted at Turtle Bay. The world will soon move on from Barack Obama, but he has done his best to extend his legacy of THE MIDDLE EAST failure and appeasement. The Palestinians deserved a rebuke. An Ally Betrayed Instead they received a gift. Our closest Middle Eastern ally will pay the price. N a parting, spiteful shot at Israel, the Obama administration permitted a U.N. Security Council I resolution to pass that seeks to permanently change the international legal status of Israeli so- called settlements in Jerusalem and the disputed West Bank. Departing from almost 50 years of bipartisan American precedent, and from the administration’s own past practice, the Obama administration refused to veto a resolution demanding that Israel “cease all settlement activities” and declaring that all existing settlements are in “flagrant violation” of international law. The administration abstained from the vote. By declaring that settlements, including “settle- GETTY IMAGES / ments” in Israel’s capital, violate international law, the resolution purports to carve into stone the armistice lines that existed at the end of Israel’s war for indepen- dence. Yet these lines didn’t become lawful permanent ANADOLU AGENCY / borders, because hostile Arab nations refused to rec- ognize the existing battle lines as Israel’s border, declined to create a Palestinian state, and instead VOLKAN FURUNCU maintained a posture of armed hostility to Israel. General view of the United Nations Security Council meeting in New York, December 23, 2016 1 4 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 12/14/2016 12:32 PM Page 1 12/14/2016 12:31 PM Page 1 finally. after 22 years sailing the high seas, NR HAS come to the trip that many saY sits high atop their BUCKET LIST: an I-can’t-believe-we’re-doing-this trans-atlantic crossing on the queen mary 2 (which just this year has emerged from a spectacular retrofitting!) so here’s what’s in store for smart wanna-sailers (we don’t call them “cruisers” because this aitn’ a cruise ship!) on this majestic liner, we’ll sail on August 31 from lovely southampton yep, in the u.K., having spent a few nights prior revelling in the delightful english countryside, then enjoying 7 days and nights of luxury ocean sailing and brainy discussions of the day’s top issues, from politics and policy to the economy and foreign affairs, arriving september 7th in BROOKLYN tom coburn, Michael mukasey, brent bozell, rich lowry, FOLKS douglas murray, charles kessler, rob long, cleta mitchell, jonah goldberg, john o’sullivan, sally pipes, jim geraghty, LIKEmark helprin, jay nordlinger, ramesh ponnuru, & many more will be aboard. wow! a great time awaits, nrcruise.com So right now go visit to get complete information about this spectacular atlantic-crossing voyage per-person prices start at only $2,577! single cabins start at $3,916 for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. listen: your bucket list says ‘do it!’ now if you’re the kind of person who would prefer to talk to a traveL expert first, then call monday to friday, 9 am to 5 pm, eST: the good 888-283-8965 people at the cruise & Vacation authority will get you in a stunning stateroom see you on the glorious atlantic this on the historic queen mary 2 that Will meet your standards, taste, and wallet. su mmer! 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:11 PM Page 16 enough to the right that the compromis- es with liberalism that he made during his career became unthinkable in the aftermath of his career. He created a Republican party that wouldn’t put up with the kind of tax increases that he had signed. A year into Obama’s presidency, liber- al writer Peter Beinart looked back on the Bill Clinton era as a time when Democrats had lived in fear of America’s latent conservatism. They had to avoid sudden moves that would awake the sleeping bear. That fear had vanished under Obama: “From top to bottom, Democrats have decided to bet the party’s future on the belief that Americans pre- fer bold liberals to cautious ones.” On criminal justice, on entitlements, on immigration, on abortion, on religious liberty, Democrats staked out positions and adopted rhetoric that were much less moderate than they had previously been. The new Democratic consensus A Non-transformational included Hillary Clinton, who ran in 2016 as the heir to Obama rather than ObamaPresident was not the Left’s Reagan to her own husband. Clinton, indeed, ran a more thorough- goingly progressive campaign in 2016 BY RAMESH PONNURU than Obama had in 2008. She eschewed the outreach to white Evangelical ACK when they were fighting Obama had pulled it off. “Obama aspired Christians in which he had engaged. each other for the Democratic to be a transformational president, like She didn’t talk about finding common B presidential nomination in Reagan. At this point, it’s fair to say that ground on abortion, as Obama had and 2008, Hillary Clinton and he has succeeded.” This judgment was as she herself had in previous political Barack Obama sparred about Ronald not crazy, but it turns out to have been pre- moments. For most of his presidency, Reagan. In January of that year, Obama mature. Less than a year later, it appears Obama had stressed that there were lim- said, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the that the Obama project has failed. its to how much he could liberalize pol- trajectory of America in a way that, you He did manage to pull his own party icy toward illegal immigrants using his know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way to the left. In this respect he was like executive authority. Finally he decided that Bill Clinton did not.” The Hillary Reagan. Many pre-Reagan Republicans he could go far to relax the laws, and in Clinton campaign criticized the comment, were less ideologically conservative, 2016 Clinton said she was prepared to and Obama felt it necessary to clarify that and much more inclined to cooperate go farther. he hated Reagan’s ideas. with Democrats in expanding the wel- Just as the Republicans of an earlier era The remark signaled Obama’s ambi- fare state, than Reagan. He defeated such concluded that they could ride a rising tion. He wanted to be the liberal Reagan, Republicans in the 1980 primaries, and conservatism to power, so Democrats in or rather the liberal anti-Reagan: the per- his alliance with them thereafter was the Obama years embraced a new politi- son who pulled American politics back to often uneasy. cal strategy. They thought that changing the left a generation after Reagan pulled it Reagan showed his party that there was demographics had displaced the old to the right. Bill Clinton had not done that. a different path to winning elections from political order. Christian conservatism Instead he had governed in Reagan’s running on a lite version of the Great was in decline. The white working class shadow. Obama thought that the time was Society. Demographic trends—suburban- was a shrinking share of the population. ripe to emerge from that shadow. Many of ization, de-unionization, movement south The bear was finally dead. his supporters wanted the same thing. For and west—gave Republicans confidence For Reagan to succeed in pulling the them, “Yes we can”—one of his 2008 in this new path. At the end of Reagan’s country to the right, he not only had to campaign slogans—meant “Yes, we can presidency, one of the Republicans he convince his party that it was safe and overcome Reaganite conservatism and had beaten in 1980 ran on a basically smart to come along with him. The Clintonite triangulation.” Reaganite platform to succeed him. party’s confidence in the new approach As late as this April, the commentator Later Republicans were still more also had to be borne out, and be seen to ROMAN GENN Fareed Zakaria was able to write that conservative. Reagan drew his party far be borne out. And this in turn had to 1 6 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 17 shock the opposition party into assimi- civil war in Syria. It’s not just that Obama lating elements of that approach. In did little beyond telling Vladimir Putin to these last two respects, Obama has so far “cut it out” after Russia annexed Crimea been unsuccessful. Doctrine of and after Putin otherwise exploited what- Reagan left office only slightly more ever opportunity arose to unravel the post– popular than Obama is now. But Reagan ObamaDecline has done lasting damage Cold War peace of Europe, or that Obama also left his party holding more seats neglected to back up the promise of a than it held when he was elected. The to the military “Pacific pivot” as the Chinese dredged reverse is true of Obama, at every level their way (island-making instead of island- of government. The public was also BY THOMAS C. DONNELLY hopping) across the South China Sea. much happier with the state of the coun- Retreats can be reversed, even if the price try when Reagan left office than it is S the Trump transition team of victory rises when it has to be won twice now—although that measure of public looks to roll back Barack (or three or four times, in the case of Iraq). opinion may say as much about growing A Obama’s second-term tsunami Obama not only restrained the Ameri - polarization over the last few decades as of executive orders and regula- c an habit of involving ourselves in the about Obama’s performance. tions, and Republican leaders in Congress world’s affairs but also, by reducing our The most important difference in their prepare to repeal Obamacare, the outgoing military power, constrained a future political records is that Reagan was fol- president’s legacy seems to shrink daily. president’s ability to do so. The propen- lowed in office by an ally while Obama But one effect of eight years of Obama sity to “resort to force,” in his view, was will not be. George H. W. Bush ran for won’t soon vanish: He’s done more dam- a disease shared nearly equally by past Reagan’s third term in 1988 and won a age to American military power than his presidents of both parties. Bill Clinton decisive victory. In this way he showed successor can repair. It’s not simply that may have agonized and dithered over the that Reaganism’s electoral success was Obama tried to end U.S. involvement in use of American power, but to a progres- not dependent on the surpassing politi- the Middle East by unilaterally withdraw- sive mind he was little different from cal talent of Reagan himself. If she had ing from Iraq, conducting a phony surge in George W. Bush. won, perhaps Hillary Clinton would Afghanistan, and failing to respond to the The consistency of the Obama disar- have shown that the political trend lines mament is reflected in defense-spending Obama had identified could carry even Mr. Donnelly is a resident fellow of the American arithmetic—federal budgets are long-term someone who lacked a trace of his Enterprise Institute and the director of its Marilyn strategy. There are several ways to reckon charisma to victory. Ware Center for Security Studies. this. The simplest is to compare the current But she did not win. The Democratic strategy of the Obama years has left the party locked out of power in the White Limited to the first 2100 “I’m a bit sad that my House, the Senate, and the House at their fiance and I didn’t end. A heavily urban and progressive responders to this ad only! know about Stauer coalition delivered presidential majori- before we got engaged. ties twice, but its geography put the party This ring is so much at a structural disadvantage in Senate, more clear and sparkly House, and gubernatorial races. And the than my real diamond!” — P.T. FROM Democrats may have pushed their strategy BALTIMORE, MD too far even at the presidential level. If Clinton had replicated Obama’s 2012 performance among white Catholics or white Evangelicals or white working- class voters, she would have won the election. 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By that comparison, reductions; there have been two one-time tration argued that these appropriations the Pentagon has lost more than $250 bil- exceptions to the defense-spending caps, were necessary to pay for unanticipated lion in purchasing power. While that’s a but they were very small, approximately war costs. But as the situation in Iraq pretty big number, it doesn’t begin to tell $30 billion over two budget years. A degenerated, the Bush team found itself the whole tale, because it looks at the prob- good guess, though, is that long-term boxed in. When it at last reversed course lem only in five-year increments. Obama spending on defense programs has been and embraced a counterinsurgency strat- has always had a longer-term outlook. reduced by close to $1 trillion in fiscal egy and the idea of a surge of troops to In 2009, during his first year in office, years 2009 to 2023. carry it out, it found itself forced to ask Obama directed then–defense secretary A subtler but more profound effect of not only for extra money for gas, beans, Robert Gates to cut about $300 billion the BCA was to make the Republican con- and bullets but also for the funds to from Pentagon programs, which had the gressional leadership a party to the Obama increase the size of the military and par- effect of eliminating several of the major military drawdown. This inspired the ticularly the active-duty Army, which it weapons-acquisitions projects that had small-government, libertarian Freedom had been in the process of shrinking. survived Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to Caucus in the House to take former speaker The practice of supplemental appropri- “transform” the force by “skipping a gen- John Boehner hostage repeatedly, such as ations has carried over through the Obama eration of weapons systems.” The poster when it led the charge to shut down the years, and though it has masked some of child for this round of cuts was the F-22 government in 2013, a move that probably the worst consequences of the defense- fighter. It was the first substantial attempt contributed to Boehner’s eventual resigna- budget cuts, it has also used limited re - to deploy stealth and other technologies tion. Boehner was no defense-spending sources inefficiently. More money is good, meant to ensure American air superiority enthusiast (Senator Mitch McConnell but planned-for money is much better. The for decades to come. Gates terminated the hasn’t been, either, since Republicans took military has been fighting the same war In a reasonable world, funding could be planned in ad vance and would not need to be justified on an ‘emergency’ basis. F-22 at just 187 planes instead of the 750 back the Senate), but the BCA favored a over and over. In a reasonable world, originally planned by the Air Force. more extreme course and had assumed a funding could be planned in ad vance and A second, smaller set of reductions totem-like status for younger Republicans, would not need to be justified on an came the following year. Gates, seeing who became the Obama White House’s “emergency” basis. Instead, for political which way the wind was blowing, sought unlikely bedfellows on the issue. reasons, we are financing the war one to get ahead of the White House by offer- The BCA’s “sequestration” provision year—or less—at a time. ing $80 billion worth of “reforms” and further limited Pentagon accounts. It stip- Thus, 15 years after 9/11 and after eight other changes on the condition that the ulated that if Congress failed to adhere to years of Obama, the military is something administration shift the spending to other the specified annual spending caps, or if like a racehorse—once sleek, powerful, defense investments. Obama gratefully it failed to pass appropriations bills and fit—put too long to the plow and des- took the windfall—and more—to pay before the fiscal year began, automatic perately in need of rest, recovery, and refit- for the one-time cost of his Afghanistan cuts to military spending would kick in. ting. The size of the force (the Army in surge and other, non-defense priorities. Sequestration reinforced the far-left– particular) has ballooned and shrunk like Gates got played. far-right alliance and meant that extrem- a fad dieter. On September 11, 2001, we But not as badly as he did in 2011. In ists could simply withhold their support had about 485,000 soldiers in uniform. April of that year, when a new tea-party for any budget deal and follow their own Donald Rumsfeld approved an additional coalition was flexing its muscles in the priorities, regardless of their negative 30,000—not to fight the war, but to under- House of Representatives, Obama decided impact on the military. With entitlements take a “transformational” redesign of the on another $400 billion in defense re - protected, the Obama administration and military. In other words, the service grew ductions. He did not inform Gates of out-of-power Democrats on Capitol Hill bigger in preparation for getting smaller. the intended cuts before delivering the could sit back and watch Republicans Of course, this too was paid for with speech in which he announced them. stake out positions that were popular in supplemental funding. This contraption Gates resigned. But the speech was a bril- their districts but that made compromise limped along through 2006 and into 2007, liant political gambit that gave the White and governing impossible. Then, at elec- when President Bush agreed to establish a House the initiative by framing the terms tion time, Democrats would simply aim crash program to get to 560,000 troops in for the subsequent negotiations that led to to beat a “do-nothing Congress.” a timely way. Obama has reduced the the Budget Control Act (BCA). That law A final budget whammy has completed Army total to about 475,000 today, and it’s achieved two Democratic priorities: It the perfect financial storm for the armed on a slope to 450,000 or fewer. jettisoned any attempt to limit federal forces: the continued reliance on extra- The Marines have suffered a similar per- spending in entitlement programs, and it ordinary “supplemental” appropriations sonnel problem, while the Navy and the 1 8 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 19 Air Force, by nature more-technological is ‘hope’ a recurring word” in his book, services, have shed ships and planes with- the historian Ronald Steel observed, “for out receiving replacements. For example, if ever there was a politics of hope, it was the Defense Department built a facility After that practiced by the Kennedys. . . . The to manufacture 300 F-35 fighters a year, legacy they left is the enduring hope that intending to replace the current light- The Fall somehow things would have been better weight fighters in the Air Force, the Navy, Obama’s last sermon were they still here.” and the Marine Corps. But in recent years, Two years after The Kennedy Legacy production of the F-35 has rarely exceeded appeared, Lyndon Johnson brought out BY MICHAEL KNOX BERAN one-tenth of that capacity. his riposte, The Vantage Point: Per - The smaller force is also a much less spectives of the Presidency. If, in John - ready force. During the Cold War, the HE memoir is, probably, the son’s view, the Kennedys left a mass of units of the Army and Air Force were thing that makes the prospect insubstantial dreams, he himself handed always about 90 percent ready in terms of T of giving it up at all palatable. down a king’s ransom of legislative personnel, equipment, and training. The President Obama is by nature treasure. Shrewdly appraising the liter- sea services, reflecting the predictable an intellectual, and eight years of hard ary value of his volume, he made the maintenance cycle of ships, could antici- labor as a man of action can only have case for his legacy in the endpapers, a pate deployment schedules years in strengthened his appetite for the luxu- catalogue of the Acts of Congress enact- advance. Since 9/11, the entire military ries of a literary life. ed during his presidency—a gesture for has been subjected to a just-in-time, by- Yet the book