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May 28, 2012 $4.99 KLING

ON KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: THE MYTH OF GOP RACISM MANZI

Can Scott Walker Slay the Beast? Christian Schneider on the Recall

$4.99 22

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MAY 28, 2012 | VOLUME LXIV, NO. 10 | www.nationalreview.com

COVER STORY Page 25 The Second Battle Of Wisconsin Wisconsin governor Scott Robert VerBruggen on Girls Walker is fighting for his p. 23 political life, as he faces a June 5 recall election instigated by public-employee BOOKS, ARTS unions. The race is widely regarded as the & MANNERS

second most important American election 38 TAKING BACK THE DEBATE in 2012. By Christian Schneider Rob Long reviews The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the of Ideas, COVER: ROBERTO PARADA by .

ARTICLES 39 GREAT EXPERIMENTS Arnold Kling reviews 16 THE GOP AND THE LATINO VOTE by Sean Trende Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Good news: Republicans can do what they think is right. Business, Politics, and Society, by Jim Manzi. 18 BEYOND EFFICIENCY by Arthur C. Brooks It’s time to make the moral case for free markets. 41 MUSIC: HIS OWN DRUM on the composer 21 MAY DAY WITH OWS by Charles C. W. Cooke Michael Hersch. A report from the revolution. 43 BACK TO TOMORROWLAND 23 HIPSTER HATE by Robert VerBruggen Charles C. W. Cooke on Walt Disney. On the supposed racism of the TV show Girls. 46 FILM: CULT FAVORITE reviews Sound of My Voice. FEATURES 47 IN THE ARENA: DRAFT BOARD 25 THE SECOND BATTLE OF WISCONSIN by Christian Schneider on the NFL draft. Will Governor Scott Walker, and public-union reform, survive a recall election? SECTIONS 30 THE PARTY OF CIVIL RIGHTS by Kevin D. Williamson It has always been the Republicans. 2 Letters to the Editor 4 The Week THE EMPTY PLAYGROUND AND THE 33 by 36 The Long View ...... Rob Long How government policy discourages people from 37 Athwart ...... having children. 44 Poetry ...... Lawrence Dugan 48 Happy Warrior ......

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Don’t Be Cross with Her MAY 28 ISSUE; PRINTED MAY 10 In “Occupy the Senate” (April 16), Kevin D. Williamson EDITOR Richard Lowry claims that Elizabeth Warren “was conspicuous in fail- ing to cross herself” at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast Senior Editors / Jay Nordlinger in Boston, “even though the signum crucis is Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones a common feature of Methodist worship.” But Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts Literary Editor Michael Potemra in my 72 years as a Methodist—during which Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy time I have attended more than 2,500 services— Roving Correspondent Kevin D. Williamson National Correspondent John J. Miller I have never seen a layman make the sign of the Political Reporter Robert Costa cross. Maybe two or three showoff clerics, but never Art Director Luba Kolomytseva Deputy Managing Editors a layman. Nicholas Frankovich / Fred Schwarz My experience has been largely in North Carolina, Robert VerBruggen Research Director Katherine Connell but it also includes three years in D.C., as well as a year Executive Secretary Frances Bronson Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard-Epworth Church. Contributing Editors Elizabeth Warren has serious flaws, but not making Robert H. Bork / Shannen Coffin the sign of the cross is probably not one of them. Ross Douthat / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin Michael Childs / Rob Long / Jim Manzi Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne Via e-mail David B. Rivkin Jr. /

NATIONALREVIEWONLINE Editor-at-Large Off by Half a Year Managing Editor Edward John Craig Columnist In The Week (April 16), The Editors mention that News Editor Daniel Foster Editorial Associates Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her diamond Brian Bolduc / Charles C. W. Cooke jubilee, and claim that in “three more years . . . she Katrina Trinko Technical Services Russell Jenkins will have the historic distinction of reigning longer Web Developer Wendy Weihs than her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.” Web Production Assistant Anthony Boiano This statement is not quite accurate. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and seven Contributors months, from June of 1837 until January of 1901. To Hadley Arkes / Baloo / James Bowman surpass her time on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II— Eliot A. Cohen / Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans who ascended to the throne in February of 1952 Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman when her father, George VI, passed away—would James Gardner / David Gelernter George Gilder / need to serve not until April of 2015, but beyond Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune September of 2015. D. Keith Mano / Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons / Vin Weber J. Gilberto Quezada Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge San Antonio, Texas Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Zofia Baraniak Business Services Alex Batey / Kate Murdock Quiet Authority Elena Reut / Lucy Zepeda Circulation Manager Jason Ng My wife and I noted this comment in Jonah Goldberg’s “Goliath and David” WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com (April 30): “As the folks at Hebrew National say, ‘We answer to a higher author- MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 ity.’” WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 Would that it were so. My wife and I are two goyim (Anglicans, to be precise) ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd who dote on Hebrew National’s beef franks, but we have missed that pleasant Advertising Director Jim Fowler theology on the packages for a number of months. We can’t help but wonder Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett what drove the deletion.

PUBLISHER Jack Fowler Robert J. Powers

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n If Geronimo had a great-great-great-step-granddaughter once removed, she’d look like elizabeth Warren.

n If you have heard about the Obama campaign’s social-media offering “The Life of Julia,” you have likely heard of it via mockery. The online slide show tracks a woman from age 3 to age 67, showing how she benefits from big-government policies and would suffer from GOP cuts (e.g., at age 18, college-bound, she gets a Pell grant; at age 27, her birth control is covered by Obamacare). Julia is a lifelong suckling at the teat of the state, with minimal initiative and commitments: At age 31, she “de - cides to have a child,” evidently by parthenogenesis (no mate is indicated). Ominously for her creators, she is also dull as dirt, a public-service announcement from a Fifties middle-school film strip. In 2008 Obama was triumphantly marketed as too cool for school—author, hoop-shooter, man of many cultures. This time around, if the sheen doesn’t shine, he will have to rely on the dirty ground game of politics as usual. Buckle down.

n vice President Biden may have been saying that he supports same-sex marriage, or he may have been saying that the federal government should treat same-sex couples as married whenever state law does. Obama strategist David Axelrod insisted on the second interpretation—as near as we can tell from his own somewhat confusing statement. The next day Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said more forthrightly that he supports Elizabeth Warren same-sex marriage. The administration as a whole cannot speak clearly because it favors same-sex marriage but evidently re - fundraising events (124) than every elected president since gards open advocacy of it as politically harmful. That’s why a —combined (94). thread of dishonesty runs through everything it says on the sub- ject. By speaking his characteristic gibberish, Biden may have n The Obama administration has settled on “Forward” as its emerged as Obama’s perfect spokesman on marriage. campaign slogan, which has a nice midcentury-totalitarian ring to it. As slogans go, it has a mixed history. It is the motto of n President Obama talks a big game when it comes to money Wisconsin, a lovely if lefty state, and the name of a great Jewish and politics, and he was ostensibly so vexed by the Citizens newspaper once edited by Seth Lipsky. Vorwärts is a Marxist United decision that, complaining about what he would later call newspaper in Germany that once lost a libel case brought by the “corrosive influence of money in politics,” he took the un - Ad olf Hitler. (The paper had claimed he was financed by usu al step of berating the members of the Supreme Court in his and Henry Ford; both claims were false, but one 2010 State of the Union address. Yet nobody has taken more was more plausible than the other.) In some ways, “Forward” advantage of this allegedly corrosive system than he. While run- is the perfect slogan for the Obama administration: Having ning for president in 2008, Obama abandoned his promise to opt brought the country to the edge of fiscal ruination, the president for public funding of his campaign, freeing himself to raise as plainly intends to move forward into the abyss. “Forward” sug- much as possible. That he did, ending up with twice the war gests the inevitable march of capital-H History. In November chest of his opponent, John McCain. Nor is he squeaky clean voters will have a chance to stand athwart it yelling “Stop!” when drawing the line between presidential business and politi- cal campaigning: In late April, the Republican National Com - n The Romney campaign hired Richard Grenell, a former mit tee lodged a complaint with the Government Accountability spokesman for , to speak for it on foreign policy. Office that the president, with his frequent Air Force One trips Some social conservatives complained because Grenell is open- to swing states, seemed to have rediscovered his ardor for pub- ly homosexual, others (including Matthew Franck at NATIONAL lic funding of campaigns. Given such a record, it will be no sur- RevIeW ONLINe) because he has agitated for same-sex marriage. prise to learn that, per a new book on the subject by Brendan J. Liberals, meanwhile, raised eyebrows at his history of personal-

ROMAN GENN Doherty, has already held more reelection ly abusive tweets toward liberal women. He ended up quitting.

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THE WEEK A few principles recommend themselves after the fact. There is general election indicated a childish pride beneath a man wide- and ought to be no test of chastity for campaign aides. The can- ly considered a statesman. The Left will call this election an didate’s views on policy matter far more than an aide’s, espe- instance of right-wingery run amok, but Mourdock, soft-spoken cially when that aide’s work has little to do with the policy in and self-assured, is no bomb thrower. His call to cut spending, question. And those who would speak for candidates should be end government support of ethanol, and cast a more suspicious as judicious on Twitter as elsewhere. eye toward Russia resonated with Indiana voters. We congratu- late him on his victory. n Journalist David Maraniss, whose new book, Barack Obama: The Story, was ex - n From 1986 to 1995, Elizabeth Warren, now a Harvard law cerpted in Vanity Fair, found and in - professor and Democratic senatorial candidate in Massa - terviewed the hitherto unnamed white chusetts, listed herself on a directory of law-school profs as a girl friend Obama met in minority, by which she meant a Native American. Warren when he was 22 (she is Genevieve explained she did it hoping “that I would be invited to a lun- Cook, an Australian). Obama’s account cheon . . . with people who are like I am.” Meaning, academic in Dreams from My Father showed why greasy-pole-climbers looking to game the system? Warren is he and a white woman could not stay at most 1/32 Cherokee: A great-great-great-grandmother was together, though to write it he wove in listed, with what accuracy we do not know, as such on an appli- details of another failed interracial cation for a marriage license in 1894. In the service of social relationship. Smoothing the crooked mobility, institutions should look for smart hires from the timbers of experience into insights is reservation (and the ghetto, and Appalachia). But once the task an old practice of memoirists. More important are is codified into rules and numbers, it becomes liable to lobby- the insights that Cook and other New York friends of Obama had ing and abuse. is a haggard system, of a into his psyche: “coolness,” “wariness,” “guardedness,” “the piece with Warren’s dirigiste blue-model worldview. N.B.: If most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his Warren wins, will she attend next year’s Jefferson/Jackson own identity.” Young Obama was deciding to create himself as a Day dinners? black American; only so could he feel at home, and advance politically. Say what you will about the man, he knew his market. n The April employment numbers, like the March ones, were disappointing. Non-farm payrolls increased by only 115,000, n Regular readers will no doubt have heard the basics about and the unemployment rate dropped only because the labor Texas’s , who hopes to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison force shrank. Ever since the economy fell into a pit, there has in the U.S. Senate, from one of his many fans here. But to been a debate about how much of its trouble is “cyclical” and review: The 41-year-old Houston native was a Princeton debate how much “structural.” The persistence of high unemployment champion, a standout at Harvard Law, and a clerk for Chief is making the debate moot. The longer people stay unemployed, Justice . He advised George W. Bush’s 2000 the more they lose their skills, including the habits of work. campaign on domestic policy and served in his administration in Many of them become demoralized and drop out of the labor both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. force altogether (an especially dangerous development when Once back in Texas, he was an able and busy solicitor general demographic trends are already shrinking our work force). At from 2003 to 2008, playing pivotal roles in Supreme Court deci- that point they become immune to even the best countercyclical sions that kept the word “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, af - policies—which, in any case, we do not have. The recession firmed the individual right to bear arms, and held off an attempt may have officially ended two years ago, but its consequences by the International Court of Justice (and the Bush ad min istra - will be ramifying for years. tion) to meddle with Texas’s legal system. To borrow a phrase from baseball, Cruz is what one might call a five-tool candidate: n As it turns out, terrorists are jerks. Khalid Sheikh Mo - He is excellent on the Constitution, on the economy, on social hammed and his fellow 9/11 conspirators are making a mock- issues, and on foreign policy, and he possesses the intellect and ery of their trial: refusing to answer questions, grandstanding, rhetorical gifts to combine these views into a cogent and com- throwing paper airplanes (nice image, guys), etc. At one point, pelling vision. We urge Texans to vote for Ted Cruz in the May one of the accused partially disrobed while the others were 29 primary, to vote for him in a runoff, should there be one, and flipping through back issues of The Economist. Their lawyer, a to send him to the Senate. blonde American woman named Cheryl Bormann, wore a full- length abaya and suggested that members of the prosecution n After 36 years of representing Indiana in the Senate, Dick dress more modestly. (The courtroom drawings do not suggest Lugar went down to defeat against state treasurer Richard Mour - that the chief prosecutor, Brigadier General Mark Martins, was dock. Lugar has served the country well in his six terms, but the dressed like a tramp.) More than a decade afterwards, the times call for a more consistently conservative voice, and it’s nation still has not quite figured out whether what happened in healthy to remind the brood in Washington that their positions New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, aren’t lifetime appointments. Lugar didn’t help his cause by 2001, was an act of war or a crime spree, and our hybrid making juvenile attacks against Mourdock—e.g., alleging that response to it—drones over Pakistan, but lavish due process the treasurer was playing hooky by sending staff to certain meet- for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—is at best schizophrenic. We ings instead of appearing in person. And Lugar’s refusal to say had better figure it out; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not the during the primary whether he would support Mourdock in the last of his kind.

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THE WEEK n The response of most former officials of the Bush adminis- going to kill him and counted off the time of the ten-second tration to the enduring controversy over its interrogation tech- pours during . Eventually, KSM began to coop- niques has been to hide under their desks. Not Jose Rodriguez. erate. If the situation in the aftermath of 9/11 hadn’t been so The former head of the CIA’s clandestine service has written a urgent, we could have waited for a softer approach to win him book called Hard Measures defending the interrogations and over. But everyone understood the stakes. In his characteristic has taken his blunt plain-spokenness on a media tour. He way, Rodriguez says top government officials put on their “big explains how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would recite passages boy” pants to authorize the CIA program. In contrast to the likes of the Koran in response to questions, and how sleep depriva- of Nancy Pelosi, who now likes to pretend she never heard of tion was crucial to breaking him. The terrorist knew we weren’t the program at the time, Rodriguez has never taken them off. Significant Silences

HANKS to the trials and tribulations of book touring, And this is where I dissent. While all of the complaints T I missed my main shot at opining on Julia, the two- my friends on the right have raised ring true to me, the dimensional darling of the Obama administration. creepiest part of “The Life of Julia” isn’t all the places Still, now that everyone has had his say, more or less, I where the government “sees” Julia, but the long stretch- would like to dissent, somewhat, from the prevailing con- es where it doesn’t. From the age of 23, when it provides servative reaction to Julia. her with “free” birth control, to the age of 42, the state is The common response is to note how Julia is the per- doing almost “nothing” for her save forcing employers to fect symbol of the “cradle-to-grave welfare state.” And pay her as much money as a man would allegedly make yes, like nearly everyone else on the right, I find the whole for the same job. Then, at the age of 42, she gets a small- thing poignantly sad, creepy, and more than a little business loan (which presumably she has to pay back— Orwellian. Julia’s life seems oddly joyless for a woman the outrage!). From then until 65, when she qualifies for who, we are supposed to believe, Medicare—as if that will still exist in has been made happy and fulfilled Obama’s fiscal universe—she is liv- by the president’s sagacity and mu - ing in a veritable desert of govern- ni ficence. ment indifference. Well, happy and fulfilled isn’t quite Ross Douthat is absolutely correct right, is it? There’s remarkably little when he writes in the New York happiness in the story of Julia. “Un - Times that, as a policy matter, “The der President Obama: Julia decides Life of Julia” is “essentially a de - to have a child” reads the Power - fense of existing arrangements no Point version of her life. Not exactly matter their effectiveness or sustain- the sort of birth announcement one ability.” We cannot afford to give breaks out the champagne and cig- Julia the life Obama promises with- ars for. That has all of the humanity out reforming or eliminating the very to it of “The spring wheat harvest in the Ukraine was in things Obama promises. accordance with Year Three of our Five-Year Plan,” or But that is how we conservatives look at this thing. If maybe “It puts the lotion in the basket.” President Obama—who is something like president-for- The vision here is one in which the government keeps Julia’s-life—has his way, future progressives will one day a watchful eye over Julia, a bit like Sauron deep in look back at these long lacunas where poor Julia is left to Mordor. James Scott in his bookSeeing Like a State lays swim the social-Darwinist currents without the govern- out how this is simply what states do. They try to make ment’s looking out for her, and shudder. their populations “legible,” i.e. visible to the state. This As the solicitor general demonstrated in his argu- process has manifested itself in all sorts of fascinating ments before the Supreme Court defending Obamacare, ways, from the widespread imposition of last names the people behind “The Life of Julia” cannot even artic- four centuries ago in Europe to the doling out of Social ulate a “limiting principle” on the scope and depth of JULIA - OF

- Security numbers in the United States today. Like a government’s “help.” In other words, the terrifying part LIFE / woman in a one-act play, Julia crosses the state’s field of of “The Life of Julia” is how it spells out for progressives COM . view, in the Obama campaign’s telling, as she benefits just how much more work needs to be done. from government largesse (without ever seeming to pay for it). —JONAH GOLDBERG BARACKOBAMA . WWW

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THE WEEK n Liberals have been attacking House Budget Committee chair- have known them. This pushback was ultimately enough to man (R., Wis.) as a bad Catholic because his propo - convince the Labor Department to reverse its position, but sals supposedly depart from his church’s social teaching. In the original intention to intervene raises some questions advance of a lecture he was giving at Georgetown, almost 90 nonetheless. First among these is, “Why act?” If there is a cri- members of the faculty wrote a letter purporting to instruct him sis with what is emotively termed “child labor” on America’s in that teaching. In his lecture, Ryan took the criticisms head-on. family-owned farms, then it has somehow managed to escape His work in government, he said, is a good-faith attempt to apply the notice of almost everybody. The average age of a farmer Catholic teachings, not those of , which he has recent- is now 55, and those on the ground explain that it’s much ly criticized. His budget does not “gut” programs that help the more difficult to get people enthused if they come to the pro- poor, as the letter claimed, but rather reforms programs that are fession late. In America we used to leave these decisions up supposed to help the poor but often fail at that task. (Ryan might to parents. have noted that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are not statistically different from those for people who have no insur- ance.) Georgetown has since announced that HHS Secretary n Al Armendariz, a muckety-muck at the Environmental Kathleen Sebelius, who resisted all restrictions on abortion Protection Agency’s Texas operation, has resigned after when she was governor of Kansas and now wishes to force video surfaced of him explaining the EPA’s approach to Catholic institutions to violate their consciences by providing the energy industry: “Like when the Romans conquered insurance coverage for abortion drugs, will be a commencement the villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into little vil- speaker this year. Faithful Catholics may agree or disagree with lages in Turkish towns and they’d find the first five guys Ryan about the best way for a society to help the poor. Sebelius, they saw and crucify them.” Armendariz protested that the on the other hand, does not merely disagree with the Catholic remarks did not reflect EPA practices, and the White Church on how to protect the right to life of unborn children; she House press secretary echoed him. The fact is that the EPA disagrees with the goal itself. Which goes some way toward does attempt to make examples of companies that come explaining why liberal Catholics on the Georgetown faculty, as into its crosshairs. Armendariz’s office accused Range elsewhere, are being taken less and less seriously by their co- Resources, the Texas firm that first showed the potential of religionists. drilling for gas in the Marcellus shale, of polluting ground- water, and put it through nearly two years n Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) is working on his own ver- of legal hell and ghastly expense before sion of the DREAM Act, which deals with young people who a federal court threw out the case as were brought to this country illegally as minors. The previous baseless, with the judge pointedly version of the bill would put them on a path to citizenship if sug gesting that the EPA might want to they went to college or joined the military. Rubio’s bill would have some evidence before bringing merely give them legal status. The original bill is a dress similar actions in the future. Whether rehearsal for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants gener- they want it or not, those who seek more ally. Rubio’s seems designed to be a precedent for an alterna- power for regulatory agencies are asking tive favored by many Republicans: no path to citizenship, just for more crucifixions. legal status. But the of fer of legal status sounds just as bad in most respects as the offer of citizenship, and in some respects worse. Offering legal status to yesterday’s illegal immigrants n In 2008, Candidate Obama said he would not “circumvent and their children is a magnet for tomorrow’s. And we should state laws” permitting the medical use of marijuana, because not want to have a large group of second-class laborers with- his Justice Department would focus on violent crime and ter- out the full rights of Americans. The political logic is also rorism instead. Yet the feds have shut down 200 dispensaries questionable. Will Hispanic voters really be attracted to a party in California alone during the Obama years, provoking com- that says it wants more Hispanics to work in this country, but plaints from Nancy Pelosi (D., San Francisco), as well as Ron not to participate in its politics? Our enthusiasm for Senator Paul and Barney Frank. Medical marijuana is a small-bore Rubio is a matter of record, and we ap preci ate his evident issue that commands the attention only of afflicted (and puta- desire to overcome conservative divisions. The bill as de - tively afflicted) patients and a handful of lawmakers. Voters scribed improves on the original by withholding le gal status regularly support it in state-level referendums, but that does from the minors’ family members. But from the sound of it, not budge the inertia of Washington. Two baby-boomer pres- Rubio should stay at the drawing board. idents have come and gone, without changing matters. Barack Obama, the post-boomer, who admitted to non-medical pot n In April, Leviathan left its natural home in the big city, beat use in his first memoir, seems content to follow in their foot- down the dusty track, and declared the farm at the end of it to steps. be an anachronism. The Department of Labor proposed to prohibit those under 16 from working in the “storing, mar- n One might say that Occupy and the Tea Party are opposites. keting and transporting of farm product raw materials”—i.e., The latter has a particular talent for being labeled as a hate doing almost anything. It also sought to replace 4-H and group despite all evidence to the contrary, and the former a gift Future Farmers of America safety classes with a government- for adding criminal acts to an ever-growing police blotter with- run training course. Furious critics warned that the move out its reputation being tarnished one whit. On May Day, would end the operation of family farms and ranches as we Occupy added a few more “isolated incidents” to its sordid

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THE WEEK tally. In Seattle and San Francisco, members of the move- marking bike lanes, promote “urban gardening,” and lobby for ment’s “Black Bloc” smashed and paint-bombed the windows increased taxes on soda and cigarettes. The principle at work of stores, cars, and a police station; while in New York City, seems to be that everything has something to do with health, and fellow criminals smashed and seized journalists’ cameras and promoting health is the federal government’s job, so the federal sent white powder and threatening letters to three Manhattan- government can do whatever it wants. Dang, this Obamacare is based Wells Fargo branches. But the Occupiers saved the best better than the Commerce Clause! But never mind the Rube for Ohio, in which state five self-described members of Oc cu - Goldberg chain of reasoning, the slush-fund aspect, and even the py Cleveland planned to blow up a bridge in Cuyahoga Valley budget deficit. Why on earth is the federal government steriliz- National Park with C-4 that they had obtained from an FBI ing dogs in Tennessee? Answer: Because it makes the feds look infiltrator. Ed Needham, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street, generous, while the state gets a “free” program. The only point complained that the alleged plot “goes against the very fabric in sending taxpayers’ money on a detour through Washington is of the Occupy Movement.” The Cleveland Five disagreed, par- to obscure whose pockets it comes from and who is responsible ticipating vigorously in their local chapter and arguing that for spending it. their blow would be struck for the “99 percent.” One of the bombers, Anthony Hayne, signed the lease for a warehouse in n If the National Endowment for the Arts is to exist at all, it which a group of Occupy Cleveland protesters lived; another, should support worthy programs such as broadcasts of the Brandon “Scabby” Baxter, had been arrested protesting fore- Metropolitan Opera. But the agency recently announced 2012 closures and was the architect of the “Occupy the Heart Fes ti - grants that will cut support for these traditional high-culture If he didn’t spike the football, President Obama at least twirled it on the ground in the back of the end zone over his killing of Osama bin Laden.

val” event; and a third, Josh Stafford, registered “Occupy” as efforts and refocus on more modern initiatives. These include a his profession on Facebook. Radicals used to decry “the vio- video game based on Thoreau’s writings (no word if it’s single- lence inherent in the system.” It certainly seems to be inherent player); “Power Poetry,” an application that encourages in their movements. teenagers to write poems via text message; and an “augmented reality” computer game called “HERadventure” featuring a n Soon after the Trayvon Martin killing garnered national black science-fiction heroine. An NEA representative explained headlines, a variety of activists advocated vigilante justice. In that “as a federal agency . . . it’s imperative that we assume a particular, filmmaker Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was leadership role and help move the field forward.” We would pre- George Zimmerman’s address, and the New Black Panther fer “upward,” if we trusted the bureaucracy to know which way Party offered a $10,000 “dead or alive” bounty. Zimmerman that is. himself remains unharmed—and yet around the country, though the media have been a little shy about reporting them, n If he didn’t spike the football, President Obama at least a variety of incidents reveal that the urge toward private retri- twirled it on the ground in the back of the end zone over his bution remains strong. In Gainesville, Fla., a group of five to killing of Osama bin Laden. He deserves praise for ordering eight black men allegedly jumped a white man who was walk- the raid, but he couldn’t help overplaying his hand. In an ing home and beat him while yelling, “Trayvon.” In Oak Park, Obama reelection ad, emphasized the political Ill., two black teenagers reportedly attacked a white teenager; downside for the president had the raid gone wrong, as if that police say one of the perpetrators claimed he was upset by the were a more important consideration than the fate of the Martin case. In Toledo, Ohio, a 78-year-old white man was ap - SEALs on the mission. In a bit of cheap point-scoring, the ad par ent ly beaten by a group of black youths who said, “This is questioned whether Romney would have ordered the hit. The for Trayvon” during the assault. In Mobile, Ala., an ongoing, president capped the week of none-too-subtle messaging with racially charged neighborhood dispute culminated in the brutal a trip to Afghanistan on the anniversary of the terror leader’s beating of Matthew Owens, who is white, by a large group of death. He signed a security agreement with the Afghans that is black men, one of whom reportedly announced, “Now that’s an important step toward a long-term relationship with them, justice for Trayvon” as he was leaving. The legal system while giving a speech to that sounded as if victory is should dispense to all these thugs a lesson in what justice real- already at hand. But the rapidity of our drawdown risks the real ly means. gains we’ve made on the ground. In the case of the war, the president would be well advised to focus on achieving success n The presidential campaign’s dog days continued with a report before boasting about it. from House Republicans that Nashville’s health department, which received a $7.5 million Obamacare grant, spent part of its n Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu has just mounted a political budget on free spaying and neutering of pets. The rationale: coup that greatly strengthens his position as Israeli prime min- Neutering would reduce the population of stray dogs, which ister. He sprang his first surprise by calling for a general elec- deter people from jogging, and would thereby improve their tion to be held in September, though one was not due until next health. Other localities used Obamacare money to post signs year. Polls have been showing that his Likud party would gain

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seats. One good trick deserves another, however, and behind as well, Mayor Johnson is undoubtedly the most popular the scenes, Netanyahu had struck a deal to take an opposition Conservative in the country, and there is much muttering that party, Kadima, into the governing coalition. In the old days he ought to be prime minister. Coalition government is looking Ariel Sharon had split Kadima away from Likud, and it makes ever more like a poisoned chalice. for national unity that they come together again. Kadima’s leader, and now deputy prime minister, is Shaul Mofaz, Iranian n Pity poor Portugal. It hit its peak five centuries ago and ever born, and a level-headed military man. The proposed general since has grown increasingly marginal in Europe, geographi- election will now not take place. A number of domestic re - cally and politically. Once a great sea power, it clung to a few forms are in the air, but more obviously this is a government of its colonies well into the 20th century, but now even those much better placed to carry the country with whatever decision are gone. And while EU membership provided an initial boost, emerges concerning Iran’s nuclear program. membership in the euro and the single market is becoming more of a straitjacket than a lifeline. Meanwhile those old n On one side: Chen Guangcheng, the charismatic, blind, self- African colonies are dripping with oil wealth. The result, taught lawyer and protester of forced abortions; his family and writes the British journalist Allister Heath: “Five hundred friends; a network of dissidents, in China and abroad. On the years after Vasco de Gama first landed in Mozambique, im - other: the officials of Shandong Province who put him in jail, pov er ished Portuguese are turning up in droves, begging for then house arrest; the goons who threatened and beat him and work permits. . . . 100,000 Portuguese have moved to Angola, his loved ones if they tried to move; behind them, the might of four times more than the traffic in the opposite direction.” the largest despotism in history. Last month Chen managed to (Angola has about twice Portugal’s population.) From pros- scale the wall of his house, breaking his foot in the process, and perous Western economy to supplier of cheap labor to the make his way to the American embassy in Beijing, on the eve Third World: They did always say the EU would transform the of a visit from Secretaries Clinton and Geithner. The embassy country. let Chen out, under a deal whereby he could live in China unmolested; then Chen feared the deal would not be honored; n Delegates to the convention of the United Methodist a apparently will let him study overseas (New York Church recently voted down two proposals to divest from sev- University is offering Chen a berth). What awaits his helpers is eral American companies that supply the Israeli military. A repression, what the Chinese, with grim understatement, call few weeks earlier, speaking for the Episcopal Church, its pre- “settling of accounts” after “the autumn harvest.” The petti- siding bishop said the church does not endorse divestment ness and cruelty of the Chinese state is matched only by the even from Israel itself. Can it be that the leadership of the bravery of those who resist it. Lincoln said it long ago: “They mainline Prot es t ant churches is finally catching up with the are the two principles that have stood face to face from the faithful in the pews? Most American Christians support Israel. beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one For decades, church elites have talked over them, blithely is the common right of humanity and the other is the divine mouthing faculty-club rhetoric about apartheid and waving right of kings.” the flag of the DBS (divestment, boycott, sanctions) move- ment against the only reliable democracy in the Middle East. n British prime minister David Cameron is suffering a bad But the persistence of the quiet majority appears to be paying case of midterm blues. His poll numbers have never been off. lower. He and his circle of friends and advisers are widely mocked as “posh boys.” The government is pursuing left-wing n “A Rose in the Desert” was how Vogue described the economic and social policies designed to placate its coalition “glamorous, young, and very chic” Asma Assad in a fawning partners from the minority Liberal Democrats, while at profile of the Syrian dictator’s wife last March. The timing of the same time bound to drive Conservative backbenchers the piece proved embarrassing for the magazine, as it coin- to protest. Local elections cided with the beginning of Bashar Assad’s ongoing slaughter have thrown up condign pun- of Syrians, which has so far claimed the lives of well over ishment, as is only to be ex - 9,000 men, women, and children. An initially defensive Vogue pected. Out of about 5,000 (a senior editor insisted the piece was “a balanced view of the con tested council seats, the first lady”) later scrubbed the 3,200-word article from its web- Tories lost more than 400, site without explanation. In an interview with NPR last about a third of those they pre- month, the author of the piece, Joan Juliet Buck, mused that in viously held. Num bers for the retrospect she wished a different title had been chosen for the Liberal Democrats are even piece and that it was “horrifying to have been near people like more dire. Making these huge that.” Judging from the piece, any horror Ms. Buck felt at the gains, the opposition Labour time was evidently overcome in admiration for Asma’s “long- party claims to be recovering limbed beauty,” her “Syrian-silk Louboutin tote,” and her pro- the electorate’s trust. Against fessed commitment to engaging Syrian children in “active AP / the trend, Boris Johnson was citizenship.” Appropriately, Vogue’s attempt to quietly erase reelected mayor of London, its shameful paean to the Assads has been thwarted by an PA WIRE / but this may alarm Cameron employee of the Syrian state-run news agency who has as much as console him. Out - reprinted the article on a fan-page titled “In Bashar Al-Assad

DAN KITWOOD spoken, consistent, and witty We TRUST.”

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THE WEEK n Al-Qaeda spokesman Azzam al-Amriki, a.k.a. Adam Pearlman of Riverside County, Calif., was terribly upset about MSNBC’s firing of Keith Olbermann. (Keith Olbermann, if you have forgotten, is a sports commentator who used to shout incoherently about politics on MSNBC.) “I used to think that MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit,” he wrote, “but it has lately fired two of the most famous journalists—Keith Olbermann and Octavia Nasr the Lebanese.” In the case of Octavia Nasr, Mr. Pearlman has confused MSNBC and CNN, which is admittedly easy to do, but otherwise he shows that he is every bit as good a media critic as he is a political analyst. Could somebody get this guy a talk show? Or a drone?

n In the Old West, or at least in old Westerns, bad guys used to fire their Colt .45s at an enemy’s feet while snarling, “Dance, pardner!” In today’s West, the guns and the dances are more sophisticated—at least in Clark Fork, Idaho, where a man said to have been using drugs (which seems entirely plau- sible) pointed an AR-15 semiautomatic at another man and ordered him to moonwalk. Not quite a Deliverance-level ordeal, perhaps, but scary nonetheless. The Bonner County Daily Bee’s conscientious reporter explains: “Late singer Michael Jackson popularized the moonwalk dance move, although a slew of other entertainers—from Cab Calloway François Hollande and Ronnie Hawkins to David Bowie and Dick Van Dyke— have been credited for using a variation of the move.” The much as King Canute ordered the waves. (The difference is perp told police he was using an Airsoft pellet gun, but folks Canute got the joke.) in Idaho know the difference, so he faced a stiff sentence until When originally elected, Sarkozy proposed what he called his victim asked that charges be conditionally dismissed (he rupture, meaning reform of the centralized powers of the state so remains jailed for violating his probation). Should have tried traditional in France. Nothing of the kind then took place. In the a dance-craze defense. campaign for reelection, this habitually competitive and ambi- tious man found himself unable to claim convincing credit for n Dinosaurs get a bad rap. Their very name connotes obsoles- achievements. Outbursts of spleen made him seem to be react- cence and fustiness; in abbreviated form, it is a pejorative term ing to the programs of rivals rather than promoting his own. for Democrats who can do math. Now British scientists are Close on his heels was Marine Le Pen of the National Front, and blaming dinosaurs for global warming—not just today, by hav- he could not make up his mind whether to condemn her or to ing had the poor judgment to rot into a rich brew of hydrocar- steal her thunder for the sake of obtaining her party’s votes. bons, but in their own era, through the humbler route of Amid mutual recriminations, the Right is now split between flatulence, which filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Sarkozy’s conservative party and the National Front. Add Still, the poor extinct beasts deserve some sympathy, because together the National Front and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s outright Chinese researchers have found that they were plagued by large, Bolshevik party, and the extremes of Right and Left have a third parasitic insects—or as the Register, a British technology web- of the votes cast. site, puts it, “Dinosaurs were DRAINED of blood by GIGAN- Poor and insincere as Sarkozy’s campaign was, in reality the TIC HORROR FLEAS.” That excuses a little anti-social Euro-crisis left him without a chance. No present head of gov- behavior now and then, doesn’t it? ernment can hope to win an election in a Europe irrevocably tied to the single currency and the political structure erected in Brussels to enforce it. In the gathering climate of economic and EUROPE political disaster, Sarkozy is the eleventh in a succession of France Turns Left officeholders in one nation after another to go down in electoral defeat. RANçOIS HOLLANDE has become the newly elected presi- Germany sets the terms for Europe, and François Hollande dent of France more by luck than by any quality he might now has to discover whether Chancellor Angela Merkel, the F possess. Almost anonymous, he has no ministerial expe- architect of austerity, is willing to permit a forlorn attempt at rience. His platform nonetheless raised expectations mightily socialist-induced growth. She had let it be known that she want- that he would be able to find employment and entitlements ed the like-minded Sarkozy to win. But then she herself has where Nicolas Sarkozy had failed to do so. Voters could con- already lost regional elections, and until and unless something AP clude that there are jobs for all, and that everyone richer than changes with Brussels and the euro, she too is likely to join the / they would pay more taxes. France, Hollande likes to promise, lengthening list of rejected European officeholders. European is not doomed to austerity, because he still believes that social- elites appear to be willing to give up almost anything except for

ism is the magic formula for growth, and can be ordered up, their precious, disastrous euro. MICHEL SPINGLER

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Obama—a sizable difference, to be sure, but much less than the 24 points between Obama’s share of Latino and white voters overall. In 2004 the pattern was even more pro- nounced. Among voters earning less than $15,000 a year, John Kerry won 58 percent of Latinos and 57 percent of whites—a nearly even split. Among those with annual incomes over $100,000, his share of both the Latino vote and the white vote dropped—to 50 and 37 per- cent, respectively. In other words, Latino voters vote a lot more like white voters when you control for income. The difference is that there are more poor Latino voters than poor white voters, which creates the appear- ance of a larger divide between the groups when one looks only at the aggregated numbers. But as the character of the Latino population changes from immigrant to second- and third-generation American, it should grow wealthier, and the income The GOP and the Latino Vote gap between Latinos and whites should Good news: Republicans can do what they think is right close. This should, in turn, help to close the gap in voting patterns. To be sure, a BY SEAN TRENDE gap of ten or fifteen percentage points between white and Latino voters is noth- ing to sneeze at. But neither does it spell UndITS routinely claim that the First, Latino support for democratic ruin for the Republicans. GOP is electorally doomed un - policies on immigration is overstated. In Second, we should question whether less it competes more effec - 2008, only 46 percent of Latino voters told the Latino population will really grow as P tively for the Latino vote. The exit pollsters that illegal immigration was fast as many suggest. Consider this: The La tino population is growing so quickly, either “very” or “extremely” important to United States would still be 46 percent analysts tell us, that the United States will them and that they voted democratic. In white if it absorbed every man, woman, become a minority-majority country by other words, a majority of self-described and child from Mexico. 2040 (or 2050; estimates vary), meaning Latinos either thought that illegal immi- Of course, it will never do that. Every that the GOP could not possibly win an gration was fairly unimportant or thought wave of immigration to our country—the election while receiving only a third of the that it was important and voted Republi - Scotch-Irish in the late 18th century, the Latino vote and 10 percent of the black can. Irish and Germans in the mid-19th, and vote. Indeed, polls of Latino voters this cycle the great influx of southern and eastern Almost invariably, this sort of analysis have consistently shown that for them— European immigrants that washed my ends with a declaration that the Repub - as for other voters—the most important great-grandparents ashore at the turn of lican party must abandon its supposed issue is jobs. Immigration rates low on the the last century—subsided almost as opposition to immigration reform, as well list of issues they care about. suddenly as it started. as its support for voter-Id measures and So why don’t Republicans perform bet- At some point, most of the people in a Arizona-style immigration laws, and es - ter with Latino voters? The answer is sim- given country who want to come to the sentially adopt some version of the ple: income. In 2008, Barack Obama won United States have come, and most of democratic position on these and a host 73 percent of Latino voters earning less those who’d rather stay put have stayed of other issues. than $15,000 a year, and 57 percent of put. As they did in the European countries Much of that analysis is flawed. For the similarly situated white voters. (Although that sent immigrants to America over the GOP to be competitive, it is neither nec- many Latinos are white, since “Latino” past 200 years, standards of living in essary nor sufficient that it change its represents an ethnicity rather than a race, Mexico are rising. Mexicans increasingly position on immigration policies. There for simplicity’s sake I’ll use “white” as enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, a fact that are several reasons for this. shorthand for “non-Hispanic white.”) greatly reduces their incentive to move Among voters making $100,000 to here. Mr. Trende is senior elections analyst for Real Clear $150,000 a year, 59 percent of Latinos So it should come as no great surprise

Politics. and 42 percent of whites went for that, according to the Pew Research ROMAN GENN

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center, immigration to this country from could have lost every latino voter in the Mexico largely stopped in the past few country in 2010 and still won a slight plu- years, and last year there was probably rality of the vote for congress. Beyond more out-migration to Mexico than immi- Arizona offers a case in point. There gration from Mexico. part of this is doubt- Governor embraced a contro- Efficiency less due to the weak economy. But it is versial immigration law that many sug- also the continuation of a trend over the gested would alienate the state’s latino It’s time to make the moral case past few decades. The rate of growth of the population. And it probably did. In 2008, for free markets latino-immigrant population has declined John Mccain won over 40 percent of the substantially since peaking in the 1980s; state’s latino vote. Brewer won 28 per- BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS the Mexican-born population grew by cent in 2010. But Brewer ran ahead of almost 200 percent in the 1980s, but in the Mccain overall, because she won over 60 couplE of years ago I wrote a first decade of the 21st century that figure percent of the state’s white population. In book called “The Battle: How had fallen to roughly 25 percent. other words, while the state’s policies the Fight Between Free En - As latino immigration to the u.S. might have alienated latino voters, they A ter prise and Big Government drops off, the latino population will were popular among white voters, who Will Shape America’s Future.” I made continue to grow. But it will increasingly shifted toward the Gop. what I thought was a very clever obser- consist of second- and third-generation As the first two points suggest, in the vation: that America is a “70 percent Americans. These voters will likely be long term the disparity between the white nation” when it comes to free enterprise. not just wealthier but more assimilated. and the latino vote will become less of an In virtually every survey on the matter, In a re cent pew poll, 62 percent of first- issue as the category “latino” loses its about seven in ten Americans say they generation latinos described their ethnici- salience. Again, there is historical prece- believe free enterprise beats all other eco- ty by their country of origin, and only 8 dent for this; as recently as 1986, the nom- nomic systems, even during recessions. percent described themselves as Amer - ination of Justice Scalia to the Supreme In response to this, several even clev- ican. Among third-generation latinos, court was seen as a bid to shore up the erer reviewers pointed out an incon - only 28 percent self-described by country “Italian vote.” But very few analysts saw venient truth: Americans may vow a of ancestry, while 48 percent self-described such motives at work in Justice Alito’s monogamous love for free enterprise, but as American. only 34 percent of foreign- nomination in 2005, in large part because they have a huge fidelity problem. Tart up born latinos consider themselves “a typi- the Italian vote as such had disappeared. a little social democracy and parade it cal American,” compared with 66 percent Eventually, so will the “latino vote.” front of most Americans, and they’re all of third- and later-generation latinos. until then, in the short to medium term, hands. So the first and second points fit togeth- any loss of latino support that Re- For example, in a July 2009 cBS er hand in glove. latino immigration will pub licans experience because of their News/New York Times poll, 64 percent of likely drop off in the coming decades, and stances on immigration could well be Americans said they thought the govern- increasingly the latino population will be offset by an increase in their share of the ment should provide health insurance for born in the u.S.A. That, in turn, means the white vote. everyone. Similarly, a Feb ru ary 2011 latino population will be increasingly of course, none of this goes to the ques- NBc News/Wall Street Journal poll assimilated, increasingly Americanized, tion of what policies Republicans ought asked a thousand Amer i cans whether cut- and increasingly likely to vote Repub - to adopt. I myself am somewhat partial ting Social Security was an acceptable lican. to more liberal immigration laws. But way to reduce the deficit. To this ques- The third and final point is that we tend we should always bear in mind that, in a tion, 77 percent of respondents said that it to observe more heavily racialized voting large, diverse country, every move to gain was either mostly unacceptable or totally in states with large minority populations. one member of a political coalition usual- unacceptable. And indeed, as the Democratic party has ly alienates another member. This is a paradox, but not a mystery. seen its base shift to non-white voters, Republicans (and Democrats), then, on one hand, citizens say they love free we’ve seen white voters increasingly vote should build their immigration policies enterprise. on the other hand, they sure Republican. not out of concern for a future coalition wouldn’t mind a new government-funded In 1982—the first year for readily that likely will never materialize. They rec center and maybe a few free pre - avail able exit-poll data—congressional should, instead, simply do what they scription drugs, and politicians eagerly Democrats won 54 percent of the white think is right. oblige. vote, a figure roughly the same as their Most people hardly have the time to share of the overall national vote. In 2010, consider the inconsistency between these they won only 38 percent of the white two sentiments. people leading lives vote, while their share of the overall filled with work, church socials, and soc- national vote was nine points higher. cer practices don’t have much opportu - If we assume a nearly all-white elec- torate prior to 1952, that probably repre- Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise sents the worst performance for any major Institute and author of the new book The Road to party among white voters in congression- Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free al elections since 1822. Republicans “I lied to you about having a lot of money.” Enterprise (Basic Books).