itself will almost certainly which the reader, spared the task of the-seat-of-the-pants approach necessi- disappoint: Presidential memoirs are by making his way through several hun- tated by a surfeit of missions and a lack of definition incredible, are implicitly not dred pages of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s resources of all kinds. The result is that to be believed. The story of most presi- prose, can only be grateful. units, when not deployed, are only about dencies is one of pride chastened, of Obama, for his part, is already hard 60 percent ready or less. This also means egotism rebuked. But it is not a story at work on the principal labor of his that the military’s ability to do anything presidents find easy to tell. “All the dog- post-presidential years, his last ser- more challenging than routine opera- matic stations in life,” Henry Adams mon, the articulation of his legacy. He tions, such as keeping sea lanes open, is said, “have the effect of fixing a certain has spoken to Doris Kearns Goodwin severely limited. It is no coincidence that stiffness of attitude forever.” Having about it. His wife has spoken to Oprah in his 2012 “defense guidance,” Obama been, successively, schoolteacher, sena- Winfrey. Since the greater part of the lowered the standard by which we deter- tor, and president, Obama has been too Obama res gestae has taken the form of mine the optimal size of our forces. Since long a professional dogmatist to be a administrative fiats likely to be repudi- the years prior to World War II, and as supple and candid memoirist. ated by his successor, the president has befits a global power, we have main- The saints themselves, when, as with little choice but to fall back on the tained the capacity to conduct two large- Augustine, they have tried their hand at Kennedy mantra of hope. It is a gospel scale campaigns at once. Obama lowered autobiography, have succeeded only by with which he is familiar, having the bar to just one war at a time. confessing themselves sinners. You can’t cribbed from it, via Jeremiah Wright, Finally, the Obama years have seen a write a persuasive confession without an in his 2008 campaign (“hope and degeneration in civil–military relations. element of self-loathing. But two terms change”) in much the way Bill Clinton It’s not simply that Obama and his in the bully pulpit have only reinforced (“the man from Hope”) had in his 1992 White House team have squabbled with President Obama’s penchant for right- run. Michelle Obama is already testing their field commanders, though there’s eous preaching. The book will be a ser- its rhetorical value as a legacy trope. been plenty of that. Far worse is the mon, and its moral will be predictable: “See, now we are feeling what not hav- social distance that’s arisen between sol- Plot the coordinates of the arc of justice, ing hope feels like,” she told Oprah after diers and the rest of us. Recently, YouGov and you will find (mirabile dictu) that the election of Donald Trump. “Hope is and the Hoover Institution sponsored they roughly correspond to those of the necessary. It’s a necessary concept, and the first large-scale survey of public atti- president’s own legacy. Barack didn’t just talk about hope tudes on military affairs since 9/11. The Ever since Theodore Sorensen pub- because he thought it was just a nice slo- most startling statistic was that nearly 80 lished The Kennedy Legacy in 1969, it gan to get votes.” percent of Americans, regardless of has been incumbent on presidents to But the ghost of LBJ, too, will haunt the party, ideology, wealth, or any other exaggerate the gifts they are bequeath- Obama legacy sermon. Jack Kennedy and demographic attribute, regard military ing to posterity. Kennedy, however, had Bill Clinton might have given America service of any sort—not just combat— not been long enough in office to amass hope, but the current occupant of the as dehumanizing and psychologically a substantial estate, and Sorensen was White House has given us something damaging. This is partly a reflection of forced to an expedient. “Not by accident more—the Affordable Care Act. our increasingly narcissistic and thera- Even so, the descent has been hard. peutic culture, but Obama has always Mr. Beran, a contributing editor of City Journal, Eight years ago Obama was practically a been in sync with the times: He has is the author of Forge of Empires: Three vegetation god, hailed by delirious turned heroes into victims. His will not Revolutionary Statesmen and the World crowds at home and abroad as the be a martial legacy. They Made, 1861–1871, among other books. redeemer of a barren time; he could 1 9 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 20 speak, quite un-self-consciously, of the “It is in the power of government to moment when “the perfection begins,” prevent much evil,” Edmund Burke one that he equated with his own ascent said; “it can do very little positive to power. good.” The attempt to do such good The Yet within a year of his inauguration, typically ends in disappointment. The the forces of equilibrium had begun to canny FDR recognized this and by Maligning reassert themselves, and the redemp- 1940 was deploring the naïveté of pro- tive prophet became a figure of ordi- gressive “utopians.” Bill Clinton made Of Israel nary time. He was still the biggest guy a comparable shift after the 1994 Obama’s simplistic reversal of on the planet, with the grandest pulpit midterm elections. Both knew when to American diplomatic tradition and most sought-after airplane. But in break with the sermon. relying on the institutional bulwarks Obama is different. The sermon has BY DAVID PRYCE-JONES of the presidency to insulate himself dominated his presidency in a way not from the reality of unfulfilled hopes, seen since LBJ or Woodrow Wilson. he tacitly admitted that he was not the This is ironic, for more than most pres- RESIDENT OBAMA has taken the charismatic man of destiny he had idents, Obama, who, according to the dramatic step of dropping the seemed to be. A charismatic leader is New York Times, prefers “conversation P longstanding policy of the Unit - by Weberian definition not a creature touching on art, architecture, and litera- ed States to support Israel, in of institutions and protocols. He rises ture” to political talk, might be expect- fa vor of the cause of Palestine. The com- above them. ed to understand the shortcomings of plete absence of any intimation that such Obama came to depend on the very the sermon as an instrument of moral a reversal of alliance was imminent adds bureaucratic and procedural machinery art. Its weakness lies in its verbosity. to the surprise. Throughout his presidency, a genuinely charismatic leader tran- The Calvinist prized the art of the word Obama has been careful to reassure scends. Ronald Reagan, reaching out to above all others, and despised as idola- Israel and the Jews that he had their the nation in 1981, compelled a House trous and pagan those rival arts that had interests at heart, or as he expressed it, dominated by Democrats to pass his long played a part in the creation of civ- that he had Israel’s back. This now looks reforms; and in implementing his pro- ilized order. The soft compulsion of tra- like deliberate obfuscation. His true gram he brought the bulk of the country ditions and customary usages, of rituals, thoughts are a puzzle, and may always along with him, an achievement signal- of art brought into the midst of life to be, but there are clues: For example, he ized by his carrying 49 of 50 states in promote a harmonious manner of liv- made no attempt to hide the hostility he 1984. Obama, on the contrary, was ing—it was as essential to the infra- feels towards the Israeli prime minister, unable to move the nation, and after structure of Western life, its manners Benjamin Netanyahu. To change Middle losing his congressional majorities and mores, as laws and regulations. East policy in his final days in office sug- descended to the humiliating expedient More so, perhaps, or so Plato suggested gests that he wanted to hurt Israel in this of issuing executive ukases, a confes- in the Laws. way but knew he could not have gotten sion of both political ineptitude and Yet in America the Calvinist sermon away with it earlier in his presidency. charismatic impotence. The would-be was for a long time practically the coun- The switch was carried out through the transformer became a prisoner of the try’s only moral art. Our earliest United Nations with surreptitious skill: institutional cage of the modern presi- prophets—John Winthrop, the Mathers, no forewarning, no opportunity for ob - dency, a conventional pol who relied on Jonathan Edwards—were all predis- jection. The main thrust of Se cu ri ty the trappings of his office to disguise posed to it; Emerson and Thoreau mere- Council Resolution 2334 is to assert that the hollowness of his leadership. ly secularized it. And although in our Israeli settlements on the West Bank A prisoner of his presidency, Obama is literature we have transcended it, the “lack legal validity.” Waging a tireless still more poignantly a victim of the sermon remains the characteristic ex - campaign to establish that Israel is some Calvinist hangover that has long colored pression of our politics, and goes far to sort of Western colony imposed on American politics. Secularize redemp- explain our blindness to those con- Palestine and therefore has no legitimacy, tion, and you can build the New Jeru - stituents of humane order that are not the United Nations has been known to salem in the mortal here-and-now. The purely verbal. The sermon is a thing of adopt 20 anti-Israeli resolutions in a sin- vision is not exclusively progressive or words: When we sermonize a problem, gle day, so in a sense, one more is irrele- Democratic; both Lincoln and Reagan we throw words at it. The words are vant and boring, like all obsessions. But invoked it, the one with his “new birth of printed in books and enacted as laws— in another sense, a small democracy is freedom” (a paraphrase of John 3:3), the Draco’s “black artillery,” in Melville’s under attack from undemocratic powers other with his “shining city on a hill” (a image. But you cannot rear a really in a way reminiscent of the 1930s. Nor - reworked conceit of the Puritans). But healthy civilization on a foundation of mally the United States uses its Security where Lincoln and Reagan invoked the words alone, though they be those of the Council veto to preserve the world’s vision to remove existing evils (slavery Constitution itself. mental health and peace. This time in the one case, intrusive government Words, however, have been Obama’s around, the United States abstained, in the other), progressives interpret it life, and the sermon his raison d’être. which signifies approval. as a mandate to use the state to create Don’t look for him to depart from it as As I understand it, the status or sover - new goods. he leaves the White House. eignty of the West Bank, and consequently 2 0 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 21 the right of Israel to build settlements is first and foremost the legacy of a single dictator of the Palestinians. The choice there, is altogether con ten tious, and I individual, this miscalculating king. before him was either a peace process or happily leave the fine-print disputing to The confused and confusing actions a campaign of terror. Shifting between the international lawyers. I also look for- and interactions of Israelis and Pal es tin i - these alternatives, he militarized the com- ward to an explanation of “legal validi- ans after the Six-Day War was the sub- munity so effectively that policymakers ty,” a contrivance apparently midway ject of The Face of Defeat, the book I concluded that Israelis and Palestinians between legal and illegal, and a good published in 1974. It was safe to visit and are unable to live together, and therefore example of the ingenuity that the ask questions everywhere, no matter how they had each better have a state. United Nations and its agencies hope remote the place. The Israeli security Israel is already a nation-state with will convert prejudice into everyday agent who often escorted me had grown the rule of law to ensure diversity and fact. UNESCO, for instance, the U.N.’s up among Palestinians, and he was power-sharing. The latest census shows cultural arm, lately passed a resolution armed only with a walking stick. A tra- that Israeli Arabs number 1.7 million, that the Wailing Wall, surviving from the ditional tribal society was in the hands about 20 percent of the population. Is - destruction of King Her od’s Temple in of elders—sophisticated, worldly men lam ists such as Sheikh Raed Salah have Jerusalem and central ever since to doing their best in an emergency that attempted without much success to pre- Jewish worship, is actually an Islamic none of them could have imagined. For vent the slow but steady integration that The settlement issue is first and foremost the legacy of a single individual, a miscalculating Jordanian king. monument. Saudi Arabia, where under Arabs, the seat of emotion is in the liver, gives Arabs and Jews the common iden- penalty of public flogging women are and the national poet, a lady from a tity of Israeli. In the Muslim Mid dle forbidden to drive a car, has been elected prominent family, had written fierce East, ethnic or sectarian identity takes and reelected to the Unit ed Nations lines about eating the liver of an Israeli. the place of the state; power-sharing is an Human Rights Council. When someone in a crowded room in unknown quantity. The principle is each On the face of it, the issue of these Nablus mentioned that the poetess was to his own, in a continuous collision of settle ments is pretty trivial, involving the rumored to be having secret assignations identities fulfilled with whatever degree housing arrangements of fewer than half in a Tel Aviv hotel with General Moshe of brutality is required in self-defense— a million people. What hides behind it, Dayan, then Israel’s minister of defense, however, is the historic and deeply emo- who claimed to be waiting for a tele- tional ordinance that has always driven phone call to plan a peace conference, Muslim conquest and possession, name- the laughter was loud and long. Another ly that land once possessed by the House escort during my researches was an THE of Islam must be possessed by it forever. Israeli Arab from Nazareth. Here were This is the Muslim equivalent of the people apart, bi lin gual, with one foot in PUBLIC Brezhnev Doctrine, which specified that Arab culture and the other in Israeli a Com mu nist country could never again culture. Among Arab Israelis now are SCHOLAR revert to capitalism. The recapture of diplomats, army officers, a prize-winning Spain and India, Serbia and Hungary, is nuclear scientist, poets and novelists, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT for the long term; the ejection of Israel and the judge who sentenced a former FOR THE HUMANITIES from Palestine is a religious obligation of president of Israel to prison for sexually the here and now. abusing a woman on his staff. In the days preceding the Six-Day The settlement movement began soon War of June 1967, Arab leaders includ- after the war, when an intransigent rabbi ing Ahmed Shukeiry, then the head of moved into the West Bank town of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hebron. Some 40 years previously, the —© Photographerlondon | Dreamstime.com announced that the moment had come “to Jews there had been massacred, and the Grants for serious nonfiction, throw the Jews into the sea,” to quote a rabbi was making a point. The settlers are biography, and history, written favorite phrase of theirs. The West Bank a mixed bunch, mostly young couples for popular audiences. was then under the rule of King Hussein with families, and either religious Jews or of Jordan. Through the proper channels, secular Zionists, in both cases written off $50,400 for 12 months the Israelis urged him not to engage in in the media as dangerous fanatics. The Deadline February 2, 2017 any fighting, above all to restrain the decision to al low settlement beyond the artillery that was starting to shell West national borders was taken by Shimon More info at: Jerusalem. The decision to do battle cost Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, both of them www.neh.gov/commongood Hussein the West Bank and handed ostensibly men of the Left. Yasser Arafat, responsibility for its Pal es tin ian inhabi- chubby in appearance but ruthless in tants over to Israel. The settlement issue character, had made himself the virtual 2 1 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 22 the Alawites in Syria or the Shiites of If A. A. Milne had never written Iraq offer daily proof of it. anything other than these delightful To complicate matters, a secular squibs, his short stories and light Palestinian identity on the West Bank Winnie-the- verse for Punch, his very amusing under Mahmoud Abbas, and an Islam ist detective novel The Red House Palestinian identity under Khaled Meshaal PoohJudging Milne’s at famous 90 Mystery, and a handful of comedies and Ismail Haniya, both of Hamas, in novels as literature for the stage, he would be one of those Gaza, are in a condition of civil war that major-minor writers whose reputations is the opposite of statehood. Hamas calls some of us delight in shoring up. for Israel to revert to being a Muslim BY MATTHEW WALTHER Thankfully for him and untold millions state with no more Jews in it, while of readers, he had the good sense to in - Abbas, currently head of the PLO on the vent Pooh Bear. West Bank, says, “In a final resolution, HAVE in front of me a beautiful I am on record somewhere saying we would not see the presence of a single little blue volume published by that Winnie-the-Pooh—the 90th anni - Israeli—soldier or civilian—on our I Methuen and Co. in London in versary of whose publication passed lands” (which presumably means the 1928. Not That It Matters is a col- last October—and its sequel The West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself). lection of essays from the end of that House at Pooh Corner are better than Racism is the sole operative agreement extraordinary silver age of English anything by Faulkner or Joyce. Re - between these rivals. In these circum- belles-lettres at the turn of the last cen- turning to them once again, I find stances, John Kerry’s opin ion that “the tury, when men such as Shaw and myself standing by that judgment; two-state solution is the only way to Belloc earned their daily bread by scrib- indeed, I feel inclined, if anything, to achieve a just and lasting peace” is a fan- bling in newspapers and magazines double down and say that they are tasy with no discernable attachment to about anything they could scrape a thou- among the ten or so finest novels in the real world. sand or so words out of: socialism, dogs, our language. “Forget negotiating,” writes Khaled the weather, how they celebrated Christ - It is important to recall that Milne, Abu Toameh, one of the best-informed mas, capital punishment, Wagner. For like Dickens, the novelist whom in and most courageous Palestinian jour- those who like this sort of thing, this many ways he most resembles, did not nalists, because Resolution 2334 is “a true defeat to the peace process.” In an article that is a cry of despair, he singles The books are, for one thing, out Palestinians who believe they now have a green light to use violence uproariously funny. against Israel. Another public-spirited dissident, Bassam Tawil, draws atten- volume is very nearly perfect: There sit down to write books from beginning tion to Palestinian corruption. Israeli are pieces on snobbery, oranges, crick- to end but rather published chapters settlements, he says, at least respect et, bad fiction, “Smoking as a Fine that appeared in serial form and were laws and regulations, while in