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nity to contemplate the potential damage that each new government act—each tiny Paid Advertisement encroachment on their freedom—could cause. This is America’s road to serfdom. No Baby Boomers Now Fear death squads or goose-stepping thugs, just one little compromise after another to the free-enterprise system. Each one Memory Loss More Than Cancer sounds sort of appealing, and no single Mayo Clinic guidelines in medically acclaimed brain health book may help prevent one is enough to bring down the system. But add them all up, and here we are, on mental decline; reveals natural discovery shown to ‘help fight memory loss’ our way to becoming Greece. SPOKANE, WASHINGTON – Don’t believe it? Consider: In 1938, When do normal, everyday memory problems become a cause for concern? when my own organization, the Amer i - That question crosses the minds of can Enterprise Institute, was founded to millions of Americans 50 and older. fight the growth of government, govern- According to a recent MetLife/Harris survey, ment spending at all levels (federal, state, baby boomers are more concerned with losing and local) amounted to about 15 percent their cognitive abilities than they are about of GDP. By 1980 it was 30 percent. To- cancer, heart disease or stroke. That’s why one of America’s leading day it is 36 percent. According to Con- brain experts, Joshua Reynolds, is offering gressional Budget Office projections, by adults 50-plus a free supply of the world’s first 2038 it will be 50 percent. clinically validated memory pill along with a Most Americans know something is free copy of his blockbuster, 20/20 Brainpower: wrong—which is why 81 percent are dis- 20 Days to a Quicker, Calmer, Sharper Mind. His top-selling book contains vital Millions of adults are suffering with progressive mental decline, a mind- satisfied with the way the nation is being robbing form of memory loss that can rip apart families and lives. Research governed, according to a 2011 Gallup information and preventive measures to help ward off mental decline. During a lifetime of has identified effective corrective measures that can be used by anyone. poll. But they rarely notice the discrepan- research, Reynolds discovered a common yet remembering things in front of hundreds of Procera AVH’s feelings of natural energy. cy between their free-enterprise values easily corrected brain condition that, if left people. It was embarrassing. Since taking Roger J. flies commercial jets for a and the statism they are getting. untreated, could have alarming conse- Procera AVH, I feel like my old self again!” major US airline. “I find Procera AVH gives What’s the solution? How do we help quences for every adult. “To a tired, sluggish mind, Procera me greater mental energy throughout the them understand that unless they actively “If you’re over the age of 45, and have AVH is like splashing ice-cold water on your flight.” choose free enterprise, they will ultimate- mental fatigue, sluggishness, poor concen- face,” says Reynolds, “some users say it’slike tration, and forgetfulness,” says Reynolds, putting on a pair of prescription glasses for Get a FREE Bonus Bottle... ly get big government? Some people say “you may be low on neurotransmitters, a vital the very first time. Everything becomes and a FREE Book,Too! they need to hear a more forceful argu- brain fuel. 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I will never stop taking it.” clinically shown to quickly improve enterprise makes us richer than statism. brains: acetyl-l-carnitine, huperzine, and Reynolds’ formula helps improve memory, focus, concentration and energy!And Master the numbers, make some snazzy vinpocetine. memory, mental clarity, focus, concentra- it comes with a 90-day satisfaction guarantee Power Point charts, show Americans the tion, even helps promote a sense of calm and so you can experience the long-term watertight evidence on fiscal consolida- Miracle Memory Molecules tranquility. results risk-free, too! tion, and the light bulbs will finally go on. Using precise amounts and ratios of these But that strategy doesn’t work. Data- “three miracle memory molecules,” Reynolds’ Reverses Memory Loss Free Rapid Detox Formula team created Procera AVH, the world’s f irst By 10 – 15 Years! for First 500 Callers! laden material arguments for free enter- clinically validated memory pill. 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This is a mistake and a missed oppor- There are several legitimate objections descended from immigrants, ask your- tunity. A great deal of research shows that to this plan. In America today, the top self: Why did they come to America? To all people demand a system that is moral- 5 percent of earners pay 59 percent of find a fairer system of forced income ly legitimate, not just efficient. Research federal income taxes while earning 35 redistribution? Unlikely. Rather, they in fields from neuroscience to social psy- percent of the income. If this is not fair came in search of a system that would chology has shown that moral arguments yet, when will it be? When the top 5 per- reward their hard work, innovation, and are more powerful and persuasive, and cent pay 75 percent? One hundred per- ambition. are processed by the brain more quickly, cent? In addition, one might bridle at the Those who dispute the president’s than material arguments. That, in a nut- president’s use of the expression “helping argument for redistributive fairness need shell, is why your bulletproof argument profession” to exclude business, as if to understand that the issue at hand is not about the national debt will always lose creating private-sector jobs didn’t help a disagreement over the tax code. It is a when pitted against a an anecdote about a others. clash of visions about America. Is the family living in a dumpster because their But the biggest objection should be to United States, while imperfect, still an welfare benefits were taken away. the president’s implicit definition of fair- opportunity society where merit is re - So here’s the question: What makes ness. The Left today believes in redis­- warded? Or is our system simply gamed people regard an economic system as tributive­fairness, in which economic to heap unearned riches on the 1 percent? moral? rewards are made more nearly equal, and If the former, then the president’s defi- One answer comes from University of it considers income inequality to be nition of fairness is wrong and should be social psychologist Jon a than inherently unfair. An alternative defini- vigorously rebutted—not with arguments Haidt, author of the best-selling book tion—a superior one, in my view—is about the efficiency of capitalism, but The­Righteous­Mind:­Why­Good­People meritocratic­fairness, in which reward is with arguments about the fairness of the Are­Divided­by­Politics­and­Re­li­gion. attached to merit. This second definition free-enterprise system. And conserva- Through extensive surveys and sophisti- defines forced equality as unfair because, tives should work for an even better cated statistical analysis, Haidt has found as Aristotle pointed out, the worst form opportunity society and even fairer— that the perceived moral legitimacy of a of inequality is to try to make unequal more moral—policies. person or system depends in no small part things equal. They should denounce the policies of on an issue conservatives generally try to Which definition do most Americans the current welfare state not just as ineffi- steer clear of: fairness. believe is correct? Social surveys again cient, but as unfair and immoral. A tax Indeed, fairness seems like a sure loser provide evidence of the answer. code riddled with special deals for crony for conservatives, which is why they tend For example, the 2006 World Values corporations is unfair. It is unfair to bail to avoid the idea. Some dismiss it as hope - Survey, which polled a large sample of out companies and individuals who made lessly subjective, even childish. Even Americans, asked respondents to consid- bad decisions and took foolish risks. Saint Milton (Friedman) argued that er this scenario: “Imagine two secre- There is nothing fair about the fact that “‘fairness’ is not an objectively deter- taries, of the same age, doing practically bureaucrats get better pay and benefits mined concept. . . . ‘Fair ness,’ like the same job. One finds out that the other than private-sector workers. Most unfair ‘needs,’ is in the eye of the beholder.” earns considerably more than she does. of all is the theft we are perpetrating President Obama is so sure that con- The better paid secretary, however, is on future generations with our ruinous servatives will scatter at the first mention quicker, more efficient and more reliable national debt. of fairness that he brandishes the term at her job. In your opinion, is it fair or not Still, the biggest challenge is not to like a magic talisman. fair that one secretary is paid more than beat the hard political Left on the issue of In his 2012 State of the Union address, the other?” To this question, 89 percent fairness. It is to resolve the Santa-state he used the term “fair” or “fairness” answered that it was fair to pay the better paradox, which finds citizens claiming to seven times. He used it 14 times in his secretary more, while 11 percent said it want small, restrained government but Osawatomie, Kansas, speech a month was unfair. welcoming virtually any public spending earlier. This result is typical. For the over- on offer. We must somehow persuade our Here is an example, from an address at whelming majority of Americans, fair- friends and neighbors to resist the allure the University of Michigan in Jan uary of ness means rewarding merit, not spread ing of welfare-state growth. Moral argu- this year. “When it comes to paying our the wealth around. This is consistent, of ments about fairness are the only chance fair share, I believe we should follow the course, with America’s founding ideals. we have to meet this daunting challenge. Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 In his first inaugural address, Thomas As the early self-help icon Dale Car ne - million a year . . . then you should pay a Jefferson laid out his vision of “a wise gie instructed his readers in How­to­Win tax rate of at least 30 percent. On the and frugal government, which shall re - Friends­and­Influence­People, one must other hand, if you decide to go into a less strain men from injuring one another, “appeal to the nobler motives” of others. lucrative profession, if you decide to shall leave them otherwise free to regu- Conservatives, unfortunately, have done become a teacher, . . . if you decide to go late their own pursuits of industry and just the opposite. into public service, if you decide to go improvement, and shall not take from the Privately, conservatives are guided by into a helping profession, if you make mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” lofty ideals on economic questions. less than $250,000 a year—which 98 per- Most of our ancestors weren’t as elo- While they generally accept the need for cent of Americans do—then your taxes quent as Jefferson, but their actions spoke a safety net, they celebrate capitalism shouldn’t go up.” even louder than his words. If you are because they believe that succeeding on

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merit, being able to rise out of poverty through hard work and virtue, and having CRITICAL PRAISE FOR control over one’s life are essential to May Day JAY NORDLINGER’S happiness and fulfillment. But in public debate, they often fall back on capital- With OWS ism’s superiority to oth er systems solely in terms of productivity and economic A report from the revolution efficiency. This dogged reliance on material argu- BY CHARLES C. W. COOKE ments is a gift to statists. It allows them to paint free-enterprise advocates as selfish FTeR a long winter’s absence, and motivated only by mo ney. Average Occupy Wall Street came back Americans are thus faced with two lousy to town for May Day and, choices in the current policy debates: the A along with the usual parapher- moral Left versus the materialistic Right. nalia of progressive public protest, The public, or a substantial part of it, brought with it a new offering: college. hears a heartfelt redistributionist argu- Intrigued by the prospect of returning to ment and knows it leads to the type of school, but initially aiming only casually failed public policies that are all around to observe, I sauntered onto the campus us today. But sometimes it feels like the in midtown Manhattan’s Madison Square alternative comes from amoral conser- Park to take a closer look. vatives who were raised by wolves and Ten minutes after it was supposed to The New, Acclaimed History of the don’t understand basic decency. have opened, the “Free University,” as it Nobel Peace Prize, ‘the Most Famous No wonder the general public is para- had been christened, was still in the and Controversial Prize in the World’ lyzed into inaction, even when dissatis- process of setting up. It was a forlorn faction with government is at an all-time sight. Lonely red balloons flew at various         high. There just doesn’t seem to be a points around the water fountains, and     (( '.&) (# good alternative to the “statist quo,” and bored policemen sat on benches looking #' ()! '($&,/,$&! #&.' +& ((##$($#!,($($&&# as a result the country is slipping toward bemused and coordinating their patrols $$ $&(%& -# ('!)&(' a system that few people actually like. with the parks department. It was raining. )(!'$# "%$&(#(% !$'$% ! Most Americans, for instance, seem to In its infancy, the scene resembled a ram- &!( $#$#(#()&$0%1 # intuitively understand the urgent need for shackle village fête in a sleepy english "$&#( "'/ entitlement reform. But do you seriously village, of the sort that Bertie Wooster expect Grandma to sit idly by and let might have popped into in hopes of find-         free-marketeers fiddle with her Medicare ing a Guess Your Weight competition and .   & !! #(($)(%&$*$ # #& # #'% &( $#!' #( # so her great-grandkids can get a slightly some free samples of strawberry jam. "$* #$$ / better mortgage rate? Not a chance—at Dotted around the park’s treelined four least, not without a moral reason (and square blocks were “professors” without    good policies to back it up). students, waiting expectantly under .$&! #& '## # Will an appeal to the nobler motives hand-drawn signs that read “Open- #+ '($)&) / work? Will voters agree to stop stealing Access Teach-In,” “Self-altering Demo - from their children, even at significant cra tizing Space,” and “Free Yoga.” They National Review, 215 Lexington Avenue, NY, NY 10016 #"$% '$   ,$'( ' cost to themselves? The truth is, we don’t were ready at a moment’s notice to teach    ' %% # # #! # & #!)  really know. What we do know is that the subjects such as “Jacobinism and Black #!$' ($(! %,"#( $  # ($ old appeals do not work—and have never Jacobinism” and “The Fiction of Men " worked. Conservatives fist-bump about and Women,” but the market wasn’t play- &'' winning elections, but meanwhile Amer - ing ball. Students, it appears, will be no (, ((  ica is on a path to be ing a country whose earlier to the revolution than they are to " ! citizens work six months of every year their classes, and the commuters cutting %$# just to pay for a government they don’t through the area evidently had more PAYMENT METHOD: want or need. Securing the future of the pressing concerns than attending the Check enclosed (payable to National Review) nation is worth more to each of us than “Protest Songwriting Workshop.” Bill my MasterCard Visa a few short-term government benefits. On the park’s north side, next to the To get off the path to social democracy statue of David Glasgow Farragut and in Acct. No.

or long-term austerity, we must rededi- the shadow of the gold-topped New York Expir. Date cate ourselves to what our Founders Life Building, a circle had formed. I wan- struggled to give us and what the culture dered over and stood on its edge. Signature of free enterprise has brought us. In so “Naomi Klein went to the Heartland       do ing, we will bequeath it to future gen- Institute’s International Conference on      erations. ,” the speaker was say-

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“common good,” of course.) She was nice—more Tom Friedman than Musso - lini—but she ultimately couldn’t help betraying that she considers her perspec- tive to be more important than mine, and both traditional liberty and the to be outdated in these modern times. By the time I left my friend and her cabal of Five Year Planners, a few of the other classes had hit their stride. I had a vague desire to attend the “Workers’ Rights and Civil Rights” class—I could have sworn that I’d heard someone at the registration desk arguing that the Thirteenth Amendment applied to elec- tric can openers or automatic doors or something—but, while searching for it, I stumbled instead into a seminar con- cerned with the very nature of teaching. The symposium—titled “Horizontal Pedagogy”—was absolutely buzzing with those evidently unhappy with the Madison Square Park, New York City, May 1, 2012 angle at which they were being taught. ing, “which must have been an unpleas- “A lot of people live in the suburbs,” The class was primarily concerned with ant experience.” (The assembled group the speaker proposed. “They have a few discussing “alternative power dynamics, laughed heartily at this.) “And what she cars and they live in houses that they sources of motivation, and the move- discovered was that the conservatives get probably bought in the 1980s. We need ments of knowledge,” and was hosted it. She wrote about it in The Nation.” He to morally exclude those who don’t rec- by two devastatingly earnest students in turned to his notes somewhat frantically, ognize the problem, and let them know their early twenties whose commitment and read aloud. “Here’s what she said that they have no place in a future Amer- to ensuring that nobody took an “unfair” they think”: ica.” role in the conversation was sufficient to When the meeting adjourned, I waved render them skeptical even of their own Climate change is a Trojan horse de - down a friendly-looking girl and asked responsibilities as facilitators. signed to abolish capitalism and replace her if I could pose a few questions. She In fact, they were skeptical of the value it with some kind of eco-socialism. As assented, in a string of jargon that includ- of teaching anyone anything at all. They conference speaker Larry Bell succinct- ed the words “interface,” “discourse,” reminded me of something that hadn’t ly puts it in his new book Climate of and “growth” among sundry other terms really occurred to me the last time I wan- Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and in a combination that was very probably dered into an Occupy franchise—namely much to do with shackling capitalism unique in the history of the English lan- that progressives of this stripe do not just and transforming the American way of guage. wish to have others pay for their educa- life in the interests of global wealth “I understand that you think these peo- tion, but wish in parallel essentially to redistribution.” ple in the suburbs can’t continue their reduce teaching to therapy. lifestyles. Where will they live if not In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure This passage elicited some impressively there?” I asked. how I’d expected the conversation to go. vigorous nodding. “Yes!” affirmed the “Where will they live? In a commu - I’d perhaps anticipated hearing stories speaker, in a voice more preacher than pro- nity!” she replied, flashing me a smile about brilliant-but-poor children who fessor, “the Right gets it. They spread mis- whose ingredients were delight and pity were unable to attend the universities of information about the science. . . . They in equal measure. their choice, or being told that America know that it means the end of how we’ve “They do live in a community,” I said. was falling behind in the world because been living. And they’ll do anything to “A different community. One that we’d student debt was crippling its finest keep the system as it is.” The group shared all design together.” minds. But those taking part seemed cap- world-weary, knowing smiles that con - “Forgive me,” I said. “But you just tivated by a single, quite extraordinary gratulated one another on their insight. described America. This is a community question, best distilled as, “Is the fact “So,” he continued. “What can we do?” that we all designed together. How would that people possess differing levels of There followed a brief conversation yours differ?” knowledge an unacceptable form of in - about the vital importance of bequeathing After a bit more back-and-forth and an equality?” “the scientific truth” to the recalcitrant awful lot more newspeak, we established This was not, as I’d initially assumed, American public and a hasty and unani- that the community for Americans who a means of arguing that the uneducated mous agreement that everybody “needs don’t wish to be “morally excluded” are effectively disenfranchised, but in - to stop driving cars.” would be of her own design. (For the stead the overture to a truly asinine