many Art” (“My first introduction to Lady meant to be self-contained. (This, I Palestinian-run areas of the West Bank Nicotine was at the innocent age of think, explains the Pooh novels’ unri- there are large-scale housing develop- eight”), chess, thermometers, Holy valed suitability for reading at bed- ments undertaken by Palestinians whose Writ (“Isaiah was the ideal author. . . . time.) A glance at the manuscripts contempt for law and building and safety He kept to one style”), and—propheti- shows us that, among other things, regulations exposes those who live there cally—those bores who fetishize “good Kanga was originally meant to be male, to financial and physical risk. brown ale”: like all the other in habitants of the Whether or not they like it, Obama and world surrounding the Hundred Acre Kerry have put themselves in the odious I suppose that I have already said Wood—a reference to Roo’s mother as position of being accomplices to tyranny. enough to have written myself down a “he” pops up in some early British They also instruct Jews on where to live, Temperance Fanatic, a Thin-Blooded printings of the novel. what sort of a state Israel has to be, and Cocoa-Drinker, and a number of other Some adult Pooh readers will be sur- things equally contemptible; which is all what conduct they expect of it. That is prised by what they have not remem- very embarrassing to a man who is com- not an enviable legacy. Perhaps it would posing at the moment on port, and who bered or were never acquainted with in have been safer, or at any rate better gets entangled in the skin of cocoa when- the first place because they have seen protected from malicious criticism, not ever he tries to approach it. But if any- only the old Disney film (the less said to have built settlements that give rise to thing could make me take kindly to about the computer-animated sequel political posturing. But after all, large cocoa, it would be the sentimental rub- and the television series, the better). numbers of Arabs are living reasonable bish which is written about the “manli- The books are, for one thing, uproari- lives in Is rael, and correspondingly large ness” of drinking alcohol. ously funny. Most of the dialogue is numbers of Jews should be able to lead worthy of P. G. Wodehouse, Milne’s reasonable lives in an Arab land. Boldly Mr. Walther is the associate editor of the great contemporary, with whom he had progressive, that would be a two-state Washington Free Beacon and a 2016 Robert an unfortunate falling-out during the solution worth having. Novak Journalism Fellow. Second World War: 2 2 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:12 PM Page 23 An E. H. Shephard drawing for a Winnie-the-Pooh book and stand-up cardboard figures of Pooh characters, on display during a press preview at Sotheby’s Auctioneers on December 15, 2008, in London “Hallo, Rabbit,” [Pooh] said, “is that you?” about Pooh at school, undergoing beat- description of a Heffalump—this creature “Let’s pretend it isn’t,” said Rabbit, ings and possibly sexual abuse before and its supposed accomplice the Woozel “and see what happens.” taking up boxing lessons in order to fend turn out not to exist; it is an extraordinary “I’ve got a message for you.” off his attackers.) “Wherever they go,” thing that there are no villains in Milne’s “I’ll give it to him.” “We’re all going on an Expedition Milne tells us in his final paragraph, “and world—as “a great enormous thing, like— with Christopher Robin.” whatever happens to them on the way, in like nothing” is a perfectly lucid exposition “What is it when we’re on it?” that enchanted place on the top of the of the Augustinian view of evil as a mere “A sort of boat, I think,” said Pooh. Forest, a little boy and his Bear will privatio boni, or privation of the good. I always be playing.” cannot reflect on Milne’s characters or the Others will be put off by unexpected For me, the crucial thing about this pas- man himself for very long without thinking hints of melancholy. Milne’s trees loom sage is that Pooh does make the promise. of those beautiful words of Blessed John in the background as a kind of reminder It is the last of hundreds of acts of kindness Henry Newman about the young (includ- of the adult world with its attendant carried out by Milne’s characters in these ing, I suppose, the young at heart): horrors. It is difficult to think of a novel pages full of charitable exemplars. Nor are with a more memorable ending than the books’ lessons confined to morality of The simplicity of a child’s ways and The House at Pooh Corner (Great Ex - the simple Golden Rule variety. I have notions, his ready belief of everything he pectations comes to mind); it is almost often wondered whether His Holiness is told, his artless love, his frank confi- impossible to think of one that is sadder. Pope Francis is a great admirer of Pooh dence, his confession of helplessness, his ignorance of evil, his inability to conceal In “an enchanted place on the very top Bear. Fiction affords no better illustration his thoughts, his contentment, his prompt of the Forest,” after confusing him with of the Holy Father’s all-encompassing forgetfulness of trouble, his admiring talk about “People called Kings and view of God’s mercy—about which he is without coveting; and, above all, his rev- Queens and something called Factors,” obviously correct, however wrong-headed erential spirit, looking at all things about Christopher Robin dubs our hero “Sir some of us might think his approach to him as wonderful, as tokens and types of Pooh de Bear, bravest of all my Knights,” sacramental discipline—than the scene in the One Invisible, are all evidence of his and begs his friend never to forget him which Christopher Robin responds to being lately (as it were) a visitant in a while tacitly begging his forgiveness in Pooh’s eating too much honey and getting higher state of things. the—well-nigh inevitable—event that stuck in Rabbit’s front door by saying he will leave his animal friends forever. “‘Silly old bear’ in such a loving voice that This suggests a rather different—and GETTY IMAGES / (One cannot read this passage inno- everyone felt quite hopeful again.” Pooh more hopeful—way of thinking about cently after learning that Christopher himself, with his speculations about cos- the “enchanted place.” But it is also per- Robin Milne, the author’s son who mogony, nearly always voiced in the form haps a bit heady for a self-described along with his toys inspired the novels, of slightly fuzzy syllogisms, sounds like a “Bear of Very Little Brain,” especially PETER MACDIARMID would go on to be mercilessly teased kind of Anglican Thomist; and Piglet’s on his birthday. 2 3 2col-new_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/4/2017 12:49 PM Page 24 Obama’s Young Garden He has planted seeds that progressives might someday harvest BY HENRY OLSEN ARACK OBAMA wanted to be the Democrats’ Ronald and international crises that would have tested even the most Reagan. Instead, he is leaving office more like the skilled statesman, did not take long to bear fruit. B Democrats’ Jerry Ford: personally popular but with Obama planted a number of political seeds during his tenure, his party defeated, divided, and despairing. Demo - seeds that could, in the hands of a skilled gardener, blossom crats on Obama’s watch, like Republicans after Ford, have quickly if Donald Trump and the Republican Congress don’t dropped to historically low numbers of congressmen, gover- govern wisely. If Obama’s strategy played poorly in the short nors, and state legislators. The Democratic party today has term, we cannot yet dismiss the possibility that it will play out less direct influence on American government at all levels quite well over the coming years. than at any time since Reconstruction. On the surface, that First, though, let us count his political shortcomings. The pres- looks like a pretty awful political legacy. ident’s smug arrogance did not simply drive Republicans crazy, it But recall that Reagan and Republican renewal came just led him to push on in pursuit of a progressive paradise when wiser four years after Ford’s 1976 defeat. The seeds for that renewal Democrats were counseling caution. Obama had campaigned as a were present for all who had eyes to see. Those seeds, cou- healer, a person who could mix red and blue in pursuit of a com- pled with an inexperienced Democratic president who could mon American vision. When he instead governed as a progressive not meet the demands of his office and a series of economic (albeit as one never pure enough for the faithful), pushing climate change and Obamacare as his major priorities, he broke faith Mr. Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and an adjunct with the independents and moderate blue-collar Democrats who professor at Villanova University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Ronald had elected him and given Democrats the largest House and ROMAN GENN Reagan: New Deal Republican. Senate majorities they had possessed since before Ronald Reagan. 2 4 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/3/2017 11:46 PM Page 25 These were unwise priorities to push when the nation was preferred by the independents and blue-collar voters who had wracked by a massive, worsening recession. But that did not reelected him. They therefore delivered another Democratic matter to the 47-year-old who had already authored two drubbing in 2014. autobiographies. According to the New York Times, Obama’s Trump’s nomination gave Democrats a golden opportunity first Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, told him early on to move beyond Obama. The Donald might indeed be the that his legacy would be preventing a second great depres- most interesting man in America, but throughout 2016 he was sion. Obama replied, “That’s not enough for me.” That, plus certainly among the least popular. As Hillary moved to the encouraging a fast recovery, would have been plenty good left to attract progressives, she doubled down on the policy for most Americans. priorities middle America didn’t value. Middle America had Obama’s progressive advisers, ignoring the counsel of his been screaming “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” to first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, believed that the reason Democrats for eight years. They didn’t listen, and so we are Bill Clinton’s Democrats were wiped out in 1994—after they where we are. had sought to pass a progressive wish list—was that they had flinched and not rammed their priorities through Congress. Do that, they told Obama, and Americans will reward the BAMA may look the fool now; he might, however, bold. Instead, Democrats lost even more seats in the House in look the genius in the not-so-distant future. That’s 2010 than they had in 1994, dropping to their lowest level because the very policies and priorities that don’t since 1946. attractO the current American center are quite popular with the Devastation dogged down-ballot Democrats, too. Republ i - future American voter. cans picked up five governorships, winning in the large states Many young, college-educated whites want a form of secu- of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. lar multiculturalism. Many first-generation Latino Ameri cans They gained an incredible 720 state legislative seats, picking want friendly immigration policies and expanding govern- up majority control in 21 legislative chambers. These gains ment. These voters are poised to make up an ever-growing allowed the GOP to control redistricting in each of the states share of the electorate. The very policies and priorities that don’t attract the current American center are quite popular with the future American voter. above, as well as other important states they already con- We should not forget that Clinton won the popular vote trolled, such as Texas. This allowed Republicans to redraw and only barely lost the three midwestern states that gave congressional and state-legislative lines heavily in their favor Trump the presidency. She also lost Florida and North for the first time in decades. Carolina by close margins and reduced the GOP’s winning Bill Clinton learned from his early mistakes and tacked to margin in Arizona by almost two-thirds. Had she shown the center for the remainder of his presidency. Obama never even the slightest interest in moving to the middle, Hillary did. He continued to push progressive priorities instead of Clinton would be president and the Democrats would con- those championed by the broad center of America, relying on trol the Senate. the power of the executive to move them forward when the Other, wiser Democrats have run campaigns that appeal to Republican-controlled House wouldn’t act. So, add stubborn- the center and the Left, and they have won in key swing ness to arrogance as a second compounding feature of states. There is no reason a Democratic Reagan can’t see this Obama’s political legacy. and make the small but necessary adjustments to regain the Obama did win reelection in 2012, but that was because of White House. Republican failure as much as his own genius. The Republican Obama’s great success as a politician has been to build a party thought it didn’t need to offer an attractive alternative very large and very loyal Democratic constituency. Even in vision to reach the disaffected center. It nominated in Mitt his darkest hours, Obama’s popularity ratings never dropped Romney a man who would have made a great scoutmaster but below 40 percent, usually hovering in the low to mid 40s. The who developed no agenda that could make up for his bland, Democrats’ progressivism may give them a low ceiling, but MBA-as-savior political persona. And so Republicans failed it also seems to give them a very high floor. to win the White House or take control of the Senate in what The Republicans would be wrong to think that their hold they had thought would be an easy victory, given the seats up on the House or the states is impregnable. The GOP has nine for grabs. governorships up for election in 2017 or 2018 in states that But Obama seems to think that he, not the Dos Equis guy, voted for Hillary Clinton and that Obama won twice. It holds is the most interesting man in the world, and so he followed another five that are up for election in those years in up his narrow escape with a second dose of stubbornness in Obama/Trump states. It wouldn’t take much for Democrats to pursuit of progressive ideals. The Paris climate accord, the make a huge rebound in statehouses, and every governor Iran deal, and the executive orders on immigration all elected in those years will be able to block Republican redis- seemed wildly out of step with the priorities and policies tricting efforts in 2021. 2 5 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/3/2017 11:46 PM Page 26 Gerrymandering is a big reason Republicans hold large majorities in many statehouses and is a significant reason they have a House majority. Fairer redistricting plans in Restraint and states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan could cost the GOP as many as 15 House seats. A court chal- lenge to the Republican gerrymander of Wisconsin is already on its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Its Discontents Kennedy previously suggested that partisan gerrymanders can violate the Constitution. If he joins with the Court’s liberals in Evaluating two terms of Obama’s judging that Wisconsin’s plan does so, and if the majority foreign policy were to adopt legal standards to constrain future redistricting, then the GOP’s House and state-legislative majorities would no longer be secure. BY RICHARD FONTAINE The Obama political legacy, therefore, remains a work in progress. Moving the Democratic party to the left has given the Republicans a chance to come back. But a party that con- T was clear from the outset that Obama would preside over trols all the levers of government can no longer unite by national retrenchment. George W. Bush had waged a global being against something. It can only unite by being for some- I war on terror and campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, pur- thing—and that remains a challenge for the GOP. sued years of confrontation with North Korea and Iran, Republicans must do what Obama and Hillary Clinton failed increased defense spending and foreign aid, and, with a “forward to do: find a way to unite the concerns of their base with those strategy of freedom,” aimed to end tyranny around the world. of the center. That will require them to do what neither The traditional American goals of security, prosperity, and free- Democrat was willing to do: be creative and compromise. dom would be advanced, his administration generally held, Trump’s core voters, in particular, believe they have been given through deep global engagement and the vigorous and confident a raw deal by both parties for a very long time. They flocked to assertion of U.S. power. him precisely because he seemed to be free of both parties’ Obama entered office believing that he could achieve the same bases and their parochial concerns. Republicans’ failure to rec- broad goals by doing less rather than more. In this he was with ognize this would set the stage for conflict with the White the American people; as Senator John McCain’s foreign-policy House and defeat in 2018. adviser in 2008, I could see the weariness among those who had, since 9/11, waged or funded the country’s battles, who worried about future confrontations and global unpopularity, and who O avoid such an outcome, Republicans need to learn the sensed that the terrorist threat, because it was diminishing, was difference between principle and ideology. Fortunately, not impelling the action it still required. The financial crisis put they had a great teacher in Ronald Reagan. the mood in stark relief, but it had built steadily throughout TReagan’s 1977 speech “The New Republican Party” Bush’s last years in office. asserts that this difference provides the secret to winning. Obama offered not fundamentally different ends but alterna- Americans hate ideology, which Reagan defined as the “slav- tive means. America, he said, would be secure, prosperous, and ish adherence to abstraction.” Ideologues, Reagan said, make free not by fighting endless wars but by bringing wars to a the facts fit their preconceived theories. Conservatives derive close. It would best its adversaries not by confronting them but their ideals from facts—and adjust their policies when they through the extended hand of dialogue. It would vanquish ter- see new facts. rorism not by remaking societies in which extremism thrives As president, Reagan did exactly that. He was for free trade but by stepping up American efforts to attack the terrorists them- but levied penalties on Japan many times because of what he selves. And it would boost its economic fortunes not through the saw as unfair trading practices. He was against tax increases, vigorous projection of U.S. power abroad but by redirecting but he signed off on two tax hikes during his tenure, includ- resources and energy toward nation-building at home. ing one designed to keep Social Security solvent for decades. This recipe for restraint and retrenchment focused mostly on He hated the Soviet Union but was willing to sign an arms- limiting the exercise of America’s military power and avoiding control agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev when he came to steps that might require its employment. It permitted ambitious, believe Gorbachev was a different type of Soviet leader. even grandiose, diplomatic initiatives, ranging from resetting In his ’77 speech, Reagan specifically criticized ideologi- relations with Russia and the Iran nuclear deal to a new beginning cal fanatics, people who “sacrifice principle to theory [and] with the entire Islamic world. And it rested on a particular ideo- worship only the god of political, social, and economic logical disposition. For