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debate about whether the very act of one person’s imparting knowledge to another  is inherently hierarchical—and, thus, Hipster undesirable. One attendee even described     the “traditional” means of conveying in- Hate formation to another as “intellectual vio- We have remained profoundly lence.” (In doing so, he took the old “all On the supposed racism of the influential for over five decades. sex is rape” canard and dressed it in a TV show Girls Why? Because of the greatness gown and mortarboard.) The consensus, of our founder? Because of the it seemed, was that education would BY ROBERT VERBRUGGEN talent of our exceptional writers? work better if we just all shared our expe- riences with one another and valued each n the pilot episode of HBO’s raunchy Because of our determination to person’s contribution equally. A self- new comedy Girls, the main char - articulate conservative principles described “radical teacher” added that acter’s parents announce that they and expose liberal platitudes? each person should be free to absorb the I will no longer be giving their 24-year- facts that best fit his or her “narrative,” old daughter an allowance. If the young ‘Yes’ to all. But also true is this: without outside interference from any- Hannah, a college graduate, wants to Our historic influence is due in thing like the truth. This approach would keep living in her fashionable, expensive large part to the many good put us on the path not only to the estab- neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, lishment of 2+2=5 as a verity, but to the she’ll need to leave her publishing intern- subscribers and friends who labeling of anyone as a bigot who had the ship for a paying job. have generously and freely temerity to disagree. She whines a lot. She visits a muscular contributed to National Review To her credit, one girl—a student in her unemployed guy she knows and has sex annually to support and sustain early twenties—kept pushing back. “I with him. (“You modern career women, our operations, and to those want to go to college to learn things,” she I know what you like,” he informs her thoughtful few who have said. “I want to be taught by people who as they’re getting started, but the experi- remembered National Review in know more than me. That’s the point!” ence is in fact quite awkward.) She drinks their wills, estates, and trusts. But she was alone, at least among the opium tea. She and her three girlfriends vocal. “Who are you to decide who knows talk about life and texting and student more than someone else? Who are you loans. One of those friends is dating a Please consider this: When you to decide what is right and wrong?” came guy who’s too nice to her. Another has a are gone, will National Review the replies. “I’m a physics major,” she British accent and a remarkable sense of . . . remain? If not, then who will answered. “My teacher does know more style. fight for those principles that you than me.” So, Girls is basically a hipster Sex and wished dearly to bequeath to the City. Which is to say that it’s pretty But the others weren’t interested in this your country, your family, and fact—or any facts, really. To them, the obnoxious. And also to say that it’s very, future generations? truth was just a construct of the ruling very white. class, to be kept or dispensed with by It has never been any secret that the virtue of its utility. They would undoubt- hipster fad among educated young Can you trust National Review? edly profit from this girl’s embrace of adults—characterized by alternative Yes. Please do so when planning external reality; instead they rhetorically fashion, apartments in trendy neighbor- your estate. Keep us standing crucified her for her apostasy and hoods, liberal politics, love of indepen- athwart history, yelling Stop. changed the subject. This attitude was all dent music and film, and above all an the more strange, given that it was utterly obsession with irony—does not, shall we By remembering National Review at odds with the assured rhetoric at the say, look like America. The whiteness climate-change roundtable—at which 15 of hipsterdom is so blinding that when in your will, estate, or trust, you or so students were convinced enough satirist Christian Lander made a will leave a legacy of continued that they were in possession of the ab - poking fun at various elements of the hip- support for those conservative solute “scientific truth” to advocate ster lifestyle, he called it “Stuff White causes and beliefs that will be as remaking the country according to their People Like.” The neighborhoods of vital to future generations as they own design. Brooklyn near where the Girls live, are to ours. Please contact: But perhaps such inconsistencies Ground Zero of the hipster epidemic, should not be surprising, because the contain some Census tracts that are heav- Jim Kilbridge Occupiers were on May Day what they ily black or Hispanic—but the famously have fundamentally always been: a dif- hipster portions of these neighborhoods National Review fuse, inchoate, and rag-tag bunch of pro- are overwhelmingly white, often above 215 Lexington Avenue gressives standing around in a park, each 85 percent, with a few tracts above 95 New York, NY 10016 wondering out loud what America might percent. When I went through photos of 212-679-7330 ext. 2826 look like if everyone else agreed with the “top 10 hipster bands” as chosen them. earlier this year by College magazine, the

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only non-white face I found was that of are normally keen to defend artistic ex - include her—a movie that no “diversity” Algernon Quashie, a guitarist for the pression, even at its most vile—pounce advocate would dare suggest should have Miniature Tigers, who’s black. on a TV show’s creators for choosing a included her. Precious is a movie about a In turn, Girls doesn’t feature any non- cast that matches their vision. black teenager in Harlem who suffers white major characters. Thus the Great A few Girls critics, including the black horrifying abuse. It didn’t need a smart- Girls Racism Panic. writer who exists, tried their hand at a sta- mouthed white girl for comic relief. You may not have noticed it if you tistical argument, noting that Brooklyn The Left was not amused. After Arfin don’t regularly read overall is only about a third white—say- tweeted an incoherent apology, deleted website or check snarky liberal , but ing, in effect, that Girls wasn’t represent- the joke, and then deleted the apology a debate has stretched on for weeks about ing reality, but distorting it. But this as well, blogger Elspeth Reeve of The whether it’s okay to have Stuff White argument is at best daft, and at worst Atlantic informed her readers that Arfin People Like types played by white people disingenuous: People do not live and was “learning there’s no such thing as on TV. The Times even ran a “Room for interact with a random sample of people ironic racism,” and highlighted some Debate” symposium with seven entries from their city or borough; they live and other jokes Arfin had written that touched on the topic. (Don’t worry; the contribu- interact with the people they get to know on race in some way. (For example, she tors were conspicuously diverse.) The in various setting—settings that are often once suggested “taking Obama to the leading charge of the Girls critics is that segregated, such as neighborhoods, jobs, White House” as a euphemism for defe- the show somehow has a responsibility and university alumni communities. In - cating.) Reeve offered no explanation as to “represent” an assortment of races deed, there are many whites, many blacks, to why this particular humorist was not and ethnicities. “I exist,” a black writer and many Hispanics in Brooklyn—but in allowed to use edgy racial material, when reminded the show’s creator via a post on large part, each group is tucked away in these types of jokes are nearly ubiquitous the blog Racialicious. its own bubble, as the briefest glance at among American comedians of all colors But if taken seriously, this constraint the Census data reveals. and creeds. puts art into tension with reality and Girls writer Lesley Arfin fought back Seven excruciating days after Reeve’s places serious restrictions on freedom of at first, tweeting a joke that was both post, the fury reached a peak with Lindy expression. Yes, there is racial diversity more insightful and funnier than anything West’s “A Complete Guide to Hipster in modern American life, but there re- on the show: “What really bothered me Racism,” an article on Jezebel, a website mains a great deal of segregation as well. most about Precious was that there was that bills itself as being about “celebrity, Some writers may choose to depict life as no representation of ME.” She perfectly sex, fashion for women.” In this brief being more diverse than it really is—and captured the absurdity of the idea that against humor we are informed, more or of course that’s fine. Others may choose every story should represent everyone, less, that where race is concerned, there is to tell stories that naturally lend them- not to mention the self-centeredness of no such thing as a joke. For example, it is selves to a diverse cast. But there’s noth- the demand that every work of art include racist to introduce someone as “my black ing wrong with telling a story about a someone who looks like you, and made friend,” even if you say it with a smile on group of people who share the same race, her observation cut by choosing an ex - your face and know that your black friend either, and it is odd to see liberals—who treme example of a movie that did not won’t be offended. The most amusing section of West’s article pertained to racism of the “tee- hee, aren’t I adorable?” variety. This is when white girly-girls find humor in pre- tending to be gangsters. We learn it’s racist for a white woman to perform a quiet acoustic cover of a violent rap song, and for “suburban white girls” to flash gang signs. It was also racist when the cute white actress from the sitcom New Girl, Zooey Deschanel, retweeted this joke from the cute white pop singer Sara Bareilles: “Home from tour and first: New Girl episodes I missed. #thuglife.” “Thug life” is a gangsta-rap theme popularized by Tupac Shakur. If the Left expects Americans to take its crusade against modern racism seri- ously, it will have to find better examples of bias than the predominantly white cast of Girls and some harmless jokes from adorable pop stars. And just as important,

HBO young liberals could benefit from light- The girls of HBO’s Girls ening the hell up.

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The Second Battle of Wisconsin Will Governor Scott Walker, and public-union reform, survive a recall election?

BY CHRISTIAN SCHNEIDER

Manitowoc, Wis. AST year, thousands of people passed by the front Scott Walker, very much alive, is standing in front of a bright doors of Madison’s Bartell community theater on their orange, $250,000 snowplow belonging to the Manitowoc way to the Wisconsin capitol to protest the state’s County Highway Department. Walker is beginning a tour of L government-employee-compensation reforms. More the state in which he will tout the $1 billion that Wisconsin recently, the theater lowered the curtain on its latest sold-out governments have saved as a result of his hard-won reforms. hit—a play written in the “Fakespearean” style entitled “The The governor, 44, is fighting for his political life, as he faces a Lamentable Tragedie of Scott Walker, Govnour of Wisconsin.” June 5 recall election instigated by public-employee unions. The dénouement of the play (which was originally titled The race is widely regarded as the second most important “F*** You, Scott Walker”) occurs when Walker escapes the American election in 2012. mob by climbing to the top of the capitol, only to be thrown to Yet you couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the election by his death while the fool yells “Sic semper tyrannis!” The play’s observing the size of the crowd in the spacious garage that author, Doug Reed, claims he is a “committed pacifist,” but houses the snowplow. As Walker speaks at a small brown podi- says he had to stay true to the form; as he notes, “the title char- um, there are about 14 people on hand, four of whom appear to acters in Shakespeare’s tragedies never survive to the end of be under the age of ten. Walker’s campaign team has to keep the play.” public attendance at press events extremely limited; in every On this late Monday morning in April, the real Governor corner of the state, protesters lurk, waiting for their chance to scream an obscenity, on camera, at the governor they have Mr. Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. labeled a “dictator.”

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Prior to Walker’s reforms, state and local-government em - alker is often compared to Wisconsin congressman ployees paid nothing or very little toward their pensions and Paul ryan—the two are young stars of the national paid only slightly more than 6 percent of their health-care pre- W republican party, and Walker just happened to grow miums. according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers alliance, the up “right down the road” from ryan. Yet their styles are very average Wisconsin government employee earned $71,000 in different. total compensation in 2011. That same year, average total ryan unceasingly warns of a coming fiscal apocalypse, mak- compensation for employees of the state’s largest school dis- ing his listeners want to grab a flashlight and canned goods trict, Public Schools, reached $101,091. Walker and ride out the federal-debt armageddon in their basements. helped close the state’s $3.6 billion deficit by requiring public Walker, on the other hand, speaks with subdued precision. He employees to pay 5 percent of their salaries toward their pen- has spent a full year explaining how his reforms are working for sions. He also required state employees to pay 12.6 percent of Wisconsin; for instance, property taxes have declined for the their health-insurance premiums—less than half the average first time in twelve years. School districts whose contracts pre- both in the private sector and for federal-government employ- viously forced them to buy expensive health insurance from the ees. unions’ own health-care company are saving tens of millions of But the most controversial part of Walker’s plan was its dollars, because Walker’s law opened up their contracts to com- sharp curtailing of union power, and in particular collective petitive bidding. large-scale teacher layoffs are occurring only bargaining. Prior to Walker’s law, all government workers in the few districts that chose not to implement Walker’s plan were required to join unions and pay dues, and unions were requiring increased health-care and pension contributions. able to negotiate all conditions of employment—wages, bene- Wisconsin’s history created a substantial headwind against fits, work rules. Walker made union membership optional, Walker. It is the state that birthed “Fighting Bob” la Follette and eliminated the automatic deduction of union dues, and ended the Progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century. It is collective bargaining for everything but wages. Today, the where the union aFSCMe was first incorporated, and in 1959 it unions are still able to negotiate wages for all employees became the first state to allow collective bargaining by govern- (including non-members), but governments may decide for ment employees. Madison’s infamous Vietnam-era protests The capitol was occupied by the ‘great hive’ of public employees, who banged drums, blew vuvuzelas, and camped on the marble floors. Throughout the mayhem, Scott Walker stood firm.

themselves how to handle work rules and other forms of com- included the bombing of a University of Wisconsin building, an pensation, and employees may decide for themselves whether attack that killed a young researcher. to give money to the unions. More recently, on the other hand, Wisconsin has been a President Barack Obama immediately jumped into the fray, labora tory for conservative reforms; Milwaukee boasts the calling Walker’s plan an “assault” on unions. Yet not only do nation’s oldest private-school voucher program, and in the early the overwhelming majority of federal employees not bargain 1990s republican governor Tommy Thompson implemented a collectively, but Obama himself unilaterally imposed a pay welfare-reform program that became the model for national wel- freeze on civilian federal workers just months before he fare reform a few years later. But when Walker was elected, it accused Walker of stripping workers of their collective- had been twelve years since the state had elected a republican bargaining “rights.” governor and 26 years since it voted for a republican presiden- These reforms propelled the state into chaos for a good tial candidate. (George W. Bush lost by a scant 0.22 percentage portion of 2011. The capitol was occupied by, to steal a term points in 2000 and 0.48 percentage points in 2004.) from Mark Twain, the “great hive” of public employees, Walker’s opponent in the recall election is Milwaukee mayor who banged drums, blew vuvuzelas, and camped on the Tom Barrett, whom he defeated in the 2010 gubernatorial race marble floors. Fourteen Democratic senators fled the state by six percentage points. In the months leading up to the May 8 for weeks to block a vote on the bill; Walker was the victim Democratic primary, Barrett and former Dane County executive of a prank call from someone pretending to be David koch, kathleen Falk were locked in an internecine struggle to demon- one of the billionaire koch brothers. (Walker’s willingness strate their obeisance to organized labor. Falk, who has now lost to take the call provided the left with a prominent talking three statewide races, was the first to announce she was chal- point: that Walker was beholden to corporate america and lenging Walker. While meeting with the state’s largest public- that the koch brothers were secretly writing Walker’s legis- employee unions in January, Falk pledged to veto any future lation.) a government-employee union issued a press release budget that didn’t fully restore the unions’ collective-bargaining comparing Walker to “adolph Hilter.” No one batted an eye power. She was quickly endorsed by all the major unions, which when a camel was seen walking around the frozen capitol ended up spending an estimated $5 million in television ads on square. her behalf. Throughout the mayhem, Walker stood firm. Walker says he “always thought she would be bought and paid

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for by the unions,” and that Falk’s pledge “just proved it.” Falk’s through Walker’s reforms. Brown Deer’s finance director, Emily union deal appeared to be too much for Democratic voters Koczela, follows up by saying Walker’s law “turned us loose in to stomach, and Barrett pulled away in the final weeks of the terms of talking about every dollar with regard to children.” primary. Following the school event, Walker retreats briefly to his cam- Barrett, unlike Falk, had trouble connecting with the unions, a paign’s “victory center” in Wauwatosa, a city just west of failure that forced him to lurch leftward in an attempt to earn Milwaukee, where volunteers are making nonstop phone calls their imprimatur. As mayor of Milwaukee, Barrett actually used on his behalf. In a corner office, Walker discusses why he, of all many of Walker’s reforms to balance his own budget; the the governors in the nation making changes to government- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the city came out $10 worker benefits, is the one facing a recall election. He mentions million ahead thanks to the governor’s plan. A Web video sent Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and California as states in out to AFSCME supporters early in the campaign blasted Barrett which Democrats are actually encouraging substantial changes for supporting passage of Walker’s bill, and a number of his to government benefits, leaving Wisconsin Democrats out of early campaign appearances were picketed by union workers. touch with the national party. Yet according to Walker, Barrett’s tangles with public unions In criticizing Walker’s plan, Wisconsin Democrats have tar- shouldn’t lull voters into thinking he’s a moderate on labor issues. geted the rollback of collective bargaining, saying their opposi- “I don’t think anybody should mistakenly think that means that tion to the plan “isn’t about the money.” Of course, it is about Tom Barrett is any less extreme on this,” Walker says, adding, little else. Walker believes it was the end of compulsory union “He was just more politically prudent to not let it publicly. membership and automatic dues deductions more than the To me, it’s pretty clear that while he had enough political sense end of collective bargaining in itself that prompted the unions’ not to publicly let out that he was doing this private pledge, the crusade against him. reality is that he’ll be just as bought and paid for.” “I think in the end . . . they would have sold their members out Among likely voters, Walker and Barrett are in a virtual tie, in a heartbeat for double the pension contributions or anything with Walker leading 48 percent to 47 percent, according to a sur- else if they only could have gotten their hands on those auto- In criticizing Walker’s plan, Wisconsin Democrats have targeted the rollback of collective bargaining, saying their opposition to the plan ‘isn’t about the money.’ Of course, it is about little else.

vey conducted by Marquette University Law School in early matic dues deductions,” says Walker. “That’s what makes a dif- May. Yet Walker has a substantial lead among independents— ference for them, because that’s what they care about. They 47 percent to 35 percent—and 60 percent of independents think don’t care about the workers, they don’t care about collective Walker’s changes will make the state better off in the long run. bargaining, or pensions. . . . I mean, they do, but I don’t think it was really about those things—it was about the raw power and money they felt was at risk here because we gave people free- N the hour drive south from Manitowoc to the Mil - dom to choose.” waukee suburb of Brown Deer, Walker tilts his head Walker shifts topics, ripping his opponents for their lack of a O back and nods off for ten minutes. He claims his hectic plan to balance the state budget. During the primary, both Barrett schedule demands such catnaps; he usually sets the alarm on his and Falk refused to say how they would have balanced the bud- BlackBerry for ten minutes, and always wakes up 30 seconds get, and failed to offer any hints as to how they would fund the before the alarm goes off. It is clear that he considers this a kind repeal of Walker’s collective-bargaining law, something they of skill. both vowed to do. Walker boasts that he was able to increase When Walker reaches Brown Deer, he receives a brief tour of funding for Medicaid by $1.2 billion without raising taxes, Dean Elementary School before he sits down to read to a class thanks to his benefit changes. of fourth-graders. After finishing the book, he takes a few ques- “Either they don’t have a plan, or the real answer is, they tions from the students before moving on to a press event in the would raise taxes,” Walker says. “Two people who are part of a library. (Sample question: “How tall are you?” Answer: Six movement that claims that they want to undo what we did in this feet.) past year can’t tell us what they would do instead.” One of the At his press event in the library, Walker moderates a roundtable primary critiques of Walker is that he didn’t campaign on rolling of local-government officials, who take turns praising his back collective bargaining in 2010; ironically, it appears the reforms. Racine County executive Jim Ladwig explains how people trying to replace him are just as unwilling to reveal the unions had for years blocked the use of prisoners to mow the details of their biggest reform plans before voters put them in county’s medians, so mowing occurred only once a year; now the power. grass stays cut. Brown Deer schools superintendent Deb Kerr Walker asserts that his opponents want to take Wisconsin says that her district is now able to build a new $22 million down the disastrous path that Illinois has traveled over the past school, 68 percent of which will be funded by savings realized year. In January of 2011, Illinois governor Pat Quinn raised