Obama, the biggest foreign-policy crises abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life.” “They have arisen not from America’s failure to act when needed but are not conservatives,” he added. Barack Obama and Hillary from intervening where it should have stayed aloof. Clinton were rightly judged by the American people to be As Obama explained in 2013, “I am more mindful probably ideologues, people who cared more about their abstractions than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, than about everyday life. Being smug, arrogant, and stubborn but also our limitations.” “Some of our most costly mistakes,” he is no way to go through political life. Republicans who want to make Obama’s political legacy an unambiguously negative Mr. Fontaine is the president of the Center for a New American Security in one should listen to Reagan. Washington, D.C. 2 6 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 2col-new_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/4/2017 12:17 AM Page 27 added a year later, “came not from our restraint but from our will- to reach Europe. Failing to arm moderate Syrian rebels when it ingness to rush into military adventures.” The lesson of recent mattered most, or to enforce the “red line” on chemical weapons, history seemed clear enough: On balance, the United States helped fuel a humanitarian catastrophe that has given sanctuary should do less in the world. The closest thing to an Obama to ISIS and destabilized the European Union. Obama did not doctrine would dictate not a course of action but what to avoid— meaningfully arm Kiev after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “Don’t do stupid [stuff].” Rather than peace through strength, and did not respond to Russian attempts to distort U.S. democ- America could have strength through peace. ratic practice until well after Election Day. For months, the Or peace of a sort. Obama sought to avoid not military con- Navy refrained from exercises to assert freedom of navigation flict per se but rather large-scale war of the Iraq variety, involv- in the South China Sea as Beijing embarked on a major land- ing ground troops and extended deployments. Despite having reclamation and reinforcement effort. In the earnest attempt to Obama sought to avoid not military conflict per se but rather large-scale war of the Iraq variety. pledged to end wars, he increased their number, carrying out avoid Bush-like sins of commission, Obama engaged in his own military attacks in seven countries—more than his predecessor. sins of omission. But his fear of the slippery slope to another Iraq led his admin- His administration often defended inaction by appealing to istration not only to wind down the wars but at times to telegraph the clock—what the 2015 National Security Strategy called its lack of commitment to winning them. “strategic patience.” According to this view, Russia is a declin- In practice, the effects were often dire. Obama surged troops ing power whose economic and demographic problems will to Afghanistan but set a deadline for their removal, allowing the increasingly limit its influence, and Moscow has courted quag- Taliban to bide its time and all parties to factor in American irres- mire in Syria. ISIS is the JV team whose barbaric ideas will olution. The complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq eliminated eventually collapse under their own weight. China, with its America’s hard-won influence over the Maliki government, unwelcome assertiveness in the region, is actively isolating itself which over time hollowed out the Iraqi security forces, followed in Asia. In Iran, the moderates will eventually triumph, and in Tehran’s political direction, and watched as its misrule helped Syria, Bashar al-Assad has lost legitimacy and will eventually give life to ISIS. The abandonment of Libya—with no stabiliz- go. The arc of global history bends toward justice—and toward ing force to follow the toppling of its dictatorship—produced a order, security, and freedom as well, even if the United States civil:: war, a terrorist sanctuary,::: and ::::::a vector for migrants hoping isn’t engaged in the hard work of bending it. '5/6#4.44622*+633 2-556//,3+6 $%61100-,0!6**2 "&1)1(35. nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe)*%,'#"(+,!0%/+*0,1#-(/- '(0/,0$,-1&+)1 "0.11'*.)+/. )&$+, ,!*+ 2 7 2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/3/2017 11:46 PM Page 28 The counterfactuals cry out: how do we know things would odds of success were virtually nil or in striking a cease-fire and have turned out better had Obama made different choices? We Assad-transition deal with Moscow, which, in the absence of can’t, but the administration’s behavior is instructive. In many American leverage, faced similarly poor chances. Opportunity of these cases, after a period of restraint it ended up engaging costs abounded. anyway—slowly, incrementally, hesitantly, but with the aim of Key allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, whose staving off disaster. Obama rescinded the Afghan-withdrawal appetite for American engagement rose with their sense of deadline, sent troops back into Iraq, armed Syrian rebels, con- regional peril, watched with concern as the administration and ducted belated freedom-of-navigation exercises in the South Congress combined to demonstrate domestic political dysfunc- China Sea, and imposed sanctions and expelled spies in tion, military incrementalism, hesitant economic leadership, response to Russia’s interference in the American election. and haphazardly set foreign-policy priorities. Adversaries attempted to take the opportunity to press their advantages. The world, and Americans, wondered where all this was headed. hE Obama administration did seize important opportu- nities. Building closer ties with countries across Asia is the right strategic impulse, and Obama had real achieve- hE immediate post–Cold War era was a period of uncon- Tments. he built on the transformation of ties with India that tested American primacy, with our country in search of began under Bush, strengthened alliances with Korea and a new global role and the domestic political will to sus- Japan, and won rotational access for U.S. troops in Australia tainT it. After 9/11, the national focus turned to fighting terrorism and the Philippines. The administration also engaged in the East and wars in the greater Middle East. And as counterterrorism Asia Summit, ratified a treaty with the Association of Southeast has subsided as the organizing principle in U.S. foreign policy, Asian Nations, and strengthened ties with Indonesia, Vietnam, new forces have risen to take its place. and Singapore. It remains to be seen how much the Trans- Their most pronounced features are global competition and Pacific Partnership’s demise will undermine these achieve- local fragmentation. The great powers are increasingly compet- ments, but certainly it will provide an opening to China to take ing for regional dominance and global influence. Ideology has a position of regional economic leadership. reentered the arena, with liberal democracy, populist autocracy, Elsewhere, too, the administration had key successes. Its and radical Islamism among the available alternatives. At the aggressive approach to al-Qaeda helped decimate its ranks. Its same time, longstanding features of the international landscape belated fight against the Islamic State has gathered steam, and the are fragmenting, from the European Union to Middle Eastern efforts to bolster NATO in Eastern Europe and boost maritime borders, from global trade liberalization even to American security in Southeast Asia have helped reassure nervous part- alliances with countries such as the Philippines. ners. Reaffirming America’s commitment to defending Japan Much of this would have happened even if a different ad - and European allies signaled important resolve. ministration had conducted American foreign policy for the And yet the administration has been of two minds about allies. past eight years. In some areas, Obama improved matters. But Logic suggests that, in retaining the traditional objectives of in more, his restraint and retrenchment fueled the competition American foreign policy but seeking to do less in their pursuit, and fragmentation that are today’s hallmarks. For all his Obama expected America’s partners to do more. Free-riding sunny optimism about the arc of history, the president con- allies would have to step up and spend more, take on additional vinced Americans that the world is endlessly complicated, military burdens, lead diplomatic initiatives, and endure domes- broken in key places, and often inhospitable to U.S. engage- tic political challenges to seal economic agreements. ment. Much more often than we’d like, the conventional wis- Obama-era retrenchment, in the best-case scenario, would dom now goes, there just isn’t much the United States can do have spurred other governments to take on their own responsi- about problems around the globe, and certainly not at an bilities. More frequently, however, vacuums emerged and were acceptable cost. then filled in ways that damaged American interests. ISIS and And yet for all that, Obama’s foreign-policy failures should al-Qaeda found safe haven in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. not discredit the ideas of restraint and caution. Just as the Bush Russia is more active in the Middle East today than it has been administration’s stumbles in Iraq should not have tarnished the at any point since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and it has initiated notion of ambition in foreign policy—or of America’s standing a program of disruption and intimidation across Europe. China up for freedom on behalf of the oppressed, or of the need for has stepped up its efforts to solidify claims over most of the military power as an instrument in foreign policy—the incom- South China Sea and enhance its economic influence over the ing administration should not reject deliberation, judiciousness, region. Iran has become the primary external actor in Iraq, and a healthy skepticism about marshaling reasonable means to Syria, and Lebanon. achieve international goals. A policy of retrenchment prioritizes international efforts, Restraint is a virtue in foreign policy, at least sometimes. both by importance and by odds of success. The administra- Pushed too far, as Obama pushed it, and transformed into a rigid tion’s foreign-policy agenda was quite often perplexing, rang- ideology, it becomes a vice—just like ambition, or the use of ing from the obviously important, such as fighting terrorism, military force, or anything else in this life. But the underlying addressing climate change, and pivoting to Asia, to the idealis- instinct is not intrinsically wrong. It’s healthy, to a point. Where tic, such as global nuclear disarmament, to the admirable but exactly that point lies is a matter of human judgment, of politi- impossibly unlikely. Obama’s administration devoted inordi- cians and policymakers attempting to locate the national interest nate time and energy to this last category, whether in attempt- in an ever-changing world. On their ability to do this turn ing to secure an Israeli–Palestinian peace accord when the America’s fortunes, and its future. 2 8 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 12:22 PM Page 1 Advertisement Re- And it could be even more LOS ANGELES (HH) – searchersRQO\¿JKWVSRWHQWLDOO\GHDGO\ have announced a important to Americans who radicalEHOO\IDWEXWDOVROHDGVWR new technique that mistakenly believe that small not VOLPPHUZDLVWVLPSURYHG amounts of exercise can radi- HowRUJDQIXQFWLRQDQGSHUKDSV To: Getcally Rid change theirOf bodies. Deep Belly Fat HYHQDORQJHUKHDOWKLHUOLIH According to Dr. Todd Miller, professor in the Department of Exercise Science at George GLI¿FXOWWRH[HUFLVHHQRXJKWR The only catch? 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As Fred Kaplan reports in his book Dark Territory, Reagan was struck by the central theme of the movie: Cybersecurity government networks controlling military assets vulnerable to amateurs, rogue states, other malefactors, and the merely curious. Reagan’s subsequent inquiries on the matter met with skepti- Policy cism, but the president insisted. The Pentagon undertook an audit of its practices and network infrastructure. The results it found were hair-raising. The federal government’s communica- Russian hacking requires a stronger tions infrastructure was woefully dependent on commercial response than it has received products and academic facilities that had, at best, indifferent security standards. Daily, secrets transited easily accessible channels. In response, the White House promulgated National BY LUKE THOMPSON Security Decision Directive 145, the Magna Carta of federal cybersecurity policy. NSDD 145 charged the different parts of the executive branch to collaborate on securing both classified RESIDENT OBAMA’S approach to cybersecurity featured and unclassified communications and empowered the govern- all of his bad habits. He placed undue faith in multilat- ment to help industry shore up its own security issues. P eralism. He emphasized intentions and neglected out- Unfortunately, like Magna Carta, the directive wound up more comes. His inner circle circumvented and ignored aspirational than practicable. formal processes designed to ensure security and promote With the end of the Cold War, cybersecurity took a backseat to sound decision-making. His staff routinely failed to follow the “end of history.” State Department and National Security through on big promises. Above all, he placed political expedi- Council veteran Richard A. Clarke continued to raise the alarm ence over clear and considered policy. about hacking and cyber vulnerability for both corporate and gov- His politics-first approach expressed itself chiefly in two ernment systems. Indeed, he kept the issue of cybersecurity alive, ways: Obama took care to serve the interests of his Silicon but at a bureaucratic cost. To insulate cybersecurity from general Valley supporters, and he took measures to shield the Oval indifference, Clarke advocated that the issue be treated as a policy Office from embarrassment when failures of administration area unto itself. It came to be seen as an emergent, unique domain. permitted massive, often sustained, hacks of our critical In one of the great ironies of the federal bureaucracy, marking digital infrastructure. Before the failure of Hillary Clinton’s out a new, distinctive policy area encourages the diffusion of candidacy, the mainstream media largely gave Obama a responsibility. Bureaucratic entrepreneurs in pursuit of promo- pass on questions of cybersecurity, unwilling to learn a tion recast themselves as subject-matter experts. Offices in pur- complex issue simply to embarrass an ideologically conge- suit of ever larger budgets promote their own “capabilities.” nial administration Without an entity responsible for ensuring sound practices across Negligence, on the part of the press as well as the president, the federal government, America’s cybersecurity functions were has had consequences. The politicization of cybersecurity scattered across dozens of tiny bureaucratic ghettos. Indeed, the stunted the development of a coherent cyber doctrine and, by government treats website and network construction as essen- suggesting weakness, diminished American power. Granted, tially domestic-policy matters but splits its security apparatuses technology changes faster than the government can write policy, across both domestic and foreign-facing agencies. Only the pres- and the government is not agile enough to deal with many ident has the scope of authority re quired to unify cyber policy. aspects of cybersecurity. Even so, the Obama administration Successive administrations have failed to answer the chal- failed to address the problem with the requisite seriousness or lenge because treating cybersecurity as a policy area unto itself to incent the technology industry to ensure the security of new dovetails with the political incentives of the executive office. products before releasing them. Obama’s political priorities put Highly complex, cybersecurity is emphatically unsexy. The us on a digital collision course with Russia’s hacking. media notice only when something goes horribly wrong, and so The chickens of this malign neglect came home to roost on cybersecurity demands that the president invest considerable Election Day. Russian interference in the general election did administrative energy without a clear political upside. More - not determine the outcome of the race. But cavalier meddling over, opacity also has advantages. Cybersecurity can be held up by the intelligence services of a hostile foreign country threw as a totem of the new and modern. The president can point to the administration’s policy failures into stark relief. Let the cyber initiatives as indications of an energetic and serious exec- Left be distracted by the fantasy that Russian hacking and utive—and typically face no realistic fear that the public will Anthony Weiner’s libido fatally sabotaged Clinton’s candidacy. scrutinize his braggadocio. Russia nonetheless felt empowered to deploy its factotums at If the experience of the Obama years has taught us anything, WikiLeaks brazenly, and conservatives must confront this clearly cybersecurity should be treated as a governing process reality with clear eyes. rather than a policy domain. Just as the government relies on electricity, and sees securing power grids as integral to its func- Mr. Thompson is a partner at the Applecart political consultancy. tioning, digital tools are central to every element of the federal 3 0 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 2col-new_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/4/2017 12:18 AM Page 31 President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Arlington, Va., on January 13, 2015. government. Continuing to treat cyber issues as a distinctive We find ourselves in a cyberwar that resembles World War I: policy realm, with satrapies and sinecures scattered across the Our technology has outpaced our doctrine, with rapid escalation executive branch, means hamstringing America’s ability to the predictable result. respond to pernicious foreign actors looking to exploit our cyber vulnerabilities. Obama recognized this problem, at least partially, after the dis- Ike the Great War, the Russo–American cyberwar broke astrous Obamacare rollout. In mid 2014, the White House created out over Sarajevo. NATO’s Balkan interventions con- the U.S. Digital Service. The results have been mixed. The vinced Russian officials that they needed asymmetric Digital Service arrived too late in Obama’s tenure and focuses Ltools, specifically cyberattack capabilities, to counter the West. more on design and site engineering than on security. Part of the As early as 1996, Russian actors began probing and then pene- executive Office of the President, it has the ambit to tackle prob- trating the communications networks of defense contractors and lems anywhere in the executive branch but lacks the manpower U.S. government agencies. Chinese hackers soon followed suit. to unify executive-branch practices. As a result, the Digital Cyber conflict ebbed and flowed during the Bush years and Service has not prioritized cybersecurity. Indeed, although its Obama’s first term. Russia periodically accessed American net- stated goal is to build “a more awesome government through works but in retrospect appears to have spent that time building technology,” the Digital Service continues to cater to the White the capacity for a full-scale assault on the digital infrastructure of House’s political imperatives. the executive branch. Moreover, the Digital Service has reinforced the administra- Vladimir Putin despises Hillary Clinton. He blames her for tion’s politically naïve view of the technology industry. Con- fomenting protest against his administration during her tenure as sisting mostly of industry veterans, the rank-and-file members of secretary of state. He sees in her enthusiasm for a no-fly zone in the Digital Service have every reason to maintain ties to their for- Syria sub rosa designs to engage Russia militarily and force a mer employers. From Silicon Valley they came, and unto Silicon stand-down. To Moscow, the collapse of the Yanukovych regime Valley they shall return. Tech companies treat engineering as a and the rise of a decidedly pro-Western Ukrainian government separate animal from security, tending to rush woefully unsafe looked like American aggression in its backyard. software to market as soon as it hits minimal functionality. As a In response, the kremlin unleashed its digital hounds. result, our digital economy looks a lot like the automotive industry Russian actors staged a rapid series of intrusions that implied before mandatory safety features. considerable planning. In late 2013, they exploited a hole in embracing the rotating-door politics familiar to Wash - Microsoft Windows to spy on NATO, the revolutionary ington would pose no real problem in normal times. However, Ukrainian government, several european government entities, these are not normal times online. We are in the midst of a and at least one academic institution. America failed to respond major cyber struggle with hostile foreign powers, Russia in decisively, and attacks escalated over the next year. In June particular. The White House has been reluctant to acknowl- 2014, officials revealed that Chinese hackers had made off with edge this struggle because our foes have exploited both the the personal records of 21.5 million Americans. By November, commercial practices of the technology industry and the Russian cyberattacks had so thoroughly penetrated the unclas- GETTY IMAGES / administrative shortcomings of the Obama White House. sified systems of the State Department that for several days it POOL - Industry, reflexively hostile to its dependence on the federal had to partially shut down its e-mail system. government with respect to regulations, has executed an effec- The damage was done. Using at least one compromised State tive counter-strategy by capturing the Digital Service, which is Department e-mail address, Russian agents had already launched stacked with former and future tech-industry personnel. successful phishing attacks (phony e-mail requests designed to KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR Meanwhile, Russia goes undeterred. gain access to a network via log-in credentials) on the executive 3 1 2col-new_QXP-1127940309.qxp 1/4/2017 12:04 AM Page 32 Office of the President. By early 2015, the Russians had suc- Less than a week earlier, Russian leaks had created havoc at the ceeded in penetrating the White House’s networks. At roughly DNC, yet here the White House was implying that such an effort the same time, Russian actors broke into unclassified networks did not rise to the level of a significant incident. What would a at the Defense Department. Even the Joint Chiefs saw their sys- “significant cyber incident” be, if the Kremlin could hack the tems compromised. president’s political party and face no serious retribution? Early on, Russia confined itself to network intrusions and data Again, from the PPD: “A significant cyber incident” is one “that theft, refraining from publicly embarrassing the White House. is (or [a] group of related cyber incidents that together are) likely American media failed to seize on the steady supply of hacking to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, stories, so the administration felt no political incentive to take foreign relations, or economy of the United States or to the public public action against Russia. Nonetheless, officials began to for- confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the mulate a new executive-branch policy document outlining how American people.” Viewed against the backdrop of the previous the federal government should retaliate if Russia escalated con- three years, that was like waving a red cape in front of Russia, now siderably. As we will see, the inadequacy of this document actu- more bull than bear. Russia had escalated its campaign consider- ally encouraged Russian escalation. ably with the DNC leaks, and the White House had failed to In September 2015, the FBI notified the Democratic National respond. Indeed, the White House had declared as a matter of pol- Committee that its systems had been hacked by a Russian actor. icy that Russian cyber operations to date were not “significant.” In March 2016, a Russian phishing scheme successfully hooked To make matters worse, the directive’s assignment of bureau- John Podesta, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, the cratic responsibility prevents the federal government from under- author of a 2014 White House report on cyber privacy. Russian taking expeditious and effective countermeasures. PPD-41 puts the operatives pulled in considerable e-mail hauls from both attacks Justice Department in charge of any “response” to a major cyber- but chose to sit on their finds. attack, ostensibly because the FBI has jurisdiction over enemy Shortly before the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia, the activities in the U.S. Cybersecurity is beset with tricky jurisdic- Russians allegedly funneled the hacked DNC e-mails to their tional questions. Are Minsk-based hackers conducting activities stooges at WikiLeaks. The stolen documents were released on in the U.S. if they attack entities in America from abroad? July 22, revealing that DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Worse still, the FBI lacks a counteroffensive mandate. In other Schultz and her staff had, as long suspected, tilted the primary- words, PPD-41 lays out an investigate-first, report-second, act- election scale in Clinton’s favor. Bernie Sanders supporters were third approach. It stipulates that the executive branch formulate a livid, and Wasserman Schultz was forced from her post. proportional response, of which Justice gets to determine the effi- These events amounted to a successful major escalation by cacy, scope, and pace—a process that would take weeks or even Russia. For the first time, Moscow had intentionally embarrassed months. The Defense Department is excluded from the White the president and his party’s nominee through a publicly conspic- House’s new cyber policy, forcing the federal government to uous effort. The fall of the chairwoman of a national party made respond to the recent, unprecedented cyberattack without most of the DNC hack Russia’s boldest and most politically consequen- its offensive capacities. By way of analogy, imagine that the tial cyberattack by far. Doubtless, Russia watched intently response to a hostile power’s shooting down an airliner were an how the White House responded. Weakness from the admin- investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. istration might have amounted to a green light to release the Responding to a new kind of attack with celerity would require Podesta e-mails at an opportune time. an act of Congress. Alternatively, the White House could simply To make matters worse, on July 26, four days after the DNC ignore its own policy, but in that case, why have PPD-41 at all? hack, the White House released Presidential Policy Directive 41. Why publish it without any restrictions? PPD-41 sets guidelines for how different parts of the executive The Russians did not keep Clinton out of Wisconsin. They did branch should respond to a major cyberattack. Presidential policy not prevent her from visiting union halls in Michigan. No directives are boring reads, and bureaucratic planning rarely gets Russian apparatchik made Clinton campaign listlessly in the last the media’s motor going, so PPD-41 largely flew under the radar two months of the race. Yet the fact remains that the intelligence in Washington. Moscow, however, almost certainly interpreted services of a rival power interfered in a U.S. presidential election, PPD-41 as the administration’s response to the DNC hack. Usually unafraid of the incumbent’s wrath. classified, PPDs are meant as significant statements of policy. President-elect Trump should be mindful of the problem as PPD-41 was probably only the sixth such document issued by the he prepares for his administration. Initial signs are good. He White House in 2016 and the first to be published as unclassified. talks up cybersecurity: During the campaign, his website even Furthermore, PPD-41 is not guidance for a run-of-the-mill featured cybersecurity as one of his top two policy objectives. cyberattack. It sets forth how the federal government should This attention is laudable, and long overdue. He should ignore respond to the Big One, to a digital Pearl Harbor, the sort of attack the petulant whining of Democrats and address the issue first by ostensibly unforeseen until then. overhauling PPD-41. The ricketiness of our cyber infrastructure is real, and the next administration must take serious, focused steps toward correcting ROM the PPD: “While the vast majority of cyber incidents it. A technological patch will not fix our problems. We cannot buy can be handled through existing policies, certain cyber our way out of it. America needs a coherent doctrine, a credible incidents that have significant impacts on an entity, our digital deterrent, and a comprehensive administrative overhaul. nationalF security, or the broader economy require a unique That requires an engaged president and an electorate unwilling to approach to response efforts.” Moscow must have seen in these tolerate foreign interference. The next president can do a great words a capitulation in response to public political meddling: deal to make sure we have both. 3 2 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 Lileks-READY_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:14 PM Page 33 Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS New-Year Trump Fears OR many who believe that thinking “long-term” camera footage shows him alone, reading his phone, and means going from a month-to-month cell- walking into a pole.” phone service to an annual contract, 2016 was Fear: Trump will roll back LGBTQ rights and set back the F horrible. Why? Because some musicians died fight for bathroom equality, because Mike Pence will blast and Hillary lost. If Prince and Bowie had not perished and him with high-frequency Jesus Beams. Clinton had thumped Trump, 2016 would have been an Probable reality: People will go about their lives, learn- AWESOME year. Amirite, Aleppo? Oh, right. Sorry. Well, ing that it is not necessary to feel the president’s approval better luck next year. to be happy. Every year is a sack of gold and lead—2001 was looking Fear: Trump’s antipathy to the Environmental Protection okay until the second week of September, as I recall, but Agency means that all the regulations will be repealed and there was always something worrisome on the news. There’s the air and water will go back to the filthy state of 2007. always a story like this: Separatists in East Grupacia bomb Probable reality: Mar-a-Lago gets a waiver to increase police station in hopes of rejoining West Grupacian rebels to chlorine in the pools. form Lower Grupacia. Or there’s the disease story: “Once Fear: Trump will force California to remove the signs on thought vanquished, E. stromboli reappears as public-health every building that say, in essence, “The State of California threat in Gambia,” which lets New York Times readers feel has determined that there are substances inside this building special, as they care for a moment about Gambia. that might possibly give a rat cancer if it ate nine pounds of Every year: North Korea blows something up. A beloved the stuff daily.” pop-culture icon perishes. One of these years you will read Probable reality: Ever heard of federalism, kids? No? that Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, has died, You’re going to love it. but only because their touring jet was hit by a North Korean Fear: He will institute some National Youth Cadre, mean- missile. Sad, yes, but he had been battling stromboli. ing that kids in their formative years will be forced to join The very people who hope 2017 will be better keep telling some government organization. one other that it can’t be better, because the New Dark Ages Probable reality: The Junior Jaycees see a small bump in are upon us. Because they lost! You might notice that the membership. Right responds like this to a presidential defeat: Fear: He will abolish the Department of Education, and “Well, drat. Four years of incremental diminution of liberty abolish public schools! and the permanent expansion of the state, with some foreign Probable reality: What was that about kids in their forma- policy based on a Pollyanna view of human nature and a mis- tive years forced into government organizations? Anyway, guided trust in international institutions.” the Education Department has fewer students than a commu- The Left’s response to a loss: HERE COMES SUPER-HITLER. nity college’s “Esperanto for Blind Mimes” course. The ED As many have noted, the Left’s reaction to the Trump vic- didn’t exist until 1980. Yet somehow we invented flight, built tory has been enough to push right-leaning Trumpophobes the Hoover Dam, and went to the moon. Saying it’s respon- into the MAGA camp. Many conservatives are still wary, but sible for education is like saying there wasn’t any atomic fis- they’re not expecting the utter ruination of American society. sion in the sun until the government created the Department The Left is like Mom when you walked into the kitchen after of Energy. Speaking of which . . . she waxed: Oh, I just fundamentally transformed that floor Fear: As DOE head, Rick Perry will let frackers frack wher- and now you’re tracking regulatory reform everywhere! ever they frackin’ want! We will do nothing about climate Progs will have to remain in a state of fury and fear for the change and probably jail people who make solar panels. duration of the administration, just to remind themselves that Probable reality: Yes, the U.S. will produce more energy. they are better people. They’re the smart ones, the only peo- We will sell it to other countries and lots of people will have ple who see the horrible future—armies of swaggering good jobs. Hint for understanding the last election: Millions young men in brown shirts and red caps, pushing around of people think that’s all a good thing and are pretty sure the helpless marginalized people while the soundtrack plays people who think it’s a bad thing have jobs like writing cap- either mindless martial music or mournful ethnic dirges, tions for Buzzfeed stories like “These 37 Soy Puddings Will depending on the decision of the documentary editor. Make You Glad Your Abortion Fell on a Tuesday.” Here’s what they’ll fear, and what will probably happen: Fear: Russia will replace the U.S. as a significant influence Fear: Surge in hate crimes. Actually, that’s more of a hope. in Europe and absorb the Baltics. “See? SEE? What did we tell you?” Probable reality: Well, you have something there. But look Probable reality: A surge in stories that say “Man who at you, all hawkish and anti-Russkie ’n’ stuff all of a sudden. said he was beaten by 250 Trump supporters in Trump When the scales fell from your eyes, did they sound like two masks chanting ‘Trump!’ retracts story after security- manhole covers falling on a sheet of steel? In short, their worst fears will not come to pass. Which Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. might be their greatest fear of all. 3 3 longview-ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 1:54 PM Page 34 The Long View BY ROB LONG TFW your whole family is judging you for the bruising campaign and didn’t listen who you aren’t instead of celebrating to the experts 1/6 you for who you are. #notforlong Who don’t really know anything anyway Hey Tweeps! Check out this pic. Does and are often 180 degrees wrong, as this look like normal chafing to you or they have been in this country, where From the Twitter feed should I see someone? Pretty busy they 2/6 these days so would prefer to just put of Kim Jong Un, lotion there. Hit me back! Predicted that we’d be experiencing @youthcaptain another famine and that I’d be killed in a Top 10 faves for 2016? La La Land, coup (!) or something 3/6 Rogue One, Abundant Wheat Harvest She wasn’t prepared. #embarrassing Thanks to Our Dynamic Young Leader, None of which has happened (#blessed #mariahcarey #newyearsrockineve and Manchester by the Sea. All great #grateful) except for the famine part 4/6 #dothedamnsoundcheck movies, hard to pick a “winner.” But my question to you @realdon- The thing about Pepe the Frog that I Forgot to add The Execution of the Dog aldtrump is, when are you going to do don’t get is why they had to make him Traitor Minister of Defense to that list! the smart thing and execute @reince- look so delicious. Hard to focus on mes- Basically a documentary, but some- priebus on live television? 