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taxes in the state by $7 billion; yet, according to City Journal’s than the police could investigate them. GOP representative Steven Malanga, Illinois’s lavish government-employee bene- Robin Vos had a beer dumped on his head. For much of the peri- fits sucked $5.7 billion from the state budget, a number that was od of the demonstrations, legislators had to escape the capitol only $2.7 billion as recently as 2008. Even with the tax hikes, the through an underground tunnel, then get on a bus that took them state was left with a $9 billion deficit. Consequently, Quinn has to their cars. One night the bus was spotted and protesters rocked proposed to reduce Medicaid eligibility and coverage and drop it back and forth as the legislators held on inside. the rates Medicaid pays to physicians. But it is Walker’s young lieutenant governor, Rebecca Klee - “[In Illinois] they’re now shutting down state facilities, laying fisch, who has drawn the worst of the Left’s vulgarisms. The off tons of public employees, and cutting Medicaid, while we comely redhead is like catnip to angry protesters; they simply added money to Medicaid and avoided massive layoffs,” Walker can’t help themselves. One liberal Madison radio talk-show host says. He points out that Illinois’s credit rating was recently low- ridiculed Kleefisch’s recent bout with colon cancer and suggest- ered, and is now the worst in the country; that Wisconsin’s pen- ed she got her job by performing sex acts. Following a recent sion system is fully funded, while Illinois’s is less than half Walker speech, a protester turned to Kleefisch’s husband and funded; and that Illinois’s unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, screamed, “Your wife is a f***ing whore!” while Wisconsin’s is 6.8 percent. Despite all the vitriol, the Wisconsin imbroglio is earning Sipping from a plastic water bottle, Walker says the entire Walker new fans around the country. When the Republican pres- recall effort is “intellectually dishonest.” He notes a recent inter- idential candidates campaigned in Wisconsin in early April, each view given to Mother Jones by Graeme Zielinski, spokesman one tried to top the others in gushing support for the governor. for the Democratic party in Wisconsin, in which Zielinski admit- At an April speech before the Illinois Policy Institute, a woman ted that “collective bargaining is not moving people”; he urged invoked a recent movie on education reform in asking Walker Democrats instead to focus on Walker’s “war on women” and an whether he was the “Superman” she was waiting for. Walker ongoing investigation of Walker’s former county-executive demurred, saying that he was partial to Batman. office. Walker says he handles the pressure of newfound fame by The investigation, which began in May of 2010, has netted hopping on his 2003 Harley-Davidson Road King and hitting several criminal charges against former Walker aides. Walker’s the open road. He says the bike gives him “freedom”; his Harley former deputy chief of staff, Timothy Russell, has been charged dealer is trying to get him to install a cell-phone communications with stealing $21,000 in contributions meant for Operation system, but he bristles at the notion. “Why would I want that?” Freedom, a picnic that honors veterans. Russell’s domestic part- he says. “The whole reason I ride my motorcycle is for people to ner, Brian Pierick, has been charged with two felony counts of not be able to get me on my phone.” child enticement. Two former Walker aides have been charged He also enjoys the egalitarianism of the Harley culture. He with doing campaign work on government time. The investiga- says that when he rides, he might have the CEO of a major com- tion is ongoing, and Democrats are hoping a charge comes down pany on one side and a janitor on the other, “and nobody knows, before the election that ties Walker to criminal wrongdoing. nor do they care.” Walker says he doesn’t “think they know anything” about Walker says he learned political fortitude by studying the tra- what’s being investigated. He notes that it was his office that ini- vails of . He has read numerous Reagan biogra- tially asked for the probe. phies, and lists Dinesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader as his favorite. “[Reagan] is a guy who was obviously well liked, but who, early HEn asked about the vituperative attacks by union on, faced tremendous challenges, major pushback, had a lot of activists he has endured over the past year, Walker people, including people in his own party, telling him to back W shrugs. He is disappointed that his two high-school- off,” he says. “But he knew who he was, he knew where he aged sons have been targeted on Facebook; he said someone wanted to go, and he knew how he was going to get there, and began screaming at his septuagenarian mother in a grocery store he didn’t back off.” last year. “There’s gotta be more wrong with your life than Walker says that if he wins on June 5, the state will begin to whether you agree with me or not” to do something like that, he come together. He doesn’t believe a recall victory will give him says. (Early in his campaign, his sons appeared in one of his tele- a new mandate; it will merely reaffirm the mandate he believes vision ads; they looked as if they had been forced to participate he was given on the day he was elected in 2010. via court order.) “If Tom Barrett wins, it doesn’t end the ‘civil war,’ it just One Sunday last november, Walker and his sons were raking opens it all up again,” he says. Barrett, he argues, is “going to go leaves in their front yard when a car on the street honked at them. to extreme lengths to try to repeal the reforms we have passed, Walker looked over to see the car’s window roll down, a hand which means you’re going to have this debate all over again. If jut out, and a middle finger extend. Three minutes later, Walker people just want to move on, the easiest way to do that is to see heard another honk, and saw two different cars on his street. This me elected.” time, two arms emerged from the cars’ windows, and both When I hand the Lamentable Tragedie playbill to Walker, he flashed him a thumbs-up signal before driving off. While he says chuckles. When informed of his gruesome theatrical demise, he that should have comforted him, he adds, “I think it just means rolls his eyes. “How pleasant,” he says. But he does not mini- I should start raking at night.” mize the national implications of the recall election—the serious Walker isn’t alone; for more than a year, it has been open sea- effects it could have on states that are attempting to rein in exces- son on Republican legislators in Wisconsin. E-mails threatening sive employee pay and benefits. To those states, a Walker loss on death and physical harm poured into legislative offices faster June 5 would be the unkindest cut of all.

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Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and The Party of Lyndon Baines Johnson. supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but Civil Rights it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats. hE depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights It has always been the Republicans reform must be digested in some detail to be properly T appreciated. in the house, he did not represent a particu- larly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON intensely segregationist than the rest of the south by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but his magazine has long specialized in debunking perni- Johnson was practically antebellum in his views. Never mind cious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now pro- civil rights or voting rights: in Congress, Johnson had consis- vided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but tently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black T worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the Americans from lynching. As a leader in the senate, Johnson did utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere major U.s. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before send- protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed ing it to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights colleague strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon 1957 act, and Johnson’s senate Democrats again staged a record- of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Fred - setting filibuster. in both cases, the “master of the senate” peti- er ick Douglass to susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression tioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been that he had taken the teeth out of the legisla- allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstand- tion. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These ing affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do got to do something about this—we’ve got to give them a little well to demolish this myth nonetheless. something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make Even if the Republicans’ rise in the south had happened sud- a difference.” denly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no compet- Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. ing explanation (there is), racism—or, more precisely, white Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amend - southern resentment over the political successes of the civil- ment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth rights movement—would be an implausible explanation for the Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main rea- those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the son either had to act was that President Wilson, the personifica- 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was tion of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats integrated federal facilities. (“if the colored people made a of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Re - Klansmen from senator Robert Byrd to Justice hugo Black held construction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and prominent positions in the Democratic party—and President Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that ever shown at the White house. is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonethe- Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights less connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. reform as the “nigger bill.” so what happened in 1964 to change Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless oppo- Democrats’ minds? in fact, nothing. sition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights REsiDENT JOhNsON was nothing if not shrewd, and he Mr. Williamson is a roving correspondent for NATIONAL REVIEW and the knew something that very few popular political commen- author of The Dependency Agenda, which will be published by Encounter P tators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the Books on May 29. “solid south” in the late 1930s—at the same time as they were

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picking up votes from northern blacks. The Civil War and the with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political mono- was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned right- poly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New ward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly country, including much of the South—Johnson owed his elec- trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ tion to the house to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of dispropor - connections—but there was a conservative backlash against it, tionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the otherwise. Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tenden- cy in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call heRe is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the T delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam). The tiniest Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign. But in the main cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indi- backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of rect. The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination 1937. Republicans would pick up 81 house seats in the 1938 of , a western libertarian who had never been election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but be so with the acquisition of its first Republican. elect- who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of ed a Republican house member in 1934, as did Missouri, while federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts Tennessee’s first Republican house member, elected in 1918, but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were was joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert the Republican party, though marginal, began to take hold in the Bork. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern South—but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of representative, William e. Miller, who had been the co-author John Tower. of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Re - At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell publican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed, wrongly, that the spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amend- “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the presi- ments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black dent for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginal- programs where most needed, particularly where they could ization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other was a problem that would be healed by time, economic develop- planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights ment, and organic social change rather than through a second statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such addi- political confrontation between North and South. (As late as tional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and edu- vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, cation, as well as of equal rights under law.”) The conventional creed, national origin or sex.” And Goldwater’s fellow Repub - Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward licans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward. and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportuni- Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or ties guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog the old elites—the two groups that tended to hold the most retro- whistle. grade beliefs on race—but among the emerging southern middle Of course there were racists in the Republican party. There class, a fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (harvard obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their University Press, 2006). Which is to say: The Republican rise in heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of most important political question and tracked the rise of middle- those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti- goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative record, Communism. the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote The South had been in effect a Third World country within the speeches—none of them suggests a party-wide Republican United States, and that changed with the post-war economic about-face on civil rights. boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the whites, however—and here’s the surprise—even those in areas North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who

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crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread century partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of rely- represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish ing upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enact- wing of the Republican party over what remained of the America ed in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency. The Republican Great Society was pure politics. Johnson’s War on Poverty was party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for mon- and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment sters to slay, both abroad—in the form of the and rate was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had its satellites—and at home, in the form of the growing welfare long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded. By the the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest elderly—even though they were, then as now, the most affluent current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti- demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of Communism—especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting above-average wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health, international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home— Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party. Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely was not his alone. to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: political heirs. In the context of the rest of his program, Segregationist Democrat , running as an inde- Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an pendent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make only five states, while Republican Richard Nixon, who had clients of them. helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried. F the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral plus Texas. Mindful of the long-term realignment already under I results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about- way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.” Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post- elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presi- The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were dential elections would more or less occupy the South like replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a Sherman. Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida. 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South—but not that slow. HE Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by T trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the coun- loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s terculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incor- reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the attorney poration of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these con- German people. I would say this—I believe this would be agreed cerns—especially welfare and crime—are “dog whistles” or to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are the name of George H. W. Bush. engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical majority of the southern congressional delegation—and they had southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred Jim Crow. years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the It was not the Civil War but the that shaped mid - past, but his strategy endures.

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motivation for having children dramatically shrinks (although it does not vanish: many elderly people still get a lot of help from The Empty their kids). One might therefore expect that the introduction and expansion of old-age programs would lead people to have fewer children. One might further expect people to marry later Playground and in life, and for fewer people to marry at all, as they envision lives with fewer, or no, children. the fact that children are not only future contributors to old- The Welfare State age programs but beneficiaries of them does not force any mod- ification to this analysis. the childless still free-ride. Or think How government policy discourages people about it this way: Imagine a society where from time immemo- from having children rial each woman has had two children. For one unusual gener- ation, each woman has three children, and then the society reverts to the historical norm of two. the temporary increase in BY RAMESH PONNURU fertility would improve the finances of that society’s old-age programs, and this effect would never be undone. the ratio of debate broke out recently in the blogs about the contributors to beneficiaries, that is, would temporarily rise ethics of having children. the occasion was the pub- above what it had originally been and then fall back to its origi - lication of a remarkably silly book arguing that nal level but not below it. A reproduction is immoral. One blogger argued in Nor does the fact that governments finance the education of response that people have an obligation to create new life as an children by taxing everyone, including the childless, affect the expression of gratitude for the life they have been given. analysis. educational expenses are only part of the economic another denied the existence of any such obligation but argued cost of raising children, including the cost of forgone income. that having children is an important source of happiness for and everyone got an education paid for by someone else, most people. In this fact he finds sufficient justification for whether his parents or taxpayers generally. Parents are not free- having children, and for governments to help people afford to riding on the childless. have them. even if entitlements reduce the number of children, it may the discussion, while interesting, would have been unintelli- still be the case that they improve social welfare. Hans-Werner gible throughout most of human history. the absence of reliable Sinn, a German economist, has noted that old-age entitlements means of contraception meant that having children was a less can be seen as a kind of insurance policy. they protect people discrete decision than it is today. and while many people felt an against the risks that they will be unable to have children, or that obligation to bear children or wanted the emotional satisfac- their children will be unable to provide for them, or that they tions they can bring, they also had an overwhelming practical won’t want to. He suggests that the desire to enforce obligations reason for wanting them: they needed the help. they needed toward parents was a major motive behind bismarck’s creation their offspring’s labor. they needed children, especially, to of these programs. but this argument, he notes, can justify only avoid hunger and privation in old age. the bargain was simple: a “moderately sized” set of entitlements. If the elderly often Parents take care of their children until they are able-bodied, leave some of their pension funds to their children and grand- and in return get taken care of by their children when they no children, the transfer programs are larger than optimal. In pass- longer are. ing he suggests that the effects of entitlements on family size in We still need to have children so that we can enjoy a secure his country have been anything but small: “In Germany, gener- old age. Modern societies have disguised the old bargain by ations of households have learned that life in old age can be socializing it. they maintain expensive government programs pleasant and economically sound even without children. the to assist the elderly, financed by successive generations. the idea of marrying and having children in order to ensure satis- children still take care of the elderly when they grow up: but factory consumption in old age had been common before now it’s all the children providing for all the elderly, collective- bismarck’s reforms. a century later”—Sinn was writing in ly. 2002—“this idea has largely vanished, and a growing number In some ways this arrangement may represent an advance for of people prefer to stay single or at best form a ‘dink family’— civilization. Most people seem to think so. but it has a little- with double income and no kids.” appreciated drawback: It imposes a heavy, if hidden, burden on the american Social Security program is often said to con- parents, especially those with several children, and societies tain a subsidy for “homemakers.” both social-conservative that adopt it therefore tend to have fewer children. For both activists who laud this “pro-family” feature and feminists and moral and practical reasons it is time to revise the generational libertarians who consider it an illegitimate government favor bargain again. for social conservatives say this. It is true that the system gives Incentives tend to change when activities are socialized, and these women benefits as though they had contributed some provision for old age is no exception. Now it is possible to taxes to the program. but what the government gives with enjoy a free ride, as the economists say: don’t raise children one hand it takes away with the other: take account of the anti- yourself, but benefit in old age from the fact that others have childrearing effect of entitlements, and only housewives with done so. Looking at it from the other direction: Parents con- no kids—a rare social type—come out clearly ahead. a family tribute more to the programs than non-parents who pay the in which the husband makes the income while the wife devotes same amount of tax, but they get the same benefits. One ancient herself full time to raising three children still loses.

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N the U.S., the debate over entitlements has dwelt almost ed to be career-oriented, like the postmoderns, but the neo- entirely on their effect on the government’s solvency, and a traditionals tended to prefer part-time employment. I little bit on their effect on the capital stock. Martin Feldstein It is easy to surmise the differences between these groups that has argued, for example, that Social Security undermines the Gilbert does not emphasize (or sometimes even mention). incentive to save. But research confirms that entitlements also Almost all of the traditional women (defined, remember, by num- reduce our stock of human capital by reducing the number of ber of children) are married; their average age at first marriage is children we have. surely lower than that of other groups; they are almost certainly That research acknowledges that large social trends other than more religious. They are also more conservative in politics: The entitlements contribute to the decline in fertility. People have list of states that went for each party’s presidential candidate in fewer kids as infant-mortality rates drop. The shift away from the close election of 2004 lines up pretty well, and in exactly the farming has reduced the value of children as laborers. The devel- way you’d expect, with their rank in terms of average age of first opment of financial markets has expanded the range of alter- marriage and white fertility rate. (The racial qualifier on the sec- native investments. The growth of female participation in the ond correlation results from the overwhelming Democratic pref- market for paid labor has also reduced the fertility rate— erence of blacks, and strong Democratic preference of Hispanics, although one has to be careful in analyzing this relationship, which holds regardless of family type.) Republicans in presiden- because causality runs in both directions. (A woman who tial politics have illustrated the pattern almost too perfectly in expects to have one child is more likely to pursue a career than recent years. The large families of John McCain, , a woman who expects to have four.) A 2005 paper for the , and led a Washington Post reporter National Bureau of Economic Research by economists Michele to comment on the party’s “smug fecundity.” Boldrin, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Larry E. Jones points out Gilbert’s essay was titled “What Do Women Really Want?” that “the size and timing of the growth in government pension and his answer to Freud’s famous question is the obvious one: systems” matches up nicely with fertility trends in the U.S. and Different women want different things, and some of these dif- Europe. They expanded on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and ferences form predictable patterns. His “traditionals” and “post- fertility fell on both sides, after World War II; and they expand- moderns” have different values and interests, on average. It is ed more in Europe, where fertility fell further. In their model, this basic fact that underlies the “mommy wars.” Hence our entitlements account for roughly half of the decline in fertility, inability to wish those wars away. and 60 percent of the difference between European and Amer - , a Democratic lobbyist and talking head, set off ican fertility. When a pension system expands by 10 percent a brief furor in April when she said on CNN that Ann Romney of GDP, the average number of children per woman drops by 0.7 had no understanding of the economic circumstances of most to 1.6. “These findings are highly statistically significant and American women because she had never worked a day in her fairly robust to the inclusion of other possible explanatory vari- life. Rosen is no more representative of “working moms” than ables.” Romney is of stay-at-homers: Each has far too much money for A 2007 paper by Isaac Ehrlich and Jinyoung Kim, also for the that. But the warring sentiments expressed during the brief con- NBER, reached similar conclusions, finding that pension pro- troversy—Rosen, under pressure from the White House, apolo- grams explained a little under half of the decline in fertility rates, gized—reflected an enduring conflict. Many moderns regard and a little more than half of the decline in marriage rates, in traditionals as self-indulgent and retrograde. Many traditionals developed countries between 1965 and 1989. One implication of regard moderns and postmoderns as selfish and materialistic. this finding is that pension programs have contributed to their This division helps to account for the political weakness of own financial woes by suppressing fertility. “family-friendly” policies: They invariably help some families In one of the last issues of the social-science quarterly The more than others. Moderns are the core constituency for subsi- Public Interest, the sociologist Neil Gilbert looked at how the dized day care. Traditionals and postmoderns often resent it as a fertility decline played out in the lives of different groups of tax on their life choices. These policies might be thought to women. He constructed a useful, if rough, typology. He labeled counteract the negative effect of entitlements on fertility. But women who reached age 40 without having their actual effect is ambiguous because different children “postmoderns.” As a percentage women respond to them differently. The of women of their age they had in- availability of subsidies might make it creased from 10 to 18 percent easier for women with no children be tween 1976 and 2005. “Tra - to have one, or women with one ditional” women, who had child to have a second. They are three or more children by that much less likely to lead a age and were usually “stay- woman with two children to at-home mothers,” had been have a third. They may even 59 percent of the group and discourage her, precisely by had fallen to 29 percent. making it easier to lead a life The percentage of “mod- with one or two kids plus paid ern” and “neo-traditional” employment. If women con- women, with one and two chil- sidering having a third child dren respectively, had also are also considering jumped (by 90 and 75 per- scaling back their par-

cent). The moderns tend- ticipation in the labor DARREN GYGI

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market, subsidized day care may be something they pay for in them to start getting their own free ride: receiving pension ben- taxes more than it is something they receive as a benefit. efits without having contributed through either children or taxes. Which effect will predominate depends on, among other Unlike subsidizing day care or forcing companies to offer things, how many women of each type a given society has. In a generous parental leave, an enlarged child credit would have an society where full-time paid employment by women is nearly unequivocally positive effect on fertility. Families of three might universal and almost nobody has three or four children, day-care often use the money for day care; of four, to move one parent subsidies might well increase fertility; not in a society with the from full-time to part-time employment; of five, to get a slight- opposite conditions. “Family-friendly workplaces,” Gilbert ly bigger house; and of all sizes, to bank for future educational notes, are also friendlier to some family structures than to oth- expenses. The choice would be theirs. ers—families with fewer children are more workplace-friendly, The social-science literature on the effects of the tax treatment one might say—and their effects too are therefore ambiguous. of parents on fertility finds mixed results. Papers have found that tax benefits for children have raised fertility significantly in Quebec, in France, and in Israel. Research on the U.S. has tend- IScoURAGInG middle-class adults from having children ed (though not uniformly) to find small effects. The effects could is one of the federal government’s most important be non-linear: Quintupling the existing $1,000 child credit could D social policies, even if its existence is not widely recog- have an effect more than proportionally larger than the modest nized. It is hard to justify it in the absence of a domestic over- policies so far studied. The goal of the credit, it should be population crisis. We would never have adopted an explicit remembered, is not to bribe Americans to have more children policy to this effect democratically. neutrality on family size than they want. Rather it is to rectify the government’s bias seems a much better policy for a in a free against children, which leaves families with children bearing an society. We ought to end the federal government’s bias against unjustifiably large share of the tax burden. Reducing that share having children. would surely help some people who want more children to have The conceptually simplest way to eliminate the negative them—and surveys suggest that in the U.S. and the West gener- effects of entitlements on fertility would be to eliminate the enti- ally, desired family sizes are larger on average than actual fami- tlements. no way that’s happening. Some proposed reforms to ly sizes. The credit would not make much difference to the very entitlement programs would reduce the effect—but not all pro- rich, or for those who have little in the way of federal tax liabil- posals would. Raising payroll taxes to finance future benefits ity to begin with. (Single parents would rarely get much benefit would not help, and could hurt. Partially converting Social from it.) The biggest impact would be on middle-class families: Security into a system of private savings accounts, whatever the exactly the people on whom one would expect old-age entitle- other merits of the idea, would not reduce the program’s implic- ments to have the largest effect. it tax on childrearing and could, again, increase it. Many Americans, especially conservatives, find the idea of Reducing the size of entitlements would reduce their effects flattening taxes appealing. They want a tax code that doesn’t dis- on family structure. Altering Social Security to slow the growth criminate between homeowners and renters, between people of benefits would be one such reform. But even a reined-in pro- who buy “green” consumer goods and everyone else, and so on. gram would still entail a large, forced transfer of wealth from In their pursuit of this goal, conservative politicians have some- larger to smaller families. To prevent this transfer would require times proposed to eliminate the paltry child credit in today’s tax either paying parents more than non-parents in retirement or tax- code. Their mistake is to consider the income tax in isolation ing them less beforehand. The rationale in either case would be from the payroll tax and what federal taxes pay for. Getting rid that raising children is a contribution to the old-age programs of the child credit would make the federal government less neu- just as taxes are, and the government should recognize it. The tral with respect to family size, not more; and expanding it tax-cut approach seems preferable: Just let families have the would make it more neutral, not less. money now instead of taking it from them to return later. Robert Readers may well wonder whether a large tax cut would be Stein, an economist at First Trust Advisors who served in the wise at a time of large deficits. But the appropriate tax structure Treasury Department during the George W. Bush administra- is a separate issue from the appropriate tax level. Whether the tion, has calculated that a $5,000 tax credit per child would fully tax code is designed to extract 15, 19, or 23 percent of the offset entitlements. (Stein, I should note, has exerted a large nation’s economic output for the federal government’s use, par- influence on my thinking on the issues considered in this essay, ents ought to pay a lower portion of that burden than they do and he pointed me toward some of the research it draws on.) The now. To make room for a large child credit, my preferences logic of the tax credit would require that it be applied against would be, in order, to cut spending, to end or reduce truly dis- payroll taxes as well as income taxes. conservatives sometimes criminatory tax breaks, and to expand the top tax brackets so that resist payroll-tax cuts on the theory that payroll taxes fund enti- a higher proportion of the income of high earners is taxed at the tlements, and tax credits that reduce people’s contributions give top rates. What’s important is that budgetary decisionmakers people something for nothing. obviously that argument, what- include the fair treatment of parents among their goals. ever its force generally, would have none in this case, since the Polls show strong public support for a bigger child credit, premise of the policy is that children and payroll taxes both especially among middle-income voters. Governor Romney finance old-age programs. If a childless couple making was recently overheard telling donors that he would be cam- $100,000 has a total federal tax bill of $30,000, a similarly situ- paigning on two things: “jobs and kids.” A presidential race is ated couple with two kids should pay $20,000. A couple that has not the right forum for a discussion of trends in Western fertility no tax liability, on the other hand, shouldn’t get an annual $5,000 rates. But there is more the governor could usefully say than he check for each child they have. That arrangement would enable has so far, and he could say it in public.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

eagle and the bear spirit were smiling. ELIZABETH WARREN: And when we die, And then I saw some traffic and saw we return to the earth and join the some litter upon the ground, and a sin- brown bear. gle tear rolled down my cheek. SENATOR BROWN: I’m confused. What TRANSCRIPT: MODERATOR: Okay. are we talking about, Andy? MASSACHUSETTS ELIZABETH WARREN: I’m not finished. ELIZABETH WARREN: White man always SENATORIAL DEBATE And as the single tear rolled down my needs to know what. Never needs to Sponsored by the League of cheek I looked right at the camera. know why. Women Voters and WBUR radio There. Now I’m done. MODERATOR: If I could, I’d like to ask MODERATOR: Ohhhhkay. Senator another question. Ms. Warren, you’re Moderated by Andy Hiller, Brown, you have 30 seconds. on the record as favoring a progressive WHDH News SENATOR BROWN: I don’t know how to income tax. Could you tell us, please, answer that. I guess, I mean, I’m sorry what you consider to be a tax rate that’s October 17, 2012 she saw some litter and cried. too high? ELIZABETH WARREN: Are you sorry ELIZABETH WARREN: The earth and the Location: Faneuil Hall, Boston, Mass- a chusetts about killing my people with your skies and the waters belong to no one. smallpox-infested blankets? The bear spirit and the eagle spirit Page 6: SENATOR BROWN: Andy, I thought we roam a land without fences. How can agreed that we weren’t going to ques- anyone give to anyone what is not MODERATOR: Senator Brown, you’ve tion each other directly? theirs to give? How can the bear spirit stated publicly that while you support MODERATOR: Ms. Warren, that’s true. take from the eagle spirit? Where does the Keystone XL pipeline, you are ELIZABETH WARREN: We also agreed the smoke begin and where does the worried about its potential environ- you people would stop just west of flame end? Both are part of the fire mental impact. Given your party’s in - Kentucky. And you’d return the isle of god. sistence on constructing the pipeline, the Manhattoes. So many agreements. MODERATOR: Senator Brown? how do you square your hesitation So many broken promises. SENATOR BROWN: What? with your own party? SENATOR BROWN: Boy, you are really MODERATOR: Do you have a rebuttal? SENATOR SCOTT BROWN: Andy, I’m doubling down on the Indian thing, SENATOR BROWN: I don’t know. I didn’t glad you asked that. As you know—as aren’t you? really understand that. all Bay Staters know—we’re in the ELIZABETH WARREN: Was that a racist ELIZABETH WARREN: Because you only middle of a difficult transition from reference to my people’s involvement listen with your ears. White man needs non-renewable energy, most of which in casino gambling? to listen with his heart. is bought from our enemies, frankly, to SENATOR BROWN: No, I just— SENATOR BROWN: I just—you wanted a more renewable clean sources. But ELIZABETH WARREN: My people use rate, right, Andy? we’ve got to be careful as we make that those revenues for the health and edu- MODERATOR: Hoping for one. transition. Does this mean we need to cation of their children. So they can SENATOR BROWN: I dunno. I think rates rely on our own resources, like sun, stay on their sovereign lands and thrive are too high as they are. I favor lower- wind, and natural gas? Sure. But I and grow like the buffalo that used to ing them, to make a flatter, fairer sys- think if you look at my record, you and roam free, before the white man came tem. all citizens of the Commonwealth will and ate them. MODERATOR: Ms. Warren? see that I’m independent. I don’t march SENATOR BROWN: I don’t think I ate a ELIZABETH WARREN: I believe I’ve to the party line. I don’t work for a po - buffalo. answered it. But if there needs to be litical party. I work for the people of ELIZABETH WARREN: I wasn’t saying more clarification, perhaps I should Massachusetts. you personally. Your people. drum my answer. MODERATOR: Elizabeth Warren, do SENATOR BROWN: My people? (sounds of drumming) you have a rebuttal? ELIZABETH WARREN: Your people. My MODERATOR: That’s all the time we ELIZABETH WARREN: I do, Andy. Let me people are peaceful and sit upon the have for this senatorial debate. We tell you a story. I was walking through land like the wind. thank the participants and the League the land with my horse. It was peace- SENATOR BROWN: I agree about the of Women Voters for their sponsorship. ful, this land. Peaceful and good. The wind part. (sounds of drumming)

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS The Buffet Rule

HIS summer the State of Massachusetts will nix Sinclair–era slaughterhouse. At home there are no sugared bake sales in school. Zero tolerance for frosting! sodas, but everything else is permitted, so nothing attains Down with sprinkles! They want to ban kids’ the allure of a forbidden delight. Moderation, portion con- T selling fudge door-to-door to raise money, too, trol. Also, I daub a big “X” in chocolate syrup on the door and by the time they’re done adults will have to stand 20 feet so the Angel of Obesity passes by. from the door to eat a Milky Way. Her school is PC, as can be expected; last month it This is intended to combat the Obesity Epidemic, as it’s observed a day of silence to support gay rights, for example. called. It’s a curious epidemic. Apparently one guy ate a I can only imagine the look on my mother’s face if I’d kept Twinkie on a subway in New York, and by the end of the silent when I came home for grilled cheese and wrote a note week everyone in the car had gained five pounds, and one of saying I was “being quiet for the homosexuals or some- them went to Hong Kong and everyone on the plane sud- thing,” as my daughter described the event. But the school denly had to let their belt out, and when the flight attendant still permits cupcakes. At an event celebrating the end of ordered cheesecake from room service that night everyone the semester, cupcakes were allowed on school grounds, on her floor discovered that their underwear was too tight and in some instances the teachers provided them. the next morning. It spread uncontrollably. The Centers for Epidemic-wise, this is like a teacher full of bird flu cough- Disease Control are still tracking down Patient Zero, whom ing in their faces. they believe to be a man who ate an entire bag of taco- It’ll stop soon enough, probably. Last Christmas—sorry, flavor Doritos in 1982. Red-and-Green Festive Time—the high-school kids came I was stricken with a mysterious case of obesity as a child. by on a fund-raising drive, offering boxes of chocolates. In elementary school we all walked home for lunch, because They weren’t utterly without nutritional merit; if you ate the Mom was waiting. In retrospect we know foil that covered them, you’d probably this was a horrible burden for mothers get some essential minerals. Fruits were everywhere; they were all repressed represented, but they were mummified and unfulfilled, living on Metrecal diet in sugar. Delicious. They also sold tins of shakes and Lark cigarettes, staring out popcorn, probably made with luscious the kitchen window wishing they were in oils that spackled your arteries and re - New York undergoing Freudian analysis, quired the clear-cutting of some Bur mese sneaking a read of Betty Friedan when no jungle for a rare tree, so you knew it was one was looking, but moms in Fargo the good stuff. seemed to be holding up okay. Happy to This will end soon. Pictures of smiling see us at noon, too. A grilled-cheese sand- kids selling cookies will look as absurd wich, a glass of milk, a cookie—then as old ads where doctors endorsed ciga- we walked back to the low-slung brick rettes, but we can’t get to that glorious schoolhouse with the name of a murdered president on the day unless the schools do their part. First, they’ll tell kids side. A few kids were on the chunk-style side, but every not to eat the stuff—but hold on, isn’t that abstinence? class had some beanpoles to average it out. We’re told that doesn’t work. Okay, they’ll ban it. Hold on, Then came junior high, and the cafeteria. Hot caramel isn’t that prohibition? We’re told that never works. Well, rolls the size of throw pillows, great greasy pizza squares never mind, it’s bad, okay? Shut up with the analogies. with the dimensions of linoleum tiles. No more walking Final step: replacing the lunchroom tables with troughs, so home at noon. I gained ten pounds. Suffered the humiliation the children can lap up a fortified slop of liquefied tofu. of getting my trousers in the husky size, as they called fat- Today’s flavor: Beets! boy pants in the Dads & Lads department. Teasing resulted. The first lady has made healthy eating her cause célèbre, My dad said I should either go on a diet or get a bra. If only and while you can guarantee that her hortatory exhalations we’d known: It wasn’t my fault. It was the epidemic. about swapping out the chili fries for braised asparagus will Now I have a child in middle school, and pack the lunch change nothing, at least she will have raised our conscious- with care: non-sugary juice pouch, protein, dairy, an apple ness, and possibly Sparked a National Conversation. You’re that has been carefully examined to make sure it has no surprised she hasn’t proposed her own Buffet Rule: 30 per- bruises, since they’re apparently poisonous, and so on. It has cent of the stuff on your tray has to be leafy. to be eaten quickly, because sometimes she must spend half We had our own conversation at home about school food. her lunch period standing by the recycling bins to ensure My kid hates it. Breaded wads of compacted chum, luke- everything is put in the proper bin; the rules for ecological- warm poultry nodules, goopy macaroni, sawdust hamburg- ly kosher disposition make a glatt kitchen look like an Upton ers—the free, union-approved food the state doles out is inferior in every way to the meal your parent makes. That’s Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. a good lesson. Easily digested, and quite nutritious. CORBIS

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punch-drunk, as we are peppered with foot notes to this closely researched bad assumptions, liberal pieties, and un- book—is that it can sometimes feel like a Taking Back challenged shibboleths. comedy act. a smart one, with a point so along comes Jonah Goldberg. and a point of view, but an act nonethe- The Debate Jonah Goldberg writes as if he’s hand- less. It’s possible to read The Tyranny of ing you a drink. You know what I mean: Clichés and bleep over the highbrow ref- R O B L O N G It’s a friendly gesture, inviting, almost erences—and there are lots of them—to conspiratorial. He writes that first sen- German philosophers and american tence, and sits you down, tells you a few political thinkers and historical events, jokes, tops off your drink, and before you and still get a lot out of the book. I know know it you look up from your empty because I did exactly that. glass, deep into his book, and you’re both But then I felt guilty, like I do when I laughing away like fast friends. You’re eat the crunchy croutons on the salad and out of the crouch and well into your pick out the shards of Parmesan cheese, second belt. suddenly, you’re not punch- and I went back and read it again, this drunk anymore. You’re drunk drunk. time for the actual nutrition. The good Happily so. news is that the book delivers at every In his new book, The Tyranny of level. The best news, at least for me, is Clichés, Jonah Goldberg pulls the Mother that it’s still funny, even if you chase The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals of all Gingriches. He enumerates the top down the footnotes. Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg two dozen liberal clichés—about the sep- although that raises the question: Who, (Sentinel, 320 pp., $27.95) aration of church and state, the living exactly, is this book for? It’s unlikely, constitution, political dissent, that sort of given the current state of the american ecaDes ago, during the 2012 stuff—and peppers them into tatters with conversation, that anyone left of center is Republican presidential pri- research and argument and wit. Jonah going to pick it up and be persuaded. maries—it was decades ago, Goldberg, for 277 sprightly, clever, and We’ve all managed to cocoon ourselves D right? or does it just seem that calmly reasoned pages, dissents from the fairly snugly within our own type—espe- way?— made his bones premise of the question. cially the Left. But persuasion doesn’t with a simple strategy. Here, for instance, is Jonah on Ide - seem to be what Goldberg is really after. He dissented from the premise of the ology: He’ll take it, to be sure. and be glad for it. question. But what he’s doing, I think, is what you some smug television-news personality What is ideology? academics have an do when you hand a friend a drink after would ooze out a question—cradled, in - infinite capacity to make this a profound- a long day. evitably, in left-wing assumptions—and ly complicated question. How could it be What conservatives have been missing Newt would blast away at the foundation otherwise for a profession that has man- is a sense of joyful confidence. We’re right aged to make the films of Keanu Reeves of the question itself, the superficiality of into a realm of serious inquiry? about everything, of course, and we know the process, and often the right of the ques- it, but we’ve behaved—at least out there in tioner to be there in the first place. Or here, on Diversity: the culture, when ambushed by left-wing It was “dials up,” as campaign strate- media stars or surrounded by liberals at a gists say, referring to the focus-group Diversity can strengthen a group or it can cocktail party—as if we’ve got something reactions. People eat that stuff up—I weaken it. The problem with the progres- to hide, something to apologize for. as know I did—and a lot of us were halfway sive obsession with diversity is that it is a if, ultimately, we’re on the losing side. to the post office with our checks made very narrow understanding of the term That’s what Goldberg is up to, I think, out to “Gingrich 2012” before we slowed applied universally. When Bill clinton in this smart and browsable book. He’s down and asked ourselves, “Dude, c’mon. said he wanted a cabinet that “looks like bucking us up. He’s reminding us what america,” he synthesized the problem Newt?” this struggle—for a country, for a way perfectly. superficially, his cabinet was Newt may not get the big prize of of life, for a future of opportunity and the most diverse ever, boasting a remark- 2012, but he’s certainly booked up with able number of women, blacks, and Jews. progress—is all about. In two dozen speaking gigs for the next half decade. . . . More to the point, his cabinet may chapters, he’s providing some good- People—and by people I mean me, and have looked like america but it acted like natured argument for all of us—especial- us—are tired of folding themselves into a what it was—a collection of uniformly ly those who live, as I do, surrounded protective crouch every time someone liberal lawyers. by liberals—in our struggle against the trots out a liberal cliché, and we’re thrilled Tyranny of clichés. The jokes, which are when someone else bats it away. Most The drawback to being such an effort- plentiful and funny and cheerfully de - people—and by people I mean me, and less stylist—or, should I say, an effortless- livered, are a little bonus. Which isn’t bad us—read the New York Times positively seeming stylist: there are over 200 for $27.95.

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probably does not have enough academic street cred to gain that sort of audience. Great For instance, even though he skewers PORTSMOUTH famous studies by renowned Princeton Experiments and Vanderbilt political-science profes- INSTITUTE sor Larry Bartels and renowned Univer - ARNOLD KLING sity of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, their position in the professional hier - archy probably makes them impregnable, particularly when attacked by someone from outside the academy. Manzi introduces a new and useful term to describe the problem of the social sciences: causal density. Causal density means that there are many factors that can affect the phenomena in which social scientists are interested. Think of all of the plausible causes of World War I, the Great Depression, or the recent financial Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of crisis. Causal density can be just as seri- Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, ous an issue when dealing with ongoing by Jim Manzi (Basic, social concerns: How can we sort out the causes of, for example, income in- 320 pp., $28.99) June 22-24, 2012 equality or differences in educational Hy are social sciences less outcomes? Portsmouth Abbey School, RI scientific than natural sci- The problem of causal density also ences? And what does this crops up in physical sciences, notably Speakers will include: W imply about public poli- biology. Even though there is strong evi- Dr. William Dembski, cy? To the first question, many people dence of heritability of diseases and other probably would answer, “Because social characteristics, the hopes of pinning sciences involve human beings, and these traits down to specific genes or sets Dr. John Haught, Woodstock human beings sometimes do things that of genes have faded. There is too much Theological Center, Georgetown are not predictable.” But that answer is at causal density. Dr. Kenneth Miller, Brown Univ. best shallow, and at worst entirely wrong. For me, the paradigmatic case of causal Moreover, the fact that human beings density is macroeconomics, as typified Dr. B. Joseph Semmes, Director of are not perfectly predictable has never by the question of how effective fiscal Research, True North Medical Center stopped economists, sociologists, or poli - stimulus is in ameliorating a recession. Rt. Rev. Dom James Wiseman, tical scientists from trying to contribute We want to know whether, all other Abbot of St. Anselm’s Abbey and useful knowledge. things being equal, more government Professor at Catholic University Jim Manzi’s book attempts to provide spending raises output and employment. an answer that is both more rigorous and History, however, does not hold other Rev. Nicanor P. G. Austriaco, O.P., more helpful. Manzi, an entrepreneur and things equal. Providence College a contributing editor to NR, ends up mak- When experiments are not practical, Dr. Michael Ruse, Florida State Univ. ing a case that social scientists would be we rely on observational data. Manzi better served by (cautiously) undertaking points out that this worked in the case of ... and more to come. more experiments. Undertaking rigorous establishing a link between smoking For information and registration: experiments is also Manzi’s recommen- and lung cancer. In that context, the cir - www.portsmouthinstitute.org dation to policymakers. cumstances under which observational or contact Cindy Waterman The ideas in this book are important, studies can demonstrate causality were and I think it belongs on the syllabus of spelled out by epidemiologist Austin at (401) 643-1244 graduate programs and high-level under- Bradford Hill. Among them are strength or [email protected]. graduate programs in social science and of relationship, consistency of relation- public policy. It is unfortunate that Manzi ship, dosage-response relationship, plausi- bility, and coherence with other scien tific Mr. Kling is an economist and the author, most findings. recently, of Unchecked and Unbalanced: How The challenge in judging the effect of the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and government deficits on economic perfor- Power Caused the Financial Crisis and mance is that the data that are available Threatens Democracy. He writes for EconLog at do not satisfy the Hill criteria. For exam- www.portsmouthinstitute.org econlog.econlib.org. ple, one does not observe a consistently

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS positive relationship between deficit in their initial conditions. Much is made spending and economic outcomes; in of the Perry Preschool Experiment, con- fact, one observes quite the contrary, that ducted in one location with fewer than large deficits are associated with weaker 150 students. Manzi argues that the best economic performance. Turning to Hill’s practice is to conduct multiple experi- other criteria, a positive relationship be - ments in a variety of initial conditions. tween deficit spending and economic He concludes that in fields with high I M P O R T A N T outcomes is plausible and coherent for causal density, experimental methods are Keynesians, but not for economists who a significant tool for producing reliable N O T I C E subscribe to classical theory. This debate results, and that a single experiment is has persisted ad nauseam. much less reliable than multiple, repli- to all National Review Manzi argues that where controlled cated experiments. Most new programs experiments are feasible (i.e., not in and policies fail to achieve their desired subscribers! macroeconomics), they can provide a results, and it would be better to discov- better, albeit imperfect, solution to the er this beforehand, using experiments. problem of causal density. For example, (Of course, to the extent that policy - if one is testing a new pedagogical tech- makers do not want to recognize failures, nique, one can randomly assign some they will not want to conduct ex per i -       We are moving our students to be taught the old way and ments.) others to be taught using the new method. Looking at experimental results, Man - subscription-fulfillment      Many of the most trustworthy findings zi notes a general finding that “programs    office from in social science have come from such that attempt to improve human behavior experiments. There is a famous Rand by raising skills or consciousness are Mount   Morris, Ill. study, now nearly three decades old, of even more likely to fail than those that    to Palm Coast, Fla. health-insurance policies with different change incentives and environment.” It is Please continue deductibles. Also famous are the various really hard to fix flaws in human charac-    experiments testing ’s ter. to be vigilant: idea of a negative income tax as a tool Manzi argues that the value of experi-      There are fraudulent to alleviate poverty. ments bolsters the case for federalism, I was once seated at a dinner table next because states can be laboratories for agencies   soliciting to an official of the Department of Edu - what works in social policy. But I am not your    National Review cation involved in education research. I sure that his case for this is sound. In made an impassioned plea for more con- theory, if Washington were to approach subscription !  renewal trolled experiments in education. The social policy by conducting rigorous, without    our authorization. official responded by asking, “Would you controlled experiments in order to deter- Please reply only to want your child to be the subject of an mine what works, that might be better, on   experiment?” At this, my jaw dropped, Manzi’s own terms, than leaving the 50 National Review and I sputtered, “They do it to my chil- states alone to engage in unsystematic    renewal notices or dren all the time! They constantly intro- tampering. I think that the case for feder-     duce curriculum changes, scheduling alism is actually more subtle: Attempting bills—make sure the changes, and changes in teacher meth- to change the skills or consciousness of     return address is ods. They just don’t bother to evaluate officials in order to influence them to whether or not it works.” conduct rigorous experiments as part of     Palm Coast, Fla. Statistical-quality-control guru W. Ed - the policy process is unlikely to work. Ignore   all requests for wards Deming used the term “tampering” But creating an environment in which renewal that are not to describe this process of introducing incentives lead them to adopt experi-     changes without rigorously eval uating mental methods has a better chance of directly payable     results. Tampering and experiments are success. A more competitive political to National Review. two ways of disturbing the status quo. But system, of the kind a decentralized struc-     only experiments are designed with the ture might provide, could create this sort If you receive any mail or intent of producing reliable measurements of environment. telephone     offer that makes of success or failure. This is a provocative book for people    you suspicious contact Like my dinner companion, most pol- who are interested in how social science icy makers view experiments as at relates to public policy. I am confident [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. best costly and at worst immoral. Even that most of the people who read it will Your cooperation though tampering is just as bad, if not benefit from it. I am much less confident     worse, it somehow escapes such criti- that most of the people who would bene-      is greatly appreciated. cisms. fit from it will read it. That reflects my Manzi points out that most social ex - pessimistic view of today’s intellectual periments are too small and too limited culture, particularly in the academy.