5/6 sage with a rumbling tummy! #same- times I like to chill with something like withmickeymouse #samewithlolcats that. U? Because at some point in the campaign @reincepriebus surely saw @realdon- Learning that it’s not really calories but Find me on Snapchat! Use code or use aldtrump in a weak moment, indecisive the timing and the way foods interact my username grandmasterkimjongun! or even fearful. #cleanuplooseends with my body chemistry. Will probably Will swap nudes! #neverletthemseeyoucry spring for all new supplements this year because my old personal trainer was set Weird to think that some people have What part of “intercontinental” is unclear on fire because of my unexplained large and meddling and incompetent in the phrase “intercontinental ballistic weight gain. families and can’t do anything about it! missile”? Because I seem to have an #firingsquads #workcamps #blessed awful lot of engineers and eggheads Are people still on here, or has everyone #gratitude who think “somewhere in the Sea of gone to Insta? Japan” is another continent. #needdis- @realdonaldtrump Notice how you’re cipline #wishihadstudiedthisstuff Hey, @billmitchellvii, great analysis of suddenly using Twitter to settle scores Trump win, etc., but wondering about and punish enemies and it’s like copy Hey! @donaldtrumpjr and @erictrump! the cross tabs on some of the battle- me much? Sad! #ownyourownstyle The three of us have a lot in common! ground states. Follow back for a convo? #beyourself Follow me back so we can DM! Would love to talk about having you dudes Not sure I get why executing someone @oprahwinfrey Taking a page from your visit here. Can share insights into with an anti-aircraft gun in front of his book, literally! Am tired of waiting for growing up with difficult larger-than-life family is “worse” than using wrong pro- engineers to make me an ICBM and am dads! noun with a trans person. Both make a working to manifest it myself with very person “disappear.” Curious. #bias fun and scary vision board! Thanks! My bad, @donaldtrumpjr and @eric- #inthebubble trump—didn’t realize you guys already Media says I have executed 340 people followed me. Am DMing you guys right Agree somewhat about 2016 being a since taking the reins. Has been more, now. Also, do you Snap or Periscope? bad year in general, but was great for my believe me. But they still write about my Have some stuff to discuss re dads and workout regime: can’t ignore the gainz in hair and my weight and it’s like, yeah, also possible tower construction. my quads, traps, delts, and calves! Pic is hello, I totally get you, @kanyewest! NSFW!!! Hey Tweeps! Chafing is better! Check Just ate a giant bowl of chili-pickled out the pics! @realdonaldtrump Weird question but cabbage, so get ready! Tweet storm wanted to know if @ivankatrump and coming on! (Among other things.) Happy Holidays to everyone! Even the @jaredkushner are, like, solid solid or if haters and the losers who I will eventu- there’s a way for me to get to know her Have to say, impressed with the way ally execute in some cruelly elaborate better. DM me! @realdonaldtrump kept on track during way in front of their families! Sad! 3 4 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:51 PM Page 35 Books, Arts & Manners becoming a columnist—he more or less show that a fierce critic of religious The Soul of invented the form—for the Baltimore believers was also at times a nuanced Evening Sun while simultaneously co- one, offering more-intelligent arguments editing a New York literary journal and and observations than those we hear Mencken writing freelance pieces for The Nation from today’s secular, progressive Left. and other magazines. He then collected Hart doesn’t try to claim Mencken for LAUREN WEINER his columns, essays, and reviews, and Christianity—he makes elaborate dis- published these collections as books— claimers in that regard—but he does try which no writer had done before, accord- to draw Mencken closer to what he calls ing to Hart. “the Augustinian tradition,” a hard-headed The “Sage of Baltimore” excoriated recognition of “human sinfulness and the his countrymen for their lack of culture. incapacity of men and women to over- At the same time, he was irked by the come its consequences.” “genteel tradition” of Anglo-Saxon Hart says that Woodrow Wilson, a Protestants: In the pages of The Smart Set Presbyterian, “embodied Puritanism as and later The American Mercury, he Mencken understood it”—not only its championed realism and sexual frank- “pinched aesthetic” (its inability to ness in fiction as a way of poking the gen- appreciate beauty) but its new reform teel tradition in the eye. What makes impulse, which led the Christians of Damning Words: The Life and Religious these two stances consistent is that the modern America to jettison their under- Times of H. L. Mencken, by D. G. Hart German-American Mencken followed standing of original sin. Confusingly, we (Eerdmans, 272 pp., $26) Continental models in art, literature, and are told elsewhere in the book that it was politics. He wrote an admiring, but shal- the Baptists and the Methodists (not the o appreciate this book, one has low, study of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his Presbyterians) who most typified the to try to project oneself back to pro-German stance led him to oppose “new Puritanism” for Mencken. (He an America where people of America’s entry into the First World War. wanted Democratic governor Al Smith of faith, instead of being on the (The Kaiser even wrote him a fan letter New York, a Roman Catholic, to win the defensive,T dominated public life and from exile after the war.) presidential election of 1928 “if only to culture. Henry Louis Mencken (1880– Hart speaks of “Mencken’s bad-boy rebuke ‘the Methodist-Baptist tyranny 1956) considered himself the defender swagger” and the lapidary skill with which now oppresses the Republic.’”) of all who felt oppressed by moralistic which he went after “Puritan smugness Harry Emerson Fosdick, whom Hart calls Christians. He railed against the reform- and cocksureness.” Yet Hart wishes to “arguably the nation’s most popular liberal ers of his time: “a despotism of inspired correct a certain view of Mencken. Non - preacher,” also enters this account; it was, prophets and policemen” who adopted a believers “seldom picked up on (and writes Hart, Fosdick’s “uncritical support federal income tax, got the United States still don’t) Mencken’s praise for for democracy” that made him ditch the into armed conflicts, quashed unconven- Christians when they deserved it,” he recognition of original sin. tional opinions, prosecuted novels for writes. Not only did Mencken admire The confusion continues with the obscenity, and wouldn’t allow Mencken certain aspects of G. K. Chesterton’s appearance in Damning Words of or his friends to legally buy or drink beer. work and maintain cordial friendships William Jennings Bryan—whose Wiki - D. G. Hart, a history professor at Hills - with several clergymen, he simply pedia entry associates him with every dale College, has a feel for the sheer wasn’t the worshiper of science that religious denomination mentioned in range of Mencken’s work. Legendary for today’s secular humanists might assume the previous paragraph save Roman his productivity, Mencken was equally he was. Psychology, for example, got Catholicism and who, in prosecuting at ease reporting on crime, floods, and the back of his hand: He called it “guess- John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in fires in his native Baltimore and assess- work, empiricism, hocus-pocus, poppy- Tennessee in 1925, went down in history ing the work of such emerging fiction cock.” Nor did he defend advocates of as the major Bible-believing punching writers as Theodore Dreiser, Willa birth control because he was a big fan of bag of H. L. Mencken. Bryan believed Cather, and Joseph Conrad. Not just his birth control; he did it, says Hart, because in original sin, didn’t he? The legal, ebullient and well-crafted prose, but the birth controllers were subject to coer- political, and social fiasco that was also his refusal to limit his subject mat- cive government action. Prohibition received the support of ter, made him a pioneer of punditry. The Damning Words is part of a religious- Bryan, and of many Progressives and young Mencken edited one Baltimore biography series from Eerdmans, the Protestants. But then, Woodrow Wilson, newspaper, then moved to another, well-known Christian publisher. Its as president, vetoed the version of it author wants to explore “the way an that came to his desk (the Volstead Act; Lauren Weiner is the associate editor of Law and agnostic tried to make sense of Protestant the veto was overridden by Congress). Liberty (www.libertylawsite.org). hegemony in the United States” and to In trying to put this all together, we SPONSORED BY National Review Institute 3 5 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:51 PM Page 36 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS might have to say that Protestantism did strife downplayed? Because properly not sit well with H. L. Mencken because it acknowledging it would draw attention The was too hard and judgmental (Bryan) and to something the book never mentions: also because it was too soft (Fosdick). The that those vapid Methodists, in America, only thing this Jewish reader came away do not set up artillery pieces in front of Feminist certain of was that Hart, a member of the the rectory to shell the houses of worship Orthodox Presbyterian Church, finds of the uncouth Baptists, Episcopalians, Economy Mencken’s critique—or critiques—of Seventh-day Adventists, Catholics, Jews, certain Protestant denominations conge- or anybody else. The refraining from GEORGE GILDER nial because he, Hart, has much to say in violence has everything to do with the objection to these denominations. civil religion that is so negatively por- The self-righteousness of Bryan, Wil - trayed in this book. son, and Wilson’s fellow Progressive No doubt Mencken didn’t attend to Theodore Roosevelt certainly comes this contrast between the Old World and through in the entertaining Mencken the New, either. Least credible of all, rants that are included here. Mencken when it comes to Hart’s Mencken, is the himself did not avoid a certain kind of bending of this portrait of the journalist self-righteousness—this book does not into the perfect agnostic to encourage a omit the unfair, even foolish, judgments recovery of genuine Christianity. It is he committed to paper. Yet the author good to know that Mencken, especially winds up offering Mencken as a potential later in his life, “displayed a sensitivity antidote for what has gone wrong with to matters of faith that his skeptical fans Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, Christianity in America, which boils often overlooked.” It is quite right for by Nicholas Eberstadt down to its general lack of realism about Hart to set atheists straight about one of (Templeton, 216 pp., $12.95) this fallen world. Hart laments that their heroes, who happens to have been “Christians see only the best in people”; more open-minded than they are. But ICHOLAS EBERSTADT has they could use a dose of Menckenian “Mencken’s brand of self-skepticism” become one of our highest- pessimism. Hart would like people of and “healthy dose of self-deprecation,” impact socioeconomic and faith in the United States, instead of get- which, if emulated, might lend weight to demographic analysts, rival- ting sucked into ideas of utopian social one’s ruminations on these matters— ingN his American Enterprise Institute col- reform, or campaigns to ban alcohol or these traits of Saint HLM just do not ring league Charles Murray. In Men without promote prayer and the reading of true. Mencken was skeptical about the Work, he alerts us to a new “invisible Scripture in the public schools, to turn world and the people in it, but, for the national crisis.” This is the flight of some inward and weigh their own shortcom- most part, he did not turn that skepticism 10 million American men in their prime ings. To his sorrow, Christianity in inward. He once observed, Hart points ages (between 25 and 54) from the work America “morphed into a form of moral- out, that cynics are “among the most force, and indeed from all the commit- ism and uplift, a sense that believers comfortable and serene of mammals; ments and responsibilities of civilized were more virtuous than unbelievers, perhaps only bishops, pet dogs, and society. He documents an “immense and that the goal of the churches was to actors are happier.” As for the traces of army” of rootless “idlers,” tending toward make more people ethical and thereby self-deprecation, they are there to charm obesity, popping pills (mainly prescrip- add to human flourishing. Mencken saw his readers, a tool in the toolbox of an tion painkillers, but also, in alarming through that [and viewed it as] an aban- often beguiling writer. numbers, harder drugs), immersed in TV donment of historic Christianity.” He was famous for being the opposite for an average of 21.7 hours a week and There are, in this outside observer’s of brooding or introspective: This most video games for 6.7 hours, and stickily opinion, American Christians who do not productive and resourceful of writers keyboarding on an oily surf of terabytes consider themselves more virtuous than admitted to finding writing lonely. And of porn, all while their baby-boom unbelievers. Granted, I can’t prove this. finally, the sufferings that Mencken en- elders retire, often on disability, and, as I do know that when Hart writes of his dured after having a stroke at the age of of this August, 337,000 manufacturing desire that Americans reassess the 68, poignantly described by Hart, appar- jobs go unfilled. “assumption that religion unites”—that ently led him to say: “It really is an out- Like most of our social-policy estab- they reassess the validity of their “civil rage to be sick like this.” We read searing lishment, Eberstadt finds this phenom- religion,” in his phrase—he goes off passages about a man who could no enon baffling in the face of a rise in track. America’s “civil religion” doesn’t longer read or write. They allow us to measured national wealth from nearly so much unite as it sets boundaries to the form our own opinion of this parting $40 trillion in 2000 to close to $90 trillion ways that disunity—which he correctly shot, from Hart, at American Protestants in 2016, and the multiplication of total says is inevitable—can be expressed. gone soft: that “the people who took hope The first reference to “Christian from the Christian message were far Mr. Gilder is a co-founder of the Discovery Institute. Europe’s endless pursuit of war” comes worse equipped to deal with the hard- He is also the author, most recently, of The four pages from the end of Damning ships of human existence than was Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Words. Why is the Old World’s sectarian Mencken.” Count me skeptical. Recovers but the Economy Never Does. 3 6 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:51 PM Page 37 jobs from 120 million in 1990 to 150 mil- rights crusade twisted into a unisex jam- throw the “privileges of the patriarchy,” lion now. Exacerbating the enigma is the boree; in every judicial process from to break the grip of the “nuclear family,” absence of any comparable male flight family court to the Supreme Court; and to unseat the presumption of male bread- in such countries as France, Sweden, stretching from every local fire depart- winners, to relieve women of their Australia, and other lands also afflicted ment on into the military, from Abu responsibility to bear and raise children, with “deindustrialization” and globaliza- Ghraib to Camp Pendleton, from West to liberate wives from bondage in bad tion. He concludes: “No other developed Point to Annapolis, where women are marriages, and to shatter “glass ceilings” nation simultaneously floats such a large pushed ahead at every opportunity in defi- galore in a world where childbearing is proportion of its prime-age men entirely ance of differences in physical prowess mostly a “choice” rather than necessary outside the labor force—neither working, and mechanical aptitude. The prevailing for survival. nor looking for work, nor doing much of idea is that male success is somehow ille- The campaign has succeeded. Many anything else.” According to Eberstadt, gitimate, a product of bias and conspiracy, boys no longer find male affirmation in this is a “silent catastrophe” that “our and that in a gender-neutral environment, school or in the labor force. While liberals news media, our pundits, and our major women would equal men in all elevated take their bows and demand more femi- political parties have somehow managed or conventionally male roles. nism, Eberstadt points to the obvious and to overlook.” Every mainstream TV channel and predictable effects on male employment. The book concludes with two rebut- magazine from Fortune to Wired joins the Bernstein and Olsen want to explain tals. There is nothing going on here, say fray in a siege of affirmative-action jour- away the problem as “deindustrializa- Henry Olsen, a venerable figure on the nalism, pretending that the leading young tion.” But surely this is just the harvest of think-tank scene, and Jared Bernstein inventors and entrepreneurs in America the other supreme achievement of from President Obama’s economic team, and the world are mostly female and that Demo cratic liberalism: the triumphant but evidence of the continuing “deindus- even Silicon Valley is somehow defective regulatory revolution that endows feder- trialization of America.” It is caused by in gender diversity. Wired says the new al bureaucrats with the power to suppress shortfalls in aggregate demand and the Steve Jobs is a twelve-year-old girl in any fundamental innovations and entre- impact of automation, globalization, and Mexico. Ellen Pao becomes a luminous preneurial disruptions that incidentally “secular stagnation.” cover attraction with absurd claims of dis- might disproportionately employ men. All that is needed, says Bernstein, is crimination against women at Kleiner Better to expand the epicene bureaucra- much more of the same: an expanded Perkins, long the world’s most successful cies and docile nonprofits with jobs allo- Earned Income Tax Credit for childless venture-capital firm (twelve out of 50 cated by quota. Better to teach new workers, higher minimum wages, paid Kleiner partners are women). The explicit generations how to stop nuclear plants, leave, and child-care assistance, together purpose of all this agitprop is to over- carbon nanotubes, weapons, pipelines, with lowering the trade deficit and increasing infrastructure spending. In other words, he endorses Hillary’s agenda, which would make the male role in poor AMONG THE STATIONS families even more trivial and otiose than it currently is and actually reduce A frozen steeple cock announced the place— the incentives for childbearing or bread- A town like any other on that coast: winning in families. Although Bernstein The rusty docks, inert, insoluble, does not mention it, a constitutional Real estate booming, tech at full sail, Equal Rights Amendment would nicely And a hitching post fit to menace drunks. cap off this ambitious scheme of “Back to the Future.” Our headlights fished those avenues in vain, But surely Eberstadt is much closer to But sometimes sweeping past a fence would silver the right idea, even though he fails to get Stands of birch, or fade against the flanks all the way there. What Eberstadt de - Of enormous forests, white pine and red, scribes as a “silent catastrophe,” an Tall as ships dwarfing shipwrecked Puritans. “extraordinary dislocation,” a “great male flight from work” increasing “our Later, on the Old Post Road, we picked up nation’s burden of misery,” as might be An AM station like a living flame, expected from “a social emasculation on A sanctuary light that hosted centuries. this scale,” is in fact nothing less than the Then a horn blast made the valleys tremble, supreme triumph of 20th-century Demo - The dry flats and graveyards of New England— cratic liberalism. This “strange with- drawal of men” merely reflects a massive You’ll hear the trumpet sound campaign waged on every American To wake the nations underground; campus, where women now account for Look in my God’s right hand some 60 percent of students; in every gov- When the stars begin to fall! ernment department where gender-rights —LEE OSER enforcers lurk litigiously; in every civil- SPONSORED BY National Review Institute 3 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:51 PM Page 38 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS and factories than how to use or build result is heavily manifest in the statistics them. Spearheaded by the far-reaching in this book and in American society. Indian pidgin-science crusade against “climate What we experienced in the U.S. was a change,” the green revolution converges massive plague of affirmative action that with the feminist campaign to “deindus- drastically upset the balance of power Country trialize,” i.e. emasculate, the economy. An between men and women both in the TRAVIS KAVULLA emasculated economy will obviously em- home and on the job. ploy more women than men. There was no evidence of systemic Enforced by the nomenklatura of the discrimination against women in the media and the universities, this campaign work force. Women as early as the 1970s for a feminist economy suppresses new earned as much men of comparable skill technology that cannot be reduced to a and experience, and black women as early software app: nearly all real innovations in as the 1960s, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan energy, mechanics, chemistry, pharmacol- pointed out, were already earning 106 ogy, genetically engineered crops, and percent of black-male earnings. Single nanotech materials science (and all of women have long made as much as single these fields are overwhelmingly male). In men. New affirmative-action rules, com- the masculine-led economy, initial public bined with the preferential availability to offerings have dropped some 90 percent, single mothers of welfare under Aid to The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian and the stock market has shrunk by Families with Dependent Children, effec- Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens roughly half—in number of companies tively destroyed the black family by dri- (Knopf, 576 pp., $35) and in shares outstanding—since the ving out fathers and disabling boys by 1990s; entrepreneurial small businesses depriving them of fatherly discipline and shed jobs, while closing faster than new example. Economists obtusely denied the HEY came on horses and with ones open; and leading academics espouse family-eating effects of the welfare state guns, a martial culture over- an alibi theory of permanently declining by failing to measure the value of leisure running a more peaceful one returns to technological advance. time, which made welfare benefits far unprepared to meet the fight. The other way to look at this withdraw- more attractive than male earnings. This ItT was a stunning and successful inva- al of men from work is the withdrawal of effect spread to lower-class white fami- sion over a short period of time. The women from marriage and motherhood lies as well and produced the social cata- invaders treated the indigenous people and the movement of men into increas- strophe that Eberstadt documents so well as barely human. They committed un - ingly short-term and feral sexual behav- in this book. speakable acts of brutality. Those not ior. In the books Sexual Suicide and Men If you want a feminist culture that abol- massacred fled from their homeland, and Marriage (both excerpted in these ishes the “patriarchy” and denies all never to return. pages), I argued in the 1970s and 1980s canonical male roles; that banishes car- The invaders were the Lakota, a that the breakdown of marriage and child bon fuels, new chemicals, and the manu- Siouxan tribe who swept west in the care fostered by feminism would require facturing they enable; that represses 1700s, taking for themselves the most a welfare state to take care of the women disruptive entrepreneurial behavior; and prized hunting grounds throughout the and children and a police state to take care that enforces preferential representation Great Plains. Or, to put it in the words of of the boys. The chief motive for male of women throughout the commanding one of their chiefs, “These lands once work effort is the approval of women and heights of the economy, you cannot at the belonged to the Kiowas and Crows, but children and a successful role as father same time have most men eagerly sup- we whipped these nations out of them, and breadwinner. Men most enjoy jobs porting the plan. Without most men on and in this we did what the white men do that are distinctly male and affirm them as board, the nation will not be able to when they want the lands of Indians.” men. Take those away, and you have defend itself or produce new technology This is the context in which Peter Eberstadt’s invisible catastrophe. and enterprise. Without women bearing Cozzens, a career diplomat and historian, When fathers abandon (or are kicked children and raising them in families, the has situated his magisterial, quietly sub- out of) families, fewer boys will suc- nation will not be able to reproduce itself. versive history. The saga of U.S.–Indian ceed in becoming effective, competent Eberstadt is thus pointing to a fatal conflicts has a wide arc, beginning in the workers or loving and disciplined hus- flaw—a sexual suicide in an American early to middle 19th century, intensify- bands and fathers. Women alone have a polity where women outvote men and ing after the Civil War, and concluding much harder time raising boys to be prefer socialism and stasis over progress only with the massacre of Lakota them- good men. The problem is compounded and prosperity, where they choose depen- selves at Wounded Knee in the winter of when schools view male achievement as dency on government over collabora- 1890. Usually, this period is retold as a a problem to be solved, not something to tion with husbands and family. But this monolithic and uncomplicated story of be celebrated, and when so few teachers “choice” is so unnatural and ultimately white aggressors and Indian victims. If are men. In their frustration, women often self-defeating that it may well be reach- attempt to turn boys into girls—to “femi- ing its morbid pinnacle today in a feminist Mr. Kavulla, a former associate editor of nize” them, as sociologist Patricia Cayo bubble. Watch for an explosive reversal in NATIONAL REVIEW, is a Montana public-service Sexton pointed out decades ago. This coming years. commissioner. 3 8 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:52 PM Page 39 one were merely to summarize the end state of 19th-century history of the American West, that might do. Yet Cozzens does a service by bring- ing out the dark ironies and wrinkles of this history. In the Great Plains, at least, it is the story of “the displacement of one immigrant people by another, rather than the destruction of a deeply rooted way of life.” During the Indian wars, oppressors became victims, and victims joined with oppressors before being betrayed themselves. Crow warriors, for instance, so despised the Lakota and the Cheyenne for having pushed them out of land they regarded as their own that they joined sides with General George Arm - strong Custer and died with him at Little Big Horn in 1876. That battlefield, ironically, became part of the reserva- tion where the Crow were later con- fined. The lesson here is that conflicts were populated with individuals and factions, not “whites” versus “Indians.” Allegiances shifted throughout. There were heroes and villains on both sides. One settler newspaper criti- cized the U.S. Army’s General Oliver Howard and praised an unlikely coun- Oglala warriors reenact a planned raid on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation, 1907. terparty. “Chief Joseph’s magnanimity may save us, and that is all,” the paper editorialized, of the Nez Perce leader The denouement was not obvious military first set foot in the region with who was just then being cast by the fed- from the beginning. The U.S. Army was the Lewis and Clark expedition. And eral government as a violent agitator stretched thin during and after the Civil from that moment to the present day is but who in fact spared the civilian War. When a string of fortifications was a longer span of time than the whole white community the depredations that attacked along the Bozeman Trail, one period of Lakota and Cheyenne occu- were characteristic of other tribes. colonel wrote to his wife, “The only way pancy of the Great Plains until their mil- Some white settlers blamed the U.S. that peace can be made with the Indians itary defeat. government for overreacting or pro- is giving up this country.” Which is just Those activists and journalists today voking conflicts. what happened when General Sherman who romanticize the Lakota, whose But it is also true that mutilation in 1868 was ordered to abandon the forts Standing Rock Indian Reservation is the and torture were often a central fea- of the region. For decades, the Army center of protests over the siting of the ture of Indian warfare, and that it was present but weak, “deemed a lesser Dakota Access Pipeline, ought to know often made little distinction between threat” than other Indian tribes by the just the kind of invention of history they men and women, old and young; Lakota and their Cheyenne allies. They are indulging in by casting places and “Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of were the hegemons in much of present- people as timeless. A soft rebuttal of total war paled beside that of the day Montana, Wyoming, and North and this tendency should be at the heart of Plains Indians,” Cozzens observes. South Dakota. every real story of the American West, This brutality prompted many pan- This situation turned abruptly. In just which has been in upheaval for nearly icked Army campaigns of reprisal. Or a decade, the U.S. Army had re - the entire time that there have been VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES / perhaps those campaigns prompted equipped, allied with Indian tribes dis- observers to record its history in writing. CORBIS / the Indian warfare. It is unclear, be - affected by the Lakota and Cheyenne, Cozzens gets this in a way only a few cause from Oregon to the desert and undertaken a series of routs that writers do—and then pretty much only Southwest to the Dakota Territory, a were so shocking a turnaround that they novelists, such as Cormac McCarthy. cycle of violence took hold in which spawned a Lakota millenarian move- This is not to minimize what is a LIBRARY OF CONGRESS one outrage was exchanged for anoth- ment—the Sun Dance—that promised remarkably sad history, or explain away / er and attempts at peace were plagued to raise dead warriors from the grave for what for many tribes is a deeply unjust CURTIS . with miscommunication or promises a final revanche against the whites and result. But Cozzens does not let the end that could not or would not be kept on their Indian allies. At this point, less of the story dictate its contents. He lays EDWARD S either side. than 90 years had passed since the U.S. it out in all its grim detail. SPONSORED BY National Review Institute 3 9 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:52 PM Page 40 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Iran-Contra scandal, he wrote that it That’s true, up to a point, as an editor at It Didn’t “brings to mind the ironic title” of Lewis’s the Daily Beast—Evelyn Waugh ver- book. At the 1988 Republican convention sion—might say. Readers of It Can’t in New Orleans, the guerrilla artist Happen Here indeed will spot dozens of Happen Robbie Conal plastered the city with superficial ways in which Trump resem- posters featuring a caricature of George bles Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a Huey Here H. W. Bush and the line “It Can’t Happen Long figure who leads a fascist takeover Here.” In 2007, when the younger Presi - of America. Both Trump and Windrip are JOHN J. MILLER dent Bush was in office, Joe Conason populist firebrands who invent patriotic adapted the title for his own tome, It Can slogans. Windrip promises “to make MAGINE this pitch for a dystopian Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the America a proud, rich land again.” He novel: An ambitious 48-year-old Age of Bush. Perhaps the phrase was in may be, as Lewis puts it, “vulgar, almost Democratic senator from Illinois the air, because two years earlier the illiterate,” but he also displays “some- runs for president. He promises to New American Library, an imprint of thing of the earthy American sense of Iraise taxes, restrict personal incomes, and Penguin, re-released It Can’t Happen humor of a Mark Twain.” There’s ugli- collectivize everything. “Call me a social- Here, calling it “a shockingly prescient ness, too: Windrip is an aggressive racist ist!” he says. Deposing a well-known novel that’s as fresh and contemporary and anti-Semite who jails journalists and senior member of his party, he goes on to as today’s news.” The new edition in - condemns his foes to concentration camps. win the general election. People call him cluded an introduction by Michael He creates his own version of Hitler’s “that sky-rocket.” Meyer, an English professor at the Brownshirts, giving them a name that Sound familiar? University of Connecticut. When I e- smacks of tea-party activism—the Minute Then this happens: Shortly after his mailed Meyer recently to ask what Men—and declaring them “the shock inauguration, the new president suspends prompted the novel’s reappearance in 2005, troops of Freedom!” He frets over Japan the Constitution, imposes martial law, and he replied: “A lot of people were made the way Trump worries about China: “We governs as a fascist dictator. Presented with this scenario, liberals would howl in horror. They’d label the In the liberal imagination, fascism is plot preposterous. They’d denounce it as a right-wing fever dream. They’d accuse its always about to happen here—and author of racism and possibly run for a usually it involves Republicans. safe space. Or so it might seem. Instead, they’re praising an 81-year-old novel that nervous by [Dick] Cheney’s role in the probably will have to lick those Little reads in part like a biography of Barack Bush administration.” Yellow Men some day.” Toward the end Obama—and calling it a prophecy of Now we come to Trump—and a brand- of the book, America even goes to war Donald Trump’s presidency. new set of ponderous references and allu- with Mexico. The book is It Can’t Happen Here, by sions. A week after the election, interest Perhaps portions of this account feel a Sinclair Lewis, a novelist whose fictional in It Can’t Happen Here grew so strong little Trumpy. Those who call attention to excoriations of middle-class life in the that retailers such as Amazon ran out of the similarities, however, tend to skip 1920s made him, in 1930, the first copies, according to Money magazine. over the inconvenient bits—and not just American to win a Nobel Prize for litera- Left-leaning pundits fueled the sales the coincidental fact that Windrip shares ture. His words “Babbitt” and “Babbittry” with their non-stop namedrops in every- Obama’s background as a rising-star once were familiar putdowns that targeted thing from the Financial Times to the Democratic senator from Illinois. Lewis provincial smugness, but today they are Washington Post. “It Happened Here,” portrays Windrip’s Democratic political nearly forgotten—and Lewis, when he is punned a headline in The New Yorker, base as “jammed with college professors, remembered at all, is most remembered above a post-election report by David city slickers, and yachtsmen,” which is a for this lesser work of political specula- Remnick. Just a month earlier, a different pretty good sketch of the Obama coali- tion, written and published in 1935. That’s writer for the same magazine, Alexander tion. And who are his foes? “The conser- because liberals have made a hobby of cit- Nazaryan, wondered whether Lewis had vative Senators,” bellows Windrip. ing it whenever they want to suggest that foretold of a time like now, cursed by “a Yet the most striking feature of the American fascism looms. In 1992, Gore populace that can no longer make the kind novel involves Windrip’s ideas—and how Vidal wrote about Lewis in The New York of judgments that participatory democracy much his rhetoric and vision overlap with Review of Books and deployed the cliché: requires.” More than a year ago, when the the progressive platform of 21st-century “People still say, in quotes as it were, ‘It book’s connection to Trump at least had Democrats. The Constitution is out of can’t happen here,’ meaning fascism, the virtue of relative freshness, Malcolm date, says Windrip, and he pledges “to which probably will.” Harris described it in Salon: “The novel bring it up from the horseback-and- In the liberal imagination, fascism is feels frighteningly contemporary.” These corduroy-road epoch to the automobile- always about to happen here—and usually days, however, the pundits are just piling and-cement period of today.” The president it involves Republicans. When the late on, as Lewis Beale did in December, when needs more administrative authority: Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times he argued in the Daily Beast that it offers “The Executive has got to have a freer examined the Reagan administration’s “chilling comparisons” to our time. hand . . . and not be tied down by a lot of 4 0 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:52 PM Page 41 dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking tremendously useful book,” he wrote. months to shoot off their mouths in “The Communists will welcome him— JAY NORDLINGER’S debates.” The urgent problem of econom- do, in fact, welcome him right now for the ic inequality requires bold action: “All fight against fascism.” Over time, as its swollen incomes [must] be severely limit- immediacy wore off, scholars have DIGGING IN ed and inheritances cut to such small sums knocked its artistry and questioned its as may support the heirs only in youth and depth. In On Native Grounds (1942), in old age.” There’s plenty more, too, such Alfred Kazin offered a typical assess- Now Get The Wonderful as a 15-point plan whose elements include ment, calling the novel “not a really ambi- New Collection by NR’s the nationalization of banks, mines, oil- tious book and certainly not a careful and Acclaimed Senior Editor fields, water power, public utilities, trans- deeply imagined one.” portation, and communication. The main problem may be that despite Lewis knew something that today’s lib- his wife’s influence, Lewis lacked a sys- erals either fail to recognize or refuse to tematic understanding of totalitarianism acknowledge: Fascism seeks to deny not or even demagoguery. Among his con- just political freedom, but also economic temporaries, Aldous Huxley and George freedom. And although the people who Orwell wrote the definitive treatments of celebrate It Can’t Happen Here often the former with Brave New World and dwell on Windrip’s poor treatment of 1984, while John Dos Passos and Robert black and Jews, they rarely mention that Penn Warren took up the latter with he’s also an anti-Catholic bigot. When Number One and All the King’s Men. Lewis describes the arrest of “a group of Lewis’s own politics were a hodge- Catholic nuns who were accused of hav- podge. He was sympathetic to socialism ing taught treasonably,” it’s hard not to and supported the Progressive Robert La think of the Little Sisters of the Poor and Follette as well as the Democrat Franklin their defiance of federal health-care man- Roosevelt. By the 1940s, however, he apparently regarded Senator Arthur beloved essayist, music critic, dates. Finally, there’s Lee Sarason, who is columnist (his NRO “Impromptus” roughly to Windrip what Steve Bannon is Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, feature has countless fans), popular to Trump. Lewis lampoons this character as excellent presidential material. podcaster,A language guru, travel spectator, cultural observer, political wiseman, histori- in an episode of gay-baiting that ought Lewis “was basically apolitical,” wrote an (Peace, They Say and Children of to make today’s liberals squirm, if they Thompson, “but insofar as his social Monsters are triumphs), Jay Nordlinger’s cared about more than using the book as a ideas were articulate and consistent, he new book— Digging In: Further Collected Writings—is now available (direct from NR bludgeon for bashing Republicans. was an old-fashioned populist radical.” for only $25, shipping/handling included). In Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in Amid these shifting loyalties, Lewis 400-plus pages, this handsome hardcover delights with over 70 Nordlinger classics just a few weeks of intense work. His refused to become anyone’s political tool. that comprise a broad and engaging array of biographer Mark Schorer has claimed that The scholar Stephen L. Tanner points to a pieces (“People,” “America,” “Abroad,” the novel owes an important debt to passage in a memoir by Malcolm Cowley, “Issues and Essays,” “Language,” and “Music”) produced for National Review Lewis’s wife Dorothy Thompson, a jour- a 1930s leftist who tried with his com- magazine over the past decade. It’s a must nalist who sounded early warnings in the rades to recruit Lewis to their cause. for any fan of Nordlinger, who is rightly 1930s about the menace of Hitler. “It is They invited the novelist to a dinner and praised by these very smart people . . . [Lewis’s] cleverness and literary imagi- heaped praise on It Can’t Happen Here. WILLIAM KRISTOL: “Few writers When Lewis discovered their agenda, he have Jay Nordlinger’s range. A handful nation one reads, but it is Dorothy’s write with his verve. A very small number voice that one hears,” adds Thompson objected: “Let me tell you, it isn’t a very know as much. But only Jay Nordlinger biographer Susan Hertog. Whatever its good book—I’ve done better books— can do it all. In this volume he does.” inspiration, the manuscript was rushed and furthermore I don’t believe any of HEATHER MAC DONALD: “Nord- into print by a publisher who hoped to you have read the book; if you had, you linger’s abiding themes are courage in the fight against tyranny and daring in the capitalize on the tumult in Europe and would have seen I was