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explained, in response to the death of his that his life in rural Virginia “shaped Music closest friend. who I am. I carry that place with me all That is true of his Night Pieces, too, the time.” the work premiered by the Cleveland He has two younger brothers: Jamie His Own Orchestra. It is a kind of trumpet concerto and Eric. Their dad, Jay, once worked for (with the Cleveland’s principal, Michael the federal government, but then he went Drum Sachs, doing the honors). The audience into the beef business. Their mom, Pat, showers this work with applause. Hersch is a writer. Michael remembers going JAY NORDLINGER is willing to take a couple of bows, but around with his dad “in this refrigera - he is eager to get off the stage. I know ted truck, and we’d stop by slaughter - Cleveland, Ohio composers who could have milked that houses—which was, you know, a little HE story of Michael Hersch is applause for a good five minutes more. traumatic. We’d stop by grocery stores one of the most amazing you’ll A soprano worth her salt, ten more. and try to sell our wares.” ever hear—in music or out. He The next morning, I sit down with Hersch’s parents weren’t musical, and T is an American composer, born Hersch, for a long talk. He describes what there was no piano in the house (either in 1971. He is one of the most honored a premiere feels like, to him: “The music house, or tent). An uncle played the gui- and lauded composers before the public is sort of safe in your mind. And then it’s tar; Jamie played the French horn. The today. He deserves this recognition too out there, naked.” This gives a composer family would listen to the radio on their (say I, as a critic who has covered him for “a feeling of incredible vulnerability. frequent car trips: bluegrass, rock, Casey years). Why is his story so amazing? First, That’s why, for years, I didn’t go to con- Kasem’s American Top 40. Michael ap - there is his extraordinary talent. Second, certs of my music. George Rochberg once preciated everything he heard. “I joined there is the fact that he started in music said, ‘A composer needs an iron stom- the KISS Army in 1978,” he says. He at a late age—and rapidly soared to some- ach.’” (Rochberg was an American com- would have been six or seven then. There thing like the top. poser, living from 1918 to 2005.) were also bands like Bad Brains and Here in Cleveland, he is premiering Hersch grew up in Virginia. His family Corrosion of Conformity. two works. To put it differently, and divided their time between Reston, on the Hersch is extremely reluctant to talk may be more accurately, the Cleveland outskirts of Washington, and a place deep about his abilities, but Jamie has talked Orches tra is premiering one of them, and in the mountains, on the West Virginia about them, publicly: If Michael heard a he is premiering the other, as a pianist. border. “Was this a weekend home?” I song, even once, he knew all the words, Before the concert, there is a “pre-concert say. “More like a weekend tent,” says forever. And all the notes, forever. He concert.” Hersch takes the stage as he Hersch. “What do you mean, ‘tent’?” I could also draw things with photographic usually does: shyly, almost apologeti - say. He says, “I mean, a tent, with little realism. Jamie was progressing on the cally—as if to say, “Sorry to bother you, stakes in the ground.” The family had a French horn, and is, in fact, a profession- your applause is so embarrassing.” tent on their farm for more than ten years. al today. He pestered his older brother to He sits down to play his massive and Finally, they built a house. Hersch says listen to some classical music, which he monumental piano work The Vanishing Pavilions, which he completed in 2005. It is apocalyptic, visionary, and staggering. And it takes approximately two and a half hours to play. Hersch does not play it all, in this pre-concert concert. He plays excerpts, a little suite. And he plays it with his prodigious technique, one that draws gasps. Apparently, his fingers can do what - ever his brain commands. Which brings us to another reason Hersch’s story is amazing: He could have a big, big piano career, which would only boost his fame as a composer. But he eschews it—playing only his own music, and that very rarely. After the excerpts from The Vanishing Pavilions, he premieres his Two Lulla - bies. These are not what you might call traditional lullabies, tunes to put baby to sleep. The first is marked “Tense, disqui- eted” (as well as “restrained”). Both are formidable piano pieces, not easy to play. But there is definitely a lullaby aspect to

RICHARD ANDERSON them. The composer wrote them, he has Michael Hersch

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS finally did—at age 18. It was Beethoven’s communicating something urgently im - their daughter, Abigail. Abby was born on Fifth Symphony, in a videotaped perfor- portant. I’ve often said, “He writes as January 27, 2006, the 250th anniversary mance by Georg Solti and the Chicago though his life depended on it.” Few notes of Mozart’s birth. His favorite time to Symphony Orchestra. Michael knew what are wasted. Nothing is for show. The compose is at night, when they are asleep. his life would be. music is unyieldingly honest. “Uncom - “It’s better than any artist’s colony.” Ordinarily, music is a child prodigy’s pro mising” is a word several of us have Among his gifts is the need for very little game. Think for a second about what used. Also, we’ve said, “When you’re at a sleep—about four hours. One can get a lot 18 means. Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, “the Hersch premiere, you feel like you’re at done, in 20 waking hours. Spanish Mozart,” died at 19. Lili Bou - something historic. Like you’re hearing, He does not struggle to compose, but he langer died at 24. Schubert, greedy, had for the first time, something that will last.” does need time. He cannot be rushed. He 31 years. Be aware of something else about works on a piece in his head until it’s Hersch does not feel at all disadvan- Hersch’s music: It can be practically un - ready. Then he writes it down, with no taged, having started when he did. “I bearable. In person, Hersch is a sunny, revision. It took almost a year to write didn’t look at it as, ‘I have so much to pleasant, affable type. But his music tends down The Vanishing Pavilions, which catch up on.’ People sometimes say, ‘You to express pain and despair. Of one of runs more than 300 pages. started so late, it must have been daunt- his symphonies, a critic wrote, “Nearly Toward the end of our conversation, I ing.’ But I wasn’t thinking in terms of unbearable, it spoke to the kind of injury ask, “Do you care if they listen?” The chronology or lost years. I was just over- from which one does not heal.” Already in allusion does not have to be explained to joyed at my luck. I had found this world, 1996, when Hersch was 24, Rochberg him: In the 1950s, there was a famous and I had it all to explore.” His parents, he commented, “His music sounds the dark essay by Milton Babbitt called “Who says, have “caught a lot of flak from peo- places of the human heart and soul.” Cares If You Listen?” Hersch, somewhat ple who think, ‘What if he had started at When he was about 30, he decided he to my surprise, says he does care. “If four or five?’ Well, maybe I would have wanted to write some very big and long people listen, and they connect with my burned out.” pieces, such as The Vanishing Pavilions. music, it’s deeply meaningful. And if they He quickly learned to play the piano. These would take years to write, each of don’t like it, it’s hurtful. But I’m gonna He wrote his first composition at 19, a them. No one commissioned them. He write it anyway.” piano fantasy. (Mozart wrote all five of recalls that people said, “You’re not doing Shostakovich liked to quip, “I like all his violin concertos when he was 19.) As yourself any favors, you know—writing music, from Bach to Offenbach.” Hersch the music critic Tim Page wrote in 2005, these pieces that no one is going to pro- is the same way—a man who devours “Hersch discovered, as geniuses will, that gram. That have no commercial appeal.” music from Gregorian chant to this week. he somehow already knew what he was He knew. But he could do no other, by his When I press him about favorite music, he doing.” Hersch himself will allow only lights. When money got tight, he worked says, “For me, late Schubert piano music this: “My mind works for music.” part-time for his father, selling beef. This is where it’s at.” He adds, “The thing “Miraculously,” he says, he was admit- was while he was teaching at Peabody, about music is, you can go for years with- ted to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. and had umpteen international prizes on out listening to a given composer, and He earned two degrees in composition his shelf. He would finish a lecture on then suddenly have a need to hear him. there. He started teaching at Peabody in Bruckner, then go to the phone to call The music is lying dormant, waiting for 2006, when he was 34; he became chair- federal penitentiaries, talking up beef. you. You can activate it anytime, simply man of the department (the composition A colleague said to him, “You’re the by engaging with it.” department) four years later. But we’re most own-drummer person I know”—an Like most artists worth paying atten- getting too far ahead in our story. excellent observation, and a high compli- tion to, Hersch is grateful to be doing After studying music just a few years, ment. what he’s doing. He considers himself he started to win all the prizes: a Gug - Because of his own-drumness, he won’t, incredibly lucky—lucky to have been genheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the as I’ve said, accept piano engagements. exposed to music, even at a late date (or Berlin Prize, etc. Veteran and famed com- People have said, “Why don’t you play a an untraditional date, let’s say). And “it posers were agog at what he could do. Brahms concerto on one half of a program just anguishes me that there are so many Some of the top performers took up his and one of your own on the other half?” people out there, possibly, who could cause, including Mariss Jansons, the con- He will not. Curious, I ask whether he has have been like me, or are like me, who ductor. In 2008, I did a public interview to practice the piano (because I suspect weren’t fortunate enough to have a broth- of Jansons in Salzburg. I asked him which he doesn’t). Does he have to practice, er who would say, ‘You need to sit down living composers stood out for him. He like mortals, or can he play whatever he and listen to Beethoven.’ What about all first named three septuagenarians: Pen - wants, whenever he wants, cold? He the people who are just as talented as I am, derecki, Pärt, and Kancheli. And then he won’t say. I browbeat him until he at last or more talented, and didn’t have the paused to make special mention of this confesses: No, he doesn’t have to prac- opportunity?” young American, Hersch. tice. He can just play at will. There you have some of Michael He has written music of virtually all But what he wants to do is compose. A Hersch’s greatness: not just a mind that types: symphonies, concertos, chamber bout with cancer, in 2007, only increased “works for music,” not just what people music, songs. The only thing that’s miss- his determination to release the pieces that unblushingly call his “genius,” but a ing is opera, which will no doubt come. are in him. He lives with the two girls he humanity, evident in his music and in Much of his music is intense, as though loves: his wife, Karen, a classicist; and his life at large.

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a contemptuous shorthand for all that is jects, regardless of how unrealistic they Back to wrong with the world’s remaining super- were. In Disney’s world, money could be power? The answer is that he was some- made from ink and paint; his brother had thing of a paradox: a conservative with a no such luxury. Both onscreen and in his Tomorrowland deep streak of utopianism. amusement parks, Walt Disney lived in CHARLES C. W. COOKE Avuncular, affable, Walt Disney is the the world of Thomas Paine: He started all-American boy, and his is the classic the world all over again. It is no accident n the autumn of 1918, a young rags-to-riches story—beginning with his that to get to Florida’s sprawling Magic man from Marceline, Mo., sat youth in the small Missouri town of Mar - Kingdom, guests must cross a lake in a sketching in France while waiting celine and ending with his death in boat. In doing so, they are leaving the I to be sent home. He was 17, on Hollywood as the president and eponym old world behind and starting anew. the cusp of adulthood, and had little idea of an entertainment empire. Disney was a Whatever this is—at the very least it is what he wanted to do with his life, be - Republican, and a fierce anti-Communist, wonderful, inspired theater—it is not yond buying a raft and floating aimlessly like his friends Gary Cooper, John Wayne, conservative. ’s complaint  down the Mississippi “like Huckleberry and Ronald Reagan. He happily testified that Paine’s maxim was “the least conser- Finn.” The man had signed up for the Red before the House Un-American  Acti -vative sentiment  conceivable” goes for Cross after being rejected by the Army on vities Committee, took on the Screen Disney, too. “I don’t want the public to medical grounds, but arrived in Paris Actors Guild, and helped found the Mo - see the world they live in while they’re in after the armistice was signed and the tion Picture Alliance for the Preservation the Park,”  Disney wrote in a memo. action was over. He was intensely disap- of American Ideals. He   rejected  the  Disney’s   utopian  inclination was not pointed, writing home that he’d “missed freewheeling style of Warner Brothers’ limited to his films and his amusement out on something big.” edgy “Looney Tunes”  series, preferring  parks; he had designs on society, too. Just over 73 years later, a few miles instead to keep “the highest moral and Although it ended up as an innocuous, if outside of Paris, workers finished build- spiritual standards” in his work. One diverting, part of Florida’s Walt Disney  ing a city that bore the young man’s unfortunate employee discovered just World complex, the Experimental Pro- name. It was called EuroDisney, and it how deeply traditional Disney was when totype Community of Tomorrow— was a tribute to America standing in the he was fired on his first day, having made EPCOT—was initially designed as a very heart of Europe’s most self-obsessed a crude joke about an animated porno- blueprint for the real world, and it was and anti-American nation. Although he graphic film while (unknowingly) sitting only Disney’s death in 1966 that put the never lived to see it, Walter Elias Disney next to Walt’s brother Roy. On the sur- plans on hold. (Disney spent the majority had got his “something big” in Europe at face, Uncle Walt, as he came to be known, of his time on his deathbed working on last. was as American as apple pie. the idea, and had already bought land EuroDisney, renamed Disneyland Paris And yet, his obsessive quest for control in Florida twice the size of Manhattan in 1994, opened 20 years ago this April. It and for perfection rendered him that for the purpose.) Were a liberal to speak was an immediate flop and was derided, most unconservative of things—a utopi- of a planned community in the way that as many of Disney’s projects have been an. Disney’s career was a procession Walt Disney did, conservatives would in their early stages, as “folly.” In its first of increasingly grand projects that he pick up pitchforks and run for the year, attendance was half of its predic - sought to bend wholly to his will. Broad - hills. (Even the name would put up our ted level, and the park lost 300 million ly speaking, writers and artists make backs.) francs. Even Disney’s biggest apologists good liberals because the problems they There is no hiding from the facts: were hard pressed to conclude anything face in their line of work can generally EPCOT was Disney’s attempt to address but that it was a failure. More hostile be overcome with the stroke of a pen. his own worries about his children’s observers in France complained about Hollywood types control the lights, the future and to rebuild the world in his own everything from the park’s perceived cul- camera, and the action, and they can tural imperialism to its dress code, which write their own endings, adjusting the supposedly trampled on the “individual parameters of their worlds without hav- “Rated One of New York City liberty” of union members. Le Figaro ing to surrender themselves to the exter- ‘Best Value’ Hotels.” ... Zagats publicly hoped that “rebels would set fire nal realities that afflict men of science, to Disneyland,” and Parisian theater pro- finance, and war. John Lennon, thus, ducer Ariane Mnouchkine infamously could sing “Imagine” with gay abandon, labeled the park a “cultural Chernobyl.” as if he were merely imagining changing Ultimately, the French concluded, it the chords to his song. The real world, was all just so American. It was all so however, does not work like this, a fact Disney. with which Disney struggled to come to New York’s all suite hotel is located in The 20th anniversary of this landmark terms for his whole life. the heart of the city, near corporations, theatre & great restaurants. Affordable in cultural history leads one to ask: Who Illustrative of his unrealistic world- elegance with all the amenities of home. was this man, whose works are American view was his dismissive attitude toward enough to so disturb the French, and his brother Roy, the Disney company’s 149 E. 39th St. (Bet 3rd & Lex) New York, NY 10016 whose most famous creation—Mickey CFO, who was often peremptorily told to Reservations 1-800-248-9999 Mouse—is used throughout the world as “find the money” for his brother’s pro- Ask about our special National Review rates.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS image. Why, he wondered aloud, could a cowboy outfit walking through the key formative years remained, for him, he build a place such as Disneyland to be futuristic Tomorrowland. Disney decided the ideal. Like Norman Rockwell, he was free of crime, pollution, and disorgani - at that moment that Disneyland was too a popular advocate for an America disap- zation, but not enjoy such things in small, and the idea for Florida’s gargan- peared, and he preserved it in celluloid real American cities? His simple conclu- tuan Walt Disney World was born. The and plastic for posterity. sion was that Disneyland was better story is about perfectionism, but it is also In EPCOT, too: The futuristic world of planned—and so would EPCOT be. He about, well, an American cowboy walk- which Disney dreamed—although far would export the precision of his anima- ing through an American land that is more prescriptive than any down-the-line tion and of Disneyland to America’s dedicated to American exploration of conservative would enjoy—would not be streets, and bring back the simplicity of the future. In its various iterations, populated by government bureaucrats his childhood. Everyone living there Disneyland is filled with celebrations of and run along statist lines, but be a place would have to be employed—even if of America: the frontier; Hollywood; Mark in which American ingenuity and busi- retirement age—and nobody would own Twain’s riverboat; Tom Sawyer’s island; ness could thrive. Disney looked to his own property. The tone was unavoid- the Carousel of Progress; the Hall of companies such as General Motors and ably collectivist: “Everyone living in Presidents; and, above all, Main Street General Electric to come up with solu- EPCOT,” Disney wrote, “will have the U.S.A. tions to problems, and relied heavily on responsibility to maintain this living Most artists from Middle America his hand-picked team of creatives—his blueprint of the future.” Robert Moses, a reject their upbringing and move abroad “Imagineers.” It was these people he was controversial city planner who remod- or to the coasts. Walt Disney did the op - referring to when he claimed that “EP - eled much of New York, and Disney’s posite. With Disneyland, he brought COT will take its cue from the new ideas collaborator at the 1964–65 World’s Fair, Middle America to the coasts, and to and new technologies that are emerging was thrilled, predicting that the “over- Tokyo and Paris and Hong Kong for from the forefront of American industry.” whelming” idea would provide the “first good measure. (The Shanghai Disney Moreover, Disney was so concerned that accident free, noise free, pollution free Resort is scheduled to open in 2015.) the government would get involved that city center in America.” However much success he had, Disney he petitioned the Florida legislature for The instinct to control was strong in never lost his love for Marceline, his full control over the land he had bought, Walt Disney, as was his belief that he “laughing place.” At the creative sessions and made it clear that he did not want could usher in a “new tomorrow.” But it for films and the planning meetings for them involved in his project, nor did he is important to look at what he chose to Disneyland, he would reminisce about want to have to seek planning permission place in his artificial world. A famous his childhood constantly. “Marceline was for his urban experiment. story is instructive here: Disney was con- the most important part of Walt’s life,” He may have been a reactionary futur- ducting a spot check of Disneyland in his wife, Lillian, claimed. The small- ist—he could fairly be criticized for California when he saw a cast member in town community in which he spent his loving both the past and the future more than the present—but he never once suc- cumbed to the notion that the government THE LAST KEENERS IN SCHUYLKILL knew best. Nor did he think that it was (A NEIGHBORHOOD IN PHILADELPHIA) possible for mankind to arrive at a finished version of a perfect world. “EP - She remembered that the Tobins were the last COT,” he contended, would be “a com - To have wailing mourners at a wake munity of tomorrow that will never be complete.” It is a sublime example of his Women who cried in disbelief that a soul had fled. split personality that, while Disney was planning a master community in which Who they were she didn’t know, or how the inhabitants would be studied to facil- They were hired or if they were volunteers itate constant improvement, he was And she was not sure who had died vocally (and financially) supporting the 1964 presidential candidacy of arch- Only that the Tobins lived on Naudain Street libertarian Barry Goldwater. And came from Donegal. She was a school girl But how did an apolitical illustrator, Then, back in the ’60s, and told me this whose sole desire as a young man was to float passively down the Mississippi, In Kelly’s, of how having heard them become both so political and such a Before that night, she never did again. staunch advocate of America’s past and Kelly’s is closed, and if I bring those future? The key to understanding this lies with the unionism of the 1930s and the Keeners up again in five years, will she establishment of the National Labor Still remember them, or will they be gone Relations Board (NLRB). With Kelly, and the last of the Tobins? In the early days of the Disney studio, before the wild, unprecedented success —LAWRENCE DUGAN of 1937’s Snow White, Disney’s employ-

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ees were few and he knew each of them Rockefeller, head of the State De - His lack of interest in the world around by name, often stopping at desks to chat partment’s Latin office, him—except in how it related to his stu- and share jokes or stories. But as the stu- called Disney and suggested that he go to dio—led him to make mistakes that cost dio grew, he drew back. He treated his South America as a goodwill ambassador him dearly: He invited the innovative employees extremely well, paying them in order to allow passions at the studio to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to Holly - much more than any other studio in the cool. wood in 1938, ostensibly without think- industry and building them a comfort- While he was away, a federal mediator ing about how it might look; and he stayed able, state-of-the-art facility in Burbank from the NLRB came in to arbitrate too long at the Motion Picture Alliance (at the height of the Great Depression, no between the SCG and the Disney studio. for the Preservation of American Ideals, less); but his operation was ramshackle, It found in favor of the SCG on every after it had been hijacked by Birchite and remuneration, bonuses, and oppor - single issue. Upon his return, Disney cranks (he eventually left). Further, his tunities within the studio were widely reduced the number of his employees to horror over the unionization of his studio perceived to be randomly allocated. It the point at which he felt that he had brought him into conflict with many was somewhat understandable that the purged the “chip-on-the-shoulder boys Jews, toward whom he was extremely world’s first major animation studio—the and the world-owes-me-a-living lads,” rude. studio that invented the genre and its but he was nonetheless forced to reinstate But the anti-Semitism rumor is basical- techniques—would not be a hive of man- Babbit and other agitators at the instruc- ly false. There is no evidence whatsoever agerial predictability. But this patchwork tion of a labor court. Disney was heart- to suggest that the Jews were singled out quilt of processes, and the influx of new, broken by the saga. Previously, his studio for special disdain, or that their being less loyal talent, created a sizeable num- had been described by a former employ- Jewish invited his opprobrium. Neil Gab - ber of employees who were upset at one ee as “one big happy family”; now he ler, the first of Disney’s biographers to thing or another, and that played straight didn’t know whom he could trust, and he gain access to his archives, found very lit- into the hands of the predatory unions. felt his generosity had been thrown in his tle evidence of anti-Semitism, and noted In 1937, the International Alliance of face. Moreover, he didn’t understand that, on the contrary, Disney employed Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) how a union could be allowed in his stu- Jews without prejudice throughout his became the first union to target Disney. dio without his permission and how the career, was named Man of the Year by the IATSE was a deeply unpleasant outfit, government could force his hand. Beverly Hills chapter of B’nai B’rith, and closely associated with Al Capone in Overnight, Disney turned rightward. A was generous to a range of Jewish chari- Chicago and headed up by thugs who man who had never had time for politics ties. But critics who hated the America were quick to resort to violence. Its at - became a leading anti-Communist and a that Disney celebrated—and took ex - tempt to unionize Disney was rebuffed, staunch conservative. From the outbreak ception, especially, to his anti-unionism, but in 1940, the Screen Cartoonists Guild of World War II until his early death McCarthyism, and close relationship was ready to move in for the kill. Its boss, in 1967, Disney—who had voted for with Ronald Reagan—have willfully Herbert Sorrell, who was described as a FDR in 1936—worked ostentatiously repeated the slur. “tough left-winger” by contemporaries for Republican candidates, including Why does any of this matter today? The (read, “Communist”), claimed that he Thomas Dewey, whom he endorsed and simple answer is that even now, among had collection cards from a majority of made a speech for in 1944; Eisenhower, both his admirers and his critics—and employees and requested that Disney rec- for whom he cut a television advertise- rightly or wrongly—Disney is seen as ognize the union. Disney was livid and ment in 1952; and Ronald Reagan, whom America distilled. His movies are the refused outright. He and Roy, he said, had he energetically supported during the favorites of children worldwide, and his “no use for any unions,” having grown up 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. amusement parks welcome hundreds of listening to their father tell of having been In 1947, he told the House Un-American millions of visitors each year. Back in physically beaten by a union member. Activities Committee that Communists April 1992, as EuroDisney prepared to Walt threatened to “close down this stu- had infiltrated his studio and success- open, the French complained that “Amer - dio” before he would allow it to be union- fully tried “to take over my artists,” that ican culture” had come to France once ized. the NLRB was in bed with the unions, again. It is important for us to know which In response, Sorrell promised to and that there was a serious threat of America is on offer; America is a big “squeeze Disney’s balls ’til he screams” Com munism in the motion-picture in - country, after all, and there is much in it and “crush [him] to a dustbowl.” A stand- dustry. that is less than desirable. We can be off ensued, and Disney, under intense As with many iconic figures, rumors thankful that Walt Disney, by and large, pressure, offered to put the dispute to a about Walt Disney abound. The two most set forth a conception of America that vote of the NLRB. Sorrell refused. Mat - popular are that he was cryogenically Americans can be proud of: He took the ters came to a head when Disney fired frozen upon his death, and that he was an best of Marceline and preserved it in (pro-union) animator Art Babbit, whom anti-Semite. The first charge is harmless, aspic, as part of an America that is not just he furiously called a “Bolshevik” and a perhaps inevitable product of his image history-minded but also forward-looking. accused of trying to destroy his studio as an innovator and dreamer about the And although Disney could veer into an from within; Sorrell immediately called future. But the second is not. Disney him- unconservative utopianism, his funda- a strike. After almost five weeks, dur - self must take some of the responsibility mental creed remained, “If you can dream ing which time production on the film for his poor posthumous reputation, even it, you can do it.” And there is no more Dumbo came to a standstill, Nelson if it is just the consequence of negligence. American sentiment than that.

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS a southern Cali fornia cult, whose devo- Marling’s guru has welcomed them as Film tees gather in a featureless angeleno base- potential acolytes and revealed her near- ment to be purged of their weaknesses and future origins do we learn the truth about prepared for what she tells them is coming them: they are not spiritual seekers Cult next: a civilizational collapse, a period of but would-be documentary filmmakers, civil war, and an opportunity to recover with a plan to clandestinely tape their Favorite the kind of authentic and organic life that indoc trination and use the footage for an a soulless modernity has stripped away exposé. ROSS DOUTHAT from us. their plan, inevitably, does not exactly this message no doubt sounds like the go as planned. Peter and Lorna have bag- ast summer in these pages, I usual “age of aquarius meets the Mayan gage, it turns out: He, an über-rationalist, reviewed Another Earth, a apocalypse” patter, but there’s a twist. is working out issues having to do with slight but haunting science- Marling’s Maggie doesn’t just claim to his late New agey mom, and she, a for- L fiction fable starring a young have foreseen the coming american dé - mer party girl, is using his ambition as actress named Brit Marling, who also co- gringolade; she claims to have lived it, her own lifeline out of anomie. and Mag - wrote the movie’s screenplay. On a bare- and then traveled backward through gie, either because she has the dark gifts bones budget, her movie created an time, à la John Connor’s father in The of a Jim Jones or because (dum dum in teresting genre mash-up, combining an Terminator, to shepherd a group of partic- dum!) she’s really who she says she is, only-in-the-movies personal melodrama ularly important people through the fire exerts an unexpected pull on both of (a grieving Yale professor falls in love to come. to corroborate her story, she them, even as the personal excavations with the young woman who accidentally has an ankle tattoo marked with the year required of her followers open cracks in killed his wife and daughter in a car she comes from (“54” for 2054) and an their relationship. these cracks widen amid an atmos- phere of mounting dread, spiked with an occasional dose of dark comedy. (Wait for the moment when Maggie is asked to sing a popular song from 2054, and re luctantly obliges.) the script, which Marling co-wrote with Zal Batmanglij, the movie’s director, keeps the unease neatly balanced between the natural and the paranormal, so that we can’t be sure what kind of story we’re actually in - volved with. One moment we’re watch- ing as Lorna is taught target shooting by an older cult member, suggesting that we should expect a purely secular, Waco- or Guyana-style endgame for the cult. the next we’re watching a pre-teen girl—one of Peter’s students in his day job as a sub- stitute teacher—build creepy towers out Christopher Denham and Brit Marling in Sound of My Voice of black Legos, as though she’s pick - wreck) with the Twilight Zone scenario immune system so weak—time travel is ing up signals from some supernatural of a mirror-image Earth suddenly sweep- hard on the body, apparently—that only source. ing into our orbit and looming up, with an oxygen tank and a steady diet of green- the resolution, when it comes, doesn’t all its counterfactual possibilities, in house-grown, toxin-free food prevents necessarily resolve anything. as she did the southern Connecticut night sky. the her body from failing altogether. More in Another Earth, Marling chooses to cut results were uneven but interesting. important, she has a gift reserved for things off abruptly, leaving some of her Another Earth wasn’t a complete work grifters and messiahs: the ability to make narrative balls hanging in the air. Because of art, but its strengths suggested that the incredible seem not only plausible, but Sound of My Voice is a more confident critics and audiences should keep an eye almost self-evidently true. and skillful movie than its predecessor, out for whatever Marling ended up doing Into Maggie’s world comes a young though, the studied suddenness of its next. couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and last scene feels like more of a cop-out. What she has done, it turns out, is co- Lorna (Nicole Vicius), whom we meet in Marling is a serious talent, and she’s write and star in yet another slight, haunt ing, the movie’s tense opening scene, when building an impressive résumé by lavish- science-fiction-tinged provo ca tion—but a they’re driven blindfolded from a ren- ing her gifts on small movies that raise the better one this time, with a sharper script dezvous point to the cult’s basement head - biggest questions. But we’ll know about and tighter, less self-consciously preten- quarters, instructed to strip and shower the scope of those gifts when she takes tious plot. titled Sound of My Voice, it fea- and change, and then ushered into the first the plunge and makes bold to answer one

FOX SEARCHLIGHT tures Marling as the charismatic leader of of several initiation rituals. Only after of them.

4 6 | www.nationalreview.com MAY 2 8 , 2 0 1 2 books5-28_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/8/2012 7:30 PM Page 47

mathematical ability is correlated with anonymity, Dallas unloaded him on In the Arena chess prowess. Cincinnati. What would be even more absurd The woeful Newman, though, was than asking chess players to take a math himself a former fifth-overall pick, sug- Draft Board quiz, though, would be to ask NFL play- gesting that, despite the Wonderlic data K Y L E S M I T H ers to take a math quiz. So the league and the Combine score and the collegiate does so. Prospective draftees submit to statistics, the Cowboys didn’t know what he NFL’s annual spring draft the infamous Wonderlic test of literacy, they were doing when they drafted him in is a conference of innocence logic, arithmetic, and other cognitive the first place: Twenty-six picks later, and experience. The players tasks. Its utter lack of rigor (sample when future superstar corner Nnamdi T are spring lambs, capering question: “Paper sells for 21 cents per Asomugha was still on the board, even with youth and anticipation. As yet they pad. What will four pads cost?”) match- the Oakland Raiders were wise enough are unacquainted with their first pay- es its lack of prophetic usefulness. to sniff opportunity. That same year, 13 checks, as they are with the unnerving Pace the claims of Malcolm Gladwell quarterbacks were drafted, including the sight of the quarterback-mauling Pitts - and others that the test has no value, longtime Cincinnati Bengals starter Car - burgh Steeler James harrison coming on Mike Florio, who for reasons unknown son Palmer, who is now with Oakland, the zone blitz. The teams that arrive to is employed to mull football for NBC, and the journeyman Byron Leftwich. offer them new homes in sleek green suggests using the test to ward off insur- None proved as successful as one who pastures are hopeful but burdened with rection. he has written, “Scoring too wasn’t drafted at all: Tony Romo. harrowing memories of wayward sheep high can be as much of a problem as This year the management of the and rams run amok. For every Super scoring too low. Football coaches want Raiders, by eagerly sought reputation the Bowl–winning quarterback like Troy Aik - to command the locker room. Being league’s most ruthless crew, and holders man or John elway, there’s a bumbling smarter than the individual players of the title, in their 2011 iteration, of most Tim Couch or a Jeff George. makes that easier. having a guy in the penalized team ever, pondered their nine- A pleasing sense of recompense for locker room who may be smarter than year absence from the postseason invita- past sorrows fills the air thanks to the rule every member of the coaching staff can tional and changed course. Detecting a of selection in reverse order of previous be viewed as a problem.” Yes, you cer- correlation between talented players and standings. As in Matthew’s promise, the tainly wouldn’t want some smartypants those with “a strong foundation in their last shall be first. Yet the meek may inher- punter to seize the chalk and lead a faith,” the team drafted a slate of the it Joey harrington, the ex-QB and No. 1 locker-room mutiny. This is why no devout. Recent high draft picks by the draft pick of the Detroit Lions who team would ever tempt fate by employ- club have too often yielded such busts as played like an asthmatic kitten. Because ing both the veteran linebacker London quarterback JaMarcus Russell, whose assessing new recruits to join in the 22- Fletcher and Christian Ponder, a spright- penchant for falling asleep in team meet- man hurlyburly is notoriously difficult. ly new play-caller for Minnesota. ings went unprophesied by either the “Let’s break it down!” cry the analysts, This year the Wonderlic met LSU Wonderlic or the Combine. The Raiders but in football, as in hollywood, as in the cornerback Morris Claiborne. he scored could hardly do worse than they’ve been Council of economic Advisers, nobody a four out of 50, then hastened to doing. If all else fails, why not consider knows anything. acknowledge that the examination had character? The NFL draft is preceded by the not captured his imagination. “Wasn’t In 1998, the Indianapolis Colts puz- “Combine,” which carries gruesome nothing on the test that came with foot- zled mightily over whether to choose connotations of blades of empiricism ball,” he reasoned, “so I pretty much Peyton Manning or Ryan Leaf with their ruthlessly spitting out athletic chaff. It is blew the test off.” he had something first-overall pick. The pair were seen as instead an exercise in whimsy at which more pressing to do that day than take a so evenly matched that San Diego, frowning coaches attempt to reduce twelve-minute quiz that he knew would which was due to have the third pick, complex athletes to their constituent be evaluated by his next employer? traded a bundle of future draft choices to parts—number of bench presses, swift- Would not a true iconoclast have left a move up a single slot and be assured the ness of wind sprints, alacrity of Gator - clean form and earned a more insou- rights to one of the pair. ade tub–overturning, etc. Is a wideout ciant, not to say wittier, score of zero? The Colts, undecided, asked each who dashes the 40 in 4.4 seconds signif- Apparently no player has ever done so, player what would be his first action icantly preferable to a rival Mercury the reported nadir being two points. upon being drafted. Manning said, who rings up a 4.6? Does it not depend The Dallas Cowboys made Claiborne “Study the playbook.” Leaf said, “Go to on the player’s ability to shed blocks, to the sixth-overall pick anyway, their Las Vegas.” Leaf was not the Colts’ pick. run patterns, to fake out defenders, to need being acute. Dallas’s man at the Today Manning is preparing for another catch—in short, to play football? Going position was Terence Newman, who has season in his hall of Fame career, while back to bench-pressing is like deciding spent the last several years master - the player he nosed out for the title of whom to invite to a chess tournament ing the re verse of the wide receiver’s most hotly pursued footballer in the class by asking potential entrants to do some touchdown jubilation: the beaten cor- is an ex-athlete awaiting trial on charges quick calculus, on the grounds that nerback’s high-speed retreat from the of burglary and drug possession. Where cameraman’s frame in the moment of is the algorithm that can take the true Mr. Smith is a film critic for the . humiliation. Furthering his quest for measure of a man?

4 7 backpage--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 5/9/2012 2:06 PM Page 48

Happy Warrior BY MARK STEYN Give-and-Take

OME years ago in this space, I cited a famous second only to Greece’s 875 percent). And yet, in the age of line he liked to use when trying to “austerity,” every single presidential candidate was running ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: on an economic platform that would increase those num- S “A government big enough to give you every- bers. thing you want is big enough to take away everything you The “extreme right” Marine Le Pen of the “far right” have.” And I posited an alternative thesis: A government National Front? Oh, if only. They don’t like immigrants, big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big but in every other respect they’re to the left of the incoming enough to get you to give any of it back. socialist. You’d be surprised how many of Europe’s alleged That’s what the political class of Europe’s cradle-to- “extreme right” parties that applies to: These “right-wing - grave welfare states have spent the last three years doing: ers” are culturally protectionist and economically pro - trying to persuade their electorates to give some of it back. tectionist, or, if you prefer, culturally nationalist and Not a lot, just a bit. In France, President Sarkozy raised the eco nomically statist—like the old British Labour party and retirement age from 60 to 62. French life expectancy is most conventional left-of-center Continental parties were 80.7, so you still get to enjoy a quarter of your entire human before they got the Eutopian fever. Now they’ve abandoned existence as one long holiday weekend. In Greece, where that market segment to fellows like Greece’s hilariously those in officially designated “hazardous” professions such named “Golden Dawn” party, which won 21 seats on a plat- as hairdressing and TV-announcing get to retire at 50, the form blaming the country’s current woes on the Industrial government raised the possibility of ending the agreeable Revolution, the “so-called” Enlightenment, and foreign arrangement by which public-sector employees receive 14 “usurers.” Usury is customarily understood as the practice monthly paychecks per annum. They didn’t actually do it of charging excessive interest. Golden Dawn, like most but the mere suggestion that Greeks should, like lesser mor- Greeks, feels the Germans and the EU and the IMF should tals, be bound by temporal reality was enough for the vot- carry on lending them money but at no interest. No, wait, ers to rebel. M. Sarkozy lost to a socialist pledged to restore forget the lending: They should give it. retirement at 60, and in Greece the government got swept Nationalist politics on transnationalist welfare does not aside not by its traditional opposition but by various sound an obviously winning formula. But we’ll see more of unlovely alternatives. The Communist party got 26 seats. it before Europe’s done. In the first round of the French Syriza, a “Coalition of the Radical Left” comprising the election, Marine Le Pen got 18 percent to M. Sarkozy’s 27. Trotskyite “Anticapitalist Political Group,” the Maoist What is it that makes one a “fringe” “extremist” and the “Communist Organization of Greece,” the Goreist “Re - other “mainstream”? Nine points? Well, she’ll close that newing Communist Ecological Left,” plus various splinter gap in the years ahead. In response, a beleaguered political groups too loopy to mention wound up with 52 seats and class will attempt to shift its spending to a European level: the second-largest caucus. A month ago, a mere 4 percent Joining the EU’s foreign minister and the nascent EU diplo- of European Union citizens lived under left-wing politi- matic corps there will be an EU finance minister and EU cians. But, after a three-year flirtation with “austerity,” the bonds and EU taxes. It will be even more unsustainable, but citizenry has decided that a government big enough to give for the Eurocrats transnational unsustainability will be you everything you want suits them just fine, and they’re perceived as being more comfortably insulated from the not gonna give any of it back. Just keep those 14 monthly whims of their “citizens.” Where, after all, would one go to checks per annum coming (it counts for your government vote down a “European” tax? pension, too) until they’re dead. If it bankrupts those left So back at the dreary national level there will be more behind, who cares? Not my problem. parties like Greece’s Golden Dawn and Bulgaria’s Ataka Even before the revolt of the non-workers, “austerity” (National Attack Union), whose official logos slyly evoke was more honored in the breach. Readers who deplore the swastika while bending this or that prong just enough Boehner and Romney as RINO squishes should see what to preserve deniability. Which seems fair enough, as passes for “conservative” in Europe. Whatever principles Greek “nationalism” is premised on the Germans’ ability Sarkozy appeared to have if only by comparison with the to fund it. cynical old roué Chirac were long fled by the time of his Meanwhile, youth unemployment in France is already 22 reelection campaign. France hasn’t balanced a budget since percent; Sweden, 23 percent; Poland, 27 percent; Hungary, de Gaulle’s successor, M. Pompidou, died in office (for 28 percent; Ireland, 30 percent; Bulgaria, 33 percent; American historians, that’s back in the Partridge Family Slovakia, 34 percent; Portugal, 36 percent; Italy, 36 per- era). Government spending accounts for 56 percent of the cent; Greece, 51 percent; Spain, 51.1 percent. For this gen- economy—and, if you take into account all unfunded lia- eration, there will be no Golden Dawn—but I wouldn’t rule bilities, French debt totals 549 percent of GDP (in Europe, out an Ataka. The aging beneficiaries of the Eutopian moment may be disinclined to give any of it back. Sooner Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com). or later, their successors will take it.

4 8 | www.nationalreview.com MAY 2 8 , 2 0 1 2 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 5/8/2012 2:38 PM Page 1 This should be you

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