telling you all to creation of new human enterprises. He the upcoming 1936 election in the go to hell.” Then, in a brilliant feat of approaches his interview subjects with a freshness and innocence that can only United States. Arriving in bookstores mockery, he compelled his flatterers to come from a deep worldliness.” only six months after Lewis had started rise and sing a Christian hymn. ROGER KIMBALL: “This is classic to compose it, the novel became an The humorous incident also contains a Nordlinger: sublimely well informed, qui- instant sensation, selling hundreds of piece of wisdom: Before trying to bend a etly cosmopolitan, endlessly curious. Dipping into this book is like slicing into thousands of copies. Embraced by the book to fit a partisan purpose, it might the Zeitgeist: bracing, a little awe-inspir- Federal Theatre Project—a New Deal make sense to read it with care. Those ing, exquisitely memorable.” make-work program for stage actors and who turn the pages of It Can’t Happen crews—it also became a hit play. Here will find a line in the first chapter Communists loved it. The Marxist that satirizes those who won’t be both- ORDER TODAY AT AMAZON.COM, critic Granville Hicks praised It Can’t ered with the effort: “We don’t want all AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, OR Happen Here in The New Masses. “Sin - this highbrow intellectuality, all this AT STORE.NATIONALREVIEW.COM clair Lewis has written a courageous and book-learning.” SPONSORED BY National Review Institute 4 1 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 11:32 PM Page 42 BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Film Going Rogue ROSS DOUTHAT STILL remember the moment when my teenage self first dared to con- template the possibility that there might, somehow, someday, be more Felicity Jones in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story StarI Wars movies. This was before the Internet (or before it mattered), in the days Awakens, the first Disneyfied Star Wars and joined by—deep breath—Cassian when geekery was not yet a culture- film and a straight-up nostalgia trip, an Andor (Diego Luna), Bodhi Rook (Riz bestriding force, when sci-fi and fantasy almost blow-by-blow reimagining of the Ahmed), Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), and superheroes barely merited a mention first Skywalker adventure: Critics praised Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang), and the bone- in the pages of glossy movie magazines. I it, fans embraced it, and everyone agreed dry droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). I don’t was reading one of those magazines— it was way, way better than the prequels. have time to explain every character (I Entertainment Weekly, I imagine—in a Which it was, on the level of acting and haven’t even gotten to the rebel-splinter- doctor’s office, and there in a modest screenwriting and execution—but it had group leader played by Forest Whitaker item near the front was the stunning no originality whatsoever, it was (like or Ben Mendelsohn’s imperial heavy, news: George Lucas was considering most J. J. Abrams flicks) a pure homage, Orson Krennic), and neither does the filming . . . wait for it . . . prequels. zippy but derivative, and by the time movie, which is the main weakness of its We were fanboys, once, and young. things wound up with a lame do-over of first two-thirds: Everything is hurried and That feeling, that pure geeked-out thrill, the Death Star assault, I was almost pin- underexplained, and, as in most block- is a hard thing to recapture. In my case it ing for the chloroform-drenched galactic busters today, the characters never relax lasted through all the trailers for The politics of The Phantom Menace. enough to become genuinely knowable. Phantom Menace—the first trailers to be So after all that curmudgeonly pream- Just an extra ten or 15 minutes would have downloaded one gazillion times—and ble, I’m here to tell you that Rogue One, done wonders for the story, let it breathe fizzled out somewhere during the second the first of the stand-alone Star Wars and let its details flourish. act of Attack of the Clones, when all self- movies (Force Awakens kicks off a tril- But those details are still well chosen. deception finally failed and I admitted ogy, the next installment of which bows There is good stuff on the moral ambigu- that yes, these movies really are that bad. next year) is also the first Star Wars movie ities of the rebellion (if not quite enough When Disney bought the Star Wars of my adult life that has stirred my long- to clinch The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan brand from its legacy-squandering cre- dormant fanhood, kicked sparks up from Last’s influential case for the Empire), a ator and announced not only sequels but its glowing coals. It is not quite the movie fine mix of villains old and new (I a new adventure in the galaxy long ago it could be—it’s too rushed, too crowded, thought the CGI version of Grand Moff and far away every single year from here too undercharacterized. But it’s a movie Tarkin worked, though others found it till doomsday, there were people for about the Star Wars universe that actual- uncanny), just the right amount of Easter whom the old magic clearly came rush- ly made me glad to step into that uni- eggs and call-backs for fans, some planet- ing back. But for me the announcement verse again—and after Lucas’s botch hopping that actually expands the uni- had the opposite effect: It made me feel and Abrams’s retread, I’ll take it. verse a little (though maybe someday we more regret, not less, over what George The plot is set just before the events of can have a Star Wars movie without a Lucas had tried and failed to do. the original movie, with the Empire desert planet), and exactly the right If the prequels had been at the level of clamping down throughout the galaxy, the amount of a certain Dark Lord of the the originals (even the level of Return of rebels plotting ineffectually, and the Death Sith. And Gareth Edwards, the director, the Jedi, the weakest of the three), The Star project a dark rumor on the stellar crafted a finale that’s actually up to the Rise and Fall and Redemption of Anakin wind. “A planet-killer,” spies and outlaws standards of the original series without Skywalker would have been a pop-culture and informants call it, in the seedy outer- simply rehashing its best beats. achievement for the ages—distinctive, rim back alleys where crucial information Calling something the best Star Wars self-contained, needing no embellish- is exchanged. And one piece of informa- movie since the originals isn’t the ment. Now instead Star Wars would be tion, in particular, becomes the movie’s strongest form of praise, and Rogue just another brand in the blockbuster fac- MacGuffin, its pearl of great price—the One isn’t the strongest movie. But it tory, one more tentpole among many, Death Star schematics, and with them the reminded me that I like Star Wars, and it competing with Marvel and DC Comics weakness that a certain Skywalker’s tor- made me remember—if not quite re- for the fanboy dollar every summer, too pedoes will ultimately exploit. experience—what it feels like to really . oppressively omnipresent to conjure up In pursuit of those plans are a motley love it. Two Disney movies in, I’ll take that old exciting shiver. crew, led by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the that level of achievement; they’ll proba- I was in the minority in feeling this daughter of a scientist (Mads Mikkelsen) bly have another few hundred chances to LUCASFILM LTD way, judging by the reaction to The Force coerced into working on the Death Star, get closer to perfection. 4 2 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/3/2017 5:52 PM Page 43 are unfazed by us. Imagine if your next decorate. Their small flock-mates— City Desk meal, your breakfast cereal or a nice plate chickadees, titmice, goldfinches—fly in of spaghetti, were served on the side- and out of feeders, scattering a seed for Bird’s-Eye walk—except the sidewalk is now 50 feet every seed they retrieve. Juncos patiently wide, and beings the size of three- or four- work the deck and the ground, sorting story buildings are thundering over the through the cast-offs. They do fly, in View table. Some of them are on skateboards as straight low bursts, although their most long as sailboats, or bicycles as big as common motion is the hop, both legs cement mixers. And yet for you it’s just springing simultaneously. On mornings another day, another crumb. Of course— after a flurry, late-rising me sees the snow and here the comparison breaks down— flecked with their prints: a Grauman’s you can fly, which means a few in-sweeps Chinese Theatre of birds. They like the take you from beneath the monsters’ feet, cover of juniper bushes. Although I have past their bald spots and Knicks caps, to never seen them actually fighting, they the safety of a WALK/DON’T WALK sign, or scurry around down there. At night, when of your cross-piece. I step outside to look at Orion, I hear Sparrows seem mainly to be bothered them fleeing in alarm. by themselves. They wrangle at sidewalk Like sparrows, they seem to get only RICHARD BROOKHISER cafés over flâneurs’ leavings (occasionally themselves in trouble. A couple of my a pigeon will muscle in). At other times, doors are long glass panes—why live in IGEONS are the iconic city bird probably related to mating, they engage in the country if you don’t want to look at it? but sparrows come close furious squabbles beneath parked cars or But birds will misjudge them, confused behind. Like pigeons they live not in the curated patches of Pparks but on the sidewalks and streets. Sparrows, and their country soulmates, They are streetwalkers, pedestrians, non-stop maintenance men (their union are charming, lively, numerous, contract specifies no breaks, unless the and transient. fact that they are always foraging makes their day one long break). in the stunted plantings in front of town- perhaps by reflections. I have found a few I am no birder. As far as I know, there houses. So we of little faith imagine World tufts, left as calling cards, and two casual- are English, and all the others. Why they War I, or is it II, as overheard by God. ties. One—a titmouse, not a junco—had are so suited to an urban existence I can- I never see them dead. Once in a while injured himself fatally. The other, a chick- not say. Size must help; they were early you see the splayed remains of a pigeon adee, looked as if he had, but I propped converts to the tiny-house movement. If that has been crushed by a car—never a him up on his stomach; 15 minutes later, I you want to see their houses, follow sparrow corpse. Red-tailed hawks and found him immobile but breathing; 15 their chirping. That is how I discovered, peregrine falcons live in the city, but they minutes after that, he was gone. years ago, that they had colonized the can’t eat all the aged. Can rats (common) One winter of unusually heavy snow, cross-pieces of street lights. Once I or raccoons (not in my neighborhood) the junipers were covered with white started looking up I saw that every tubu- venture up to their nests? Probably their decking, leaving only a few portholes for lar hollow end had an insistent denizen. bones and feathers get swept or hosed ingress and egress. The juncos stayed They also like the metal housings of away, too small to be remarked. inside, as in an igloo. At last the whole retractable awnings; they live over the Birds in the country often hide from thing collapsed, causing I trust only dis- door of my favorite restaurant, just us, nesting and singing in trees, swoop- aster not injury. below the neon sign, watching the aspir- ing for insects at dusk when they leave Sparrows, and their country soulmates, ing models come and go. only dark shapes against the waning sky. are charming, lively, numerous, and tran- Not being picky eaters must also help. In the bare trees of winter those that sient. If they are not expendable, they are The noble ivory-billed woodpecker, don’t go south gather in visible flocks. regularly expended. Who could name called the Lord God bird because that is These sometimes include a sparrow, but them, much less care for them? Be quiet, what you exclaimed when you saw him, they seem like odd birds out, for their greenies; you care about the great pulsing is no more because he ate larvae in the niche is filled by juncos. system of Gaia, not its cogs. We are told trunks of dead tupelo trees. Log the bay- When I was young they were called that a sparrow is worth only one-eighth of ous, no more ivory-bills. Sparrows say, slate-colored juncos. Now, in a migration a penny (“Are not two sparrows sold for To hell with that, I’ll finish your pretzel to dullness, they are called dark-eyed jun- a farthing?”). Elsewhere, the price sinks if you don’t want it. No taste and no cos. (Just so the Baltimore oriole, which to one-tenth of a penny (“Are not five shame means lots of sparrows. recalled a city and a lord, is now the east- sparrows sold for two farthings?”). And They are unafraid, nearly unmindful of ern oriole, which evokes a time zone.) yet, the bird pricer insists, God watches humans. We mean no harm; we are not “Slate-colored” describes their heads, every one (“One of them shall not fall Frenchmen, dreaming of ortolans. But the necks, backs, and wings exactly; their upon the ground without your Father”). sparrows don’t know that, and still they undersides are as white as the snow they But what man could believe that? SPONSORED BY National Review Institute 4 3 backpage--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/4/2017 1:51 PM Page 44 Happy Warrior BY DANIEL FOSTER Varieties of Ridiculous Experience ERE’s a headline that popped up in my social tainment blog, at least for anyone who’d prefer to consume media today: “Leslie Jones condemns Simon & comedy and virtue-signaling separately. But it can get a lot Schuster over Milo Yiannopoulos book deal.” worse. Take the middling celebrity who is our president- H I say sincerely that I’d pay up to five elect. Whole divisions of major press operations are dedi- American dollars for a widget or an app that automatically cated to covering each 140-character ejaculation of his removes headlines of this sort from my life, or at least ren- stream-of-consciousness, public Twitter diary. His tweets ders them something like “I don’t care condemns I don’t aren’t executive orders, or veto signatures, or authoriza- care over I don’t care.” tions for the use of military force. As it happens, this dispatch on the second-least-bad part of On the other hand, they already move markets, shake Lady Ghostbusters and a traveling outrage salesman, respec- embassies, muck up the best-laid plans of the leaders of tively, appeared in the The Onion’s AV Club, the non-satirical coequal branches of government. (though still, allegedly, funny) arts-and-entertainment sec- I used to think the worst social media could do was the tion of that publication, where I was comments section on YouTube. What a once an intern, a feature writer, and, for fool was I. As if the Gutenberg press about twelve seconds, a sports colum- There’s achieved its greatest infamies in printing nist. (Go ahead and Google your heart bawdy limericks. out for the archives of my AV Club sports something This is the reason I’ve reduced my column, “The Mercy Rule.” They actually social-media output to next to nothing purged it from the Internet after they bigger at play, since the election. It occurred to me that nixed it. I mean they practically poured too, this whole social media almost never matter at all. salt on the servers.) And the few times they do matter, they I wrote a Happy Warrior lament some- supernova of the matter for the worst reasons. time back about the fading Onion of my I do think there’s something to the youth. It’s still excellent, of course, but its political that “fake news” stuff, by the way. I under- salutary cynicism and silliness about poli- gives even the stand the criticism made in a hundred dif- tics have given way, increasingly, to lec- ferent ways by friends and colleagues on turey jokes that are cleverer, but not most innocuous the right—that self-appointed arbiters of necessarily better, than your Samantha truth in the mainstream media will equiv- Bees or John Olivers. I think part of that is cultural artifacts ocate on “fake news” until their voices go turnover on the writing staff—the gonzo an ideological hoarse, that the fact-checking (or “fact- Gen-X midwesterners who founded the checking”) doyens will say Alex Jones is paper being replaced by Ivy League timbre. the same as the Wall Street Journal edito- Millennials who sometimes forget that rial board is the same as any unkind word satire that isn’t funny first is really just whining. uttered about the Affordable Care Act. But there’s something bigger at play, too, this whole But “fact-checkers” malfunction in a very particular supernova of the political that gives even the most innocu- fashion—namely by interpreting messy, ambiguous, and ous cultural artifacts an ideological timbre, that turns value-laden fact patterns in just the way that most flatters every public utterance into a manifesto. On the comedy a certain kind of center-left episteme. side, that means every political joke has to have its papers Yet there remains a kind of “fake news” that malfunc- in order and its privileges checked. On the AV Club side, tions in a much simpler way—namely by being knowing- that means inviting readers to form battle lines over every ly and maliciously false. It’s true that lots of uncareful book contract. people on the left will refer to both the economic literature This is one of the ways “fake news” really operates, by on the deleterious effects of a minimum wage and to reporting on epiphenomena as if they were material. I Internet reports that Hillary Clinton sold children into understand that some people must care what Jones thinks sex slavery from a ping-pong bar on Connecticut Avenue about Yiannopoulos (though I can’t imagine what it must in D.C. as “fake news,” but I don’t think that just be like to be someone who does), and I even get that these because they fail to make the relevant distinction we things can have consequences (most likely Yiannopoulos should make, too. will sell a few more books). But when you get down to Warrior’s Note: I wrote my last column, before the elec- brass tacks, what’s been reported is that a middling tion, from the presumption—nay, the assurance—that celebrity had an emotion. Hillary Clinton would win. On that, as on so much else, I To a certain extent, treating the emoting of middling was profoundly wrong. This is me acknowledging that I celebrities as newsworthy becomes self-fulfilling, an don’t know anything about America and likely never did. ostensive act. This is annoying in the context of an enter- So read the above with that in mind. 4 4 | www.nationalreview.com JANUARY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/3/2017 1:10 PM Page 1 0 PLEASE JOIN US FOR NATIONAL REVIEW INSTITUTE’S IDEAS SUMMIT THURSDAY, MARCH 16 and FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2017 MANDARIN ORIENTAL, WASHINGTON, D.C. Featuring THE INAUGURAL WHITTAKER CHAMBERS AWARD DINNER 1955 Society members are invited to join us for a special dinner at Mount Vernon on Friday, March 17 and a private breakfast with NR talent on Saturday, March 18. Space is limited. Formal invitations will be extended to all members registered for the conference. For registration and additional information, please visit www.nrinstitute.org/ideas-summit or call Alexandra Zimmern, National Review Institute, at 212.849.2858. www.nrinstitute.org National Review Institute (NRI) is the sister nonpro(t educational organization of National Review magazine. NRI is a quali(ed 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. EIN#13-3649537 base_new_milliken-mar 22.qxd 12/13/2016 5:10 PM Page 1